Picturing the Cold War: An art graft/eye graft

Alternatives

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 393-418

  Sylvester, Christine ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 21444433950     PISSN: 03043754     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030437549602100401     Document Type: Article

References (141)

1. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naaas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 2.
2. Max Kozloff, "American Painting During the Cold War," Artforum 11, no. 9 (May 1973): 43-54;
3. Eva Cockcroft, "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War," Artforum 12, no. 10 (June 1974): 39-41;
4. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
5. Cockcroft, note 2, p. 39.
6. Guilbaut, note 2, p. 96.
7. Ibid., p. 85.
8. Ibid., p. 177.
9. Peter Watson's From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (London: Random House, 1992) is a good read on such connections, albeit rather offensive on gender issues. On page 46, he comments on Herodotus's discussion of men of humble birth in Babylon, 500 B.C., being paid to take the ugly women as wives: "There is surely a case for adopting the same procedure at picture auctions: bidders should be paid to take away the misshapen rubbish, no less common among art objects than [among] Babylonian wives."
10. E.g., E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years' Crisis: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1962);
11. Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1965);
12. Graham Allison, Essence of Decision (Boston: Little Brown, 1971);
13. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979);
14. Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations (Prince-ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987);
15. Jim George, Discourses of Global Politics: A Critical (Re)Introduction to International Relations (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994).
16. Stephen Krasner, "Structural Causes and Regime Consequences: Regimes as Intervening Variables," International Organization 36 (1982): 186.
17. E.g., Robert Keohane, After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
18. Most recently, see Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
19. This, of course, is one of the key points in R. B. J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations Theory as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
20. Derrida, note 1, p. 3. I am taking liberties with Derrida, using him here evocatively. His discussion of blindness refers to spaces beyond contingency, to a physical condition that is often the subject of art and that lies at the heart of drawing - "drawing is blind, if not the draftsman or draftswoman" (p. 2). He also says, however (more along the lines of the use here of blindness), that "skepticism is precisely what I've been talking to you about: the difference between believing and seeing, between believing one sees [croire voir] and seeing between, catching a glimpse [entrevoir] - or not" (p. 1). I am using his ideas to suggest the contingent nature of seeing and not-seeing, about researching and writing without seeing what one could see. I am grateful to Fiona Sampson for articulating this difference.
21. E.g., Christine Sylvester, Feminist Theory and International Relations in a Postmodern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),
22. Christine Sylvester, "The Contributions of Feminist Theory to International Relations," in Steve Smith, Ken Booth, and Marysia Zalewski, eds., International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 254-278.
23. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 256.
24. W. Jackson Rushing and others claim that Abstract Expressionists rectified the decontextualized primitivism of Picasso and Matisse, where bare breasts and exotic men were taken into the Western gaze. Artists like Jackson Pollock engaged, he says, in an "intellectualized primitivism" as a "willful recontextualization of forms and myths." See Rushing's Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 121.
25. For a feminist look at aspects of primitivism, see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (London: Pandora, 1989), ch. 3.
26. Leja, note 15, p. 331.
27. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
28. Derrida, note 1, p. 17.
29. Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (London: Jonathon Cape, 1995), pp. 9-10.
30. See David Herwitz, Making Theory/Constructing Art: On the Authority of the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 5.
31. This perspective also informs Alwynne Mackie, Art/Talk: Theory and Practice in Abstract Expressionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).
32. See Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). On the nature of that theory, the biographers of Jackson Pollock attribute to the art critic Clement Greenberg the view that "like soldiers in the class struggle, artists either did or did not advance the cause; they marched either with history or against it. The art critic's job was to define the cause and, within the limits of persuasion, rally the soldiers to it."
33. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga (London: Pimlico, 1992), p. 523.
34. Leja, note 15, p. 22.
35. Annette Cox, Art-as-Politics: The Abstract Expressionist Avant Garde and Society (Epping, UK: Bowker, 1982).
36. Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (London: Paul Chapman, 1985), p. 22.
37. Derrida, note 1, p. 4.
38. Mackie, note 21, p. 3. For explicit discussions of "The Politics of Art," see special issue of International Political Science Review 12, no. 1 (1991).
39. Cox, note 24, p. 18.
40. Ibid., p. 6.
41. Utopian striving was a distinguishing philosophical component of many avant-gardes. See Herwitz, note 21. That van Gogh fits this characterization may come as something of a surprise, since we commonly think of him as mad rather than as political. See Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 456. Chipp also says there that the "Expressionists too dreamed of a renewal of society in which art could take the place once occupied by religion. . . . The Constructivists felt that they were forging a weapon for a truly revolutionary art."
42. Cox, note 24, p. 7.
43. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 133.
44. Timothy Luke, "Prepositional Phases: The Political Effects of Art on Audience," International Political Science Review 12, no. 1 (1991): 67-86.
45. Greenberg, note 25, p. 25.
46. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), pp. 297-298.
47. Francis Frascina, ed., note 25, p. 100.
48. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell and Russell, 1957), p. 170.
49. Leja, note 15, p. 17.
50. Cox, note 24, p. 17. Stephen Polcari points out, however, that Pollock was in Siqueiros's workshop for only two months, "seemingly less for Siqueiros's politics than for the opportunity to learn the use of Duco in mural paintings. His relationship with Siqueiros terminated in a fistfight." See Polcari's Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 32.
51. Cox, note 24, p. 18.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. Naifeh and Smith, note 22, p. 539.
55. Polcari, note 39, p. 31.
56. Christopher Lasch, The Agony of the American Left (London: Andre Deutsch, 1970), p. 44.
57. Greenberg, note 25, pp. 22-23.
58. Cox, note 24, p. 18.
59. Derrida, note 1, pp. 3, 5. Arguably, all artists run risks - the portrait painter may get the subject "wrong," the landscape artist may be called sentimental, bucolic in temperament, the painter of petunias in pots will be subject to the charge of kitsch. All artists may fail to find a market or appreciation for their work. What sets the New York School's efforts apart from the everyday risks of being an artist was the effort to stand at some distance from the politics of the era. Greenberg waxes romantic when he says that this avant-garde tried in effect to create "something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape - not its picture - is aesthetically valid; something given, independent of meanings, similars, or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself" - note 25, p. 23.
60. Rushing, note 16, p. 121.
61. Mark Rothko, cited in Leja, note 15, p. 51.
62. Leja, note 15, p. 51.
63. Quoted in Rushing, note 16, p. 130.
64. Leja, note 15, p. 62. This was not the only time so-called primitive art was appealing. Leja refers to it as a "recurrent and persistent feature of modern art history" (p. 52), but one that took on particular outlines during and following World War II.
65. E.g., Harvey Fergusson, Modern Man: His Belief and Behavior (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1936);
66. Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart, 1941);
67. James Harvey Robinson, The Mind in the Making (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1921).
68. Quoted in Mackie, note 21, p. 35.
69. Rushing, note 16, p. 126.
70. Derrida, note 1, p. 4.
71. Leja, note 15, p. 53.
72. Derrida, note 1, p. 5.
73. Derrida, note 1, p. 3. Emphasis in original.
74. Leja, note 15, p. 256.
75. Derrida, note 1, p. 12.
76. Leja, note 15, ch. 4.
77. Quoted in Leja, note 15, p. 203.
78. See Christine Sylvester, "Homeless in International Relations? 'Women's' Place in Canonical Texts and in Feminist Reimaginations," in Marjorie Ringrose and Adam Lerner, eds., Reimagining the Nation (London: Open University Press, 1993), pp. 76-97.
79. Leja, note 15, p. 209.
80. Carol Duncan, "Virility and Domination in Early 20th-century Vanguard Painting," Artforum 12, no. 4 (1973): 31.
81. Laura (Riding) Jackson, from "How Blind and Bright," The Poems of Laura Riding (Manchester: Carconet New Press, 1980), p. 24.
82. Duncan, note 67, p. 30.
83. Leja, note 15, p. 254.
84. Polcari, note 39, p. 286.
85. Leja, note 15, p. 255.
86. Chadwick, note 35, p. 304.
87. Ibid., pp. 306-307.
88. According to Jackson Pollock's analyst, Ruth Fox, "Lee actually caused Jackson's [alcoholic] binges [because] she derive[d] pleasure from the pain she [was] able to inflict by precipitating the argument, the quarrel, the tension which unconsciously she [knew would] land her husband in another drinking bout." From Naifeh and Smith, note 22, p. 687. Here is the wife, who single-handedly at times kept Pollock's career together, cast as a primitive demon.
89. Polcari, note 39, p. 287.
90. Leja, note 15, pp. 257-258.
