One of the central events in the mid-twentieth century arts was the forging of a new poetics by the composer/inventor John Cage, the dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. To my mind this poetics has not been well characterized in the literature on the arts. One early and dismissive view was that it amounted to ‘neo-Dadaism’, presumably because of its seemingly anarchic quality and its use of materials that were not traditional vehicles of artistic expression. Another view was that it was an ‘aesthetics of chance’. This seemed to capture something central to Cage’s work, which starting in the late 1940’s involved methods of chance composition, and some of Cunningham’s choreography, which used chance to choose the order of poses and positions of the dancers. And Cunningham’s pieces were only united with their music at the actual performance, so at any moment the juxtaposition of music and dance was unforeseen by either artist, and so in a sense a matter of chance. Yet chance played no prominent part of Rauschenberg’s artistic process, and Cage and Rauschenberg both insisted that they were operating with a shared sensibility and poetics.
The most secure route into this poetics is, I think, through considering what each artist vehemently rejected: the fundamentally Romantic model of the work of art as primarily an expression of the artist’s mind, in particular of the artist’s mental states, attitudes, moods, and emotions. Each experienced this model as oppressive in limiting the choice of materials and handling to precisely those and only those that expressed the artist’s taste. Why is the expression of taste objectionable? Perhaps the answer for this poetics is the formative and ineliminable role of the past. Taste is the present and summative achievement of a sensibility originating perhaps in early childhood, and presumably for most of us no later than early adulthood. When the composer finds herself drawn to a certain sequence of seventh chords, the dancer to a certain fluid sweep of the arm, the painter to a certain scumbling in the background, and each puts something of those into her new work, there is a sense in which the past dominates the present; that taste that was (necessarily) formed prior to the act of making selects the elements and starts to position them within the work so that they will bear certain meanings (and not others). If this is right, then what this poetics rejects is not exactly ‘self-expression’, though this is the terminology used both by critics and the artists themselves, but rather a particular model of the self in art, that is, one wherein the self that is being expressed is treated, for the purposes of making art, as fixed prior to the act of making.
What Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg shared was an ambition and an attitude towards artistic meaning. The ambition was a sort of ‘letting-be’: let sounds be sounds (and not vehicles for expression and elements of structure); let movements be movements (and not vehicles for the expression of some mysterious and otherwise unavailable interiority); let things be themselves (and not bearers of extra-artistic meaning or compositional elements). This poetics is given its greatest exemplifications in celebrated works from the late 1940’s through the 1960’s such as Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano and String Quartet no. 1, Cunningham’s Winterbranch and RainForest, and Rauschenberg’s ‘Canyon’ and ‘Monogram’. My recent trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see the exhibition of Cunningham’s works entitled ‘Clouds and Screens’ and Rauschenberg’s (literally) ‘The ¼ Mile or 2 Furlong’ piece raises a question: when and why does this poetics falter?
Many viewers have noted a decline in interest in Rauschenberg’s work around 1964, and such viewers (including myself) face the prospect of 1040 or so feet of later Rauschenberg with some trepidation. Rauschenberg said that the distance between his house and his studio determined the physical expanse of the piece; so it was part of his attempt to ‘blur the boundaries’ between art (the studio) and life (the house). Also, Rauschenberg suggested that the one sure effect of viewing the piece was that by the end the viewer would not remember her thoughts at the beginning. So the sheer expanse does something to fulfill the constitutive aim of the poetics: it eliminates the possibility of a synoptic grasp of the work. Who can so much as remember it all, much less organize, analyze, and understand it all? But one might think that this is a rather desperately literal-minded way of fulfilling the poetics.
The exhibition of Cunningham’s work falls into three parts. In the entrance are some of the floating silver balloons that Warhol designed as part of the staging of ‘RainForest’. To the left are eccentrically placed and irregularly showing projections of two films of Cunningham dancing: a solo performance of Changeling (1957; filmed 1958) and a duet with Carolyn Brown of Night Wandering (1957; filmed 1964). To the right is a room containing 19 screens and projectors showing bits of performances of Cunningham’s company. The brief sequences are seemingly unconnected, except that occasionally there is a countdown of numbers (‘9 . . .8 . . .7’) on some screens, and less frequently a simultaneous such countdown on all the screens. This surely is meant to exemplify Cunningham’s and Cage’s practice of treating a fixed temporal expanse as the sole element shared by the otherwise uncoordinated sounds and movements in a performance. Cunningham himself had introduced the practice of staging ‘Events’ consisting in part of combined excerpts from different pieces. But this too seemed to me a failure. Why? The excerpts are all quite brief, so nothing of the sense of a sustained performance is evoked. Perhaps part of what made Cunningham’s work so compelling was the sense of conveyed in every performance of a difficult activity sustained. Seeing such an activity perhaps induces in the mind of the viewer the sense that the artist is engaged in a serious activity, though one without clear analogues in everyday life. And so one trusts the artist. I watched the performance of Night Wandering four times; in Cunningham and Brown one has artists one can trust.