The Art of Return

The Sixties and Contemporary Culture

James Meyer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780226620145
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

More than any other decade, the sixties captureour collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King Jr. declaring "I have a dream!" or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels, the revolutionary sixties resonates around the world: China's communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets, calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War.In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

Part 1

The Sixties Return

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past most fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connections but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable.

Henry James, preface to the New York edition of The Aspern Papers

What can one period mean to another? Under what circumstances does a previous time become meaningful, useful even, and the past no longer appear to us as merely past? What are the forms of these animations, the mechanisms of these returns?

T. J. Clark has referred to modernism as our antiquity.1 The version of modernism he describes in Farewell to an Idea projects a view of history as a forward motion, a process that we can steer and mold. The modernism Clark describes supposes that we can cast off a burdensome past, invent new forms, wipe the slate clean. It promises that we can be new. This belief system is now so ossified we can barely understand it, Clark says. The modernist future is a dead future, one whose logic we cannot even begin to grasp. Clark’s account is a cautionary tale, a tissue of contradictions. Utopic dreams yield dystopic outcomes. Formal innovation and cooptation are inextricably linked. Modernism fails. Again and again. From Jean-Louis David’s Paris of Year 2, to El Lissitzky’s Vitebsk, to Jackson Pollock’s Manhattan, the modernist ideals of social improvement and unfettered freedom are ruthlessly betrayed.

Yet the slow decline of modernism as a viable aesthetic principle does not foreclose the future as an idea.2 To speak of the future entails that we consider the recent past, the past that bleeds into our moment. Narratives of the present are historical narratives, genealogies of the contemporary. Matthew Arnold once described the condition of being modern as an “impatient irritation of mind” in the face of the “immense, moving, confused spectacle” we call the present. Being modern requires a comparative awareness: we are “delivered” from our self-absorption, our myopia, and our sheer perplexity, the poet says, when we consider other cultures and eras. When we compare. Arranging two events in our minds allows us to perceive their difference—the distinction between a current state of affairs and a prior condition. The moment we are in—Arnold’s “confused spectacle”—is a little less confusing.3

Theories of modernism and postmodernism, for all their refinements and differences, typically compare a current moment to an earlier time, a generic “past.” Where futuristic modernism, the modernism of Friedrich Nietzsche and T. J. Clark, negates the past as burden, as something we need to forget, a second version of modernism (associated with T. S. Eliot and Clement Greenberg) is a narrative of continuity, of tradition. The most salient contemporary works of art and literature invite comparison with older monuments. The rare innovator, the “individual talent,” is capable of expressing emotions in ways previously unexpressed. The old languages will not do.4 But rather than transgress the medium’s proprieties, as the avant-gardist (a Marcel Duchamp or John Cage) attempts to do, the modernist poet or painter brings the medium forward another step by eschewing established formal norms. Modernism “continues the past without gap or break” by not repeating what came before.5

Postmodernism repudiated the historicism of the second modernism while mourning the utopic imagination of the first. It rephrased newness as post-ness. Once-radical innovations, such as the grid and monochrome canvas, were now perceived as preexistent, repeatable, no longer new.6 The postmodernist work could only speak of its belatedness, its status as supplement, as copy, as allegory.7 The work was never “present” to a viewer as the modernist artwork was claimed to be.8 Its temporal character was far more ambivalent. Douglas Crimp describes the paradoxical nature of the exemplary postmodernist work, the “Picture,” as “both present and remote.” A viewer does not necessarily remember the original image (the particular movie that may have inspired a Cindy Sherman Film Still, for example). He or she remembers its having been present, which is to say its absence. A distance has been established between the time of viewing and another moment, prior yet uncertain, evoked by the Picture.9

Futurist modernism, historicist modernism, postmodernism: the seminal aesthetic theories of the last century were narratives of time. The contentious debates between critics associated with these paradigms typically addressed how works of art and writing come to terms with the past—and how this “past” exerts a tenacious hold on the present. And, in fact, the representation of the past, the imagination of history, has reemerged as a contemporary preoccupation. The histories of indigenous peoples; the court of Henry VIII; the Middle Passage of slaves from Africa to the Americas; the colonial cloth trade; a text by the eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; a coal strike in Thatcher’s Britain: artists and writers explore these and other histories. In a time that is often described as presentist and temporally ambiguous, practitioners rifle the past opportunistically to illuminate a present condition. Reimagining history, they ask what the past means to us now.10

Now, there is no past more present during our time than the Sixties.11 If modernism is our “antiquity,” then the Sixties is indubitably our modernism—or what stands for it at present. The Sixties is our modernism, I argue in this book, because the Sixties represents the memory of modernism and earlier modernities, the memory of the fantasy that we can “be new.” That we can invent new forms, wipe the slate clean. That we can build a more just society. Futuristic modernism did not seem so ancient then. Utopic longings were not so easily dismissed. The Cultural Revolution was the memory of the People’s Revolution, the counterculture the memory of older utopic communities, the “neo” avant-garde the memory of the historical avant-garde.12 During the Sixties the imagination was constantly spoken about, lauded, molded into a politics. (“All power to the imagination!” the students of Paris declared to the world during the “Events” of May 1968.) What we call the Sixties is the last time the imagination was so enunciated, so celebrated, the last time it seemed as if “everything was possible,” as Fredric Jameson once observed.13

