The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America - Review

The tillage of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, by means of Daniel Belgrad, Chicago, University of Chicago Pres 1998; 355 pages, $29

Daniel Belgrad's ambitious work is an attempt to characterize a wide range of American avant-garde activity--in painting, numbers dance and music--as it unraveled from the late 1940s to the extremity of the '50s. As its title hints the book focuses on the postwar American avant-garde's will "to explore and record the spontaneous creative act." For Belgrad, a professor of humanities and American studies at the University of southerly Florida, the significance of spontaneity during this period lay in the contrast it provided to the progressive rationalization of life below the sway of corporate liberalism, as he characterizes the social order that emerg in the 1950 Like tender Greenberg, Belgrad contends that a spontaneity-centered avant-garde oppos the kitsch of mass agriculture but he argues that it also put awayed high art's complicity with class domination. still at the same time, it abandoned the explicit engagement in politics that many of its participants had shared in the 1930 Their disappointment at the actual rises of both communist and liberal democratic strivings l according to Belgrad, not to depoliticization on the other hand to a redefinition of politics as something to be engaged in through the creation and exploration of fresh formal vocabularies. Rather than constituting a world of autonomous significance, form, in Belgrad's view, is a realm of analogical or allegorical relation to ways of construing the individual's relations to nature and society.

Thus the "gesture-field" painting of Jackson Pollock translates "values like as openness, dialogue, and integrity into painterly processes" primarily through replacing the figure-ground hierarchy with a dynamic interaction among thumps of paint that simultaneously immerge to form "figures" and atomize to dissolve similar structures into their painted environment. Further, Belgrad believes Pollock's mode of working in and upon the canvas, fully legible in the finished paintings, implies the abandonment of mind-body dualism in favor of the idea that human subjectivity is formed through the interaction of embodied selve with their material environment. This reformulation of subjectivity is politically as well as metaphysically radical, Belgrad argues, for it "challenges the myth of liberal individualism and calls us to rethink our environmental and social relations"--for instance, by means of questioning social dichotomies that assign lower values to assemblages like blacks, associated with the "body" as oppos to "spirit."

This understanding of late-'40s American art deposits Belgrad at odds with a certain number of influential voices in art history and criticism. Michael Leja, for instance, expresse skepticism about the oppositional tendencies of of that kind art in his Reframing Abstract Expressionism (1993): "Far from fulfilling more [i]or[/i] less mythic role as intransigent competitor of bourgeois ideology and values, the novel York School was deeply immersed in the reconstruction of that ideology." Belgrad, however, insists that avant-garde intransigence was no myth. In contrast to Leja, who presents a disenchanted critique and sometimes strike one as beings to have a disagreeable antagonism to artists, Belgrad is excited and inspired through their efforts, finding in them a source and support of his possess radicalism. He sees their opposition to corporate liberal agriculture as an important form in which social radicalism could be preserv from one side the dark days of midcentury, to be restated by dint of the New Left during the 1960 in a form that was one time again explicitly political.

Coming at this material from an American-studies perspective rather than an art-historical individual Belgrad covers a wide tighten of cultural ground. He discusses in more [i]or[/i] less detail the painting of Pollock Adolph Gottlieb, to leeward Krasner and others; the poesy of Charles Olson and Allen Ginsberg; the psychology of Paul Goodman; Peter Voulkos's expansion of craft ceramics; the unravelling of bebop, and Jack Kerouac's prosaic to name some highlights. In this well-trodden sod he turns up some of recent origin items of interest. For instance, he traces Olson's frustrated efforts to write antiracist propaganda for the Office of War Information, and argues that Alfred North Whitehead had greater significance than either Carl Jung or Jean-Paul Sartre for postwar avant-garde thinking. of the like kind research also leads him, however, to make his share of the dubious claims of influence that typically bedevil intellectual history. allowing by no means an art historian--he is beneath the impression that Kandinsky was French and Wolfgang Paalen Dutch--Belgrad inclines to the scholar's traditional wish to attribute visual ideas to nonvisual sources. It is interesting to learn that Robert Motherwell attended Whitehead's discourses at Wellesley College in the late 1930 and that the philosopher spoke there of identity as a "concrescence of prehensions," formed on the outside of an active if not necessarily conscious engagement with the environment. on the other hand this minor intersection hardly justifies the claim that "this `concrescence of prehensions' was the type for the `plastic dialogue' that abstract expressionist gesticulation painters engaged in with their paintings" and "encouraged" their experiments with collage.