The South Central Modern Language Association

Futurism as a Submerged Paradigm for Artistic Activism and Practical AnarchismAuthor(s): Estera MilmanSource: South Central Review, Vol. 13, No. 2/3, Futurism and the Avant-Garde (Summer -Autumn, 1996), pp. 157-179Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern LanguageAssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3190375Accessed: 09/10/2010 18:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The South Central Modern Language Association and The Johns Hopkins University Press are collaboratingwith JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to South Central Review.

http://www.jstor.org

Futurism as a Submerged Paradigm for Artistic Activism and Practical Anarchism

Estera Milman The University oflowa

We [Futurists] find more enjoyment in the combinations of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the "eroica" or the "pastoral."

-Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises, " 19131

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise.... Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat, and landslide.

-John Cage, "The Future ofMusic: Credo," "delivered" in 1937, published in 19582

Italian Futurism has not fared well within an art historical literature that is agenda-bound to the custodianship of "high" culture. The field's more normative texts are charged with the responsibility to protect and perpetuate "history's top ten"3 and thus are committed to the defense of some of the very same cultural assumptions against which the Futurists initially directed their iconoclastic polemics. However, despite this hierarchical program evidenced throughout most traditional histories of early twentieth- century Modernism, reference to the other side of the modernist coin is embedded just below the surface of even these ultra- conservative cultural texts. It is within these covert slips of the pen that the submerged legacy of pre-World War I Futurism can be tracked. The following historiographic investigation will provide a preliminary explication of the process by which Italian Futurism was, for all intents and purposes, written out of the English language art historical canon. Conversely, this essay will argue that, despite deliberate attempts to marginalize the movement, Futurism nonetheless provided a model for subsequent manifestations of artistic activism, in particular for the myriad of contemporary artists whose lineage is rooted in what has come to be called the [Marcel] Duchamp/[John] Cage legacy.

Central to the field of modem art historical studies'

C South Central Review 13.2-3 (Summer-Fall 1996): 157-79.

South Central Review

methodological assumptions is a general consensus that writing history is a form of cultural production that is by its very nature constitutive of power. Committed to the recontextualization of a history of modernist practice disempowered through its dependence upon formalist, apolitical values of so-called late-Modernism, many contemporary historians attempt to confront the jurisdiction of their respective "universal" histories. What is sometimes lost sight of in this ideologically loaded contest of meaning is the extent to which such hegemonic constructs are methodologically dependent, not only upon the formal analysis of privileged sets of artifacts sclectively removed from everyday experience, but also on the concurrent perpetuation of hierarchical lines of demarcation among the media. Because hegemonic canons are embedded transparently in (and widely disseminated through) the "textbook," it is textsbooks that provide the most telling evidence of the impact of this historiographic process upon Futurism.

In his widely used 481-page survey Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art

(tellingly subtitled Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture), George Heard Hamilton opens the page and one-half of text that he devotes to the Italian movement with the proposition that "the conjunction of Cubism and Italian Futurism was a brief but spectacular episode in the spread of Cubist theory and practice."4 Insisting that Futurist artists had little more than a "program" until they adopted Cubist technique,5 the author then posits that, having erupted "on the European scene in 1912," Futurism "was a nine-month wonder soon to be extinguished by the First World War."6 Through its insistent delineation of Futurism's charter members from subsequent generations officially affiliated with Italian Fascism, Hamilton's statement confirms the successful depoliticization of the movement within formalist histories of twentieth-century Modernism. The author closes his brief synopsis with tenuous acknowledgment of what he describes as the movement's importance in the development of moder aesthetics: "By calling attention to the specific character of moder life," Futurism "forced the public to accept the artist as an interpreter of that life, even in its most raw and immediate actualities."7 In suggesting that the Futurists integrated the experience of the moder world into their art-specific activities, the author has made reference to the movement's attempted eradication of the line of demarcation between art and life.

H. H. Arnason devotes six pages of his 740-page textbook History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture to the discussion of "Futurism in Italy." The author attempts to situate the movement within a contemporaneous atmosphere of anarchism and notes that "the futurists were passionately concerned with the problem of establishing an emphatic identity between the spectator and the painting, 'putting the spectator in the center of the picture.' " Arnason here identifies a second primary characteristic of much subsequent avant-garde production: the conviction that the art event or object is an initiator of interactive experience and that it is the receiver who finishes the piece. Nonetheless, the author's defense of the traditional formalist hierarchy is articulated transparently in his discussion of Russolo, whom Arnason singles out as an innovator whose

158

Estera Milman

rejection of painting in favor of noise provided the conceptual foundation for the "electronic music of today," yet whom the author nonetheless describes as perhaps the least original "artist" in the group.9

Arnason's brief recapitulation of Futurist "painting, sculpture, and architecture" refers to yet another prerequisite to subsequent manifestations of artistic activism. The historian recounts that Umberto Boccioni's 1912 "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" describes "sculpture as environment" and thus prophesies "the development of constructivist sculpture, dada and surrealist assemblage, sculpture as literal motion, and even the environments of pop sculptors of the 1960s."'1 Despite this rather expansive delineation of the Futurist legacy, Arnason seems unwilling to include performance, or art "actions" and "events" within this listing; instead he persists in addressing sets of artifacts, in this case "sculpture," "assemblage," and "environments." The author includes a discussion of the event arts later in the volume, under the heading "New Directions in the 1960s and 1970s." Arason does not turn to Futurism when he attempts to provide a genealogy for these "new" manifestations but looks instead to mid-century North American painting. He postulates that "the act of painting was dramatized by the abstract expressionists or by a critic like Harold Rosenberg with his concept of action painting.""' It is important to remember that Rosenberg was Clement Greenberg's primary mid-century rival and that Greenberg, in turn, is now counted among the most influential progenitors of contemporary formalist analysis (and, as such, was an avid defender of the lines of demarcation among the media and between art and life). Since the revisionist agendas of many post- modern historians are positioned in direct opposition to Greenbergian formalism, Amason's choice of Rosenberg's iconoclastic 1952 essay as the historical precursor to performance art is, in and of itself, deserving of particular note. I would posit, however, that the author was unaware of clandestine parallels among aspects of Rosenberg's thesis (as presented in "The American Action Painters") and elements of historical Futurism, a proposition that will be discussed at some length later in this essay.

Arnason's survey of performance art also includes an introduction to Fluxus. The Vietnam-era collective is described as "a loose association of predominantly German and American artists, poets, and musicians involved in a wide variety of mixed media events, in many of which the influence of John Cage persists."'2 The author closes by paraphrasing George Maciunas's "Fluxus Art-non-art- amusement" manifesto, which insists that Fluxus "forgoes [the] distinction between art and non-art [and] is the fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage, and Duchamp."13 Although Macunias's manifesto is often cited in the current literature on the topic, Arnason's early paraphrase is, I believe, interesting in its own right. Arason has here not only made reference to the Cage/Duchamp legacy, he has concurrently identified yet another vestige of Futurism's rarely acknowledged impact on the contemporary intermedial arts.