What was this “everything,” what made it possible? A new economic order came into place then, Jameson suggests in a classic argument, an order he defines as a transition from one phase of capitalist and technological innovation to another. During the long Sixties—a period roughly spanning the mid-Fifties to the late Seventies, and on which we will have much to say—the industrial economy of high modernity evolved into a nuclear, televisual, and digital order. Advanced capitalism, postindustrial society, consumer culture, the media age: that era has many names.14

Jameson’s Sixties is the most theorized we have—a structuralist mapping of “levels” emerging simultaneously around the globe.15 His account is richly dialectical. On one hand, the Sixties represent a toppling of authority, a revival of the Enlightenment dream of universal freedom, a dream of being new. Globalization was then a fantasy of universal socialism, of Marxist totality, incredible as that now seems. “The globalization of revolutionary forces is the most important task of the whole historical period that we live in,” the leader of the German New Left, Rudi Dutschke, declared then.16 But hegemonic forces were equally at play. Colonialism mutated into neo-colonialism; multinational corporations penetrated Third World economies; the Green Revolution opened up new markets; the U.S. military-industrial complex competed with the Soviet Union for Cold War dominance.17 The long Sixties ushered in new forms and experiences of mediation, an infiltration of the televisual and digital into psychic life, a depletion of the somatic. And it catalyzed awareness of domestic and global injustices, a longing for new freedoms and bodily pleasures and alternative lifestyles. The new economy generated middle-class affluence, the necessary precondition for the repudiation of this “System” by young people.18 The counterculture that emerged then “was grounded paradoxically not in the failure, but in the success of a high industrial economy.”19 To write or research or make art about the Sixties is to confront an era of extreme paradoxes, of irreconcilable contradictions. We are grappling with them still.

Sixties Children

The Sixties is both distant and near. It is our future past, for it imagines, and spectacularly fails to imagine, this moment, however we would describe it. The Sixties is a crux, a tectonic shift in politics and culture. It is modernism’s apogee and conclusion, its final bow; and it is the beginning of the time we are in.20 And so the meaning of the Sixties is fiercely contested. Some would leave behind a period they experienced—to forget what they remember. They view the ideologies they embraced, the choices they made then, with skepticism or even contempt.21 They have turned the page—a long time ago—and chasten us to embrace our presentness. To move on, get on with it. If we can’t “be new,” we can at least be contemporary.22 Others view that time nostalgically. They remember what happened—they were “there.” And they inveigle the rest of us (who were not “there”) to remember, too. Remember the March on Washington. Remember Stonewall. Remember feminism. Remember May. Remember Vietnam. Remembering the Sixties helps us imagine that change is still possible. Sixty-eight, most iconic of Sixties years, is thus proposed as an imaginary “space for thinking, describing, and theorizing social change in the present tense.”23

Others (the numbers grow ever larger) don’t understand what all the fuss is about. They have no memories of the Sixties or Seventies nor cherish their parents’ memories of that time. That era feels as ancient to them as modernism; Angela Davis is “almost as remote” a figure to this cohort as Emma Goldman.24 And there are others who have heard ”too much.” Who are burdened with secondhand memory. Who remember their parents’ memories, their professors’ memories. Who have heard about the glory days, the daring exploits of the Sixty-eighters. Who are reminded that they live in an era of diminished expectations—a dull time. And they are weary of these comparisons.25

There are others who recall that time vaguely. Who barely remember—but cannot forget. Who remain fascinated by those random images that remain, inexplicably, from that tumultuous era, secreted in the depths of memory. Sixties children, I call them. One need not have been born during a period to harbor a feeling for it, to identify with it, to be marked by it. “We do not necessarily belong to the generation to which the dates of our birth consign us,” historian Pierre Nora has written.26 Nora’s claim—that we often identify with a past era, or with a generation that is not properly “ours”—is complicated when this past is relatively recent, when it brushes up against the contemporary, when it impacts us in ways we don’t entirely grasp. The Sixties is recent history, after all, and certainly momentous. It remains insistently present even as it feels more historical, more foreign, with every passing year. It returns—and we return to that time. And so many practices of return were developed by artists and writers born during the long Sixties, whose earliest memories date to that period, or who were born in its aftermath.27 Children of the Sixties. How did the upheavals of that era affect them before they were aware of what was happening? Who are they?

We catch a glimpse of them in Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006), a film and photo installation by Luke Fowler (fig. 1.1). Fowler revisits the history of the Scratch Orchestra, the anarchic musical ensemble co-founded by British composer Cornelius Cardew in 1969. Some of the Scratch members were trained musicians; many were not. Scratch arrangements were ba...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Sixties Return
• Part 2: Entropy as Monument
• Part 3: The End of the Sixties
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index