Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg 9780691253084

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BRUTAL AESTHETICS

BRUTAL AESTHETICS Dubuffet Bataille Jorn Paolozzi Oldenburg

Hal Foster

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts National Gallery of Art, Washington Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts Bollingen Series XXXV: 67

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Copyright © 2020 by Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] 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: Asger Jorn, Untitled (Raphael’s Angels), c. 1949. Ink on postcard, 3 ½ × 5 ½ inches. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA. Photo courtesy of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg. Figure 4.9 reproduced by permission of the Fondazione Torino Musei. It is prohibited to duplicate this image using any method. All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-20260-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Foster, Hal, author. Title: Brutal aesthetics : Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg / Hal Foster. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2020] | Series: The A.W. Mellon lectures in the fine arts ; 2018 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020011054 | ISBN 9780691202600 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern—20th century. | Aesthetics, Modern—20th century. | Civilization in art. Classification: LCC N6490 .F66 2020 | DDC 709.04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011054

This is the sixty-seventh volume of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, which are delivered annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and organized by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. This volume is based on lectures delivered in 2018. The volumes of lectures constitute Number XXXV in the Bollingen Series, supported by the Bollingen Foundation. This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Designed by McCall Associates, New York This book has been composed in Hope Sans, Monotype and Mercury Text, Hoefler&Co. New paperback printing 2023 ISBN (paper) 978-0-691-20260-0 ISBN (ebook) 978-0-691-25308-4

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The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

have been delivered annually since 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, with the goal of bringing “the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts.” As publication was always an essential part of the vision for the Mellon Lectures, a relationship was established between the National Gallery and the Bollingen Foundation for a series of books based on the talks. The first book in the series was published in 1953, and since 1967 all lectures have been published by Princeton University Press as part of the Bollingen Series. Now, for the first time, all the books in the series are available in one or more formats, including paperback and e-book, making many volumes that have long been out of print accessible to future generations of readers. This edition is supported by a gift in memory of Charles Scribner, Jr., former trustee and president of Princeton University Press. The Press is grateful to the Scribner family for their formative and enduring support, and for their commitment to preserving the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts for posterity. Images in this edition may have been altered in size and color from their appearance in the original print editions to make this book available in accessible formats.

Contents 1

Introduction: Positive Barbarism

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1 | Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes

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2 | Georges Bataille and His Caves

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3 | Asger Jorn and His Creatures

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4 | Eduardo Paolozzi and His Hollow Gods

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5 | Claes Oldenburg and His Ray Guns

248

Acknowledgments

251

Notes

277

Index

285

Photography and Copyright Credits

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INTRODUCTION

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Introduction: Positive Barbarism

This book is born of my puzzling over this paradoxical statement by Walter Benjamin: modernism teaches us “how to survive civilization if need be.”1 Although he varies the phrase in a few texts of the early 1930s, he never explains it; apparently it remained a riddle for him too. Given the situation in Europe, the referent of “civilization” seems clear enough; it is the travesty of civilization authored by Fascism and Nazism, civilization turned into its opposite. This is the barbarism, exploited by the dictators that rose in the ruins of World War I, that Benjamin hopes, in a desperate dialectic, to counter. “Barbarism? Yes, indeed. We say this in order to introduce a new, positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of experience do for the barbarian? It forces him to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with a little and build up further, looking neither left nor right. Among the great creative spirits, there have always been the inexorable ones who begin by clearing a tabula rasa.”2 Yet what kind of modernism teaches us to survive a civilization become barbaric, and what sort of survival could this be? Benjamin posed the notion of positive barbarism in a short text titled “Experience and Poverty” written in summer 1933 when he was in exile, mostly in Paris but for the moment on Ibiza.3 Hitler had come to power in January, it was the depths of the Depression, and Benjamin was as poor as that Spanish island was then. Hence his title, which should be read as a chiasmus, both the experience of poverty and the poverty of experience.4 Certainly the essay abounds in sudden twists of this nature, especially regarding the question of value, economic and other. In fact the entire text is a parable of paradoxes that we are asked to tease out. Benjamin begins with a fable about gold. On his deathbed an old man tells his sons of a treasure buried in their vineyard. They dig for it everywhere but find nothing; yet, with the soil thus turned, the vineyard soon bears a great crop of grapes, and they learn that “the blessing lies in hard work and not in gold.” This is experience that produces wisdom (Erfahrung) as distinct from experience that supplies information (Erlebnis), and it can be “passed on” in tales like this one (etymologically “tradition” means “to pass on”). However, according to Benjamin, such experience, such passing on,

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is now impoverished: “Who still meets people who really know how to tell a story?”5 This old kind of knowledge is collective—a good thing for Benjamin—but he does not admit that it is also patriarchal. Moreover, as is often the case in critical theory, Benjamin projects a legendary past when subjectivity and society were somehow integral in order to cast modernity as a fall from such grace. And here he keys this breakup to the trauma of World War I: “Many people returned from the front in silence. Not richer but poorer in communicable experience.” For Benjamin the wise speech of the old father has succumbed to the stunned muteness of the young soldier. “A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a landscape on which nothing was the same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.”6 Benjamin describes the fall in a litany of reversals: moral experience is undermined by corruption, economic experience undercut by inflation, physical experience undone by hunger.7 Then, in the major turn in the text, he embraces this poverty, and so bids farewell to the very tradition of experience that was lamented only a moment before. It is this transvaluation (Nietzsche is on his mind as well as Marx) that enables Benjamin to advocate for modernist artists, writers, and architects who are able “to start from scratch.” However, his list of such “constructors” is unexpected: he mentions artists such as the Cubists and Paul Klee, writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Paul Scheerbart, and architects such as Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier— odd couples all. Even though Benjamin knew of the Russian Constructivists from his visit to Moscow in winter 1926–27, he does not invoke exemplary figures like Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Clearly his concern is with the situation in Western Europe, one that was shipwrecked, not post-revolutionary.8 (figs. 0.1, 0.2) Apart from impoverished experience, what unites his different constructors? For one thing they all “reject the traditional, solemn, noble image of man.” For Benjamin this image enfolds a bourgeois subjectivity, a deep psychology, which they discard as outmoded. For example, Klee designs his figures schematically, as though on a “drawing board”; “they have no inwardness, and that is what makes them barbaric.” At stake here, then, is not a visionary order to be engineered so much as a bare life to be endured, not “the new man” of utopian modernists like the Constructivists so much as “the naked man of the contemporary world who lies

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0.1 PAUL KLEE, Fleeing Ghost, 1929. Oil on canvas, 35 1⁄4 × 25 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago. 0.2 EL LISSITZKY, The New Man, from Figurines: The ThreeDimensional Design of the Electro-Mechanical Show “Victory over the Sun,” 1920–21, published 1923. Lithograph, 21 × 17 7⁄8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.”9 However, Benjamin does sneak in one Constructivist note: his constructors reject “humanlikeness” as “a principle of humanism,” and stress the “arbitrary, constructed nature” of representation. Rather than a “technical renovation of language,” Benjamin argues, this is “its mobilization in the service of struggle or work—at any rate, of changing reality instead of describing it.” He means the echo of Marx to be clear.10 For Benjamin modern architecture is most forthright in its rejection of interiority as inwardness. Although he acknowledges the utopian dimension of glass architecture as advanced by Scheerbart and others, here the material signifies transparency, which he pits against the opacity of the bourgeois interior stuffed with private mementoes. “Objects made of glass have no ‘aura’,” Benjamin avers. “Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession.”11 In short, modern architects such as Walter Gropius “create rooms in which it is hard to leave traces.” And yet not everything is coldly objective in his account. In fact, at this point Benjamin offers a wildly dialectical appraisal of technology: even as it has produced “a force field of

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destructive torrents,” it has also released a fantastic array of creative possibilities. Like the nineteenth-century caricaturist J. J. Grandville (another Benjamin favorite), fantastical writers like Scheerbart explore “how our telescopes, our airplanes, our rockets can transform human beings. . . into completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures.”12 This transformative imagination is also at work in mass culture, especially in early Disney films. “The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man,” Benjamin claims. “His life is full of miracles—miracles that not only surpass the wonders of technology but make fun of them.” In his account Mickey cartoons are so popular because they offer “tremendous relief” to Europeans buffeted by catastrophic war, intensive industrialization, and economic disaster. Magically in these animations “a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon.” It is thus not only modernist artists like Klee who teach us “how to survive”; so too do cartoon characters like Mickey, and nowhere more so than in early films such as Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie (both 1928). With only a few words of squeaky dialogue, each movie is a symphony of onomatopoeic barbarisms in which almost everything becomes an object or an instrument of magical transformation. (fig. 0.3) Yet in a prior fragment on Mickey Benjamin makes a darker point about such metamorphosis: “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being.”13 And further: “Here we see for the first time that it is to have one’s arm, even one’s body stolen,” and still endure. It is then that Benjamin delivers his initial version of the key line: “In these films mankind makes preparations to survive civilization.”14 There is more to say about his extraordinary sketch of a positive barbarism, but perhaps this is enough for me to present my thesis for this book. Like everyone else, Benjamin thought that the worst had come with World War I, with “the tiny, fragile human body” caught “in a force field of destructive torrents.” But the worst had not come; it did not arrive until the mass deaths of World War II, the Holocaust, and the hydrogen bomb. Only then did the positive barbarism that Benjamin glimpsed in modernist art, architecture, and literature become a necessity. Only then were artists and writers truly forced “to start from scratch, to make a new start, to make a little go a long way.” Yet, in these extreme circumstances, what means could they hope to