In The Story ofModern Art, Norbert Lynton states that "Futurism introduced... a new kind of artist, a performer whose studio work may well be noticed less than

159

his personal appearances."14 In the chapter "Beyond Painting and Sculpture," the author mentions (albeit as an aside) that many contemporary manifestations of performance art "could individually be shown to have antecedents of a sort ... with the Futurists' and the Dadaists' soirees," among other moder art historical precedents.5s Although Lynton speaks briefly of Cage as someone who was "close to avant-garde art" [emphasis mine], he chooses Allan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) as the first occurrence of "performance as art" (figure 1). The author insists that Happenings find their "historical links with Surrealist exhibitions . . . rather than with the polemical soirees of the Futurists or the cultural cabarets of the Zurich Dadaists."'6 It should be noted that Kaprow dates the realization of his first "Happening" (a term he is credited with having invented and which he associates with the blurring of art and life) to his participation in

Cage's late 1950s music composition workshop at the New School for Social Research. Curiously enough, Kaprow has further acknowledged how deeply influenced he was by the 1952 appearance in print of Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters."17

In keeping with his normative role as custodian of a formalist canon, Lynton adamantly argues that works classified as being "beyond painting and sculpture" were not attempting to negate "art." Toward that end, he offers the following seemingly eccentric repudiation: "Whatever infection Robert Motherwell's book on Dada generated in obscure places, it was received in 1951 as an exceptionally interesting piece of history, an account of strange, often nonsensical, and sometimes foolish things done a long time ago when the world was very different."'8 Interestingly enough, included in Motherwell's "infectious" anthology is a genealogy of early twentieth-century anti-aesthetic cultural radicalism (authenticated by one of the founding members of the Zurich and Berlin Dada) that recounts the debts that Dada owed to Futurism. Submerged references to the same iconoclastic

history of early twentieth-century Modernism would concurrently resurface in

Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters," cited earlier by Arnason as a

precursor to the "new directions" of the 1960s and 1970s. Motherwell has stated that his editorship of The Dada Painters and Poets was

initially undertaken in an effort to "teach himself Surrealism" for which "Dada was the older brother."'9 Furthermore, when asked whether or not Dada was a constituent of Abstract Expressionism, he insisted that the Abstract Expressionists "loved art, a most anti-Dada attitude."20 However, regardless of Motherwell's initial intentions, it was Surrealism's older brother that would capture the imagination of the next generation of radical artmakers. Contrary to Lynton's assertion, the impact of Motherwell's anthology cannot be overestimated.2l By the late 1950s and early 1960s, the term "neo-Dada" had come to encompass the

production of John Cage and his disciples Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, the works soon to be canonized under the rubric "American Pop Art," constructors of Happenings, New Realism, "Common Object Art," the overtly political, anti-

Pop "NO!art" group, and the works of participants in the Fluxus collective, among others. Although neo-Dada was considered by some to be a rubric coterminous

160 South Central Review

Estera Milman

Figure 1: Dick Higgins, Allan Kaprow "In" the Set for "Eighteen Happenings," 1959

(Collection of Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts).

161

162 South Central Review

with cultural critique, it was often invoked by some formalist critics of the period as a pejorative term.=

Of the aforementioned manifestations of neo-Dada, it is Fluxus that has most

successfully captured the imagination of our own present and that has come to be credited as a direct precursor to contemporary video, correspondence, and

performance art, among other intermedial artistic practices. In a 1982 essay "Fluxus: Theory and Reception," Dick Higgins (the collective's in-house historian and theorist) posits that the early twentieth-century lineage of the "iconoclastic" movement of which he was a founding member includes Futurism:

Futurism was the earliest such movement.... [Marinetti] proclaimed "words at Liberty," (a form of visual poetry), "synthetic theater" (that is, performance pieces which were synthesized out of extremely raw-seeming materials, similar to musique concrete of the post-World War II era), simultaneity, a time related form of cubism, music of noises, and many other such formal innovations or unconventional arts which are still fresh to consider.23

Responding to his unspoken (yet fundamental) responsibility not to allow Fluxus to be perceived as being derivative of anything, Higgins adamantly attempts to establish a firm line of separation between what he understands to be the

accomplishments of historical Futurism (and Dada and Surrealism) and the activities of the Vietnam-era avant-garde community of which he himself was an

energetic participant. In the course of so doing he describes Russolo's

compositions as being "far more conventional than what one might have expected from reading his famous 'Art of Noises' manifesto,"2 thus inadvertently providing evidence that Cage's disciples were fully familiar with the Italian composer. Higgins continues:

Even the visual arts, in the works of Balla and others, being the summit of Futurist fine art, is [sic] rather conventional with regard to its formal structures and applications-it is certainly rather conservative when

compared to the innovative cubism of France at the same time. ... Of course [Futurism] is of great technical and historical interest, as a starter and a precursor, but its works have only moderate intrinsic interest as works.2

This statement bears a marked resemblance to the formalist, media-biased

positions evidenced in the art historical textbooks cited earlier and confirms the

pervasiveness of hegemonic hierarchies, even within supposed "alternative" art

cultures. However, Futurism's relative obscurity within the art historical canon is

not exclusively dependent upon the movement's failure to conform to a set of

prerequisite formalist norms. The complex historiographic process of

marginalization that led to Futurism's exclusion was also informed by art-world

responses to a series of context-specific sociopolitical concerns, or more

specifically, by the impact of these concerns upon the authors of the field's

histories.

Although Italian Futurist works were not represented in the 1913 Armory Show (the point in time when European Modernism invaded the United States, en masse), this omission did not prevent Futurism from entering the mainstream discourse of the visual arts in the United States as a disembodied concept embedded within broadly defined perceptions of "modernity." As a result, decontextualized elements of Futurism were easily appropriated into a loose-knit collective of contemporaneous cultural avant-gardes then associated with anarcho- individualism.26 Both the Armory Show and the contemporaneous Patterson Pageant at Madison Square Garden were seen by some to be parallel manifestations that hailed the breakdown between artistic and political radicalism. Directed by John Reed, the Patterson Pageant was a play, or "mass action," dramatizing a Wobblies millworkers' strike in New Jersey.2 The spectacle was deliberately scheduled to attract the attention of the press through its overlap with the successfully scandalous exhibition of moder art. Mable Dodge, who contributed to the realization of both events, prophesied to Gertrude Stein that the Armory Show would be a revolutionary and riotous "Declaration of Independence."2 Conversely, in much the same way that the Paris popular press had felt free, by 1912, to describe the French (and Paris-based Italian) avant-garde of the period as an "anarchic disorderly rabble,"2 The New York Times labeled the Armory Modernists "cousins to anarchists in politics."30 As a paradigmatically iconoclastic and anarchic European movement, Futurism served as but one transplanted symbol of World War I era utopian radicalism.3' In the mid-thirties, however, the Marxist North American vanguard came to perceive historical Futurism through the historiographic blinders of the contemporary movement's then current official affiliation with Fascism.

