Frank Sadorus: Photographer (Photo Essay)

Abstract

Expressionism Avant-garde art has correspondingly been concerned less with the physical reproducton of visual and tangible realities than with psychic and cerebral processes . These have presented all the more challenge to the artist, in that the irrational components in them have surfaced, during world wars and other political crises, into social reality itself. In order to deal with this irrationalism, art has oscillated between extreme forms of abstraction and dematerialization on the one hand , and highly distorted and exagger~ted forms of realism and materiality on the other, not infrequently manifested in the same work. At the one pole, artists sought inner-directed mental and psychic energy; at the other, a sublimation of outer-directed p_hy~ical energy. In the postwar era, abstract expresSIOnism sought to reconcile the two poles with an art abstract in content and physically energized in form. This was believed to represent a kind of creative quintessence with the violence and gratuitousness of the physical gesture conveying pure and naked spiritual energy. The work of art stood as an emblem of the transformation of a once-material, once-functional object , ~ painti~g , into a state of pure creative gestur~ , which re~a1ned, however, highly sublimated symbol!~ ~onnect1ons _to the physical effort traditionally or atavJ_stJcally associated With nonartistic economic production-labor. The act of painting renders the idea of physical labor in a form as far removed as possible from the modern, labor-associated concepts of discimmmtt=: ttt'. t_:::_.r_:::~r.J_t~,:.~~?:iiSi -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-----·,.-....... ....... ,l2mll8888! ~ _ _._..,_ -M:::;::;::::':::::::::::::*~ David Kunzle is Professor of Art at the University of Caltf?rnta,_ Los Anr;;eles . He is the author of The Early Com1c Stnp, Fashion and Fetishism , Posters of Protest, and articles on popular protest and revolutionary art in the Americas. pline and uniformity . Abstract expressionist art attempts to replicate what is conceived of as the primal energy displayed by primitives in pretechnological labor, combined with the spontaneous aggressiveness of the hunter or tribal warrior. The appeal of abstract expressionism is as a form of cultural atavism. At the same time it imposes a unique body-autograph in an increasingly machinedominated and labor-alienated era, restoring the otherwise missing stamp of human personality to the human-made artifact. It arose in the United States at a time of rapid economic growth, increased personal affluence for the majority, and the global extension of United States military power. 2 All this was accompanied by an attrition , among American people at large, of a sense of social responsibility, of commitment to collective effort , which had been generated by the struggles against the Depression and Fascism. 3 The majority acquiesced in what appeared to be the unimpeded functioning of a natural law of the free market. In these circumstances, the solipsism and asceticism of avant-garde art constituted a refuge for the suppressed conscience of a cultural elite disturbed by naked competition for personal wealth , while the aggressive and individualistic nature of that art was actually in fundamental conformity with the ideology upon which the competitive society was based. By 1960, faith in salvation through increasing personal wealth and the acquisition of consumer goods was beginning to erode. There began to appear studies critical of the march of consumerism and of manipulation by advertising , television , and the mass media generally-studies which achieved a wide circulation .4 The milk of that sacred cow, the American Way of Life, and its ideology were turning sour. As the cold war thawed, Communism was seen less as a direct physical and military threat than as a psychological and ideological rival feeding upon the vast pockets of poverty located around the world, which were as yet not cured by the United States . Ideological cracks began to show at home. The intensified economic penetration of the Third World, accompanied as it was by a thickening of its philanthropic veneer, reflected the suspicion that the absorptive capacity of the domestic market was after all, limited. Advertisers as well as producers of ~on­ sumer goods upped the ante. The impoverished foreign~r had to be persuaded that progress and happiness lay in the acquisition of United States-produced soft drinks and television sets · virgin, once-sterile lands in remote countries were' seeded with the fruits of American democracy. At ~ome, the ~wful possibility of psychological and physIcal saturation by consumer goods was countered by ~ven harder, more cunning, and more insidious sellIng techniques . In the United States people continued Pop Art as Consumerist Realism to buy, but more anxiously . Thei r consumption of the new and ever more sophi sticated luxuries was tempered by the uncertainty of whether they were