Late Modernism. Robert Genter

to appreciate the work that he and his fellow artists were producing.

      While not all participants were willing to echo Duchamp’s unabashed elitism, most agreed that, because of the nature of mass society and mass culture, the goal of the modern artist was to carve out a realm to safeguard the work of art from the distorting hands of an ungrateful public. Modernism, in other words, needed safekeeping. One participant, however, grumbled numerous complaints against this consensus. Throughout the proceedings, literary critic Kenneth Burke, who had recently achieved academic fame for his 1945 book of literary criticism A Grammar of Motives, wondered aloud if his fellow discussants had not in fact distorted the project of art in general. A veteran of the avant-garde movements in Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s and a poet and fiction writer in his own right, Burke had obvious modernist credentials. But he spent three days in San Francisco trying to convince his fellow artists and critics that they had gone astray in their aesthetic projects. Specifically, Burke took a stand against what he saw as the two opposed but equally untenable approaches to modern art. On the one hand, several commentators including Robert Goldwater argued that the artwork at its essence was an external manifestation of the artist’s true being and therefore needed protection from the public at large. As Goldwater explained, the modern artist had to struggle to ensure that nothing disturbed “the integral expression of his own personality as he conceives it—be it dealers, be it patrons, be it the concept of society in general.”³ Modernism, according to such a definition, was the medium through which the artist discovered himself outside the concerns of the world at large. On the other hand, several commentators such as Marcel Duchamp and Frank Lloyd Wright argued that the work of art had little to do with the intentions or feelings of the artist and existed as an ontologically distinct statement in and of itself. “We don’t emphasize enough that the work of art is independent of the artist,” asserted Duchamp; “the work of art lives by itself, and the artist who happened to make it is like an irresponsible medium.”⁴ For Duchamp, the imperative was to shield the artwork from any interpretive or cognitive distortion, guaranteeing in some sense its sacredness. Although the two camps disagreed on the origins of the artwork, they agreed, as Arnold Schoenberg declared, that such work should “never bow to the taste of the mediocre.”⁵

      Burke cringed at such language, continuously interrupting his colleagues to question their claims and their motives. Of course Burke was not rejecting the project of modernism overall. He was just as committed as the others at the table to the belief that art at its essence was the privileged medium for disrupting the staid conventions of modern life and reenchanting what had become an awful, gray landscape. But Burke feared that his fellow artists and critics had let their antisocial, if not misanthropic, feelings interfere with the true purpose of art—persuasion. “Very well, the artist is expressing himself,” exclaimed Burke, “but he must use some kind of language.”⁶ Throughout, Burke argued that an exclusive focus on separating the artist and the artwork from the consuming public was foolish, ignoring the fact that the goal of the artist was to persuade the spectator, listener, or reader. According to Burke, “there is always communication…. The communication is there the minute the painting is done” (27). Even worse, artists like Duchamp and Wright ignored the fundamental need for artistic statement in a confused modern age. According to Burke, the recent global catastrophes—from economic collapse to total war—had not only irreparably damaged the average individual but had destroyed the traditional vocabularies through which the world was understood. In such a vacuum, the artist had a responsibility to offer new forms of orientation, new ways of understanding modern experience, and new sites for communion. “That’s why we should take modern expression so seriously,” argued Burke, “because it is concerned with the basic motives of life, with the things over which men will lurk, and mull, and linger, and for which they will seek new statements” (28). Those scrambling to escape into the purity of the aesthetic realm, disconnected from the social landscape, had according to Burke forsaken the true task of the artist.

      Burke’s criticisms in the late 1940s predated what would become a larger revolt against the aesthetic and epistemological assumptions of modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, as a range of intellectuals and artists associated with the movement known as postmodernism criticized the project of modernism in the postwar period as too esoteric, too devoid of playfulness, and too disconnected from popular concerns. Of course Burke was no postmodernist. While he challenged the elitism and biases of those gathered together in San Francisco, Burke had not, as others eventually would, given up on the project of modernism. Instead, he argued that the project simply needed to be recast. According to Burke, modern artists could not remain content with isolating themselves from anything that hinted of the popular, vernacular, or commonplace in the name of individual purity. Such artists instead needed to begin the difficult project of unearthing the shared historical, cultural, and political traditions in which they lived and reorienting those traditions in ways that were not merely more equitable and just but also translatable and digestible to a skeptical audience. In other words, modern artists needed to stop focusing on simply expressing themselves and instead to begin communicating, using the methods available in the modern world, to those willing to listen. “Can’t the artist create for a communication?” Burke wondered aloud; “certainly he is not talking to himself, is he?” (33). In other words, modern art according to Burke needed to recover its roots as a form of rhetoric.

      Burke was part of a group of artists, writers, and intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s that began critiquing modernism from the inside, so to speak, challenging the obvious elitism and sense of separation that had led so many artists to abnegate their responsibility to translate their visions to a consuming public. Throughout the postwar period, Burke and those who followed his lead like sociologists C. Wright Mills and Erving Goffman and novelist Ralph Ellison or mirrored his theoretical moves like sociologist David Riesman, Freudian revisionist Norman Brown, novelist James Baldwin, and artist Jasper Johns reformulated the project of modernism in the early Cold War, giving rise to the movement I refer to as late modernism. Unwilling to abandon the literary and cultural revolution begun in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by their modernist predecessors, whose original goal was to explore new forms of consciousness and unearth new forms of perception in the hopes of transforming the world at large, late modernists argued not only that the nature of the aesthetic form needed to be rethought in an age of mass media but that the general assumptions about the nature of subjectivity needed to be updated. They reformulated aesthetics as a mode of symbolic action—a deliberate attempt to use the aesthetic form to challenge the choice of lens through which individuals made sense of the world around them and to persuade them that the visions offered by the artist were not merely more poetic but possibly more liberating. For late modernists, the spoken word, the written work, the musical refrain, and the abstract canvas were all calls to action on the part of the artist as rhetorician, that is, an artist who interweaved rational arguments, libidinal enticements, and poetic pleas in his works in order to produce a commitment or at least a response from the viewing audience. Modernists, in other words, needed to take communication, and everything connected to it, seriously. “For in this world, communication is never an absolute,” proclaimed Burke, for “only angels communicate absolutely.”⁷ But Burke demanded that his fellow modernists at least try. In so doing, Burke and other late modernists ushered in a new form of cultural politics, one that did not simply point to the rise of postmodernism in the 1960s but that overcame the artistic limitations of those postwar modernists like the ones Burke encountered in San Francisco in the late 1940s. The future of modernism was up for grabs.

      The Contours of American Modernism

      In a 1967 essay, “The Culture of Modernism,” Irving Howe, in troubled, almost exacerbated language, argued that the cultural sensibility of the Western avant-garde of the early twentieth century had reached an unfortunate end. The exhaustion of modernist literature, exemplified in the failure of current writers to match the enthusiasm or radicalism of their predecessors, was for Howe a key sign that modern society was able to assimilate any and every oppositional force. As Howe argued, “it seems greatly open to doubt whether by now, a few decades after World War II, there can still be located in the West a coherent and self-assured avant-garde.”⁸ In part, Howe blamed the failure of modernism on its practitioners who had either retreated into university classrooms or had turned to the trappings of authoritarian