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0.3 Walt Disney Studio, Steamboat Willie, 1928.

find? What ground could they claim with any conviction? What but the most basic and the most brutal?15 I am concerned with the turn, from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as manifest in the work of the Frenchmen Jean Dubuffet and Georges Bataille, the Dane Asger Jorn, the ItalianScot Eduardo Paolozzi, and the Swedish-American Claes Oldenburg. Each of these figures proposes a different version of brutal aesthetics, one that pares art down or reveals it to be already bare, so that they might begin again after the compound devastations of the time. To what ends exactly? Why does Dubuffet invent the category of art brut? What does Bataille seek in the cave paintings at Lascaux? Why does Jorn populate his Cobra canvases with denatured figures? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous assemblages of industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake cheap products from urban scrap? “To begin again” is an oxymoron, and the contradiction shows in these projects. My figures aim for a foundational approach, only to find an equivocal one; they

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claim a clean slate, only to discover an overwritten one. Like Robinson Crusoe (whom Dubuffet and Oldenburg adopt as a persona), each washes up on an island of his own devising, only to find that it is less safe terrain than treacherous ground. There tricky questions will soon confront us: How could Dubuffet imagine an art that is “unscathed” by culture? What did Bataille hope to unlock in “the enigma” of prehistoric representations of animal and man? Why did Jorn picture political crises in the form of “human animals”? How did Paolozzi pick out a path to survival in the destruction all around him? And why did Oldenburg stake his desire for metamorphosis in junk? My group includes two philosophers, Benjamin and Bataille, two painters, Dubuffet and Jorn, and two sculptors, Paolozzi and Oldenburg, yet they range over these disciplines in ways that transform them significantly. All the artists are also innovative writers: one object of positive barbarism is language, which they treat as both a tool and a target (their texts are full of invented terms, mangled words, and other linguistic barbarisms).16 And some venture into philosophy or suggest that art already qualifies as such (painting can be a vehicle for philosophy, Dubuffet argued, and Oldenburg suggests the same for sculpture). Several of my figures are connected personally as well. Dubuffet alone was acquainted with Bataille, whom he read, and friendly with Jorn, about whom he wrote (Jorn returned the favor), and he influenced Paolozzi, who studied his art brut collection in Paris, as well as Oldenburg, who did the same in Chicago (Dubuffet was a role model for both artists).17 More important is this commonality: each figure proposes a different ground for brutal aesthetics. In the first instance this ground is a positing of a beyond or a before to official culture. Thus for Dubuffet art brut falls outside the history of art, while for Bataille cave painting precedes it. Both thus claim a zero degree of art, one free of basic conventions of making and viewing; for them art brut and cave painting even undercut “the primordial convention” that art is “made to be beheld.”18 However, what appears as an ur-beginning can open on to a mise-en-abyme. Perhaps this goes with the territory: most of my figures are riddled by questions of origin—the origin of art and representation, of humanity and sexuality, of law and sovereignty—that are contradictory or at least enigmatic in nature. And sometimes in the face of these riddles they propose extreme notions, such as the brut in Dubuffet or the transgressive in Bataille, that qualify as limit concepts, that is, as ideas that point to a place where

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0.4 JEAN DUBUFFET, Le prince charmant (Prince Charming), 1946. Oil and mixed media on canvas. Private collection.

thought cannot go (for reasons ideological or historical or both). Sometimes, too, these limit concepts deliver them into double binds. Dubuffet projects various others as alien to culture, such as the child and the insane, only then to acculturate them; and Bataille thrills to transgression, only then to acknowledge that it serves to reinscribe the law. Often, to borrow a Bataillean term, these projects are “impossible,” and yet this impossibility holds an interest of its own.19 In the second instance (which is the first in order of practice) my artists seek a ground in brute materiality. (fig. 0.4) For example, Dubuffet mixes in dirt, pebbles, and asphalt in his haute pâte paintings, while Oldenburg stuffs kapok into muslin and vinyl to make his soft sculptures. In doing so Dubuffet erodes the basic distinction of figure and field in painting, while Oldenburg counters the fundamental expectation that sculpture be vertical and stable. Often this partial undoing of the object induces a partial undoing of the subject (both artist and viewer), and sometimes this operation is cast in terms of regression. Dubuffet was greeted as a cacaïste, Oldenburg

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0.5 CLAES OLDENBURG, C-E-L-I-N-E, Backwards, 1959. Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with casein, 30 × 40 × 3 inches. Glenstone, Maryland.

described his early sculpture as “shit art,” and Paolozzi saw his object-making as a “mud language.” But this regression is not necessarily a reduction. According to Freud, the infant does not distinguish much between a turd, a penis, a baby, and a gift; that is, the anal zone is a site of symbolic transformation, and so it is often in brutal aesthetics as well.20 This is to suggest that sheer materiality and semiotic metamorphosis are not opposed in this art. In fact just the opposite obtains: Dubuffet, Jorn, Paolozzi, and Oldenburg all show us how a substance can motivate a sign and how a sign can transform a substance.21 (fig. 0.5) Thus do my artists experiment with language; some like Dubuffet brutalize it, others like Oldenburg eroticize it, all play with it. Yet they find no secure ground here either; in every instance they render language more ambiguous, not less. Sometimes this linguistic entanglement prompts a strong counter-impulse to sweep language away, or at least to clear art of names. If Duchamp proposed that a work of art can consist in nomination alone (a urinal becomes a Fountain because the artist declares it so), Dubuffet and Oldenburg work to exnominate art (art brut, Dubuffet insists, is art “that doesn’t know its name”).22 (fig. 0.6) Indeed, they can be seen as

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0.6 HEINRICH MÜLLER, Man with Flies and Serpent, c. 1925–27. Colored pencil on paper, 22 1⁄2 × 16 1⁄2 inches. Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne.

anti-Duchamps who militate for an aesthetic that is more motivated, not more arbitrary. Certainly my group as a whole counts as a neo-avant-garde distinct from the dominant Duchampian lineages. Language is one stake of positive barbarism then. Originally a “barbarian” was a person who could not speak, at least in a way that a Greek might understand. The word evokes this stammering onomatopoeically (barbar), and most of my artists would embrace the association, which is also active in “brute” (from the Latin brutus, dull or stupid). Bataille self-identifies as an anti-classical iconoclast, Jorn as a Nordic vandal, and the others as urban primitives.23 So how do they differ from the barbarians picked out by Benjamin two decades before? To be sure, some attributes of his positive barbarism carry over to my figures. They too are opposed to interiority understood as inwardness, and they also reject humanlikeness as a principle of humanism. Other characteristics in his account simply do not last or are transformed utterly. For example, the fantastical merging of nature and technology, glimpsed by Benjamin in Scheerbart, becomes monstrous in Paolozzi, while the presence of the creaturely is more pronounced, yet as an avatar of “damaged life” à la Theodor

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Adorno, not of playful adaptation à la Mickey Mouse. Finally, my figures are more scavengers than constructors, but then that is true of some of the Benjamin barbarians as well: they too “begin with a little” and make it “go a long way.”24 I would be remiss not to mention two renowned uses of the term “barbarism” in the critical field that concerns us, especially since both should be differentiated from positive barbarism. The first also comes from Benjamin, who in “On the Concept of History” (1940), his final essay before his suicide, wrote, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”25 This resonant formula is fundamental Marx: the luxury of culture depends on the expropriation of labor; great art often rests on oppressive inequality. Benjamin expresses this truth, pertinent to all times and places, not to spite what we love but to remind us of its cost, and all my figures would agree with him. The second evocation of barbarism comes from Adorno in “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), and it is equally chastening: “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”26 Here again my figures would assent, yet they would take this aphorism as a mandate to continue to make poetry, painting, and sculpture, only to make them more barbaric. (Indeed, this is how Adorno came to understand his statement too; a “mimesis of the hardened” was central to his late theory of modernist art.)27 Let me anticipate a few questions that might arise along the way. First, what relation do my artists have to the figurative tradition? Prewar modernists—Fauves, Expressionists, Cubists, Constructivists, Dadaists, Surrealists, and others—distorted the figure in multiple ways; however, in doing so they retained it as a foil. For the most part this connection-in-opposition to the figurative tradition was swept aside by the Holocaust and the Bomb, which obliterated “the tiny, fragile body” en masse. But then abstraction was not an option for my group either, compromised as it was by prewar associations with sundry spiritualisms, utopianisms, and idealisms that historical events had first prompted and then bankrupted.28 For these reasons my artists stick with figuration even as they turn it toward disfiguration, to an art of denatured bodies and stunted gestures.29 (figs. 0.7, 0.8) Such disfiguration is central to the notions of the brut in Dubuffet, the informe in Bataille, the creaturely in Jorn (who titled a series of works “disfigurations”), the monstrous in Paolozzi, and the lumpen in Oldenburg. And yet, extreme though it is, this disfiguration could still be