In response to strategic calls to action issued by the Popular Front a decade and one-half prior to the publication of Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters," over "400 leading American artists, academicians and modernists, purists and social realists, were brought together on a platform in defense of their public interests"32 during the First American Artists Congress Against War and Fascism. Convened at the New York City Town Hall and the New School for Social Research on February 14-16, 1936, these sessions were presented one year prior to Cage's initial delivery of his first" The Future of Music: Credo," quoted in the epigraph to this essay. Included in the Congress's Second Closed Session was a brief statement chronicling the state of "Art in Nazi Germany" (anonymously signed by "A German Artist in Exile" and read by John Cunningham, a member of the Congress's National Executive Committee) and another on "Art in Fascist Italy," by Margaret Duroc. Duroc's essay does not limit itself to a discussion of contemporary Futurism:

Taking his cue from Marinetti, leader of the Futurists, Mussolini said, "We do not want to be a generation of hotel keepers and museum guardians." And "As for myself, I have been in a museum only twice."... As early as 1909, the Futurists issued their first manifesto in which they proclaimed,

163 Estera Milman

164 South Central Review "We wish to glorify war-only hygiene of the world!" These people found bomb-throwing a lyrical and mystical practice. "War," Marinetti has very recently said, "is beautiful, because it completes the beauty of a flowery meadow with the passionate orchids of machine-gun fire."33

The perception would resurface-in mainstream surveys that were published at mid-century and are still much read-that the flowering of Futurism's union with fascism was prophesied in Marinetti's 1909 "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism." This view is noticeably absent from the contemporary art historical textbooks cited earlier.

There is little question that Italian Futurism posed a serious problem for historiographers who attempted to defend early twentieth-century Modernism and the artistic vanguard within a McCarthyist context. In 1952, Meyer Shapiro (who had presented the paper "The Social Bases of Art" at the opening of the First Closed Session of the 1936 American Artists' Congress Against War and Fascism) published the essay "The Introduction of Moder Art in America: The Armory Show" in Daniel Aaron's America in Crisis. Originally penned in 1950 as a Bennington College public lecture, the essay is far more than a history of the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art; it is a strategic defense of late- nineteenth- through mid-twentieth-century Modernism, per se. At the close of the

published article, Shapiro openly reiterates his historiographic agenda:

[Today] the hostile criticisms made in 1913 have been renewed with great virulence. We hear them now from the officials of culture, from Congress and the President. The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently condemned modem art as "meaningless" and "pornographic," and as a sign of decay of civilization in our time. These criticisms are sometimes linked in an unscrupulous way with attacks on Communism, foreign culture, and religious doubt. They have a parallel in the attempts of the totalitarian regimes in Europe to destroy moder art as an unpalatable model of personal freedom of expression and indifference to the state. The Nazis suppressed this art as "cultural Bolshevism"; the Russian government and its supporters in the West denounced it as an example of "cosmopolitanism" or "bourgeois decadence"; Catholic spokesmen have rejected it as a manifestation of godless individualism.4

"The Introduction of Modern Art in America" is replete with eloquent discussions of pre-World War I popular perceptions of the interrelationship of Modernist artistic practice and larger cultural concerns. However, in keeping with his intention to defend personal freedom of expression, the author repeatedly adopts an overtly formalist vocabulary as he addresses diverse manifestations of

European and North American Modernism. The only exception to the rule is his brief and only reference to Italian Futurism. Shapiro situates this aside within a discussion of the Progressive era's North American bohemian left, the broadly- based collective of anti-rational cultural radicals of socialist, anarchist, and/or liberal persuasion, that included among its diverse membership both the infamous Marcel Duchamp and Reed:

Estera Milman

[In 1913] modem art enjoyed also the friendliness of advanced political minds who welcomed a reforming or revolutionary spirit in art as an ally of their own aims. The issues of art were easily translated into the language of radical politics. Academic art, the cult of the past, tradition, rigid standards and rules, represented authority and privilege; the new art stood for growth, freedom, the individual, and the open future. As a young man, John Reed, who was later to report the Russian revolution, supposed that Futurism was the artistic corollary of Socialism; who could foresee then the Fascist ties of this Italian movement which glorified action and violence as ends in themselves?"35

Despite his reference to Futurism's eventual relationship to Fascism, Shapiro is here distinguishing the movement's historical position within a broadly described, pre-World War I anarchistic tradition from Futurism's subsequent political affiliations. He has, nonetheless, excluded Futurism from his formalist hierarchy of early twentieth-century Modernism, a lineage that Shapiro's essay charts in terms far more inclusive than its title would suggest.

However, other McCarthy-era historians of leftist persuasion would continue to describe historical Futurism through historiographic positions evidenced in the 1930s. For them, the supposition that Futurism's affiliation with Italian Fascism was prophesied in Marinetti's founding manifesto of 1909 became a defining principle through which they historicized and deliberately marginalized the pre- World War I movement.

In 1955, Milton Brown published his still much-used survey, American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression.36 In his discussion of the critical aftermath of the 1913 Armory Show, he notes that anti-modernist opinion became so extreme that some individuals went so far as to predict that the First World War would "cleanse Europe of its cancerous decadence" thus unconsciously echoing "the fascist philosophy of Futurism, . .. 'War is a good cleanser.'"37 Although the author is less than supportive of aspects of modernist practice that he believes were informed by "nonsocial" tendencies, he adamantly defends the World War I era North American and European modernist avant-garde from contemporaneous critical attacks. The only exception to this rule is Futurism. Instead, Brown goes to great lengths to ensure that any discussion of Fascism that appears in the text includes reference to Italian Futurism.38 Brief references to Futurism's formal devices and their impact upon numerous North American Modernists are scattered throughout the text.39 However, despite the obvious implications of charting the legacy of Futurist visual vocabularies, the author attempts adamantly to minimize these debts in statements such as the following:

Futurism, which, in its concern with machine civilization, should have found some echo in our own advanced industrial society, was never influential, first, because we saw the machine not as a destroyer of the individual spirit, but as a creator of material comfort and, second, because the social violence which infested Futurism was inimical to our own tradition of reformism.40

165

South Central Review

Brown's reference to the North American tradition of reformism suggests that he is specifically addressing the impact of Futurism on artists of the Progressive era. So too does the following citation which recounts the Futurists' official North American debut during the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco:

The catalogue of the Exposition also contained a Futurist manifesto covering nineteen points, an attack directed equally against tradition and French modernism .... Although the Futurists were something of a sensation in San Francisco, their effect upon American art as a whole was negligible [proof, in part] that the nihilism of Futurist thinking was completely foreign to the American mind of the period.4

On the other hand, in a laudatory discussion of the contemporaneous Masses, Brown insists that, although the periodical was "a kind of cultural organ of the Socialist Party, . . . varying kinds of socialists, anarchists or liberals" found "a common ground for expression in its pages."42 While it could be argued that the author was attempting to distinguish "anarchism" from "nihilism" when he insisted that early twentieth-century Futurist polemics were completely "foreign to the American mind of the period," the survey's readers would have had some

difficulty understanding this distinction, based on the fact that contemporaneous dictionaries equated anarchism and nihilism, not only with each other, but also with socialism.43

Decontextualized (and depoliticized) elements of historical Futurism nonetheless did provide powerful yet submerged paradigms for artistic activism, not only for pivotal cultural critics and artists at mid-century, including Cage, but also for the composer's disciples in the artistic counterculture who, in turn,

participated in what has been described as the romantic revolution of the 1960s.

