Life Outside the Lines

As the last century drew to a close, the cultural world was awash in movements--among them Impressionism, Symbolism, Aestheticism, Realism--that seemed to bear the heavy responsibility of ushering in a new century by creating a new epoch. The better part of the 19th century, both here and abroad, had been marked by its continuity with the past. But as the ferment testified, the very end of that century and the beginning of this one would be marked by discontinuity, disruption and dissonance. “Make it new,” poet Ezra Pound enjoined his fellow artists. The injunction would become the motto of the 20th century.

As you read this timeline, you can trace an ongoing and highly self-conscious effort to revoke the past, challenge the artistic verities and declare a modern culture, which was the explicit mission of the aptly named Futurist movement launched in 1909. Though generalizations are fallacious, still, where Futurism led, virtually every major artist of the century followed. No more architectural classicism, decreed the modernists. No more melody in music. No more neatly constructed narratives in theater. Even the very idea of what had constituted art was under attack. When in 1917 Marcel Duchamp lugged his urinal to a gallery, he was demanding that art now be redefined.

But if the campaign to create a new culture from whole cloth characterizes most of the great aesthetic achievements of the century, that campaign was itself given impetus by three interlocking forces so powerful that each is impregnated in some way into almost every one of those achievements. The first was technology. New technologies throughout the century generated new aesthetic possibilities, most obviously with the motion picture and television but also with the Moog synthesizer, portable cameras, cable TV, VCRs, Discmen, computer graphics and the Internet, to name but a few.

Even more important, though, is that technology affected sensibility. Nineteenth century art had largely been concerned with the natural world and its order and harmonies. The emphasis was on recording nature or discovering objective correlatives for it. Twentieth century art, on the other hand, rapidly embraced the unnatural world of machines and cities. Its emphasis was on process--on the mechanics of seeing, hearing and moving.

Whether inspired by the Machine Age or not, 20th century artists were obsessed with taking things apart. Thus Picasso and the Cubists deconstructed a scene into its views and angles, celebrating not the object they painted but a way of seeing it. Similarly, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Varese took on musical romanticism by deconstructing it into notes, and John Cage finished the task by eliminating even the notes. Balanchine reinvented ballet by extirpating the hoary narratives of 19th century dances and concentrating on pure movement instead. Brecht stripped theater down to its techniques, Godard movies, LeCorbusier and Van Der Rohe architecture and Robert Wilson opera. In each case, the objective was not to fool the audience into thinking that what they were seeing or hearing was real or natural but to show the audience that what they were seeing or hearing was manufactured.

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Abetting technology in the formation of a 20th century aesthetic is a second force: the growing sense of democracy. Particularly in America, where the beginning of the century coincided with the infusion of millions of immigrants and where the great black migration to the North would soon begin, culture was invigorated by fresh voices and new perspectives that were responsible for many if not most of our artistic milestones--from jazz to blues to rock ‘n’ roll to rap to the American musical theater. Indeed, one of the great stories of the century is how these groups battered down the thick walls that had separated high culture from so-called low, the elite arts from the popular ones until it was virtually impossible to tell the difference.

A hundred years ago, the difference had been huge. Nineteenth century art was primarily art from the top down--that is, from the elites. Twentieth century art was just as likely to be from the bottom up--from minorities whose work had at best previously been consigned to the classification “folk art.” Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, Igor Moiseyev, Martha Graham, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Frank Gehry, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, again to name but a few, either operated within popular culture or borrowed heavily from it. In fact, in time the commercialization of popular and mass culture would become as much a theme of late 20th century art as discontinuity had been a theme of early 20th century art.

The last force that has shaped the artistic century is psychological. This is, after all, the century of Freud, and the idea of an interior reality, of a subjective vision that supersedes an objective vision of the world, has stamped itself indelibly on art. Abstract Expressionism, with the great squiggle paintings of Jackson Pollock, owes a debt to the force of an individual sensibility pulled from within and sprayed on the canvas. Miles Davis’ jazz owes no less a debt to the expression of mind in music. And Rem Koolhaas has applied the same notion to architecture. It is certainly no accident that one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the century, “Citizen Kane,” is dedicated to the proposition that truth will always evade us; that all we have is our subjectivity.

But while one can see the breakdown of old forms that had been predicated on an objective reality, less apparent is how that breakdown has contributed to an increasing sensationalism. When you rip off narrative, melody, representation and whatever else have traditionally constituted objectivity and order, what is left is basically the sizzle of the senses. Whether it is Steven Spielberg making a big-budget special-effects blockbuster, or Metallica blasting a thrum of sound, or a shock artist like Damien Hirst dismembering animals, the tendency is to attack the viscera more directly than ever before. Faster, bigger, louder is the dominant aesthetic now--the apotheosis of the new that the century seems to have been racing toward.

That it has gotten there is a testament to the continuity of our century’s discontinuity. Technological innovation continues apace, and the concern with process hasn’t withered. Democratization, which was energized by the movies, television and even regional theater, now has the Internet with its capacity for ultimate narrowcasting, and the entertainment virus that was introduced into art along with democratization has become arguably the prevailing value of our entire culture. And subjectivity has so triumphed that there are whole schools of philosophy dedicated to the proposition that nothing is objective.

One imagines Pound would have been proud.

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