[PEN-L:2669] Re: Art and revolution series <3.0.1.32.19990127101400.00c8a340@popserver.panix.com> <3.0.1.32.19990127100512.00cc2284@popserver.panix.com> <36AF2409.E5AE3219@mail.ilstu.edu> <3.0.1.32.19990127122027.00b374cc@popserver.panix.com>

[Mathew Forstater <forstate@xxxxxxxx>]

And Bob Kaufman, the greatest of all Beat poets, started out as a union
spokesperson.

Louis Proyect wrote:

> 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)