Postwar Art Research Articles

Out of History: Postwar Art in Beirut

Beirut has a tight hold on the Western imagination: a multilingual and cross-cultural Mediterranean port, a liberal haven in the region, and a hotbed for political violence. Such popular characterizations rest on the city's reputation as a site of both cosmopolitanism and volatile instability. The end of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) coincided with the art market's global turn, and contemporary postwar artistic production in Beirut carries a similar cachet in me international art world.1 In particular, curators and critics have focused their attention on a group of friends, colleagues, and sometimes collaborators—often tagged as the postwar generation—whose mixed-media practices converge on a critical interest in the war, its histories and memories. Intimately contextual, this work also resonates on an international scale. Its archival aesthetics link the strategies of the postwar generation with global neoconceptual projects, and the works' allegorical approach to history engages with postmodernism's theoretical disillusion with grand narratives. However, for the most part, critics have securely localized this body of work, reading it as symptomatic of postwar Beirut. This essay contends that these artistic strategies both intervene in representations of the city and partake in its history of cosmopolitanism.

Hard Hats and Art Strikes: Robert Morris in 1970

For his 1970 Whitney Museum solo exhibition, Robert Morris turned the museum into a “construction site” with his large-scale process pieces. He then closed the show early as part of a New York art strike to protest the Vietnam War. Investigating the historical circumstances surrounding Morris's embrace and subsequent denial of hard-hat labor reveals a crisis of political art at this moment, particularly within the context of the New Left's vexed relationship to workers. This exhibition has disappeared from Morris's reception, yet it altered his artistic trajectory and enacted a pivotal redefinition of artistic labor in postwar American art.

Postwar modern art and California's progressive legacies

This essay explores mid-twentieth-century cultural and social shifts resulting from California's once-famous commitment to expanding public education. The starting point is how progressive ideologies of education shaped the ambitions of Jay DeFeo (1929 – 1989), one of the state's most important mid-twentieth-century artists. Three distinct lenses are used: (1) the pedagogical goals of the Department of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1940s, when DeFeo pursued her undergraduate and master's degrees; (2) women's modern art networks that developed around the state throughout the first half of the twentieth century and the models that provided young women like DeFeo with intellectual and creative ambitions; and (3) an examination of what expanded access to higher education meant more generally for a group of young women who graduated with DeFeo from San José High School in 1946. The essay moves between art and social history in order to reveal the correlation of overlapping sets of social relations and the subjective horizons they provided for young adults responding to a complex set of opportunities and limitations. An argument regarding the larger effects of expanding higher education emerges from the juxtaposition of the social, institutional and subjective domains drawn from a narrow slice, a microhistory in effect, of California mid-twentieth-century cultural shifts, some of which took material form in paintings, others in the decisions people made about the most intimate aspects of their lives.

Eyesight alone: Clement Greenberg's modernism and the bureaucratization of the senses

One of the most influential and provocative art critics of the twentieth century, Clement Greenberg propelled abstract expressionist painting - in particular the monumental work of Jackson Pollock - to a leading position in an international postwar art world. Caroline A. Jones' magisterial study widens Greenberg's fundamental tenet of opticality - the idea that modernist art is apprehended through eyesight alone - to a broader arena, examining how the critic's emphasis on the specular resonated with a society increasingly invested in positivist approaches to the world.Jones argues that Greenberg's modernist discourse developed in relation to the rationalized procedures that gained wide currency in the United States at midcentury, in fields ranging from the sense-data protocols theorized by scientific philosophy to the development of cultural forms, such as hi-fi, that targeted specific senses, one by one. Greenberg's attempt to isolate and celebrate the visual was one manifestation of a large-scale segmentation or bureaucratization of the body's senses. Eyesight Alone offers artists, art historians, and twentieth-century art lovers a critical history of this essential thinker that brings his work into dialogue with contemporary critical discourse, illuminating the contested history of modernism itself.

