Rock and Roll in Representations of the Invasion of Vietnam

Abstract

RECOGNITION THAT RECENT CULTURAL DEVELOPMENTS have invalidated the critical concepts of high modernism is now commonplace. Since Herbert Marcuse's early sixties writings, we have known that the collapse of high bourgeois art into industrial culture accompanied a similar collapse of distinctions between culture and social reality, though now we more clearly understand the result of the latter to be the information processing of a totally mediated environment. To these we may add a less commonly recognized collapse, that of the boundaries between different mediums. Modernism has been understood, preeminently by Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, in terms of a medium-specific formalism initially proposed by Lessing: 'Purity' meant selfdefinition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of selfdefinition with a vengeance.' Even though it perforce coexisted with varieties of intermedia, such an essentialism had wide currency in sixties art, but today, when more typical cultural developments consist of the interdependent and simultaneous innovations in music, painting, graffiti, dance, fashion, design, and club-going instanced in the mid seventies by punk and the mid eighties by hiphop, not only is the path to purity much less frequently trodden, but the boundaries between one medium and the others have become increasingly blurred. And so a contrary project for modernism has become clear: Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk nourished Eisenstein's dream of the meeting of all the arts in the film frame. This dream eventually materialized in video's combination of all previous mediums with one another, and also of art with everything else, in a single (pseudo)reality. With the loss of both formal and social autonomy for art, events in industrial culture typically appear as general projects realized more or less simultaneously in several mediums, none of which can be categorically distinguished from the others: various kinds of performance enacted for films, records, tapes, and printed matter, modulating into similarly diverse but similarly integrated advertising projects. commodities produced by and around The Victory Tour, Madonna's tour, or the Pope's tour; by the protean roles of Andy Warhol or Mal-