The New Monuments and the End of Man: U.S. Sculpture between War and Peace, 1945–1975

THE NEW MONUMENTS

AND THE END OF MAN

_____________________________________

THE NEW MONUMENTS

AND THE END OF MAN

U.S. SCULPTURE BETWEEN WAR

AND PEACE, 1945–1975

ROBERT SLIFKIN

_____________________________________

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

For Amos, wily prophet

Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Jacket illustration by Mike Reddy, based on Robert Smithson, Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970.

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-0-691-19252-9

eISBN (ebook): 978-0-691-19426-4

Version 1.0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930956

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Designed by Jeff Wincapaw

CONTENTS

_________________________________________________________

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  7

INTRODUCTION: MONUMENTALISM AND METHOD  9

CHAPTER ONE: THE NEW SENSE OF FATE  31

CHAPTER TWO: SCULPTURE AND THE WEAPON  67

CHAPTER THREE: NEW MONUMENTS AND REVERSED RUINS  117

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CREDIBILITY GAP  163

CHAPTER FIVE: THE EMPTY ROOM  191

NOTES  216

INDEX  236

ARTWORK/PHOTO CREDITS  246

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

_________________________________________________________

This book is the product of many years of reading, writing, looking, thinking, and talking. And while the majority of the reading and writing was a solitary affair, I am extremely grateful for the conversations and company of numerous friends and colleagues whose intelligence and encouragement kept me inspired and whose criticism and erudition kept me on the right track. Jay Curley, Hal Foster, Mark Haxthausen, Frank Heath, Alex Kitnick, Denise Lassaw, Meredith Martin, Alex Nemerov, Alex Potts, Jennifer Roberts, Sara Jane Roszak, Lytle Shaw, Rebecca Smith, and Marin Sullivan were especially crucial interlocutors; each read portions of the manuscript and provided valuable feedback that has critically shaped the final project. I am equally grateful for my colleagues and students at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University who have steadily challenged and stimulated me and have provided a supportive and congenial environment to work and think. In particular Pat Rubin and Michele Marincola suggested genial advice in our occasional chapter meetings, Anne Wheeler shared her expertise on Robert Smithson’s archives, and Tom Crow offered sage insights on a range of subjects, both low and high.

I was fortunate to have the support of a number of institutions, many of which provided not only financial support but also collegiality and inspiring locations. My research was deeply enriched by my time at three institutions: The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where Jon Wood shared his expert insights about modern sculpture; at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the equally extraordinary library and scenery took my research to places I did not expect; and at the NYU Research Institute in Athens, where the opportunity to study classical statuary and architecture pushed me to think about the broader traditions of monumentality. A fellowship from the Hauser and Wirth Institute provided the opportunity to spend significant time in the archives of the David Smith Estate in New York where Susan Cooke, Tracee Ng, Rebecca and Candida Smith, and Peter Stevens all generously shared their knowledge.

Earlier versions of chapters four and five appeared respectively in the journal American Art and the Terra Foundation book Experience (2107), and I am grateful to the publishers and editors at these volumes for their support and critical feedback.

Two people made the inevitably laborious nature of writing this book much less onerous: Michelle Komie who expertly navigated the manuscript to its final form and Sam Allen who deftly tracked down images and prized reasonable licensing agreements from the local authorities.

Mike Reddy, whose witty and evocative illustrations appear at the beginning of each chapter, was an ideal collaborator.

And finally, I want to thank my family, Amanda and Amos, who, as the song goes, were there for the lowest lows and most of the highs that rocked this deadline chaser.

TRAJECTORY OF V2 ROCKET

JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL (GATEWAY ARCH) F. 53

INTRODUCTION

MONUMENTALISM AND METHOD

_________________________________________________________

Everything cannot be so easily grasped and conveyed as we are generally led to believe; most events are unconveyable and come to pass in a space that no word has ever penetrated; more unconveyable than all else are art-works, whose mysterious existences, whose lives run alongside ours, which perishes, whereas theirs endure.

—RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

The only relation to art that can be sanctioned in a reality that stands under the constant threat of catastrophe is one that treats works of art with the same deadly seriousness that characterizes the world today.

—THEODOR ADORNO, Valéry Proust Museum

This book describes how a significant strand of visual art produced in the United States in the years between 1945 and 1975 responded to the perils and promises of technology at a moment when, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower described it in his farewell address on January 17, 1961, it appeared that the growing power of a military-industrial complex threatened to fundamentally corrupt the nation’s politics, if not the very structure of our society.¹ In particular the book considers how a number of American artists during these three decades—a period demarcated by the respective ends of World War II and the Vietnam War—reengaged with the largely neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a means to imagine the future in the face of humanity’s newfound capacity for self-destruction by its own, technologically abetted hand. The fraught relationship between man and machine has been a recurrent theme throughout the history of modernity. Yet it took on a new, fateful significance in the wake of the United States’ decision to drop two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945. Humanity—and the United States in particular—now seemed to have harnessed, as Eisenhower’s predecessor, Harry Truman, stated in a radio address hours after the attack on Hiroshima, the basic power of the universe . . . the force from which the sun draws its powers.²

This new phase of technological development, while certainly exhibiting the archetypal dilemmas of the Faustian bargain and the modern Prometheus, was arguably singular in its apocalyptic potential. There was a sense that humanity’s relationship to the natural world had been irrevocably changed and that the future would never be the same, whether that meant that mankind would no longer be beholden to the limited resources of the planet or that humanity would destroy itself and its environment, or at least return either or both to an almost elemental, if not primordial, existence. The truly world-historical implications heralded by the dawn of the nuclear era for both peaceful and militaristic ends were not only articulated by presidents but suffused nearly all realms of existence in postwar American society, bringing, as Tom Vanderbilt puts it in his vibrant account of Cold War survival culture, the tremors of an unrealized war into the textures of everyday life.³ While the threat of attack required concrete means of deterrence and dispersal, like the Interstate Highway System (begun in 1956) and the concomitant growth of suburbs, as well as innovative conceptual strategies like cybernetics that were dedicated to the command and control of complex systems, the sense of living under the constant and spatially expansive menace of nuclear extermination had manifold social resonances and psychological effects that informed various realms of culture in both direct and oblique ways.⁴

In the way that it posed more problems than it could possibly solve, the atomic bomb was something of a perverse philosophical object, making questions of fate, free will, and humanity’s relationship to its environment a matter of life and death. Along with numerous social scientists and philosophers, many artists and writers in the immediate postwar years sought to address the existential consequences foretold by the bomb. William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel lecture, declared that our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up?⁵ Expanding on President Truman’s assessment of the fundamentally material—and notably molecular—implications of the atomic era, Tennessee Williams declared in 1949 that in an age of demented mechanics, all plastic art is created under the threat of material destruction, going on to argue for the elemental bond between the source of this menace and the painter’s very materials, since even at the base of the pigment are the explosive elements of the atom.⁶ Williams’s assertion of the reconfiguration of artistic practice in the light of the atom bomb was echoed in the words of painters like Willem de Kooning, who stated, somewhat skeptically, in 1951 that today, some people think that the light of the atom bomb will change the concept of painting once and for all and Jackson Pollock, who around the same time described his paintings as part of a larger social reality that included the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio.⁷

Such explicit references to the bomb by artists and writers in the years following the end of the war were quite common. A number of critics and scholars in the ensuing years have considered the ways in which postwar visual art reflected and responded to this momentous matter, whether in terms of expressive imagery, as in the Pollock’s cosmic vortexes or Adolph Gottlieb’s avowed blasts or in more allegorical portrayals of the ravages of war by artists such as Philip Evergood or Isamu Noguchi, or in the even more explicit antiwar imagery artists like Nancy Spero or Ed Kienholz began to employ in the 1960s as the country became increasingly mired in a seemingly unwinnable war in Vietnam (that was largely waged as a limited war meant to prevent all out nuclear war between the world superpowers).⁸ Yet these examples of the ways in which the subject of war was figured in the visual arts of the postwar period are in in many ways anomalous. The history of art in the United States beginning in 1945 has been generally understood as a succession and arguably a refinement of various types of abstraction, from the gestural brushstroke of abstract expressionism, to the geometric austerity of minimalism, to the informational abstraction of conceptualism, with pop providing the only significant instance of overt representation and perhaps not surprisingly contributing many of the most important examples of antiwar imagery such as James Rosenquist’s F-111 (see fig. 71) or Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (see fig. 25).