Aspects of the World War I era movement would enter this art-world discourse, not as a set of disembodied Modernistic principles (as had been the case in 1913), but rather as a subset of Dada, or more specifically of those elements of historical Dada accessible to numerous artists searching for an anti-formalist lineage.

There is little question that Futurism was capable of providing subsequent avant-garde communities with proof of the value inherent in the polemical presentation of a radical "public face." Furthermore, numerous examples can be cited that suggest that a number of Futurist formal devices and strategies reappeared among subsequent generations of art-makers. For example, the

provocation inherent in the "performed" manifesto (a strategy the Futurists

employed during the 12 January 1910 first Futurist evening in the border town of Trieste as they lobbied for intervention against Austria) would soon thereafter be

adopted by Dada. It could probably be argued that a depoliticized version of this same provocative form of public interaction is evidenced in John Cage's 1937

"presentation" of his credo "The Future of Music," and that a repoliticized version is evident in the political street theater of the Vietnam era, for example, in the Guerilla Art Action Group's Bloodbath (an protest performance directed as much

against the Institution of Art as against the war that was "performed" in the lobby

166

Estera Milman

of the Museum of Modem Art in November 1969). Mention could also be made of the Futurists' adoption of the conventions of variety theater as an effective model for their own interactive public events, of the migration of this strategy through Dada, and Vaudeville's subsequent reinvention as one of the primary defining terms for Fluxus, as evidenced in George Maciunas's manifesto, cited earlier by Amason. It would be possible to be even more specific; for example, the uncanny similarity between certain formal conventions of Futurist Synthetic Theater, in particular with sintesi (the presentation of brief, "one idea" pelfurmances), and later descriptions of Fluxus concerts and street performances as assemblings of "single idea events." However, unless we are able to unearth evidence of the extent to which a particular community of artists was able to access its historical paradigms, doing so provides little more than a discussion of "prophesies" and a wishful listing of chronological precursors.

There is indisputable evidence that as co-editors of the proto-Abstract Expressionist little review, possibilities 1, (Winter 1947/48), Cage, Motherwell, and Rosenberg accrued direct access to one retrospective personal history of Swiss and German Dada through their association with Richard Huelsenbeck, who was busily editing selected portions of his En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism (1920) for inclusion in the single issue of the journal. It is also incontestable that they were introduced to Huelsenbeck's laudatory recollection of Dada's debt to Futurism, as is evidenced by the very second sentence of the excerpt: "From Marinetti we . . . borrowed 'bruitism,' or noise music." The Huelsenbeck continues:

I spoke on the significance of bruitism at a number of open Dada gatherings. "Le Bruit," noise with imitative effects, was introduced into art (in this connection we can hardly speak of individual arts, music, or literature) by Marinetti who used a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums, rattles, and pot covers to suggest the "awakening of the capital." . In contrast to the cubists or for that matter the German expressionists, the futurists regarded themselves as pure activists. While all "abstract artists" maintained the position that a table is not the wood and nails it is made of but the idea of all tables, and were forgetting that a table could be used to put things on, the futurists wanted to immerse themselves in the "angularity"' of things-for them the table signified a utensil for living, and so did everything else. Along with tables there were houses, frying pans, urinals, women, etc. Consequently Marinetti and his group love war as the highest expression of the conflict of things, as a spontaneous eruption of possibilities, as movement, a simultaneous poem, as a symphony of cries, shouts, commands, embodying an attempted solution of the problem of life in motion.... Every movement naturally produces noise. While number and consequently melody are symbols presupposing a faculty for abstraction, noise is a direct call to action.... Bruitism is life itself.44

Huelsenbeck's history of Dada also provided an overt critique of formalism and of the myth of artistic privilege. Having opened with a definition of the Futurists as "pure activists," of "noise [as] a direct call to action," and of bruitism as the

167

South Central Review

paradigmatic eradicator of the line of demarcation between art and life, the author repeatedly describes the true Dadaist as an individual "who has fully understood that one is entitled to have ideas only if one can transform them into life-the completely active type, who lives only through action, because it holds the possibility of achieving knowledge."45 This declaration brings to mind Rosenberg's anti-formalist 1952 essay, "The American Action Painters," wherein the mid-century critic asserted that "at a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act... What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."46 Motherwell, in a somewhat self-serving way, has stated that Rosenberg's "notion of 'action"' (which, despite his School of Paris bias, Motherwell admits stood in direct

opposition to estheticism) was a direct response to Huelsenbeck's history of early twentieth-century cultural radicalism.47

"The American Action Painters" contains numerous declarations that echo Huelsenbeck's polemical reiteration of the Futurist agenda, including a paragraph that parallels his insistence that Futurism rejected "abstraction" in favor of action. Rosenberg writes:

The new American painting is not "pure" art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the esthetic. The apples weren't brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and color.... In this gesturing with materials the esthetic, too, has been subordinated ... What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.48

The 1952 manifesto also confirms the North American vanguard's abandonment of the liberal left and Marxist projects for which Rosenberg himself had earlier served as one particularly fluent spokesman. In the penultimate paragraph of his

contemporaneous essay, "The Introduction of Modem Art in America: The

Armory Show," Shapiro provides a synopsis of the loss of the paradigm of

politicized artistic activism that so deeply affected Rosenberg, among a host of

others, including Shapiro himself:

The revival of political radicalism during the depression of the 1930s led to criticism of modem art as too narrow and as incapable of expressing deeper social values. Many artists hoped then to find a bridge between their aesthetic modernism and their new political sympathies; but the weakness of the radical movement, the eventual disillusionment with Communism, and the effects of war, re-employment, and the growing role of the state in the 1940s, reduced the appeal of this criticism.49

It is, in part, to the loss of utopian belief in the efficacy of such actions that

Rosenberg too makes less than laudatory reference in "The American Action Painters":

The diagonal of a grand crisis separates [this type of painter] from his personal and artistic past. Many of the painters were "Marxists" (WPA

168

Estera Milman

unions, artists' congresses); they had been trying to paint Society. Others had been trying to paint Art (Cubism, Post-Impressionism)-it amounts to the same thing. The big moment came when it was decided to paint... just to PAINT. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value-political, esthetic, moral.5

It is important to note, however, that Rosenberg is here also celebrating his generation's liberation from what Shapiro calls "aesthetic modernism."