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0.7 ASGER JORN, The Timid Proud One, 1957. Oil on board, 39 1⁄2 × 31 1⁄2 inches. Tate Museum. 0.8 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Krokadeel, 1959. Bronze, 37 × 26 1⁄2 × 9 inches. National Galleries of Scotland.

presented as a realism (as Oldenburg did with his first major project, The Street), a realism true to a world in which the capitalist processes of reification and fragmentation had moved out of the factory and into the streets. Importantly, most of my artists look for artistic materials in this second nature of industrial waste and commercial glut: “Car wrecking yards as hunting grounds,” Paolozzi said of one of his sources. “Junkyard is beach is street,” Oldenburg said of three of his sites.30 Some of my figures go so far as to see representation as an act of violence. Art proceeds “by successive destructions,” Bataille argued, with graffiti in mind. “Insofar as it liberates libidinal instincts, these instincts are sadistic.”31 Dubuffet would agree, and so might Jorn (as long as we replace “sadistic” with “erotic”), and even the benevolent Oldenburg took the phrase “Annihilate/Illuminate” as a central motto (“the original inspiration of The Store,” he remarked of his second major project, “was a butcher shop”).32 Also paradoxically, my figures conceive mimesis as more performative than representational. Bataille longed for a return to the ritualistic basis of art that he detected in the caves, and Dubuffet insisted on presence and participation in his work: “The painting will not be viewed passively. . . but relived in the way

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it was worked out. . . if I may say so, re-acted.”33 Somewhat in keeping with the contemporary phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dubuffet moved to bracket pictorial conventions in order to freshen perceptual capabilities, and most of the others did too. Certainly they stressed material process, all with the ambition to reanimate subject-object relations, or at least to resist a society more and more governed by the commodification of things and the administration of people. A second question. How do my artists relate to given models of avant-garde practice? Although they are affined stylistically with Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, they regard all three as exhausted ideologically, and to a degree they shift from the subversive impulses of such movements toward the foundational imperatives of modernist painting.34 At the same time they have little interest in the formalist concern with “medium specificity”; on the contrary, they advance different programs of medium impurity.35 Of course, some preoccupations of brutal aesthetics do run back to prewar precedents, above all the fascination with the primitive, whether this is associated with the art of tribal people, children, or the insane, all of whom the Nazis had declared “degenerate” only a decade or so before. Yet the primitives taken up by my group are not the modernist ones. After the intervention of Claude Lévi-Strauss and others, “the savage mind” could no longer be opposed to modern sophistication, which also meant that it could no longer be projected as pristine.36 So, too, my figures complicate modernist primitives with related avatars such as the destitute outsider, whom Dubuffet calls “the common man” and Oldenburg “the rag man.” Again, at issue in brutal aesthetics is less primitive life than bare life, less life unscathed by culture à la Dubuffet than life at the mercy of power à la Giorgio Agamben. The Benjaminian trope of “the naked man in the dirty diapers of the present” becomes actual.37 (fig. 0.9) In a sense modernist primitivism was not primitive enough for my postwar figures. As a result some like Jorn turned to mythology and archaeology, and others like Bataille to anthropology and prehistory (the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 triggered a resurgence in the last field). Certainly for Bataille the prehistoric displaces not only the primitive but also the ancient as the originary site of art and representation. Although prehistory had interested prewar modernists like Amédée Ozenfant, there are telling differences here. In keeping with the modernist emphasis on pure vision, Ozenfant saw the handprints on cave walls as proud marks of the first man,

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0.9 CLAES OLDENBURG, Snapshots from the City, from the performance series Ray Gun Spex, held within the exhibition The Street, February 29, March 1 and 2, 1960.

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whereas Bataille saw them as ambiguous signs of a being conflicted about its newfound humanity.38 Then, too, in the postwar period in general, the image of the first man was shadowed by the specter of the last man. Interest in prehistory was haunted by anxiety about posthistory, and sometimes my figures imagine a strange synchrony between an absolute before and a no less absolute after. Implicit in Jorn, Paolozzi, and Oldenburg, this is explicit in Bataille, for whom the caves are both “the cradle of humanity” and its bomb-shelter tomb in waiting. If the topos of the primitive shifts with these postwar figures, so too does the image of the animal. A secondary subject in traditional art, the animal persists in modernist work, especially in Expressionism, where it is often another avatar of pure vision. (“Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eyes of an animal?” Franz Marc wondered. “How does a horse see the world, how does an eagle, a doe, or a dog?”)39 In brutal aesthetics, however, the animal returns strongly and mutates variously into a beast, a god, a monster, or a creature, and in this last guise it registers not a natural state to reclaim but a denatured condition to confront. Thus the animal has no stable meaning here: for Bataille it marks, in its very difference, the emergence of the human order in the caves, whereas for Jorn and Paolozzi it registers a contemporary crisis in that order. Like the rough beast of Yeats, the creature is a mythical being that slouches onto the historical stage precisely at a moment when what counts as law and authority becomes murky.40 Another shift in avatars should be underscored. A key persona in prewar avantgardes is the artist as engineer, who is presented often in a utopian guise (as in Constructivism) and sometimes in a debilitated state (as in Dada).41 In both cases, however, such constructors build from the ground up, as Benjamin says, with figures “designed on the drawing board.” This is less the case with my postwar artists, who displace the engineer with the bricoleur as a central persona. (figs. 0.10, 0.11) In his influential definition of 1962 Lévi-Strauss opposed the two types directly: whereas “the engineer questions the universe” with abstract logic, the bricoleur “makes do with ‘whatever is at hand’,” with a heterogeneous “collection of oddments left over from human endeavors.”42 This account derives from the very milieu that concerns us (Lévi-Strauss associated the bricoleur with art brut, about which he corresponded with Dubuffet).43 My artists propose other related avatars as well; Dubuffet speaks of his artistic role as a sorcerer and an alchemist, and Oldenburg of his as a magician

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0.10 EL LISSITZKY, Self-Portrait, 1924. Gelatin silver print, 5 1⁄2 × 3 1⁄2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art. 0.11 Eduardo Paolozzi at work on a lost-wax bronze figure, 1956.

and a clown. Whatever the individual twists, the artist as bricoleur puts into focus a critical paradox: that these artists “begin again” with the already given—with found works (as in the art brut collected by Dubuffet), appropriated images (as in the fleamarket canvases painted over by Jorn), industrial fragments (as recast by Paolozzi), and urban scraps (as remade by Oldenburg). Again, my group is distinct from the Duchampian neo-avant-garde, and the practice of bricolage differs from the use of the readymade.44 But neither is bricolage simply a repeat of collage, and the dialectics of shock in Dada and Surrealism are not at work in the same ways. (How could one outdo the photos of Auschwitz or Hiroshima in this respect, and why attempt to do so in any case?) Finally, bricolage also differs from constructed sculpture; my positive barbarians are as interested in destruction as both a means and an end. Even so brutal aesthetics is not nihilistic: as Oldenburg suggests, to “annihilate” is only the first step; to “illuminate”—to see, to connect, to transform, to reanimate—is the important thing. In fact my positive

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barbarian might be labeled homo connectus, one whose watchword is “metamorphosis.”45 However, my figures do not equate artistic transformation with cultural sublimation; on the contrary, the drive to desublimate—to undo proper forms and to release libidinal energies—is very strong in this group. Just as figuration is turned toward a brutal disfiguration, representation is understood as a violent “alteration.”46 How, then, to square this disruptive bricolage with the commitment to painting on the part of Dubuffet and Jorn, and to sculpture on the part of Paolozzi and Oldenburg? Most of my artists operate within these traditional mediums, but they also work against them; at the very least they transform them substantially. Dubuffet not only operated on a horizontal plane but also worked the ground into his canvases (with dirt and the like); he takes painting down, literally humiliates it (humus means ground), and a similar thing can be said of Jorn with his deformed figures and ugly colors, and of Paolozzi and Oldenburg with their different debasements of sculpture. All bring in materials, marks, and models, such as asphalt, graffiti, and urban walls, that were mostly foreign to art heretofore. And they do so less for the sake of mere disruption than in the hope of an alternative address, even another audience, beyond the given channels of traditional painting and sculpture. So, too, even though most are suspicious of mass culture, they do not hesitate to appeal to the common man (as with Dubuffet), the banalities of kitsch (as with Jorn), or the pop image-world then in emergence (as with Paolozzi and Oldenburg). My group does not take a mandarin position on these matters; rather, they see them as postwar conditions to explore and to exploit. A third question. Given the equivocal relation of positive barbarism to the human figure, what is its view of humanism at large? This tradition arrived with a few counts already against it. First was its attack on modernism, such as the charge of “the dehumanization of art” by Ortega y Gasset and others, as well as the call for “a return to order” by Jean Cocteau and associates; both date to the interwar period but were still fresh enough.47 More importantly, humanism had proved to be helpless before Fascism and Nazism, each of which had perverted the classicism so central to the humanist tradition; again, this travesty was the civilization become barbaric that was to be survived in the first place.48 For these reasons Dubuffet, Bataille, and Jorn all railed against humanism; Dubuffet went so far as to call for “a complete liquidation of [its] ways of thinking.”49 Certainly all my figures rejected classical