Despite the profound existential repercussions and equally decisive historical and political importance of the atomic bomb and the harnessing of nuclear energy, attention to the ways these matters influenced aspects of US postwar culture has been notably lopsided. While many commentators have effectively demonstrated how a nuclear fear motivated a wide array of popular forms, such as science-fiction literature and cinema, and crucially informed social practices such as city planning and school programs that taught children to duck and cover, when it comes to examples of what are traditionally viewed as high art such as painting and sculpture, these issues typically take a back seat to questions of formal innovation and theoretical explication, perhaps because of a long-standing deference to the ostensible nonobjective indeterminacy of these practices or because of an embarrassment at the kitschy and humanistic themes such topics inevitably summon.⁹ When postwar art in the United States is considered through a social-historical perspective (which arguably has become an increasingly prevalent methodological approach to this material), it is commonly interpreted as a product of what one author has called the cultural Cold War, in which artists and their works are understood as complicit or unconscious dupes of governmental policies that sought to present modernism’s will toward abstraction and abstruseness as evidence of first-world democratic freedom and a foil to communist totalitarianism.¹⁰ It should be added that these sorts of readings have less to say about the art of the 1960s and 1970s, a moment when more cool approaches like minimalism, pop, and conceptualism became dominant, and yet if anything the presence of war became increasingly felt among many citizens.

This book offers a different sort of social-historical reading of postwar art in the United States. Its focus is less on how the subject of war was articulated, visualized, and critiqued, or the covert ways in which it may have been marshaled for specific political aims, and more on the way that humanity’s possible self-destruction radically reconfigured the underlying assumptions about what it means to make a work of art in the first place. If the category of art can be understood as designating a special type of object, one, as Rilke states, whose lives run alongside ours, which perishes, whereas theirs endure, as well as one whose bestowed cultural significance warrants its preservation across time and space, typically through the institution of the museum, then what does it mean to create art when the future of society and the Earth seems critically endangered? What is the modern artist’s role when, as Henry Miller wrote in his 1956 study of the poet Rimbaud, the visionary, prophetic capacities associated with vanguard or avant-gardist practices seems menaced by the precariousness of the future and the works of contemporary artists appear to lie like fallen tombstones amidst the still intact, still upright splendors of ancient times.¹¹

Miller’s image of a fallen tombstone as a symbol for the fate of the artist, and more generally the fate of the American species, which he declares is in danger of being extinguished altogether, hints at one reason why the category of the monument became a significant motif for a number of artists working in the postwar years. His words also suggest how the equally pressing question concerning the status of man as an active agent in the world, typically understood in terms of the rubric of humanism, may have been instigated by humanity’s newfound technological reach.¹² That perhaps the end of man as posited by (mostly French) thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault may have only been thinkable and articulable after the end of man was technologically possible and that the antihumanist sentiments expressed in the work and writings of an American artist like Robert Smithson (who would draw on Foucault’s notably geological metaphors in his statement that the object or thing or word ‘man’ could be swept away like an isolated sea shell on a beach) may have been crucially informed by the military-technological nexus of postwar American culture that made a posthumanist landscape a literal possibility.¹³ Some of the central concepts associated with postmodernism, such as the professed end of grand historical narratives and the concomitant critique of a humanist perspective that sought to de-center man from an anthropocentric, universal, and transcendental model of subjectivity, may find aspects of their origins in the new existential terrain augured by the bomb, even as the threat of the extinction of humanity generated an effulgence of humanism.¹⁴ The nuclear-apocalyptic foundations for the humanist response to the postmodern de-centering of the subject is pithily summarized in a line from Ed Dorn’s 1960 poem Sousa, which declares: The desire to disintegrate the earth / is eccentric.