Farewell to the El: Nostalgic Urban Visuality on the Third Avenue Elevated Train

Farewell to the El: Nostalgic Urban Visuality on the Third Avenue Elevated Train Sunny Stalter "Toll a bell for the El/For the last clientele/With a stubborn and sporting esprit/Not a cinder around, yet my vision is blurred/Sentimental? Yes, that I may be./Nothing ever again can be quite what the Third Avenue El was to me."—This metropolitan dirge, composed by Michael Brown, is the current hit of Julius Monk's suave revue in the new nightclub cellar, The Downstairs. Mr. Brown's wail poignantly expresses the general lamentation for the passing of Third Avenue as we knew it. Shedding a tear for Third Avenue, or any city antique, is a popular sport. Nobody in town is kept as busy as the nostalgia-minded. Their eyes are never dry from weeping for another lost cause. New York, chameleon-like, changes with extravagant regularity; the city's old familiar song is the ra-ta-ta of the riveter. But Third Avenue is a special field day for the nostalgic. 1 May 12, 1955, was truly a "special field day for the nostalgic"; it was the last day to ride on the Third Avenue elevated train. The El had ceased to be an important form of public transportation in New York City by the mid-twentieth century, carrying a mere 70,000 fares per day compared to the subway's 4.5 million. 2 Although there were still elevated trains throughout the city's boroughs, the trains that ran down Ninth, Sixth, and Second Avenues in Manhattan had been torn down by 1942. 3 The Third Avenue El was the last of its kind, and riders were eager to memorialize this dying technology. An account of the last ride on the Third Avenue El describes the train being overrun by "souvenir collectors" who stripped the car of "everything that wasn't nailed down": "The black metal destination markers proved the most popular items and were quickly removed from their window slots. Several persons carried six or eight signs tucked under their arms and for a while there was a brisk trading of 'duplicates.'" 4 This hunger continued for less concrete souvenirs that could communicate the experience of the train ride. The New-York Historical Society opened "Exhibit of the City's Elevateds" the day the Third Avenue El closed, replacing the literal ride with a figurative [End Page 869] one. 5 A decade later, the New York Public Library tracked "The Rise and Fall of the Elevated Railroad"; along with the usual photographs, sketches, and contracts, this retrospective included a "1 1/2 hour program of old [E]l movies (and some new ones too)." 6 Elevated trains (and their tracks, stations, and passengers) were common in cultural representation of the New York cityscape throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 7 However, the Third Avenue El's imminent destruction made it a particularly resonant subject for postwar artists and writers. Popular and avant-garde filmmakers shot on its cars and beneath its tracks in the shadowy world of the Bowery. 8 Photographers preserved the flowery ironwork on the girders and the potbellied stoves and stained glass in the stations. 9 In the 1950s, the El traveled nearly empty while subways were packed and cars jammed the streets, but this anachronistic transportation technology gained a new hold on the city's cultural imagination. The Third Avenue El's end was the beginning of its afterlife as an object of aesthetic contemplation. 10 New Yorkers mourned the El because it was a link to the city's past that was about to disappear—one of many in a period of rapid urban development. New York has always understood itself as a city that changes "with extravagant regularity," as Emory Lewis suggests above. 11 The 1950s were no exception, a decade "highlighted by a construction boom that once again transformed the cityscape. High-rise apartments and slum clearance projects were going up virtually...

Constructing the Postwar Art Novel: Paul Bowles, James Laughlin, and the Making ofThe Sheltering Sky

This paper considers the story of the making of Paul Bowles's novelThe Sheltering Skyas a case study for the emergence of the art novel as a commercial niche after World War II. Bowles's novel expresses disdain for American culture and depicts its characters' flight to the Sahara, but its subject matter contrasts with the story of the novel's creation: an unlikely collection of American mass-culture and high-culture institutions, including Doubleday, the William Morris Agency, and the avant-garde publisher New Directions, collaborated in the production and promotion ofThe Sheltering Sky. The story of the novel's making and of its immediate commercial success, the product of a New Directions marketing campaign that effectively advertised Bowles's distance from American culture, exemplifies a neglected aspect of postwar cultural history, when institutions from across the cultural spectrum recognized the existence of a growing market for avant-garde detachment. (EB)

“Ask Somebody Else Something Else”: Analyzing the Artist Interview

We conceived this selection of papers in part because we both rely frequently and heavily on the artist interview in our own work, which is primarily on postwar American artists. The phenomenon of the artist interview—not quite document, not quite literature, not quite propaganda, not quite staged voyeurism, not quite entertainment, not quite verifiable fact—has become increasingly compelling within the context of so-called modern and postmodern production and theorization. It seems to embody a kind of supplementary economy, at once extending the purview of the autonomous art object and simultaneously revealing that any such notion of autonomy is always already a fiction. In addition, the artist interview seems clearly designed to bring the figure of the artist into direct consideration when looking at or thinking through the implications—formal and historical—of any artwork, an impulse very much in tension with prevailing suspicions that warn against linking art with its makers' intentions or biographies.

Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (review)

Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music Catherine Pellegrino Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. By Michael Broyles . New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.[ 387p.ISBN 0-300-10045-0. $40.00.]Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Michael Broyles's history of mavericks in American music attempts to document a paradox: a tradition of tradition-defying musicians in America. To do this, Broyles calls upon his considerable narrative skills and his experience with social histories of music; he has previously written Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), and edited the journals of Lowell Mason's year in Europe (A Yankee Musician in Europe: The 1837 Journals of Lowell Mason [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990]). A brief introductory chapter sets out Broyles's focus and plan for the book: "this book is not about mavericks themselves; it is about the maverick tradition. It is about American society's long-standing fascination with the figure of the maverick, what that means about the place of music in American culture and what that tells us about American society" (p. 2, emphasis in original).After this introduction, Broyles sets out with a series of chapters that profile various American composers who, for one reason or another, have stood outside the musical mainstream of their times. Part 1 of the book, "Pioneers," contains chapters on William Billings and Anthony Philip Heinrich, both composers who often get short-changed in music histories, even histories of American music. The source materials used in these chapters are extremely valuable resources, and it is also useful to have brief, thoroughly-researched biographical portraits of these important early American musicians. Both of these chapters have a strong focus on the relationship of the composers to their communities, and the tensions that arose as a result of their insistence on following their own personal vision. Part 2 of the book, "New Concepts and Forces in American Culture," begins with a chapter on Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein, which resembles the two chapters on Billings and Heinrich. From there, however, the reader might be forgiven for wondering where the mavericks had gone, for in the next two chapters, Broyles takes a considerable detour. In order to set up the material on twentieth-century music in the second half of the book, he devotes a chapter (" 'Prologue to the Annual Tragedy' ") to demonstrating how isolated American music was from the modernist revolution happening in the other arts (both in Europe and America) in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The following chapter, "The Community of the Ultramoderns," returns to the mavericks, profiling Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, and Henry Cowell briefly, but its real focus is on the development of self-organizing societies of musicians. Two such organizations, the International Composers' Guild and the League of Composers, the conflicts and tensions between them, and their effect on the American concert scene and the American public's acceptance of modern music in the 1920s, are the primary material of this chapter. After setting the scene in these two chapters, the third large section of the book, "After the War," returns to the topic of mavericks. This section includes a chapter on what Broyles terms "The Serial Wars," and the debate over who was more marginalized [End Page 754] in the post-war art music scene: composers who built on the serialist innovations of the first half of the century, or those who continued in the tonalist tradition of Copland, Samuel Barber, and others. Broyles casts the debate in terms of a "fight to claim the mantle of maverick" (p. 161), and although this is one of the few mentions of the concept of the maverick in this chapter, that concept is never very far from the surface, especially in the composers' competing claims of oppression. The next two chapters profile John Cage, Harry Partch, and Frank Zappa. By the time Broyles gets to Zappa, the trend that began in the serialists' chapter has become fully realized: composers want to be considered mavericks, and consciously style themselves in that image, as shown by Broyles's claim that Zappa...

Explosive Propositions: Artists React to the Atomic Age

Argument“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the urgent expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.– Yves Klein 1958 (Klein 1973, 10)

The Art of the City: Modernism, Censorship, and the Emergence of Los Angeles's Postwar Art Scene

"The Art of the City" asks how Los Angeles's world-renowned 1960s art scene, a scene celebrated for its youth, dynamic use of new industrial materials, regional specificity, and sexy masculinity, emerged in the face of decades of municipal censorship and anti-modernist politics. Despite years of elite self-promotion and civic boosting of the city as a center for high art, it was not until the beat counterculture made headlines that Los Angeles attracted international attention as a significant site for art production, exhibition, and collection. Yet it was never inevitable that Los Angeles would host an innovative and commercially successful modern art scene. Rather, Los Angeles's 1960s art world benefited from complex social and spatial struggles between diverse creative communities and Los Angeles's conservative authorities, including the City Council, the Los Angeles Police Department, and the County Board of Supervisors.

