[PEN-L:2653] Art and revolution series

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have decided to write about Andy Warhol next. It sort of keeps a certain
consistency with what I have been writing about so far, but I wish I had
the time to pursue another thread, namely the connections between "new
poetry" of the 1950s with leftist culture of the 1930s. The new poetry
movement, as defined by Hall-Pack-Simpson in their legendary anthology,
consisted of several overlapping schools: the beats, the San Francisco
renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. Beat poet
Allen Ginsberg's ties to the 1930s, both through his family and through
elective affinities, are profuse. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, basically the
founder of the San Francisco renaissance, was a long-standing anarchist.
The Black Mountain college, which I've written about before, was tied to
both Bauhaus culture through the presidency of Joseph Albers and to New
Deal culture, through the man who replaced Albers, Charles Olson.

The New York School, which included Kenneth Koch and Frank O'Hara,
maintained an uneasy alliance with the beats, but really had more in common
with Abstract Expressionist/cold war liberalism than it did with the 1930s.
O'Hara was an Abstract Expressionist artist as well as a poet and had the
same sort of self-destructive bent as his drinking buddy Pollock.

It is important to understand that the "new poetry" movement was one of the
main cultural influences on the student revolt of the 1960s. The
Hall-Pack-Simpson anthology was one of the few places a young student could
find outspoken denuciations of American capitalism, although phrased in
literary rather than political terms.

One of the things that I have long believed is that the attempt to break
down history into the "30s", "40s", etc. is profoundly undialectical. In
actuality, there is a continuity that is not too hard to identify if you
take the trouble. I suppose the reason that bourgeois ideology tries so
hard to fragment our history in this fashion is that they don't want people
to take a long view, as Paul Baran emphasized. The artistic and political
traditions of the 1930s are still very much worth identifying with, just as
those of the 60s are. In the attempt to fashion new styles which make
everything else obsolete--in the Generation X mode--the mass media are
simply trying to lobotomize us.

The material on Warhol is fascinating. He is an extremely complex figure, a
working-class homosexual who really represents bourgeois high culture at
the end of its tether. He loved to bite the hand that fed him. More to follow.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)