With these sorts of questions in mind, I have set out to offer not simply a more nuanced or historically specific account of a major strand of the art of the postwar period but also what I take to be a more generous approach to understanding the significance of these works, one that sees artists as more than illustrators or cultural barometers, who merely reflect on larger social ideals and anxieties, or as unwitting dupes or opportunistic dissemblers who were complicit to the hegemonic politics and propaganda of the Cold War, or even as critical activists, protesting the evils of the military-industrial complex through their work. In many ways, my focus is less attuned to questions of authorial intention or critical agency than on the ways that works of art can signify and resonate beyond their creator’s primary artistic aims and objectives. Throughout this book I apprehend works of art as complex and often contradictory nodes within a multifaceted array of cultural practices that can offer a privileged perspective for understanding what might be called the epistemological and even ontological implications of nuclear war, and more generally, the technological capacity of humanity to destroy itself (or just as crucially choose not to). The works that will be discussed in the following pages address to various extents the specific questions and challenges that confront a society suddenly and irrevocably made precarious by the advent of technologies that appeared to have the potential to radically alter the fate of humanity. These works also, I will contend, consider the social responsibilities of such a society, even if—or for that matter especially because—it emerged victorious from a war, whose both military and social implications seem to be boundless both in time and space.¹⁵ Which is not to say that I don’t at times recognize the ways these works did in fact reflect and respond to the culture in which they were created, and even at times seek to assuage the political and psychological anxieties that the atomic age instigated. Indeed, one of the central theses of this book is how these works in their oftentimes dramatic vision of a decimated, dehumanized future contained a strident message of the necessity of a new social order that would render such conflicts obsolete, demonstrating how, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger has argued, The idea of the end of the world is simply a negative utopia.¹⁶

By considering postwar art through the relationship of technology and war (and as a corollary, technology and peace), a very different sort of history of the period emerges. Most notably perhaps, the conventional chronology based on a progression of stylistic movements loses its apparent self-evidence and usefulness. During my research, as I tracked the numerous instances when the question of war was directly cited by certain artists and critics during the period between the end of World War II and the end of the Vietnam War and began to consider the ways that this body of work registered and responded to humanity’s vexed relationship to technology, particularly through what could be called varieties of futurological imagination, it became increasingly apparent to me that many of these works share certain affinities that could be considered if not a coherent style, certainly a significant concern, and one that manifested itself in certain formal and conceptual affinities that drew on this heightened sensitivity to questions regarding temporality.

An admittedly loaded but nonetheless revealing comparison will highlight some of the correspondences my study will pursue. Separated by nearly thirty years, Peter Grippe’s City #3 from 1947 (see fig. 8) and Michael Heizer’s City begun in 1972 (see fig. 66) might seem at first glance to be in many ways diametrically antithetical in terms of their respective place in the history of modern art, the former appearing as a traditional sculpture made from the age-old method and materials of molding terra-cotta and the latter with its expansive and decidedly architectural semblance confounding the very category of sculpture itself, both works can be understood as responding to the central anxieties concerning the survival of human culture and its monuments in the second half of the twentieth century. In the case of Grippe’s City, the thin, curved terra-cotta armature of his city is inscribed with dates from the historical past and from the future symbolizing the material precariousness of human culture and the urge to preserve it. Heizer’s City, in its massiveness and stolidity, registers these concerns negatively, serving as a buttress against destruction and ruination, while its associations with Mesoamerican sources (which are equally visible in the faces that adorn the surface of Grippe’s work) summon a Pan-American precedent for a lost civilization, and its location in the empty, desiccated landscapes of the American West not far from the testing grounds of the US Air Force, suggesting the very threat the work sought to contest. Indeed, the expansive scale of Heizer’s work invites an aerial perspective, which in the postwar period had distinct connotations of bombardment. The mazelike negative spaces produced by the supporting walls within Grippe’s sculpture, which can be seen to summon the images of decimated European cities that began to appear in the first years of the war, similarly invite an overhead view (see fig. 9). These intimations of an aerial perspective and its associations to military violence begin to insinuate how the activation of space, which became something of a leitmotif in the critical reception of postwar sculpture, resonated with much larger cultural anxieties of the period and, more important to the larger claims of my book, indicate the ways that the largely aesthetic and ontological considerations that have dominated the discussion of postwar sculpture in the United States were crucially informed by social and political matters.