Autonomy in Post-war Art, Quasi-heroic and Casual

Autonomy has been a key term in the academic, anti-modernist culture wars of the past few decades, beginning with Marxist-inspired critiques of the view that art ought to transcend base material and political interests, and culminating in poststructuralist negations of the apparent illusion of subjective autonomy underpinning traditional understandings of aesthetic experience. At the same time, through much of the twentieth century there has been a series of attacks on the autonomy of art launched by avant-garde artists opposed to the idea that art was possessed of internal, self-generating structures and conventions that distinguished it clearly from everyday objects and phenomena. We have now reached a point, however, where the post-modern, or avantgarde, or neo-avantgarde critiques of autonomy have lost much of their edge whether this autonomy pertains to definitions of the art work, the subjectivity of the artist fashioning the work, or that of the viewer immersed in contemplating it. No longer does the prospect of escaping from some relatively autonomous arena of art into a radically heteronymous world of the everyday seem particularly radical or exciting. The trajectory is well travelled, and the normative imperatives of aesthetic autonomy too feeble for any great excitement to be generated by transgressing them. Nor is it nowadays much more than a formulaic exercise for a critic or scholar to imagine freeing him or herself from some bourgeois ideal of autonomous, self-determining subjectivity, a theoretical-critical exercise that enjoyed its high point in the academic world of the 80s and early 90s. These circumstances are a potentially fruitful context in which to revisit inherited notions of aesthetic autonomy and to examine the ethical imperatives that made it such a key issue in artistic debate of the post-war period.1 Adorno is arguably the post-war thinker who has offered the fullest and most resonant analysis of the problematics of autonomy, as these manifested themselves in art and understanding aesthetic experience over the past half century. The section on art and society in his book Aesthetic Theory, the final drafting of which he was working on at the time of his death in 1969, condensed his thinking on the complex status of modern art in a formulation that still seems remarkably incisive some four decades later. According to Adorno, the condition of any significant work of modern art is radically split between the promise of autonomy and its existence as social fact.2 A significant work of art work simultaneously resists incorporation within the fabric of the culture from which it emerges, and itself is part of that very fabric. In making this point, Adorno is not seeking to moderate modernist claims for art's autonomy by arguing that art should be seen as having a partial or relative autonomy. Rather he sees art's situation as radically paradoxical; as, on the one hand, figuring a possibility of autonomy denied by the administered world of modern capitalism and, on the other, as being immersed within a reality where sustained claims for subjective autonomy are only hollow illusions, or symptoms of an endemic social alienation and fragmentation. The perspective on issues of artistic autonomy developed in this article also owes a lot to Jacques Ranciere's recent revisiting of them in his writing on 'the aesthetic revolution and its outcomes',3 particularly in his recent book, The Partitioning of the Sensible (Le partage du sensible): Aesthetics and Politics. By

Art Criticism as Narrative Strategy: Clement Greenberg's Critical Encounter with Franz Kline

lEw books have had a greater impact on post-war Anglo-American art theory, art criticism, and art history than Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture: Critical Essays. A collection of thirty-seven reviews dating from 1939 to the late fifties and published in 1961, Art and Culture (hereafter A&C) offered a comprehensive and highly refined critical oeuvre to an expanding postwar art world eager to make use of an interpretive cosmology of modern art. It also revived Greenberg's reputation as a critic in the face of Harold Rosenberg's popularity in the late fifties. It does so by retelling the story of his experience of modern art at mid-century through heavily revised reviews and essays that were written earlier in his career. A&C became the modem art textbook for a generation of art history graduate students who were also cutting their teeth as practicing critics for such publications as Artforum. This state of affairs has much to do with the historiographical construction, seminal to the professionalization of art criticism in the sixties, that Greenberg's art criticism was analytical (and thus sophisticated) while Rosenberg's was rhetorical (and thus journalistic and popular). This paper is concerned with exploring what certain of these revisions reveal about Greenberg's intentions as a critic at mid-century. But it will also direct attention to the development of the midcentury art world, the historiographical fate of certain mid-century artists, and finally, the nature and function of art criticism itself not what philosophers, art historians, and even art critics themselves claim criticism is or what art critics say they do, but how criticism is actually practiced. These

Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (review)

