The Arts: 100 Years Of Attitude

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

It all happened so fast. One minute Madama Butterfly was on the Gramophone, Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills was on the reading table, the pretty Gibson Girl you had seen in a magazine was on your mind. You wondered if you wanted to see Maude Adams in her return engagement as Peter Pan. Or perhaps brave the odors and chatter of the nickelodeon to catch that spunky new girl--her name, unpublicized at the time, was Mary Pickford--people were talking about in Ramona.

How sweet it was--the genteel culture of this century's first decade. There were noises off, of course: the clatter of Ashcans in New York City's ateliers, for example. But--saints be praised!--New York's police commissioner had closed Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession after one performance because it was "revolting, indecent and nauseating when it was not boring." As late as 1912, a magazine editor (quoted in Ann Douglas' Terrible Honesty) could write that "no-one paints life as it is--thank Heaven--for we could not bear it," and receive few arguments from his readers. It was an era in which the word irony described a passing attitude, not a cultural imperative, and celebrity was something pleasant that happened to deserving strivers, not the glue that held everything together, everyone in its thrall.

Yet to borrow a famous phrase from Karl Marx, "All that is solid melts into air"--was melting already, as of 1911, and forming large and inconvenient puddles on the floor, quite insusceptible to the morally muscular moppings of outraged critics. Here one directs the reader to the foldout chart elsewhere in these pages. Prepared with much disputatious--not to say rebellious--muttering by this magazine's critics, it lists the century's "best" work in every facet of the arts. Its most interesting aspect is the intensely clustered dates of the works representing the major expressive forms.

A period of just 11 years--1911 to 1922--contains the greatest painting, play, novel and poem of this century and encompasses as well major annunciatory works by the authors of what we deem our greatest musical composition and sculpture, and not a few runners-up in several categories. To put it simply: there was in these few years an outburst of creative (and subversive) daring that may well be unsurpassed in human history.

1911. Matisse paints The Red Studio, "discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color," as his biographer Hilary Spurling puts it. Already burdened by the Fauve ("wild beast") misnomer, his public saw his work as a threat "to undermine civilization as they knew it." At virtually the same moment, his great rival Picasso creates his equally masterly Cubist collage Still-Life with Chair Caning and Guitar, which reverses the centuries-old traditions of sculpture, focusing the spectator's eye not on the final effect but on the process and materials by which it is obtained.

1913. Stravinsky premieres his ballet The Rite of Spring in Paris, setting the audience into a riotous frenzy with his rhythms--violent syncopation, sudden changes of meter, "barbaric" repetitions--subverting everyone's expectations for a predictable and reassuring beat. We are but a moment from Wozzeck (1925) and on the way to banishing tonality itself from opera.

1914. World War I begins. Its mindless slaughter heightens and validates the modernist vision. Picasso, watching the military vehicles rumble through Paris, sees in their camouflage painting a kind of Cubism, therefore a kind of modernist triumph. That same year James Joyce begins Ulysses, overturning our traditional expectations for action, plot, drama and the direct impact of one character on another in the novel. "Like Proust," Edmund Wilson writes, "he is symphonic rather than narrative...musical rather than dramatic."

1921. Six Characters in Search of an Author is performed in Rome. Pirandello challenges the conventional distinction between illusion and reality as well as authorial omniscience--the whole business of tyrannically driving "his" creations along to some preordained point. This prefigures what may be postmodernism's most interesting idea: it is the reader, not the writer, who is the final arbiter of a work's meaning. Which, naturally, renders meaning itself indeterminate.

1922. Ulysses is published. So is T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Some claim it is a hoax, a parody of modernism's obscurantist tendencies. Others see its analogies to Joyce's work. Both are inferentially portraits of a pullulating urban landscape; both wear their classical erudition boldly. Which is to say, both writers embrace modernism's most basic hallmark--self- and cultural awareness--and know exactly what traditions they are undermining. The difference between them may be largely a matter of fastidiousness. Ulysses is finally an affirmation: "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes." Eliot's nervous collage can only evoke the low vitality of his cityscape; he cannot embrace it. There are too many "young men carbuncular" within its limits, deceiving themselves with "systematic lies," failing to acknowledge "the agony and horror of modern life."

We need not choose between these visions. Both are true. Both are untrue. What we need to do is wonder at how firmly this brief, incredibly fecund period set the terms of the cultural argument that would preoccupy the rest of the century. The shock of the new drew much of its reshaping, revolutionary force from frustration with outworn artistic conventions and had been gathering strength and energy out of repression and dismissal for at least 50 years.