91. Derrida, note 1, pp. 5-6. Emphasis in original.
92. Cockcroft, note 2, p. 119.
93. Both cited in Guilbaut, note 2, p. 119.
94. Walter Lippmann, "La Destinee Americaine," Les Eludes Americaines 1 (April-May 1946): 1. Quoted in Guilbaut, note 2, p. 128.
95. Jackson Pollock's written answers to a questionnaire, Arts and Architecture 61 (February 1944).
96. Reprinted in Byran Robertson, Jackson Pollock (New York: Abrams, 1961), p. 193.
97. Robert Motherwell in Dorothy Miller, ed., Fourteen Americans (New York: MOMA, 1946), p. 36.
98. Leja, note 15, p. 283.
99. Stephen Spender, "We Can Win the Battle for the Mind of Europe," New York Times Magazine, April 25, 1948, p. 33.
100. Lasch, note 45, p. 72.
101. See Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics in the Post-Cold War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
102. In 1940, the government also organized a periodic "Buy American Art Week." A panel discussion held at the University of Chicago in conjunction with one of these events, and broadcast by radio, featured Eleanor Roosevelt speaking on "Art and Our Warring World."
103. David and Cecile Shapiro, "Abstract Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting," in Frascina, ed., note 25, p. 147.
104. Cockcroft, note 2, p. 131.
105. David and Cecile Shapiro, note 89, p. 148.
106. Quoted in Cockcroft, note 2, p. 128.
107. William Hauptman, "The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade," Artforum 12, no. 2 (1973): 48.
108. William Hauptman, Artforum Ibid., p. 51.
109. Cockcroft, note 2, p. 129.
110. Was it ironic that the prestigious $1,000 Rich-Campana prize for art went in 1947 to Abstract Expressionist William Baziotes for his painting entitled Cyclops?
111. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 82.
112. David and Cecile Shapiro, note 89, p. 147. Indeed, Chadwick points out that "the consolidation of Abstract Expressionism as the dominant practice in American modern art pushed to the margins not only women moving toward artistic maturity in other 'modern' styles during the 1940s, but also many women professionally active in what would come to be seen as 'conservative' and 'outmoded' figurative styles." See Chadwick note 35, p. 300.
113. Letter from Bryan Robertson, June 26, 1973, from archives of the National Gallery of Australia. Emphasis in original.
114. Letter from Henry Geldzahler to James Mollison, June 22, 1973, from archives of the National Gallery of Australia.
115. Leja, note 15, p. 330.
116. See Nancy McGlen and Meredith Sarkees, Women in Foreign Policy: The Insiders (New York: Routledge, 1993).
117. For a view of British attitudes toward women in foreign policy from an earlier point in history, see Carol Miller, "Women in International Relations? The Debate in Inter-War Britain," in Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland, eds., Gender and International Relations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 83-121.
118. Leja, note 15, p. 330.
119. E.g., Andrew Linklater, "The Question of the Next Stage in International Relations Theory: A Critical-Theoretical Point of View," Millennium 21, no. 1 (1993): 77-100;
120. Robert Cox, "Social Forces, States, and World Orders: Beyond International Relations Theory," Millennium 10, no. 2 (1981): 126-155.
121. E.g., Richard Ashley and R. B. J. Walker, "Speaking the Language of Exile: Dissident Thought in International Studies," International Studies Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1990): 259-268;
122. James Der Derian and Michael Shapiro, eds., International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1989).
123. See special issue on "Culture in International Relations," Millennium 22, no. 2 (1993).
124. Roland Bleiker, "Forget IR Theory," Alternatives 22, no. 1 (1997).
125. R. B. J. Walker, One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988).
126. Hugh Dyer, "EcoCultures: Global Culture in an Age of Ecology," Millennium 22, no. 3 (1993): 483-504.
127. E.g., Anne Tickner, Gender in International Relations: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992);
128. Jean Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987);
129. Ann S. Runyan and V. Spike Peterson, "The Radical Future of Realism: Feminist Subversions of IR Theory," Alternatives 16, no. 1 (1991): 67-106;
130. Sylvester, Feminist Theory, note 14.
131. Curators of international art at the gallery speak of an Australian "grocer aesthetic" - quoted in Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1991, p. 12.
132. The headline of the Melbourne Herald for December 17, 1973 read: "Would You Pay $1.3m for This?" (The amount translates into $2m. in US dollars.)
133. Scott, note 97, p. 74.
134. Riding, note 68, p. 24.
135. Andrew Kopkind, quoted in Lasch, note 45, p. 111.
136. Braden, "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral,'" p. 14. Cited by Lasch, note 45, p. 111.
137. Derrida, note 1, p. 63.
138. "The Making of the Australian," part II, interview with James Mollison by Rosalie Gascoigne, David McNeill, and Peter Townsend, Art Monthly Australia 24 (September 1989): 3.
139. James Mollison, Art Monthly Australia ibid., p. 3.
140. Derrida, note 1, p. 57.
141. Riding, note 68, p. 24.