Contemporary cultural historians convincingly argue that the romantic revolution of the 1960s represents the legacy of early twentieth-century utopian, anarchic radicalism. Such propositions are confirmed, to cite but one example, by Robert Pincus-Witten in his 1988 introduction to Jon Hendricks's Fluxus Codex. Interestingly enough, Pincus-Witten also chooses to disassociate his subject from Futurism. However, I would posit that unlike some of his predecessors this critic/historian does not do so because he associates Futurism with Fascism. Instead this author's marginalization of the movement is based on his assumption that Futurism was but one of many early twentieth-century Modernisms representative of a depoliticized, high formalism. For Pincus-Witten, Fluxus's iconoclastic agenda was offered as a critique of an imperialist, Vietnam-era value system,51 and as a result stood in direct opposition to what he perceived to be the ineffectuality of Futurism's formalist intentions. The resultant decontextualization (and disempowerment) of the World War I era Italian movement is strikingly evident in the following:

Fluxus focused on Happening-derived theatrical events that stressed the communal and the democratic. The ephemeral achievements of Fluxus were inflected by an idealist anarchy that stressed the participatory and self-reliant. This strain invokes a political history reaching back to the Wobblies, the Patterson Strike, and the Feminist model of Emma Goldman, not to say the theatre of Futurism.52

Conversely, Pincus-Witten's dismissal of the debts Fluxus owed Futurism is countered by Jon Hendricks, a founding member of the Guerilla Art Action Group (one of the most politicized, art-based collectives of the Vietnam era) and fellow traveler in Fluxus. In his foreword to the codex, the author describes the movement as a successor to a subversive counterculture initiated in opposition to the "neo-fascist" McCarthyist 1950s.53 Surprisingly, Hendricks has little difficulty citing Futurism as the first of a select listing of historical precedents for Fluxus:

These precursors, in broad terms, were Futurism, Dada, and Russian Constructivism. Though elements of each had become generally accepted, the essence of each remained taboo in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when several experimental movements were struggling against the high tide of academic abstraction.54

While the author's assertion confirms that Futurism's affiliation with Italian Fascism had been written out of the art historical discourse of the 1960s, it also

169

South Central Review

indicates that the movement's resultant historiographic exclusion from the normative canon had remained intact. Although set in motion in response to sociopolitical convictions maintained by historians in the McCarthy era, the initiation of the process that led to Futurism's marginalization coincided with the point in time when formalist analysis (as currently understood) began to accrue hegemony over other methodological approaches to the history of art. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Futurism had been excluded from the mainstream of a well-established, apolitical history of early twentieth-century Modernism. Ironically, it was Futurism's position outside the hierarchy of academic formalism that ensured the Italian movement's privileged place within a Vietnam-era selective genealogy of anti-aesthetic artistic practice. It is important to note, however, that the ease with which Futurism could be reinvented as a viable model for artistic activists who concurrently perceived themselves to be descendent from an anti-fascist tradition provides evidence that, once decontextualized in response to one historiographic agenda, any historical subject can be recontextualized into whatever fiction a new present deems "appropriate."

Hendricks's foreword also summarizes the radical changes across the arts that were taking place in the late 1950s. The author includes Cage, Black Mountain

College utopianism, George Wittenbor's Documents of Art Series directed by Motherwell, and Kaprow's definition of the concept "Happenings" in his discussion of this paradigm shift within the United States.55 In his alternative

history of the other side of the Modernist coin, tellingly entitled Assemblage Environments and Happenings (1962), Kaprow juxtaposes discussion of the

production of Jackson Pollock (one of the paradigmatic action painters) and Robert Rauschenberg (one of John Cage's better-known disciples), alongside the event works of the Japanese-based Gutai Art Association and members of the Fluxus collective. The author recounts that he himself had studied briefly with

Cage, having enrolled in the composer's composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York City in order to "learn more about the sounds [he] was employing in his Environments,"5 a form of the artist's own production that served as precursor to his "Happenings" (and one that, according to Amason, was

"prophesied" in Boccioni's 1912 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture). Kaprow credits Cage's 1952 experiments as precursors to subsequent synesthetic events, including his own:

Even earlier in America, John Cage organi7ed an event at Black Mountain College combining paintings, dance, films, slides, recordings, radio playing, and a lecture, with the audience in the middle of the activity. Since my own efforts, in 1957, were done in Cage's composition class, where he described the event, I should mention it as an important catalyst.57

By his own admission, Kaprow was also influenced by the "events" of George Brecht, Al Hansen, Dick Higgins, and Jackson Maclow, all of whom were also enrolled in Cage's 1957 class at the New School for Social Research (and who

170

Estera Milman

were later to become charter members of the Fluxus collective).8 George Maciunas, Fluxus's primary impresario and master of ceremonies, opened his 1962 manifesto, "Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art," with the following observation: "Neo dada, its equivalent, or what appears to be neo dada [emphasis mine] manifests itself in very wide fields of creativity." The manifesto was "presented" by Arthus C. Caspari in Wuppertal, on 9 June 1962 (figure 2) and provides evidence of the extent to which concepts similar to those that Huelsenbeck had chosen in his delineation of Dada's debts to Futurism had entered the discourse of the radical contemporary arts by that point in time. For example, Maciunas insists that "what appears to be neo dada" is "bound with the concept Concretism, [the extreme conclusion of which] is beyond the limits of art, and therefore sometimes referred to as anti-art, or art-nihilism."59 Intent on liberating his audience from "the artificial world of abstraction," the artistic activist briefly recounts a purported transition from artificial, illusionistic, and abstract art to concretism which, in its most extreme form, becomes reality itself. He explains that, in the plastic arts, the concretist expresses "the reality of the rotten tomato, rather than an illusionistic image or symbol of it"60; in music the concretist prefers the material sound produced by "striking [a piano] with a hammer or kicking its underside," to a note sounded on the instrument's keyboard. According to Maciunas, "concrete sounds are commonly, although inaccurately, referred to as noises."61

When the "Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art" manifesto was declaimed in 1962, one of Maciunas's charts was draped behind the reader. In a similar diagram produced in 1961, the artist positioned the words, "Futurist Bruitism, via Varese," as the central component of the upper third of the chart, flanked by "Dada theatre happenings," on the far right, and "Abstract calligraphy lettrism," on the far left. John Cage's name runs across the full bottom of the diagram. Although Cage has said that "in order to understand the 'sense of musical renaissance and the possibility of invention' that had taken place around 1935, one should turn to Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noises [as well as to his own teacher] Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources,"62 it is Edgar Varese whom he regularly credits as having "fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music."63 As can be expected, possibilities (for which he served as Music Editor) included selected transcriptions of a "conversation" between Varese, Alexei Haieff, and eight other composers including Cage and Cowell. Russolo, it should be noted, is not mentioned. One possible explanation for this omission is implied in Haieffs adversive response to a question posed by Adolf Weiss. When asked, "What accounts for the Neo- Classical or Ultra-Conservative tendencies of the average American composer today? And by 'average' I mean those most frequently performed in the field of 'serious' music," Haieff retaliated by stating, "The lack of vitality in Neo-Futurist [emphasis mine] and Ultra-Progressive composers."6 By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cage would find it necessary to attempt to disassociate his production from the rubric "neo-Dada," a new (and oftentimes pejorative) descriptive term that was to enter the vocabulary of another generation of adversaries.65

171

South Central Review

Figure 2: Arthus C. Caspari reading Maciunas's manifesto "Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art," Wuppertal, West Germany, 9 June 1962 (photograph by Rolf

Jahrling, 1962; courtesy of the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit). Behind Caspari is Maciunas's chart Zeitkunst / Zeit-Raum / Raum / Raum-Zeit /. . . / Zeit-Raum Kunst /Raum /Raum-Zeit.