Reviewed by: Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz Daniel Morris Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz, by Lisa Saltzman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 173 pp. $40.00. Compared to literary studies, the discipline of art history has been slow to theorize the complex relationship between historical reality and its representations. In part through the incorporation of film theory, however, art historians have begun to incorporate post- structuralism into their work. Developing an eclectic model indebted to psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and narratology, Lisa Saltzman places a leading German artist, Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945 to non-Jewish parents), in the sociohistorical matrix of the haunted environment of contemporary Germany. His art is a symptom of the difficulty contemporary Germans have had in moving from a stagnant state of melancholia to a [End Page 163] psychologically productive mourning of Hitlerism. Her work resituates Kiefer as a post-war artist who may have more in common with filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Werner Fassbinder, and with novelists such as Günter Grass, than with the “neo-expressionist” artists to whom he is usually compared. For Saltzman, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is the most influential essay in film theory. Although Mulvey describes how the male gaze dominates the female body in film, Saltzman interprets the essay as an example of a post-modern ethics based on the Mosaic injunction against the worship of images. She argues that Mulvey writes in the tradition of a prior classic of post-modern ethical criticism, Theodor Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), in which he wrote that “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” Saltzman’s point is that Kiefer represents a visual trace of his own theorization of the hebraically inflected ethical issues of representation that informed Adorno and Mulvey. Unlike the strict injunction against iconography in the paradigmatic essays by Adorno and Mulvey, however, Kiefer registers ambivalence about the prohibition against image making. He plays out the desire to witness the Holocaust while framing silence in a way that represents the world of the past and the struggle to remake the German self after Auschwitz. Kiefer pivots between a wish to mourn the past and, therefore, to work through his belated relationship to Hitlerism, and a melancholic realization that forgetting the past is impossible for him. Saltzman succeeds in making her case for Kiefer’s ethical imagination, especially when she pays close attention to the aesthetic (formal) elements of his art. Her attention to his technique of burning, charring, or cauterizing his surfaces in works after 1975, for example, enables her to theorize his painting as “the concrete trace of historical wounding.” His art becomes a site to visualize the wound of an historical reality that is unrepresentable, except as an erasure. Because Kiefer is in a belated relation to history, he is in the impossible situation of trying to come to terms with events that shattered his identity, but that he never experienced directly. When Saltzman moves away from a close scrutiny of the texture of his work, her readings of his intention to mourn the Shoah sometimes feel strained. I was not convinced by her argument that political trauma was Kiefer’s motivation for entitling his obscure paintings with Kabbalistic titles. Gershom Scholem has demonstrated that messianic movements tend to be a reaction to social and political catastrophe, but must the general category of mysticism, which fits Kiefer, necessarily be tied to historical trauma, as Saltzman suggests? Saltzman’s thesis is based on a historical understanding of Kiefer, and so it is important to her argument to link Kabbalah to political trauma. At the end of the book she mentions that Kiefer has also developed an interest in Hinduism. How does this new interest in the myths of Hindu culture relate to German catastrophe? Because Saltzman is dealing with so many issues and theories in a short study, and because Kiefer’s pictures are mysterious and opaque, her book is valuable for opening [End Page 164] up questions about the meanings of his art, rather than for answering them. She describes Kiefer’s interest in Jewish culture as a form of “German Orientalism” but does not...

La beauté tragique: Mapping the Militarization of Spatial Cultural Consciousness

The author investigates the militarization of immersive cultural consciousness, as initiated by the aerial bombardment of civilians at Guernica and during World War II. Parallel to this trend he observes an ambient-immersive impetus in post-war art, which he traces in the example of the Espace group, and in the currently developing technology of virtual reality.

Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier

The German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) was buried in Ambleside, England, just over fifty years ago. One of the last letters he wrote before his death was to his American patron Katherine Dreier (1877–1952). Virtually nothing has been written on the relationship between Dreier and Schwitters, although for nearly thirty years she was one of the most crucial influences in the artist’s life. Their correspondence, which is mainly to be found in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, is not only valuable in a consideration of Schwitters’s life and work but, more particularly, sheds new light on the development of the Merzbau, a huge installation extending over several rooms of Schwitters’s house in Hanover. Katherine Dreier, as well as being a close friend of the artist and his wife, was the first to introduce Schwitters’s work to the American public. She frequently exhibited his collages during the thirty years’ existence of her own Société Anonyme, and through her close association with Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she established the basis for Schwitters’s enduring reputation in the USA and for his decisive influence on postwar artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