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norms of beauty; for his part Bataille extolled the “paradoxical beauty” of prehistoric Venuses, and Jorn elevated the crude productions of the vandal North over the canonical masterpieces of the classical South, while the others sided with vulgar expressions like graffiti.50 Most were also happy to be deemed bad painters or sculptors, which is to say that they also rejected the normativity of the good. “Those who try to combat the production of shoddy pictures are enemies of the best art today,” Jorn wrote in an anti-hierarchical challenge typical of the group.51 Yet to question an “inhuman humanism” is not necessarily to be anti-humanist; the critique of humanism is still made in the name of the human, which it hopes to redeem.52 Moreover, the types (or anti-types) that recur in this art, such as the creaturely and the monstrous, are also articulated in relation to the human, which remains front and center (already in antiquity homo barbarus was structural to the definition of homo humanus, as it was again in the Renaissance).53 By and large, then, my artists are equivocal about humanism, as Oldenburg is when he declares: “I am a humanist bastard.”54 Does he mean that he is a bastard because he is a humanist or because the degradation of humanism degrades him too? Either way Oldenburg aims “to make hostile objects human,” to de-reify the world and to reanimate life, and this ambition is shared by the others.55 This is less a reversal of humanism than a détournement as defined by Jorn: “Détournement is a game born of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values.”56 Let me sneak in a few questions that are important to me personally. Was positive barbarism affected by the contentious debate about humanism between Heidegger and Sartre in the late 1940s?57 How is it related to the general concern with “the human condition” as articulated by Hannah Arendt and others in the late 1950s?58 And, to look ahead, did it bear at all on the different anti-humanisms, associated with Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, in the 1960s? Those figures were crucial to my own formation, and one reason I am drawn to the generation that preceded them is to consider what they may have reacted against. A fourth question (a large one). What conceptions of history and philosophy can be drawn from brutal aesthetics? In dire moments some of my figures envision a history thrown in reverse, where progress has become regression (somewhat in line with the grim argument of Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1947), while others project a posthistorical condition, where the modernist proposal

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of the new man has become farcical and the Hegelian notion of the end of history no longer speculative. At other times my figures simply feel stuck, as if history had stalled and dialectics were suspended.59 To be sure, this stuckness prompts some of my figures to insist all the more on quasi-dialectical ways of working. Stymied by the bipolar fixity of the Cold War, Jorn develops his prolix notion of “triolectics,” while Paolozzi proposes his obscure “theory of opposites” and Oldenburg offers his volatile practice of “contraries” (whereby the deathly Street is followed by the erotic Store), but these count as symptoms of the problem more than solutions to it.60 Certainly my figures remain interested in the negative; in a postwar letter to the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who had advanced the “end of history” thesis before the war, Bataille attests to his “unemployed negativity.”61 And Dubuffet and Bataille in particular seize on negative remainders, such as the brut and the informe, that appear to resist any cultural assimilation. Often, however, this sense of stuckness renders my figures equivocal by default, and sometimes it leads them to force artistic transformations in tendentious ways. Let me ask another question in the form of a personal aside. If the equivocal positions of my figures are post-dialectical, might they also be proto-deconstructive? Consider the limit concept of the brut. In Lévi-Straussian structuralism the central opposition is that between nature and culture, the raw and the cooked. The brut, which means “unrefined” (as in unrefined oil), is neither the one nor the other; it falls disruptively between nature and culture, the cru and the cuit. The base and the informe in Bataille are also ambiguously positioned; the base is neither noble nor ignoble, and the informe is neither formed nor unformed.62 Ditto the creatures in Jorn, which upset the opposition of human and animal, and the monsters in Paolozzi, which disturb the binary of man and machine. This proto-deconstructive possibility is an attractive one for me, as I was shaped not only by the critique of humanism in the 1960s but also by the deconstruction of oppositions and origins in the 1970s. Of course, my figures in the 1950s are not averse to such foundationalism—they propose new beginnings after all—but, again, the foundational often cedes to the equivocal here, and this outcome points indirectly to the uncertainty of all origins.63 A fifth question (also large). What are the politics of brutal aesthetics? Liberal democracy was in crisis well before World War II, and some of my figures are equivocal on this subject too. In the phrase of the historian Zeev Sternhell, they are neither

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Right nor Left, and the consequences of this equivocation are still debated, with Dubuffet and Bataille the most controversial cases.64 The others tend toward Marxist positions, Jorn most emphatically, but for many artists and writers of this generation the link between modernism and socialism was broken (perhaps it was never so secure in the first place).65 In any case, brutal aesthetics arises from a different conjuncture, one marked by a fatigue with politics in some quarters, especially after all the accusations of collaboration and amidst all the calls for commitment. As advocated by the young Roland Barthes, who resisted the Sartrean demand for political engagement, “writing degree zero” was in part a search for a literature blanched of ideology, and much the same can also be said of the “art degree zero” of the same period.66 For this generation, Denis Hollier has argued, literature was “an art of despiteness,” and some of my artists suggest a general refusal of this sort too.67 However blank it might appear, this position can count as a politics, and “unemployed negativity” has its own force. That said, several of my figures do broach a fundamental question in political theory. I did not expect the issue of sovereignty to be so persistent, yet there it is, explicit in Bataille and active in most of the others too. (fig. 0.12) Perhaps this should not have surprised me; after all they operate not only in the ruins of a world war but also in the vise between Soviet totalitarianism to the East and American triumphalism to the West. This was an overdetermined situation—an old liberal order destroyed by Nazi and Fascist regimes, these regimes overcome in turn but at immense cost, and then a treacherous Cold War locked in place—and it had to prompt questions about the nature of political authority. On the one hand, this produced a great uncertainty about the ground of lawful rule; on the other, it incited a concomitant interest in figures that might count as outsiders or outlaws to such authority. The figure of the sovereign calls up the beast as its opposite number, which, as we will see, sometimes appears as a sign of crisis in the social order.68 But then I was on the lookout for such symptoms, as this book is part of my larger project to rethink the twentiethcentury avant-garde at times of political emergency.69 A final note on politics. Most of my artists posit a ground that is largely individualistic—art as an ark of one—and this focus limits the political ramifications of each project.70 At the same time some of my figures do conjure up an idea of collectivity, however sketchy and non-utopian it might be. Certainly they explore what could

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0.12 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, The King, c. 1955–58. Bronze, 105 3⁄4 inches. Yale Art Gallery.

count as a vernacular culture after the Nazi and Fascist perversions of “the people,” or as a common culture in the face of a mass media on the rise. Here the phrase “positive barbarism” rewards a little more attention. When Benjamin presented it, he employed a particular term, Barbarentum, which is not the usual word for the opposite of civilization (which is Barbarei). The choice is telling. Although by the nineteenth century Barbarentum signified a primitive state of formation, even earlier it indicated the distribution of foreigners in a given region.71 Barbarentum might thus be translated as “barbarianhood,” a collective that is in part actual and in part imagined. If Benjamin saw his modernist Barbarentum as “the proletarian alternative to a moribund bourgeois culture,” it is not clear how my figures viewed their versions—not quite in default of this alternative, but hardly identical with it either.72 For Bataille all society was in need of barbarization, by which he meant a fundamental recovery of sacred experience. Dubuffet focused his appeal on the common man, whom he projected as an outsider; in this respect his collective partook less of the proletariat proper than of the Lumpenproletariat, “the refuse of all classes” that, according to Marx, is more likely to be “a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” than an integral part of socialist change.73 For his part Jorn pursued collaborative forms, such as murals, ceramics, and publications, which he regarded as micro-models of a communal life to come; in pre-capitalist modes he hoped to find post-capitalist possibilities. At the same time he took the banalities of popular culture, such as flea-market paintings, as a crucial resource. Paolozzi and Oldenburg also developed a double strategy. For Paolozzi this entailed a “search for archetypes” that were collective in nature, on the one hand, and for iconic images that might compete with Hollywood and Hammer films, on the other.74 For Oldenburg it meant an attempt to reground art in the shared experience of everyday life on the one hand, and to match “the American deities” of consumer culture on the other.75 In each case the collectivities were largely impossible and the projects almost desperate. But then I come back to the notion of the creaturely as a sign of crisis, and, perhaps oddly, I find a modicum of hope there. Recall again the prewar fascination with the primitive, the child, and the insane. For the most part modernist scholars like me have charted this exploration in terms of the unconscious and the cultural other, that is, in terms of psychoanalysis and anthropology. That approach is not wrong as far as it goes, but even as this primitivism appealed to an absolute