172

Estera Milman

In 1913, Hans Richter (who, alongside Richard Huelsenbeck, would soon thereafter become a charter member of the Zurich Dada circle and who would later be credited as the co-founder of abstract cinema) was first introduced to "modem art in all its glory" during the autumn Herbst Salon at Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm gallery. Unlike the contemporaneous Armory Show, the Berlin exhibition included a broad cross-section of Italian Futurist works. Through Walden, Richter would meet Marinetti while the founder of Futurism was on his 1913 Berlin tour. In response, the young German Expressionist enthusiastically distributed copies of the Futurist manifesto to cabdrivers and other members of the general public gathered at Potsdamer Platz station." In his own retrospective insider's history, Dada Art and Anti-Art (1964), Richter recounts that Marinetti corresponded directly with the Zurich Dada circle, that "Futurism was one of the main arsenals from which Dada drew its weapons," and that Marcel Duchamp "had paid homage to the Futurist theory of formation through motion in his famous Nude Descending a Staircase, which caused such a sensation at the 1913 Armory Show."67 The author also lists ten examples of the stylistic debts that Dada owed its own historical precursors, the first five of which were specific to Futurism:

* Dada's improvisatory cabaret technique, with its shock-effects, is a product of Futurism. It is clear from contemporary accounts that Dada soirees were virtually indistinguishable from Futurist performances which had been taking place all over Europe since 1912.

* The manifesto as a literary genre, whether declaimed on stage with all sorts of provocative and often clownish trimmings or distributed as a fly sheet, goes back to the manifestos of the Futurists, beginning with Marinetti's famous first manifesto, published in Le Figaro in 1909.

* The layout of Dada posters and fly-sheets, which employed typographical elements as capriciously as painters used the various elements that made up their collages, incorporated Futurist ideas.

* The phonetic poem was quite certainly not inspired by the obscure and isolated experiments of Scheerbart, nor yet by Mallarme's reflections on the subject of vers libre; the source lay much closer at hand. It was the Parole in Libertd of the Futurists.

* Photomontage, so enthusiastically practiced by Hausmann, was basically no more than a "correct" application of the "realistic" Futuristic principle of assembling suggestive documentary items to produce an all- embracing, dynamic pattern of interpenetrating aspects of reality. All Hausmann did was to apply this principle exclusively to mechanically reproduced items.6

During an unpublished mid-century conversation with Giddeon Bachmann, Richter recalled his 1930 participation in an international congress of independent film convened in Brussels to discuss the future of experimental cinema. Contextualized as this event was, within what the filmmaker describes as "the intensifying turmoil in Europe,"69 the primary topic under discussion was whether,

173

in such times, experimental film was justified. Although the majority of participants agreed that, on a humanistic level, it was necessary to attempt to do something to prevent the return of the "paleanthropic age-which finally came with Hitler and Mussolini in Europe," Richter recounts that the congress "split open" because the representatives from Spain and Italy were opposed to what he identifies as "progressive independence." In the course of this late 1950s interview, the renowned filmmaker and Modernist makes less than laudatory note of the fact that members of the mid-century North American experimental film

community had been referred to as "neo-Surrealists," playfully adding that he believed that a more apt rubric would be "neuro-Surrealism."70 Admitting that then-contemporary vanguard film production made him uncomfortable, he suggested that the "values of the 1920s were still values [and that the new generation of filmmakers should] work together with us to work something out that leads to another direction."71 As he recounts the process that led to the realization of his groundbreaking abstract films, Richter also discusses early twentieth-century experiments with sound, making particular note of Russolo's noise organ, and adamantly insisting that "long before Varese and all those

people, ... the Futurists had played with abstract sound."72 In 1974, John Cage published another credo entitled, "The Future of Music,"

which he opens by recounting that "years ago [he] decided to follow Varese and

fight for noises."73 The essay is replete with statements that reiterate the author's conviction that music is an activity that cannot be separated from life and that confirm his championship of the progressive blurring of distinctions between

composer, performer, and listener. Cage describes this eradication of hierarchical lines of demarcation between art and life as evidence that society is in transition and as confirmation of the value inherent in what he describes as "musical

examples of the practicality of anarchy."74 Although Luigi Russolo's name is once

again noticeably absent, the voice of the author of "The Art of Noises" remains

audible, nonetheless.

NOTES

1. Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises," excerpts reprinted in Futurist Manifestos, ed. Umbro

Apollonio, trans. Robert Brain et al. (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 27. The original reads:

"godiamo molto di piui nel combinare idealmente dei rumori di tram, di motori a scoppio, di carrozze e di folle vocianti, che nel riudire, per esempio, I'Eroica' o la 'Pastorale"' (Luigi Russolo, "L'arte dei rumori," inFuturismo, ed. Umbro Apollonio [Milan: Gabriele Mazzotta, Editore, 1970], 129).

2. John Cage, "The Future of Music: Credo," Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 3.

3. I am here making direct reference to Lawrence Alloway's "The Long Front of Culture," Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959), rpt inModern Dreams: The Rise and Fall and Rise ofPop (New York: The Institute of Contemporary Art and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 31-33. The British pop critic recommends that "instead of reserving the word [culture] for the highest artifacts and noblest thoughts of history's top ten, it needs to be used more widely as the description of 'what a society does"' (31). Alloway proposed that the humanist's traditional role as "taste giver [and] opinion-leader [was, by mid-century] clearly limited to

swaying other humanists and not to steering society," and that having "lost their grip on public values," humanists had been superseded by the mass media (32-33). In language that bears an uncanny resemblance

174 South Central Review

EsteraMilman 175

to early Futurist dogma, the critic continues: "The missile and the toaster, the push-button and the repeating revolver, military and kitchen technologies, are the natural possession of the media-a treasury of orientation, a manual of one's occupancy ofthe twentieth century" (33). When first published, 'The Long Front of Culture" included a reproduction of the cover of a recent issue of the British edition of the Science Fiction Quarterly. Alloway's credo also included a lengthy citation of a reader's "reading" of this Futuristic visual text:

I'm sure Freud could have found much to comment and write on about it. Its symbolism, intentionally or not, is that of man, the victor, woman, the slave. Man the active; woman the passive. Man the conqueror, woman the conquered. Objective man, subjective woman; possessive man, submissive woman! . .. What are the views of other readers on this? Especially in relation with Luros's backdrop of destroyed cities and vanquished man? (33)

4. George Heard Hamilton, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall; New York: H. N. Abrams, n.d.), 222.

5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 225. 7. Ibid. 8. H. H. Anason, History ofModernArt: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:

Prentice-Hall; New York: H. N. Abrams, 1977), 220. 9. Ibid., 221. 10. Ibid., 223-24. Hamilton concurs with Amason's assessment of Boccioni's influence: "By insisting

that the modem sculptor eschew 'the traditional sublimity of the subject' as well as precious materials of former times-marbles and bronze-for everyday substances like glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, horsehair, leather, cloth, mirrors, and electric lights, [Boccioni] laid the foundations for much that was to be realized in Dada and by certain Constructivist and Pop artists of the present day" (Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Art, 225). In a 1920 history of Dada, Richard Huelsenbeck recalled that although Boccioni had been killed by the time the Zurich Dada circle came into existence, they were all familiar with "his thick book, Pittura e sculturafuturiste." Richard Huelsenbeck, "En Avant Dada" (1920), The Dada Painters andPoets, ed. Robert Motherwell, trans. Ralph Manheim (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 24.