Which is, of course, not to suggest an uninterrupted and unswerving trajectory between the art of the immediate postwar years and that of the 1960s and 1970s or that the varied array of art produced between the thirty-year period between 1945 and 1975 came out of similar social conditions. The difference between a work like Grippe’s and that of Heizer reflects not only the two artists’ different approaches to sculpture but also the changing attitudes about the peril of nuclear annihilation that took place between the immediate postwar years and those of the 1960s and beyond. As Paul Boyer argues in his pathbreaking history of US nuclear culture, a fundamental shift in attitudes concerning the threat of nuclear war took place following the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. After this genuine, albeit ultimately thwarted, confrontation between the nuclear superpowers, military policies on both sides of the political divide began to pursue a policy of détente, which sought to transfer the risk of all-out global nuclear war to that of limited wars, which would take place in so-called third-world countries like Vietnam. According to Boyer, as fear diminished about of an attack on the home front, the prevailing American stance toward the nuclear war threat from 1963 to well into the 1970s was one of apathy and neglect.¹⁷ And yet while angst-ridden visions of nuclear apocalypse largely faded from public view by the mid-1960s the underlying anxieties about human-induced technological destruction that motivated so much of postwar culture did not so much disappear but, as I will argue, were distilled into less dramatic and arguably more decorous forms like the austere and often industrially fabricated objects of minimalism and the spatially expansive practices of land art like Heizer’s, which nonetheless often carried an expressive charge that was recognized by many of its initial viewers. While artists and critics typically did not mention the subject of nuclear war in any direct way (although, as I will show in chapter three, artists like Heizer did in fact overtly declare these concerns, and allusions to the subject can be discerned more often than most previous accounts of the period suggest) these factors continued to inform central aesthetic concerns such as permanence, spatial expansiveness, and most central to the book, the concept of the monument.

The endpoint of my study, 1975, delimits not only the official termination of the United States’ military involvement in Vietnam but also the moment when certain spatial practices associated with sculpture and installation became in many ways the dominant aesthetic paradigm for advanced artistic practices (so that even painting exhibitions were to be perceived in terms of installation and numerous contemporary art spaces contain galleries whose vast, often industrial scale often competes for the attention of the beholder with the art on display). This was the moment when, to use the influential language of Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 essay, the white cube of the gallery would become recognized as an aesthetic element in its own right.¹⁸ In fact, as I argue in the final chapter, this ultimate aestheticization of the gallery space and academicization of the expressive potential of sculptural space (typically understood through the respective philosophical and academic discourses of phenomenology and institutional critique) obscured the more overt political significance—and arguably the expressive capacity—of this body of work, its ardent engagement with exigencies of what Buckminster Fuller called utopia or oblivion.¹⁹ If the apocalyptic oblivion that Fuller hoped would be staved off by utopian practices like his own has not yet come to pass, the modern oblivion of the strident futurological visions of these works nonetheless might explain in part what appears to be contemporary society’s unwillingness to face the continued threat of technologically abetted destruction not only—still—in bombs and other forms of weaponry but also in the so-called slow apocalypse portended by the effects of global warming in which the biblical covenant of the fire next time has been reversed into the water again.²⁰