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alterity, it also assumed a centrality—a stability—in Western subjectivity and society that they might not have possessed. The appearance of the creaturely in my figures points in another direction: not to an outside or a before to culture (which is more or less fictive), but to cracks within the symbolic order, “fissures in the space of meaning” created by “exposure to a traumatic dimension of political power” (which can be quite real).76 Most of my subjects attempt to force these cracks into openings, into new possibilities for artistic practices and social relations alike. I come to the apologetic portion of this introduction. My positive barbarians are all white men who are mostly blind to the barbarisms of colonialism and sexism. Despite their critiques of the Western tradition, most show little solidarity with other cultures, and the misogyny of some is galling, especially for a contemporary audience. Perhaps the concern with the human as such rendered my figures insensitive to diversity within the human; certainly the creaturely and the monstrous often collapse markers of difference, sexual, racial and other.77 Does this mean that the brutal search for new ground after World War II is only a boy quest, or, more radically, that we must burn Dubuffet, Bataille, and the rest? This question raises a methodological dilemma that is also a political conundrum: how to be alert to the problematic aspects of our objects of study, and neither judge them according to anachronistic standards of our own nor excuse them by recourse to historical relativism (as in “most men were sexist then, so why pick on these”)? Then there is this problem: although a few of my artists are not household names, all qualify as established and some as canonical. At the same time most in my group at least embrace the position of the outlier, and I attempt to highlight aspects of the work that is not so familiar.78 For instance, I take up Bataille the amateur prehistorian of the 1950s, not the dissident Surrealist of the 1920s, and I consider Jorn the upstart member of Cobra, not the veteran leader of the Situationist International. In doing so I hope to reposition my figures, even to revalue them, which is one path for progressive scholarship.79 But then, if I focus on men, why not include others who could be considered in terms of brutal aesthetics? Although artists like Jean Fautrier and Wols might be considered, they have received attention lately, and I do not pretend to be comprehensive in any case.80 (Where is brutalist architecture? some might ask. I am keen on this work, but it is simply outside my project here.) Then there is this difficulty:

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the brutal can become a cliché of its own, a brutalism become decorative, along the lines of the notorious description of epigonic Abstract Expressionism as “apocalyptic wallpaper.”81 There is also a brutal chic (Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Arte Povera sometimes verge on this category) and, worse, there is a creaturely kitsch (Francis Bacon in art and Curzio Malaparte in literature are often guilty here).82 At any rate I trust my criteria will become clear as I move along. Finally, why the time frame of the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s? This period is bracketed, historically in the West, by the ruins of world war and the rise of consumer culture and, critically for me, by the notion of positive barbarism on the one side and the problem of spectacle on the other; the conjunctures before and after are different. This framing touches on further questions concerning academic field and theoretical approach. Over the last few decades two models of postwar art guided my generation of artists and critics in this field: the neo-avant-garde and postmodernism. For the most part the first was concerned with how avant-garde devices such as the readymade were rehearsed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the second with how the assumptions of modernist painting were cast into doubt by Conceptual, feminist, and other artists in the years after 1968. Both models opened up new spaces for practice and research, yet they also tended to overlook the early portion of the period that I address here. So, too, interested as they were to challenge the old criteria of formalist modernism, they concentrated on art forms other than painting and sculpture, a distortion that I also aim to correct. Then there is the question of approach, which returns me to the greater project of which this book is one part. Put reductively, modernist scholars have often cast prewar avant-gardes as transgressive, in a position of radical innovation, and postmodernist critics have often framed postwar avant-gardes as resistant, in a position of stern refusal to the status quo. In both cases the avant-garde assumes an oppressive presence of law, whether that is understood as social convention or political rule or both, as the object of its contestation. But what if no such ground exists in this stable form? How is the avant-garde to be defined or located then? How to create, how to survive, in a state of emergency? Again, one response is to seek out a place before or an outside a presumed order from which to begin again. Another is to trace the fractures that persist within it, to pressure them, even to activate them somehow. We will encounter both approaches in the pages that follow.

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1.1 ARNOLD NEWMAN, Jean Dubuffet, 1956. Gelatin silver print, 8 1⁄2 × 7 1⁄2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

1| Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes “I was looking for an entrée,” Jean Dubuffet wrote in 1945, about his prior attempts to launch an artistic career, “but it didn’t work.”1 (fig. 1.1) In 1917, at the age of sixteen, he had taken art classes in his hometown of Le Havre, and in 1918–19 he briefly attended the Académie Julien in Paris, yet he gave up painting in 1924 and reluctantly entered the family wine business in 1926, as his strict father had demanded. In 1933 Dubuffet turned to art once more, with a series of papier-mâché masks and marionettes of friends, only to drop it again in 1937. By this point his father had died and his marriage had failed, so he resumed the wine trade, now on his own in Bercy.2 Only in 1942, after his discharge from the military in 1940 (tellingly for an act of disobedience, a failure to salute properly), did Dubuffet find his entrée into art, and it took the paradoxical form of a departure from it. His was a double stance, one taken against art that he deemed official, including modernist as well as traditional forms, and for art that he called brut, his ambiguous term for images and objects that were “unscathed” (indemne) by artistic culture.3 (“Raw” is one translation of brut, “outsider” is another; I will stick with brut.) “There was more art and poetry in the talk of a young barber—in his life—in his head—than among the specialists in art and poetry,” Dubuffet declared, also in 1945.4 At the time he was preoccupied with the expressions of “the common man” (l’homme du commun) or “the man in the street” (l’homme de la rue), as he was with the drawings of children in the years immediately before, and as he would be with the art of the insane immediately after. This was his way to work through the modernist exemplars of cultural alterity—the primitive, the child, and the mad—inherited from predecessors like Paul Klee and Max Ernst. As this path led Dubuffet to art brut, my primary concern here, I need to retrace it, but first a word of caution. Although he saw “genuine art” as “more modest” than official art, Dubuffet was anything but humble, and he was as sophisticated as he was outspoken. In short, his own work could not be brut, strictly speaking, and in the end he understood the term as an heuristic: “The man without culture—therefore integrally asocial—we all agree, does not exist,” Dubuffet wrote in 1968. “He is a utopian vision.”5 On the one

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1.2 JEAN DUBUFFET, Olympia (Corps de dame), 1950. Oil on canvas, 35 1⁄8 × 45 7⁄8 inches. Hamburger Kunsthalle.

hand, then, we cannot charge him, as critics routinely have, with sheer hypocrisy; on the other, he did manipulate art brut for his own ends. This is simply to say that Dubuffet was adept in the strategies of the avant-garde. After all, his entrée-asdeparture follows a logic of inscription, familiar since Gauguin (if not Manet or Courbet), whereby, in order to win a place within modernist art, one makes a move outside its given ambit—often to an other projected as primitive.6 (fig. 1.2) Rather than invalidate the brut, however, this ambiguity (this duplicity, if you like) might be central to its operation; it is what gives the brut its edge.7

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Here, then, is my thesis. Dubuffet sought a ground for his work in art brut, which he approached (in order) through the drawings of children, the graffiti of the common man, and the art of the insane.8 Initially he deemed the child prior to culture, the common man hostile to it, and the mad oblivious of it; eventually, however, he saw that these were largely projections of his own. Dubuffet took up each avatar of the brut in turn, assimilated it in part, then put it aside; this is how he proceeded, both in his art and in his writing, in the first decade of his mature work (which is as far as I will go with him). In a final iteration, from his haute pâte (high impasto) paintings of the late 1940s to his nearly abstract series such as the “Texturologies” and “Matériologies” in the late 1950s, brut became a matter less of source and subject than of material and process, yet this ground proved to be “equivocal” as well (equivoque is another of his key terms).9

Brut 1: The Child “In 1942 I was looking at the drawings of children a lot,” Dubuffet commented in retrospect, and a small show of such work was held in Paris at the time.10 Although this interest was hardly his alone, mediated as it was by predecessors like Klee and Ernst, it did redirect his practice. Prior to this moment Dubuffet was concerned mostly with nudes in a style that combined aspects of Matisse and Picasso, that is, in a style that qualified as officially avant-garde. By 1943, however, both the schematic drawing and the arbitrary coloring of the art of children are evident in his painting. If there is a distinctive attribute of his work of that year, it is the hieratic frontality of his figures. Often, as in Bodyguards (1943), they are posed symmetrically, sometimes cropped at the knee, hip or waist, and presented full in the frame; sometimes too they fill the support completely, with heads lined up (this is a characteristic of much art Dubuffet would soon dub brut).11 (fig. 1.3) And he carried over this frontality in his paintings of rural scenes, such as Cow Jar (1943), in which the conventional perspective of pictorial space is flattened into horizontal bands or stacked sections in a way that again evokes child drawing. (fig. 1.4) Dubuffet also adapted this compositional device to his urban paintings, as in the several Views of Paris (1944), where the frontality of the facades is well suited to such treatment. (fig. 1.5) This

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1.3 JEAN DUBUFFET, Gardes du corps (Bodyguards), 1943. Oil on canvas, 65 2⁄3 × 35 inches. Private collection.