11. Amason, 224. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Norbert Lynton, The Story ofModern Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 88. The

author quickly retreats back into his formalist position when he singles out Boccioni as the finest "artist" in the group at the same time that he dismisses most "art" of the Futurists as tentative and incapable of "[measuring] up to their swaggering announcements" (88).

15. Ibid., 318. 16. Ibid., 331. 17. Kaprow had studied the history of art under Meyer Shapiro at Columbia University from 1950 to

1952 and music composition with John Cage at the New School for Social Research from 1957 through 1959. In a February 4,1996, conversation, Kaprow brushed aside the suggestion that his Happenings were influenced by Surrealism and insisted instead that, although he may not have been fully aware of the implications of "The American Action Painters" when he first read the December 1952 issue ofArt News, by 1956 the piece had deeply permeated his thinking about the arts. The artist went on to recount to me that Rosenberg had responded to the publication of "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock" by accusing Kaprow of having "literalized" his own 1952 essay. Authored in 1956, Kaprow's eulogy of Pollock appeared inArt News 57.6 (October 1958). The aforementioned conversation took place in Iowa City on the occasion of a planning session for the exhibition "Allan Kaprow: Inventions/Re-Inventions," hosted by The University of Iowa Museum of Art, March/April, 1996.

18. Lynton, 319. Kaprow also openly acknowledges the impact of Motherwell's anthology upon his own artistic production.

19. Max Kozloff, "An Interview with Robert Motherwell," Artforum 4.1 (September 1965): 37. Motherwell would later serve as general editor for The Viking Press's The Documents of Twentieth Century Art series, including the volume, Futurist Manifestos, from which the translated headnote for this article was quoted. Bernard Karpel, who authored the critical bibliography for The Dada Painters and

176 South Central Review Poets, served as Documentary Editor for Viking's Futurism volume.

20. Ibid. 21. Dick Higgins recently confirmed that "because of World War II, dada was not widely discussed

until the 1950s, thirty-five years after its inception: without [people like] Robert Motherwell (whoseDada Painters and Poets was seminal to most of us)-we would have had a hard time indeed figuring out just what the Dadaists had done, what they had achieved and what they had not managed" (typescript for the artist's formal response to the Walker Art Center's February 1993 Fluxforum Symposium, for which we both served as respondents; n.p.). For my own investigation of the topic see Estera Milman, "Historical Precedents, Trans-Historical Strategies, and the Myth of Democratization," in Fluxus: A Conceptual Country, ed. Milman (Providence: Visible Language, 1992), in press. Higgins's statement was received by members of the audience as validation of my methodological approach in this September 1992 essay.

22. For my recent work in the area, see Milman, "Pop Art/Pop Culture: Neo-Dada and the Politics of Plenty," The Image in Dispute: Visual Cultures in Modernity, ed Dudley Andrew (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1996), and Milman, "Notes on the Aesthetics of Doom," in NO/art (Berlin: Neue Gesellschaft fir Bildende Kunst, 1995), 88-93.

23. Dick Higgins, "Fluxus: Theory and Reception" (paper presented during Fluxus: A Workshop Series, Alternative Traditions in the Contemporary Arts, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, April 1985). The paper was written in 1982 and published in 1991.

24. Ibid. Higgins's attempted explication of the differences among Fluxus's accomplishments and those ofthe movement's historical precursors concentrated on distinguishing Fluxus from historical Dada. In a recent letter to me addressing my reference in print to the choice ofthe title "Neo-Dada in der Musik" for a 1962 proto-Fluxus concert in Dusseldorf, Higgins still found it necessary to insist that it was only because the Fluxus community as yet had no name that "[we] used Neo-Dadafaut de mieux, though we knew it wasn't accurate" (letter from Dick Higgins to the author, "4 October 1992, Buster Keaton's Birthday [1898]").

25. Ibid. 26. Legend has it that it was Marinetti's insistence that the Futurists be segregated from other

Modernists that resulted in this exclusion. Although the works that were included in the exhibition affirmed an acute School of Paris bias on the part of the Armory Show's organizers, as chance would have it, Picasso and Braque were also poorly represented. As a result, the Armory Show's public and the

popular press came to associate Cubism with Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp. Despite his mid- century anti-Fascist agenda, Milton Brown would admit that, on formal grounds, Duchamp and Picabia were closer to the Futurists than to the Cubists (Milton Brown, American Painting: From the Armory to the Depression [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955], 111). Interestingly enough, Brown chose to reproduce Duchamp's futuresque Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, opposite the title page of his

survey of American painting. 27. Prior to the first World War, the Wobblies, or North American branch of the Industrial Workers

of the World (IWW), were associated with anarcho-syndicalism and provide a particularly apt example of the period's blurring of lines within leftist political thought

28. Letter from Mable Dodge to Gertrude Stein, 24 January 1913, quoted in Edward Abrahams, The

LyricalLeft: Randolph Bourne andAlfred Stieglitz and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 3-4. Abrahams's book also provides a description of the Patterson Pageant

29. Mark Antliflf Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 135.

30. Quoted in Abrahams, 4. 31. A little over a year before the Zurich-based Dada circle adopted Simultaneity from Marinetti, a

definition of"Simultanism" (credited to both Cubism and Futurism) and a tongue-in-cheek score for a simultaneous performance appeared in the first issue ofthe proto-Dada periodical 291 (New York, March

1915). 32. Stuart Davis, "Introduction," inFirstAmericanArtists'Congress (New York City, 1936), n.p. 33. Margaret Duroc, "Art in Fascist Italy," FirstAmerican Artists' Congress, 72-73. 34. Meyer Shapiro, "Introduction of Modern Art in America: The Armory Show," Shapiro,Modern

Art Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 176.

Mid-century attacks in Congress against Modernism did not necessarily distinguish the Futurists from other "germ-carrying art vermin" of foreign origin: "Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder.

Estera Milman 177

Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth... Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane ... Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms. Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason" (Congressman George A. Dondero, "Modem Art Shackled to Communism," Congressional Record, First Session, 81st Congress, Tuesday, 16 August 1949, Washington, D.C.: GPO).

35. Shapiro, "Introduction of Modem Art in America," 162-63. 36. Brown's text was the first survey to address this topic. The author's agenda, as evidenced in his

1955 publication, echoes critiques of Modernism's "nonsocial" tendencies that were prevalent within his community of intellectuals during the mid/late thirties. Brown's work of this period had appeared under the imprint of the Critics Group and the Marxist literary joural Dialectics; his The Painting of the French Revolution was published as issue number 8 of the Critics Group Series (New York: Critics Group, 1938); and his essay, "The Marxist Approach to Art," appeared in issue number 2 of the Critics Group periodical, Dialectics: Marxist Literary Journal. The historian would later help found the Art History Program of the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY.

37. Brown, American Painting, 57. Four years later, President Eisenhower would announce that "our government should not sponsor examples of our creative energy which are non-representational to the point of obscurity" (ArtDigest [15 November 1953]: 4).