Thus the book’s focus on sculpture and the various expanded practices that would largely come to define the advanced art of the late 1960s and 1970s is not marshaled in the name of medium specificity or any sort of commitment to sculpture as a discrete and coherent field of practices. Rather, it seeks to understand how certain attributes associated with sculpture during this period, in particular its engagement with industrial and technological modes of production and its activation of actual space coupled with its long-standing associations with monumentality, positioned a certain body of work as signal expressions of the new existential terrain of the nuclear era. This thesis was already intimated by Jack Burnham, who in the final pages of his Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), a book that considers the intertwined histories of modern sculpture and technology and thus in certain ways offers an important precedent to my own study, muses on how because future human life now depends upon the control, if not rehabilitation of industrial technology—both as a maker of consumer goods and weapons and because of the possibility of an irreversible technology, one that destroys organic life and substitutes for it very sophisticated forms of synthetic life, modern sculpture has a role in shaping our destination as a post-human species.²¹ If sculpture and other three-dimensional practices increasingly became the dominant mode of artistic production in the years between 1945 and 1975, this was due not to the aesthetic dictates of modernist materialism or postmodernist critique but rather because of the way these works spoke to some of the most pressing social issues of the time. Indeed, in its frequent allusions to technology and with its long-standing associations to the memorial statue, U.S. sculpture in the years between 1945 and 1975 often conveyed a broad temporal span from a prehistorical past to the future, and, more generally, between the anticipated dangers of war and the promises of peace. In this regard, pace Faulkner, the true tragedy of the postwar era is not the awareness of our possible extinction through technological war so much as our continued refusal to seek a different political path that would make the world a more peaceful place.

MONUMENTS AND MONUMENTALISM

At a moment when the future of humanity seemed tethered to the powers of technology (and in particular militarized technology), numerous artists began creating works that in one way or another turned to the tradition of the sculptural monument. In general these works were not monumental because of their size, scale, or siting (although many of the works were relatively large and did activate their surroundings). Or perhaps one might say they were not monumental merely because of these conventional attributes. Rather, I hope to show in the following pages how a great deal of three-dimensional art from this period, from the categorically modernist sculptures of David Smith to the avowedly specific objects of Donald Judd to environmental and installation-based practices of an artist like Robert Smithson, all exhibited a crucial degree of what might be called monumentalism. Whether designated by their creators or critics as a monument or not, these works often exhibited a complex temporal dimension that imagined a vision of the future, whether utopian or catastrophic, that through various effects that emphasized the material presence of the sculptural object, was synchronized to the contemporary space and time of the viewer. In their multitemporal mode of address these works offered some of the most articulate expressions of a society standing on the crux of an age of unprecedented possibility and predestined peril.

Considering the alternatingly primordial and futuristic fantasies of death and destruction prompted by the fear of nuclear war it is understandable that the monument, with its deep-seated associations as monolithic marker of time—one can think of the calendrical arrangements of Stonehenge as much as the memorial, and oftentimes funerary, functions of classical statuary—experienced something of a renaissance in the postwar years. The Janus-faced temporal logic of the monument, in which its physical presence simultaneously recalls an event or figure from the past and points to its anticipated perpetuation into an unspecified future, provided an unparalleled means for numerous artists to engage with the preposterously anachronic apocalypse predicted by the postatomic condition, one that was stridently expressed in US Air Force General Curtis LeMay’s threat in 1965 that the power of these space-age weapons had the capacity to revert their targets—the North Vietnamese in this instance—back to the Stone Age.²²

This new monumentalism beginning in the years after the war was in many ways unexpected. As Lewis Mumford suggested in an essay from 1937, a modern monument is a contradiction in terms since even the most ostensibly contemporary monument risks possible obsolescence, irrelevance, and unintelligibility as it perseveres in an environment that is bound to change both materially and ideologically.²³ Already by 1903 the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl, in a now canonical essay on the theoretical implications surrounding the preservation of monuments, claimed that the traditional monument, understood as a work of man erected for the specific purpose of keeping particular human deeds or destinies (or a complex accumulation thereof) alive and present in the consciousness of future generations, has all but come to a halt today.²⁴ For many artists and