tipping up of the ground to the vertical plane recurs throughout this decade of his work, as does the converse move, the incising of the figure into the flat field of the painting.12 Here, then, his involvement in the art of children is not foreign to his engagement with modernist art; on the contrary, in an instance of the avant-garde gambit noted above, the outside play serves the inside game. (figs. 1.6, 1.7) At the time the preeminent authority on the art of children was Georges-Henri Luquet, a philosopher who wrote widely on psychological and anthropological subjects.13 Luquet based his 1913 dissertation on the drawings of his daughter Simonne and developed his findings in Children’s Drawings (1927). “Children draw for fun,” Luquet wrote in the first sentence of that book. “For them drawing is just like other games, and is interspersed among them”; more, in such images resemblance to things is “fortuitous.”14 Soon, though, children do strive for reference to the world, but they fall short because they lack the synthetic capacity to render most proportions, relationships, and dimensions accurately.15 However, this “failed” realism

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1.4 JEAN DUBUFFET, Bocal à vache (Cow Jar), 1943. Oil on canvas, 36 1⁄4 × 25 1⁄2 inches. Private collection.

prompts a conscious choice that is essential to this art. “Children draw what they know,” Luquet insists, “and not what they see”; they hew to an “intellectual realism” that is distinct from the “visual realism” of adults.16 Although he does not mention avant-garde art, Luquet is modernist enough to deem both kinds of realism conventional: in his view, even if most children accede to visual realism eventually, this is not a necessary outcome.17 In fact, he asserts, “children become disenchanted with drawing about the time they acquire the concept of visual realism and its fundamental commitment to perspective.”18 According to Luquet, intellectual realism is governed by “internal models”; the object depicted by the child exists in her mind more than in the world, and she is faithful to this mental type more to any mundane referent.19 Indeed, she aims to conserve this model at all cost. Hence her sign for a horse or a house will reappear, in whole or part, in drawing after drawing (Luquet called this insistence “graphic automatism”), and if the image seems wrong to the child, she will simply do it over

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1.5 JEAN DUBUFFET, Vue de Paris, la vie de plaisir (View of Paris, The Life of Pleasure), 1944. Oil on canvas, 34 3⁄4 × 45 3⁄4 inches. Private collection.

on the same piece of paper. What defines the internal model is its “exemplarity”; it “is not meant to represent an individual object or person, but a category of objects.”20 To achieve this goal of “a generic image,” the child works “to present the greatest number, if not all, of the essential elements of the represented object, and to preserve each in its characteristic shape, ‘in itself,’ as it were.”21 It is this imperative that leads the child to her intellectual realism, which adults see as distortion but she regards as fidelity, and in this matter she proceeds logically. For Luquet the central principle of intellectual realism is “transparency,” according to which the child depicts aspects of an object even if she cannot see them (such as toes within a shoe or furniture inside a house); she depicts them because she knows they exist. This transparency underwrites two other operations. In the first device objects are often “projected onto the ground surface,” and “elements situated in different planes in a scene are set one above the other in tiers so that they are not even partially occluded by those in front of them”; in effect, this is an early intimation of the architectural modalities of the plan and the elevation.22 Luquet calls the second device, also dedicated to transparency, rabattement, a term adapted from geometry that signifies the rotation of a plane figure in order that it is

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1.6 JEAN DUBUFFET, Paysage vert (Green Landscape), 1944. Oil on canvas, 25 1⁄2 × 32 inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 1.7 Child drawing, 1939. Gouache on paper, 12 × 10 inches. Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne.

1.8 Drawing of a house by a six-year-old child, from Georges-Henri Luquet, Le dessin enfantin, 1927.

represented fully in plan. The child applies rabattement “to the supports of objects” in particular (the legs of an animal or the wheels of a car), which thus appear “folded out” in a way that, from the perspective of visual realism, does not appear supportive at all.23 (fig. 1.8) However distorted such drawing looks to adults, Luquet insisted that it is realist; the art of children betrays “little evidence of two tendencies opposed to realism: schematism and idealism,” and the nonfigurative “conception of drawing seems to be alien” to them as well. Yet, again, this realism is not the usual one: viewpoints change, even combine, such that people appear both frontally and in profile, buildings in elevation as well as in plan, and so on. It is the internal model of the object that is important, not the perceptual view of the subject. In time, however, the child encounters objections from adults and develops skills of her own, and gradually she gives up on intellectual realism—on exemplarity, transparency, rabattement, and all the rest. They are schooled out of her, and the protocols of visual realism schooled in. I hope this is enough to suggest not only how Dubuffet borrowed from such art but also why he took it as the initial basis for his brutish work. For the art of children, which he included in the art brut collection from the beginning, speaks directly to his anti-aesthetic then in emergence: it has a strong claim on the motivated (children draw “solely for their own personal satisfaction,” not for others like parents and teachers), on the fundamental (according to Luquet, this art

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1.9 JEAN DUBUFFET, Nature morte au jambon (Still Life with Ham), 1944. Oil on canvas, 25 × 36 inches. Private collection.

reveals prime elements of picture-making), and on the general (we were all child artists once).24 This last point was especially important to Dubuffet; again and again he favored generality over specificity.25 Of course, these broad concerns with the necessary, the essential, and the universal are quintessentially modernist; so too are the particular qualities typical of child drawing, such as flatness of image, frontality of figure, ambiguity between horizontal and vertical planes, and composition understood as tabulation more than as tableau. (fig. 1.9) Like Picasso with African sculpture, then, so Dubuffet with the art of children: he turned its attributes toward the ambitions of modernist painting.26 At the same time Dubuffet did not collapse his elaboration of child drawing into official art, modernist or other. In no small measure the frisson of relevant paintings, such as Woman Pinning Up Her Hair (1944), arises from the treatment of traditional

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1.10 JEAN DUBUFFET, Femme épinglant ses cheveux (Woman Pinning Her Up Hair), 1944. Oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 31 1⁄2 inches. Wexner Family Collection.

themes with childish techniques. (fig. 1.10) These works stray from modernist precepts in other ways too. For example, his version of childish frontality in picture-making does not always align such “all-over-ness” with all-at-once-ness, such “facingness” with instantaneity, as is often claimed of modernist painting.27 In the art of children an image tells a story—it involves time—and this is true in Dubuffet as well, especially in his Paysage paintings. “Intellectual realism allows children’s drawings to be, in their representation of space, a kind of flat sculpture,” Luquet wrote, “and, in their representation of time, a miniature theatre.”28 Much the same can be said of many Dubuffet paintings of 1943–44; they constitute an intellectual realism of their own. In some canvases of these years Dubuffet evokes the child in another way too. Consider Childbirth (1944), which presents this event as a little boy might imagine it. (fig. 1.11) A man and a woman stand, dressed in formal black, on either side of a naked girl, who lies, arms and legs extended, almost hieratically at right angles, on a dirty white rectangle that we come to read as a bed. The mixed viewpoints—most

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1.11 JEAN DUBUFFET, L’accouchement (Childbirth), 1944. Oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 31 1⁄2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

dramatically, the vertical disposition of the adults juxtaposed with the horizontal orientation of the girl—are characteristic of child art; so too are the transparency of the breasts of the woman and the rabattement of the limbs of the girl. And there are other childish attributes as well, such as the schematic drawing and the arbitrary coloring (the figures are outlined in greenish yellow and the skin painted in reddish ocher). Yet Dubuffet channels the child in a manner that also exceeds Luquet. As Freud first argued in his papers “on the sexual theories of children” (1907–8), children are riddled by questions about origins—of gender, of sexuality, of life as such—and curiosity about babies becomes “the prototype of all later intellectual work.”29 Sexual difference is stressed in Childbirth, male and female are denoted by the simplest signs (such as breasts for women), and the source of the child also seems obvious: a male baby falls headfirst from the crotch of the girl. But are sex and birth so clear here? According to Freud, boys intuit the vagina only at the age of ten or so (remember he wrote in Vienna in the early 1900s), and they first speculate that babies arrive by way of the anus. (One benefit of this initial theory of cloacal birth is that it accords men the ability to bear children too; the fantasy of male creation ex nihilo, which is strong in modernist movements like Futurism, is born at this moment as well.) And in fact the hole is ambiguously rendered; it could be vaginal or anal. Childbirth thus stages a childish confusion about birth, even a childish consternation, which is conveyed formally through the estrangement of the figures and spatially through the disjunction of the planes. Its vertical–horizontal ambiguity recalls that of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), a key intertext for Childbirth; in both paintings the viewer is placed in the position of a subject faced with a traumatic scene. And this traumatic initiation seems to involve not only the secrets of childbirth but also the ways of patriarchy, for we understand the man and the woman to be the petit-bourgeois parents of the excruciated child-bearer, who appears to deliver the infant for them.30 Soon Dubuffet would evoke the child at the level of material and process too, but at this point he moved away from this avatar of the brut even as he retained aspects of its picture-making. “I realized that children have an appetite for the civilization of adults,” Dubuffet later explained. “They want to be adults.”31 In other words, he deemed them insufficiently anti-cultural to count as truly brut. That was not the only reason for his disenchantment. “Their art comes, in time, to express a

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cultural transcription of the world: a house, a tree, the sun, a dog,” Dubuffet argued. “I feel their art depicts a language, the language of their elementary vocabulary . . . The painting of children is completely ‘dictionary’.” What does he mean? On the one hand, Dubuffet turned to children to unlearn what they had not yet learned, the conventions of visual realism; on the other, he sought to turn the childish vices of synthetic incapacity, arbitrary color, and the like into the modernist virtues of his own art. In doing so, however, Dubuffet came to see what Luquet had always known: that the intellectual realism of the child comprises a set of conventions in its own right; more, that it insists on a strict correspondence, not between signifier and referent as in visual realism, but between signifier and signified. That is, it insists on a “transcription” between pictorial image and mental type, such that this stick figure always equals the internal model of “man,” or that rectangle topped by a triangle always equals the internal model of “house”—a transcription stricter in its way than any in visual realism. But then, in one of the fundamental double binds of the entire brut project, Dubuffet was on the side of the very acculturation that he lamented, as he would be with his other avatars of the brut too. If anyone constructed a dictionary of pictorial transcriptions (“a house, a tree, the sun, a dog”), it was Dubuffet, and it was the constriction of his own incipient language that he chafed against.