"Judge for Yourselves!"-The "Degenerate Art" Exhibition as Political Spectacle

Volk, come and judge for yourselves!I Thus Adolf Ziegler, National Socialist president of the Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts, opens the 1937 Munich exhibition Degenerate Art. What they could 'judge for themselves is clear enough-a quickly assembled selection of over six hundred modernist works of art seized from museums throughout Germany. Just what kind of an event Ziegler invites the German Volk to take part in has proven, however, a little more difficult to decipher. Although the exhibition can clearly be classified as a species of propagandathe fascist art form nonpareil-when critics turn their attention to Degenerate Art they tend to forget they are examining propaganda and concentrate instead on what the Nazis do, or fail to do, as curators of an exhibition of modernist art. As such, Degenerate Art is judged extraordinarily incompetent: the pictures are hung too closely together; works are incorrectly attributed and labeled; groupings meant to represent a single artistic movement (say Dadaism) include works from quite unrelated movements (like Der Blaue Reiter); quotations from artists and critics are displayed without regard for either their accuracy or their original contexts. Through this flurry of corrections postwar art historians express their desire to overcome the past. Yet reprimanding these art-historical errors does not help us understand the spectacle and function of Degenerate Art. Whatever else they reveal about the function of modernist art in Nazi propaganda, the mistakes must also be seen as integral to the exhibition, displays by the National Socialist state of its power to exercise its will with impunity. Casual errors flaunt the speed with which this state was able to expropriate works from museums all over Germany so as to erect the exhibition in less than three weeks. Furthermore, the main targets of the exhibition are precisely those critics, dealers, and museum directors who claim to comprehend this

John Cage: Silence and Silencing

John Cage's ideas on sound, easily the most influential among the postwar arts, were developed with a great deal of dedication, imagination, and good will, within a complex of technical, discursive, institutional, cultural, and political settings, forever changing over the course of a long and productive career. They matured within the sphere of music and, until he began to branch out into other artistic forms, most of the ideas he adopted from elsewhere were brought into the fold of music. He was known for introducing noise and worldly sounds into music, in other words, for stepping outside the confines of Western art music, as well as proposing a mode of being within the world based on listening, through hearing the sounds of the world as music. However, when questioned from the vantage point of sound instead of music, Cage's ideas become less an occasion for uncritical celebration (as is too often the case among commentators on Cage) and his work as a whole becomes open to an entirely different set of representations. What becomes apparent in general is that while venturing to the sounds outside music, his ideas did not adequately make the trip; the world he wanted for music was a select one, where most of the social and ecological noise was muted and where other more proximal noises were suppressed. Moreover, his ideas did not make the trip at a time when the social conditions of aurality and the nature of sounds themselves, in Cage's term, were continuing to undergo major transformations not immediately amenable to music as practiced. By midcentury, two decades after the first large onslaught of auditive mass media in the late 1920s, radio, phonography, and sound film had consolidated in the United States and expanded their overlapping positions. These media introduced on a social scale a newly pervasive, detailed, and atomistic encoding of sounds, gathering up all the visual, literary, environmental, gestural, and

Warhol's Closet

Over the course of ten days in the spring of 1988, the venerable New York auction house Sotheby's exhibited and sold the ten thousand items that comprised the Andy Warhol Collection, a vast array that included “19th-century Americana, Art Deco classics, American Indian artifacts, postwar art and 20th-century jewelry, watches and collectibles.”

World War II: Reverberations

The 1994 fifty-year anniversary of the D day invasion of Normandy, the success of the controversial 1993 film Schindler's List, and the 1993 opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., are all clear indications that World War II still remains in the public eye. Indeed, the recent major changes in geopolitical boundaries in Europe and the atrocities in the name of “ethnic cleansing” point to the continued relevance of concerns addressed by postwar artists.

Postwar Sculpture Re/viewed

As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, literature on postwar art and culture is still flourishing. An interest in Abstract Expressionist painting has played an important part in recent attempts to contextualize abstraction within the sociopolitical matrix of the war's aftermath and cold war politics of the 1950s. Sculpture, however, is frequently marginalized and, when discussed in art-historical literature, dismissed as secondary by postwar culture makers.