38. For example, the author's critique of the Art World: A Monthly for the Public Concerned with Higher Ideals (which frst appeared in print in October 1916 and which Brown associated with "hysterical anti-labor and anti-radical repression") includes the following accusation: "[The Art World's] excessive nationalism was part of a general attitude which revealed itself as a psychopathic bigotry with amazing analogies in later developments in fascist ideology. While the destructive concepts of Futurism were being perverted to the uses of fascism in Italy, here in America an artistic system which directly foreshadowed the Nazi credo was being propounded" (Brown, 85). In the chapter "Modernism" (under the sub-heading "The Cubist Tradition"), Brown insists that "the Futurists, with their glorification of the machine and their philosophical nihilism, even though aware of the problem, were incapable of any rational solution of the man-machine relationship, save that of fascism" (113).

39. Brown recalls that Joseph Stella had maintained direct contact with the Futurists prior to 1913 (111), that Charles Demuth's paintings of industrial subjects are characterized by "a predilection for the 'ray-line,' a derivation fromthe dynamic, directional lines of Futurism" (112), and that Lionel Feininger's early works were "dominated by the Futurist tendency toward disintegration of form" (116). Brown is also willing to admit that John Marin's skyscrapers were "dynamic forces [within which the painter saw] as did the Futurists, a pervasive dynamic movement" (134) and that many of Max Weber's 1915-1917 paintings "had more to do with Futurism in their subject matter and reiterative rhythms than with the pattern-like arrangements of Cubism" (139).

40. Ibid., 104. 41. Ibid., 64-65. 42. Ibid., 32. The originalMasses was founded in 1911, disbanded in 1916 for its adamant pacifist

agenda, and reorganized in 1926 under the masthead, NewMasses. Brown insists that this pre-World War I blurring of distinctions occurred because "the lines of 'leftist' political thought were as yet not sharply drawn and [the] party itself was split into various factions" (32).

43. See, for example, Webster's StudentDictionary (New York: American Book Company, 1953), 30, 548, 777, or the 1934 unabridged second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, 96, 1652, 2381.

44. Richard Huelsenbeck, "En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism," possibilities 1 (1947): 41. A fulltranslation of Huelsenbeck's 1920 history of Dada appeared in The Dada Painters andPoets (1951). In the 1947 excerpted possibilities version, Huelsenbeck presents but one sentence describing the "accidental" discovery of the word Dada prior to recounting the debts Zurich Dada owed Futurism. As was the case in the original, in the 1951 translation this reference is preceded by a lengthy description of the process by which the Zurich Dada circle coalesced. The following reference to the Dadaists' relationship with the Futurists also appeared in Motherwell, although not in the possibilities excerpt: 'Through Tzara we were also in relation with the futurist movement and carried on a correspondence with Marinetti.... We regarded Marinetti's position as realistic, and were opposed to it, although we were glad to take over the concept of simultaneity, of which he made so much use" (Motherwell, 24).

45. Ibid. 46. Harold Rosenberg, "The American Action Painters,"ArtNews 51.8 (December 1952): 25.

178 South Central Review

47. Motherwell's published recollection reads as follows:

In the mid-forties [I was editing] a cultural magazine, dealing mainly with painting, and I felt very strongly that the various arts should be brought together. So I asked John Cage to edit a musical section, and Harold Rosenberg to edit a literary section.... At that time I was editing "Dada" proofs of Hulsenbeck's [sic] which ultimately appeared in the anthology as "En Avant Dada." It was a brilliant piece.... Harold came across the passage in the proofs in which Hulsenbeck violently attacks literary esthetes, and says that literature should be action, should be made with a gun in hand, etc. Harold fell in love with this section, which we then printed in the single issue that appeared of " Possibilities." Harold's notion of'action' derives directly from that piece. (Kozloff, 37)

48. Rosenberg, 26. 49. Ibid., 176. 50. Ibid., 30. Rosenberg had earlier confirmed the radical depoliticization of the post-World War II

North American vanguard in his 1947 editorial preface to possibilities. Signed by both Rosenberg and Motherwell, but usually credited to the former, the preface states: "Naturally the deadly political situation exerts an enormous pressure.... Once the political choice has been made, art and literature ought of course to be given up. Whoever genuinely believes he knows how to save humanity has ajob before him which is certainly not part time" (possibilities, 1).

51. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Fluxus and the Silvermans: An Introduction," in Jon Hendricks, Fluxus Codex (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1988), 16.

52. Ibid. 53. Hendricks, 22. 54. Ibid., 21. 55. Ibid., 22. 56. Allan Kaprow, Assemblage Environments andHappenings (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1962),

212. 57. Ibid. The term "Happening," as credited to Kaprow, is always capitalized. John Cage describes

his 1952 Black Mountain event in some detail while being interviewed by Michael Kirby and Richard Schechner. See "An Interview with John Cage," Tulane Drama Review 10.2 (Winter 1965): 30-72.

Cage's anarchic performance has attained mythical status within the history of contemporary alternative artistic practice. Within this discourse this event concurrently illustrates an historiographic legerdemain; it has come to be acknowledged as the first "Happening." See, for example, Mary Emma Harris, TheArts atBlackMountain College (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 226.

58. Kaprow, 212. 59. George Maciunas, "Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry, Art," (ca. 1962), reproduced in Clive

Phillpot and Jon Hendricks, Fluxus: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988), 25.

60. Ibid., 26. 61. Ibid., 27. 62. John Cage quoted in RoseLee Goldberg, PerformanceArt: From Futurism to the Present (New

York: H. N. Abrams, 1988), 124. 63. See, for example, John Cage's essays "History of Experimental Music in the United States"

(1959) and "Edgar Varese" (1958) in Silence, pages 69 and 84, respectively. In the 1959 essay, Cage recollects his musical editorship of possibilities.

64. possibilities, 100. 65. In 1961, Cage explained: "Critics frequently cry 'Dada' after attending one of my concerts or

hearing one of my lectures.... I often point out that Dada nowadays has in it a space, an emptiness, that it formerly lacked" (Cage, foreword, Silence, xi). In 1963, one year after "Pop Art" had accrued

hegemony over the term "neo-Dada," Andy Warhol noted: "Johns and Rauschenberg-Neo-Dada for all those years, and everyone calling them derivative and unable to transform the things they use-are now called the progenitors of Pop. It's funny the way things change. I think John Cage has been very influential.... History books are being rewritten all the time." Warhol was among a group of newly identified "American Pop artists" who were interviewed by G. R. Swenson, in "What Is Pop Art?" Art News 62.7 (November 1963): 61.

Estera Milman 179

66. Marion von Hofaker, "Hans Richter Chronology," manuscript version, to be published in Hans Richter: The Prophet ofModernism, ed. Stephen C. Foster.

67. Hans Richter, DadaArt andAnti-Art (London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., 1978), 216-17. 68. Ibid. 69. Hans Richter, audio tape of a circa 1958 interview by Giddeon Bachmann, originally intended

for publication in the never-realized Cinemage 6; courtesy of Anthology Film Archives, New York City. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Cage, 'The Future of Music" (1974), Silence, 288. 74. Ibid., 296.