Brut 2: The Common Man “In 1944 I was interested in old walls,” Dubuffet remarked, “and the drawings on them.”32 Evidently, his interest in the art of the common man overlapped, at least briefly, with his involvement in the art of children. In any case, by 1946 he was all in: “It is the man on the street that I’m after, personally, he’s the one I feel akin to.”33 In the first instance “the common man” stood for found expressions in the city, graffiti above all, that were anonymous in origin and collective in address; the second avatar of the brut was thus positioned as both an artist to emulate and an audience to engage. This was an improvement for Dubuffet. Even though he valued child drawing as a primordial form of art, it remained a private one; graffiti was primal in its own way, and it was public to boot. Moreover, it did not issue, as child drawing usually did, in adult image-making; the messy opacity of the urban wall also resisted

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1.12 BRASSAÏ, Graffiti, from Series VI, Love, 1935–50. Gelatin silver print, 15 3⁄4 × 19 2⁄3 inches. Tate Museum.

the official paradigms of the picture, the transparent window and the reflective mirror. Finally, its aggressivity appealed to Dubuffet: the graffitied image is attacked even as it is made; representation and destruction converge here, and this convergence is often sexual in impulse (its heterosexism did not faze him).34 (fig. 1.12) Whereas Luquet guided his engagement with child drawing, Brassaï mediated his involvement with graffiti. Dubuffet met the Hungarian photographer in 1944, and by 1947 they had planned to collaborate on a book on graffiti (which never appeared). For Brassaï “the discovery of the wall by modern artists was an historical event every bit as important as Cubism”; it was not only “uncharted territory” artistically but also “truancy’s blackboard” socially. Thus did graffiti constitute “an elementary language without any clear official status, whose anachronistic and spontaneous quality confers on it a strange topicality.”35 Note the layered temporality in this statement (we will encounter it again with Bataille on cave painting, which also interested Brassaï): graffiti is seen to bring together the primordial and the present. One can see why it was a strong candidate for the brut appellation.

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1.13 JEAN DUBUFFET, Message (“Dubuffet est un sale con, un foireux, un enculé...”), 1944. Ink on newspaper, 10 × 10 inches. Private collection.

In summer 1944, toward the end of the Occupation in Paris, Dubuffet produced Messages, a set of notes scrawled in gouache and ink on newspaper in a manner inspired by graffiti. Like graffiti, these messages range from the innocuous (“the key’s under the shutter”) to the obscene (“Dubuffet is a filthy cunt, a half-baked loser, ASSHOLE”); they are vulgar in the double sense of common and offensive.36 (fig. 1.13) Although there is an elegance to the script that the artist could not unlearn, the Messages are materially aggressive too. “I abuse the paper, I tear it up,” Dubuffet wrote to his new champion, the critic and editor Jean Paulhan, about this project. “I scratch it, I abrade it.”37 As Rachel Perry has argued, the Messages thus perform a defilement that is not only physical but also verbal (the “message” often breaks down) as well as personal (e.g., “Dubuffet is an asshole”).38 Medium, language, and self are all linked; the implication is that the Occupation has degraded all three.39 Dubuffet depicted graffiti directly in the work that followed Messages, a set of fifteen lithographs titled The Walls produced in early 1945 to accompany twelve poems by the Resistance leader Eugène Guillevic. However, apart from the shared

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1.14 JEAN DUBUFFET, Mur et gisant (Wall and Recumbent Effigy), 1945. Lithograph, 15 × 11 1⁄4 inches. Fondation Dubuffet, Paris. 1.15 JEAN DUBUFFET, Homme et mur (Man and Wall), 1945. Lithograph, 15 × 11 1⁄4 inches. Fondation Dubuffet, Paris.

topos of the walls, there is scant connection between image and text. Instead Dubuffet draws an analogy between lithographic stone and urban surface: both are dark grounds scratched with white lines in the form of initials, names, and signs such as a phallic gun and a bald profile (a recurrent emblem of the artist). The sketchy figures in The Walls appear “dispirited,” “tormented,” even “condemned,” the critic Noël Arnaud commented at the time. One recumbent figure is even entombed, which is appropriate given that the walls in question were associated with “the zone,” an area in Paris used for summary executions and clandestine burials during the Occupation.40 (fig. 1.14) Here again Dubuffet evokes a degradation of the self: often the haggard men in The Walls appear to merge with the dilapidated structures. One image is subtitled “Man Cornered,” and another shows a guy with an X on his chest as though he were marked along with the wall or targeted against it. (fig. 1.15) Contrary to the famous exemplum of Leonardo whereby the true artist conjures new pictures from mere stains on a wall, here the figure threatens to collapse into the field, the subject to detumesce into the space around it.41 As rehearsed by Dubuffet in The Walls, then, graffiti is on the side of the formless (the informe is a key term in Bataille that

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1.16 JEAN DUBUFFET, Pisseurs au mur (Pissers at the Wall), 1945. Lithograph, 15 × 11 1⁄4 inches. Fondation Dubuffet, Paris.

Dubuffet takes up too). Again, representation is turned toward destruction (another Bataillean theme), portraying toward defacing (a particular interest of Brassaï), and attention toward distraction (one of the poems states that walls “are good as a screen against the gaze of passersby who find neither form nor lesson”).42 Yet there is defiance as well as degradation in The Walls; the figures appear discontented as well as damaged. In one image two men—en face on the left, in profile on the right—urinate on opposite walls below a schematic skyline, one of which shows the date of the lithograph (January 16, 1945), various names and nasty phrases, and the initials of both Dubuffet and Guillevic (they seem to be the two pisseurs). (fig. 1.16) What is the nature of the aggressivity on display? If we follow Freud, it stems from our hostility to the social demand that we renounce, repress, or sublimate instinctual gratifications for cultural ends. His Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) argues that the values of “beauty, cleanliness, and order,” deemed to be the fundaments of civilization, originate in a reaction-formation against the messy opposite of these values—our anal and urinary eroticism as infants.43 The surrogates for Dubuffet and Guillevic appear to react against this reaction-formation in turn; they

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piss on its extreme Nazi version in particular. However, in doing so, they might also confirm its structure. Here is another double bind, that of a transgression that reinscribes the law, and it tripped up Dubuffet often enough. Dubuffet also moots a relation between authority and violence in Wall with Inscriptions, which was painted soon after The Walls in April 1945 (it was likely shown with them).44 (fig. 1.17) To the right stands a schematic policeman in dirty gray, and to the left appear splotches on a wall in the same non-color, along with the usual initials, names, expletives, and exclamations. Again Dubuffet draws an analogy between medium and wall, both of which are marked aggressively (whatever color exists in this world has drained to the bottom). He depicts the flic in childish fashion, the body turned out and the head in profile, but more meanly than a child would. Although he is not as wasted as the men in The Walls, his legs and arms are spindly, and though he watches over the wall, his demeanor is brittle: the civic authority of both wall and police are in doubt (he too is Xed, though here the X signifies his uniform).45 In all these images the walls are barely intact; they are decrepit (one title in The Walls names them as such) as well as despised. At the same time the aggressivity, both depicted and enacted, appears puerile; in keeping with much graffiti, The Walls suggests an adolescent attack on the sociopolitical order as though it were simply a parental regime to rebel against. In the end the aggressivity is mostly reactive and largely abstract—a political limitation of the art of the common man that Dubuffet carried over into his own practice.46 According to Dubuffet, “the social order” was “a department of culture”; hence to be anti-cultural was to be anti-social, and that was politics enough for him.47 Put another way, Dubuffet was a liberal anarchist who regarded politics as a matter of revolt and judged a work of art by its degree of “contestation.”48 In his view the common man defies social distinction as such (“when one is ranked, one loses the quality of the common man”).49 Seen positively, art made under this aegis might aspire to “a common function” whereby it would “no longer [be] the privilege of a certain group or class.”50 Seen negatively, this position tends to elide differences, not only of class but also of gender and race (there is no “common woman” or “common person of color”). Did Dubuffet see any political collectivity on the horizon? If his common man is affined with any class, it is not the proletariat but the Lumpenproletariat, a connection that Clement Greenberg detected in 1949. His art,