It was not that tunes would suddenly disappear from music or realistic representation of the world from art or narrative cohesion from fiction. Increasingly, though, these comfortable and reassuring sources of pleasure were segregated in a popular culture that was dismissed by finer sensibilities as aesthetically retrograde. Nor was it that everything interesting in high culture had been accomplished. Brancusi's and Hemingway's pursuit of pure form, stripped of all Victorian encrustations, proceeded. And most of the isms (Dadaism, Surrealism, Absurdism) in some way derive from what we might oxymoronically call classic modernism.

All proposed, seemed sometimes to wallow in, what appeared to be--often joyously, often grimly was--chaos. "Things fall apart," Yeats wrote in The Second Coming (in 1921, of course), "the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." It was the century's earliest epitaph, and is still perhaps its most powerful one. And Yeats had yet to conjure with the metaphors of modern science--the theory of relativity; the uncertainty principle; the looming figure of Freud, pseudo-scientific poet of our subjectivity--let alone with Fascism and Stalinism. Or, possibly most addling to a poet, the rise of industrialized mass culture.

Lost in the bogs of Celtic myth, Yeats--unlike many of his peers in the modernist pantheon--was not much interested in modern design and architecture's streamlining ways. Or in the ability of books and magazines more and more perfectly to replicate artistic icons past and present. Or in the capacity of the movies to create their own time and space, independent of observed reality. We must imagine him, instead, mourning with the great critic Walter Benjamin the destruction of the artwork's "aura" or magic, deriving from its uniqueness, its firm roots in a specific historical place.

It is almost as if the producers of popular culture sensed, and tried instinctively to compensate for, this defect. For the content of movies, popular music, latterly television, has remained stubbornly locked to the 19th century traditions of melodrama and romance. We may admire the multiple narrators of Citizen Kane, not to mention its sheer panache; we may adore Bart Simpson, not least because he's such a self-conscious little transgressor, so aware of both his self-destructive impulses and his generally thwarted impulse to be better. But we have to admit that these remain rather lonely modernist gestures in mass culture. And pretty small potatoes compared with Ulysses or The Waste Land.

On the other hand, we also have to admit that in the last third of the century, modernism ran out of steam intellectually even as it gathered near dictatorial cultural power. Take the art world, for example: allied with the museums, the mass media and the marketplace, it began to wield, as early as the '70s, in Hilton Kramer's words, "a pervasive and often cynical authority over the very public it affects to despise." We live now in an age of empty "Sensation" (to borrow the title of the recent Brooklyn Museum of Art show) and debate not the subtleties of high craftsmanship but the appropriateness of public funding--talk about power!--for works that large segments of that public, not all of them ignoramuses, deplore. Strolling the latest Venice Biennale, novelist (and art critic) John Updike observed that it was nearly impossible to find anything that "reminded one of art in the old sense, even in the older modern sense," since "the desire to shock...had become veritably frantic."

Perhaps that's because the universalist desire to reform all culture, make everyone see in a new way, is dead. What's true of literature is true of all the arts now: there are readers of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, there are Michael Crichton's readers, and the twain don't meet. Except, possibly, theoretically in cyberspace. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: "Culture follows money." And the money--perhaps even the creative zeal--is now in the new media. A radically reshaped culture is beginning to be created there. We can already begin to see what the generation born with a TV remote in its hand, hip-hop on the CD player and a computer screen in its face will do to traditional narrative. They'll speed it up, scramble it--and render it in new tonalities, using new palettes. You can see it in the way Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run toys with time, in the down-the-rabbit-hole goofing of Being John Malkovich, in Keanu Reeves' encounter with that manic bullet in The Matrix. It's a kind of back formation from computer language, this narrative revolution manifesting itself in film. But it surely partakes of the new machine's ability to cast us adrift in ungrounded cyberspace, where all the spatial and temporal laws governing the representation of human reality will be revised, maybe repealed. It will extend to the other arts. It will reorder our perceptions more surely than Matisse and Stravinsky did, for a pixel--unlike paint, canvas or score paper--has no past to overturn, is radically innocent. It has no tradition to draw on, perhaps is not subject to "the anxiety of influence."

Peeping warily into the new century, the cultural traditionalist (anyone over the age of 40) feels like saying, with Estragon in Waiting for Godot, "I can't go on like this." He forgets the brave and cheeky response Samuel Beckett, last of the classic modernists, gave to Vladimir: "That's what you think."