really needed , how much they really contributed to the indi vidual 's total happiness, and whether they did not create a prison of escalating personal indebtedness. In other words , the straightforward process of acqui ring things , the once simple relat ionship of owner and thing owned , was undermined . Ownersh ip of objects no longer conferred feelings of power. Consumers as well as producers began to examine motivations, becoming conscious of media pressures even wh ile continuing to yield to them. As acquis ition and possession became ends in themselves , they lost their organic relationsh ip to personal lives, and their historic role of conferring feel ings of power. Major luxury goods, like automobiles and refrigerators , lost even their social meaning as status symbols as they came within the financial reach of the majority. In these ci rcumstances , the apprehension , latent ever since the very beg inn ings of the monetary economy, that purchase of luxuries as opposed to barter of necessities vitiates social relations became acute and neurotic. When production is the act of unidentifiable persons or agencies , when sel ling is known to be motivated exclusively by greed , and when acqu isition is total ly detached from necessity, there arises a psycholog ical cris is of a magnitude in direct proportion to the efficiency and ruthlessness of the producing and selling process . By the late fifties works of art were figuring increasingly on the roster of luxury consumer goods. Those who could afford a second car could afford to pay several thousand dollars for a single painting . The postwar era saw a burgeoning market in the United States both for Old Masters and works by living American artists . Works of art had one inestimable advantage over cars and other such conveniences: they did not wear out or become obsolete. They did not lose their value economically or socially. They were an investment, and became, through a change in law, a tax write-off, and thus effectively paid for out of the public purse. This law was to have far-reaching consequences and become a· means of consolidating the crucial decisions about support for the arts in the hands of the rich. 5 The desire to acquire art for purposes of investment and status derived from that same core of uncertainty about the relationship of real needs to the consumer goods which were swallowing up an increasing share of total personal income. Works of art were seen as objects of permanent aesthetic significance and monetary value, which compensated for the spuriousness, obsolescence, and dispensability of all the other stuff. Art constituted a growing, if relatively tiny corner in an investment market dominated by the stock of corporations of unfathomable immensity. Income derived from 17 such stocks seemed as impersonal as the corporations themselves , which were increasing both their power and their remoteness by means of transnational , global movements. The new art patrons, many of them newly rich , were the managers and professional servants of these industrial behemoths, part cog and part control lever in essentially dehumanized and anonymous economic systems . The art object, by contrast , connoting that intensely individual and rebellious presence-a presence both psychological and physical-communicated values richly compensatory for the meaninglessness of work and the leisure derived from work. Abstract and abstract expressionist styles offered a veh icle of compensation and a refuge , but only temporarily . Inevitably, the style which proclaimed enduring values , but whose success depended on the freshness of its break with preceding styles , would itself be superseded ; art was subject to the same fundamental economic laws as any other luxury object on the market, with the difference that the rhythm of turnover was slower. The coalition of artists, critics , gallery owners, media people , educators , and museum personnel , the first beneficiaries of the new allAmerican boom in art , were able to summon up traditional formalist concepts and "universal values" in order to prolong the life of a style , even as they p! a:-~ned , li ke good corporate executives, and recru ited for the next swing in the market of artistic taste. Consensus was reached to maintain the reputation and value of certain styles and image-types, whose longevity was ensured through constant variations , multiples, and prints. Among others, Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol , Roy Lichtenstein , and most remarkably of all , perhaps, Ernest Trova have produced a kind of staple product, which only needs renewal through fresh label design , packaging , or marketing techniques . Pop Art and the New Realism Around 1960, then , consumerism entered a new, defensive-aggressive phase, demanding more than the outright escape offered by abstract and abstract expressionist styles. Psychologically, it needed a form of confrontation , out of which another, more sophisticated kind of refuge might be formed . This pseudoconfront