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1.17 JEAN DUBUFFET, Mur aux inscriptions (Wall with Inscriptions), 1945. Oil on canvas, 39 3⁄8 × 31 7⁄8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

Greenberg wrote of Dubuffet, “crosses social and status lines as high art never did before. It exposes, for the first time to our respectful view, the spontaneous graphic effusions, the lumpen art, of the urban lower classes.” Just as Marx gives this leftover class a political role, Greenberg continued, so Dubuffet gives it “an aesthetic role”; yet, “in a way not unlike Marx, Dubuffet exaggerates the subversiveness of what he discovered.”51 Two comments might be appended to this insight. First, note how “the lumpen” shifts from a political category to an artistic one, and indeed, despite his anti-cultural stance, Dubuffet does aestheticize this figure. Second, Marx did not overestimate the subversive aspect of the Lumpenproletariat; on the contrary, he warned that this leftover class was usually drawn to reactionary movements, and the same might be cautioned about the common man as imagined by Dubuffet. As with the drawing of children, Dubuffet moved away from the graffiti of the common man once he had assimilated its effects, and here too he contributed to its acculturation even as he condemned that operation. Years later, when asked if graffiti qualified as brut, Dubuffet replied, “Yes, but [it is] very feeble . . . Much of it is useless, merely copying.”52 With “copying” he acknowledges not only the conventionality of graffiti, its given code of scratched homunculi, initials, and expletives, but also its automatism, the sheer repetition of such signs. Yet how is it “feeble”? Perhaps Dubuffet points to graffiti as an acting-out, which would suggest that he came to see this avatar of the brut as limited by its very aggressivity. In another instance of the double bind of transgression, graffiti is constrained by its own discontent with the civilization that it attacks. On this view, if the child only accedes to official culture, the common man merely lashes out against it, and that is insufficient. But might Dubuffet thus project his misgivings about his own brutish work onto his brut avatars? “For me,” he concluded, “there is only one art . . . [and that is] to recreate the world entirely.”53 In the end graffiti did not count as brut any more than child drawing. So what could qualify?

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Brut 3: The Insane In July 1945, two months after Wall with Inscriptions was painted, Dubuffet traveled to Switzerland, in the company of Paulhan, Le Corbusier, and the Swiss writer Paul Budry, in order to visit psychiatric hospitals.54 His collection of art brut began in earnest with this legendary trip; in fact “prospecting” was its primary purpose.55 Dubuffet had already ruled out folk and naïve art as models of brut; in his opinion they were produced by “simple people full of respect for cultural art.”56 What remained, after both child drawing and graffiti were found lacking, was the art of the insane. At least initially it did not appear to be “dictionary” like child drawing or “copying” like graffiti, and unlike folk and naïve art it was oblivious to official culture. In short, it seemed “unscathed.”57 Dubuffet was hardly new to the art of the insane. He had encountered The Artistry of the Mentally Ill, the influential compendium of work collected from various sanitoria by the German art historian-turned-psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, on a prior sojourn in Switzerland in 1923, just a year after it was published. “I wasn’t able to read Prinzhorn,” Dubuffet recalled. “But the pictures . . . struck me very strongly.”58 Although the book prompted him to correspond with a few doctors and patients at the time, this source remained latent in his art for over twenty years. (In the interval, of course, the Nazis had declared modernist interest in insane art a key symptom of its “degenerate” condition.) It was not until Dubuffet passed through child drawing and graffiti that he returned to it, or rather, as if in deferred action, it returned to him. That said, his work shows morphological similarities to the art of the insane even before July 1945.59 (figs. 1.18, 1.19) If drawings by children often misrepresent sexual difference, pictures by the insane frequently dislocate the body, and sometimes in a way that suggests a connection between a disturbed psyche and a distorted body image. (After all, the ego is, in the first instance, an imago, and, if it does not cohere, its representations are not likely to cohere either.) Typically, significant parts of the body, especially eyes and mouths, are grossly enlarged or disruptively plunged into other parts, so that eyes become breasts, mouths double as genitals, and faces appear in torsos. Dubuffet experimented with such derangements of the body image, often in a manner that corresponds to works in The Artistry of the Mentally Ill. His pictorial affinities with

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1.18 HERMANN BEEHLE (BEIL), Untitled, n.d. Pencil and chalk on toilet paper, 6 7⁄8 × 4 3⁄4 inches. Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg. 1.19 JEAN DUBUFFET, Madame Mouche, 1945. Oil and mixed media on canvas. 28 1⁄2 × 23 5⁄8 inches. Private collection.

Hermann Beehle, one of “ten schizophrenic artists” picked out by Prinzhorn, are especially close: a frontal presentation of schematic nudes sometimes rearranged, often splayed, and always embedded in the support (for Beehle this tended to be toilet paper, a use of lowly material that appealed to Dubuffet). Apart from distortions of the figure, what did Dubuffet see in the art of the insane? In his view such work is even more motivated than child drawing, given that, made under its own compulsion, it often anticipates no viewer and acknowledges no audience.60 The brut artist “wants to do it himself,” Dubuffet commented, “like a fish who excretes the water in which he swims.”61 At the same time it displays even more freedom than child drawing, for its intellectual realism is even further removed from visual realism. “The insane introduced . . . pure caprice, pure mental invention, with absolutely no visual justification,” Dubuffet claimed. “Everything was permitted, everything was possible.”62 Even though these two attributes are contradictory—compulsion on the one hand, freedom on the other—they became central criteria in his modeling of art brut. (figs. 1.20, 1.21)

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At first Dubuffet did not distinguish between the brut and the insane. “Many (nearly half ) of the objects in our exhibition are by inmates of psychiatric wards,” he wrote in “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art,” his introductory text to the first show of the art brut collection in October 1949 (at the time it consisted of some 200 works by 63 artists). Not only are both alien to official art, Dubuffet argued, but all “genuine art” is touched by madness. In this way he presented both the brut and the insane as radical instances of the Romantic genius free of all convention. Here is the crucial passage in the essay: What we mean [by brut] is anything produced by people unscathed by artistic culture, works in which mimicry [mimétisme], contrary to what occurs with intellectuals, has little or no part. So that the makers (in regard to subjects, choice of materials, means of transposition, rhythms, kinds of handwriting, etc.) draw entirely on their own resources rather than the stereotypes of classical or fashionable art. We thereby witness the pure artistic operation, unrefined, thoroughly reinvented, in all of its aspects, by the maker, who acts entirely on his own impulses.63 Before Dubuffet, Prinzhorn had presented the art of the insane in terms of essential expression, and Klee had framed it in terms of direct vision. Both are modernist idealizations, in keeping with primitivist projections of purity, that Dubuffet carried over to art brut, for he too referred such work to primordial depths.64 However, unlike his predecessors, Dubuffet imagined this pure source less as an origin of art to reclaim redemptively than as an outside to art to tap transgressively: “I believe very much in the values of savagery; I mean: instinct, passion, mood, violence, madness,” he wrote in 1951.65 Yet this positioning was also problematic, for even as Dubuffet questioned the “distinction between normal and abnormal” (“who, after all, is normal?”), he opposed art brut to “cultural art” in a binary that rendered the latter more stable, not less.66 Again, this is the double bind whereby transgression comes to support the very law that it aims to contest. In fact, for its primary theorist Bataille the purpose of transgression is to reinscribe the law, which in his case meant primarily the sacred basis of authority that secular modernity had eroded. As Michel Foucault glossed the operation, transgression is “profanation in

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1.20 AUGUST NATTERER (NETER), Witch’s Head, n.d. Pencil, pen, and watercolor on card. 10 1⁄4 × 13 1⁄2 inches. Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg.

a world which no longer recognizes any positive meaning in the sacred”; it is “a way of recomposing its empty form, its absence, through which it becomes all the more scintillating.”67 This double bind indicates a blindness in Dubuffet, but it might point us to an insight into both art brut and insane art. This insight is twofold, involving subjectivity as well as society. First, far from unscathed, the insane are damaged, and, again, this psychic disturbance is often registered in the figural distortions that they produce. Through similar disfigurations in his own work Dubuffet evoked this psychotic condition of self-dislocation, which is thus far from the “completely pure artistic operation” that he otherwise ascribed to art brut. This is a contradiction—again, compulsion versus freedom, blocked subjectivity versus “mental invention”—that Dubuffet did not (perhaps could not) resolve. The second insight, involving the social, is less explicit. The derangements in the art of the insane point to a worldview that is debilitated, not empowered, and hence to an understanding of transgression that accords less with the subversive

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1.21 JEAN DUBUFFET, Figure au site champêtre (Figure in a Rural Setting), 1949. Oil on canvas, 45½ × 35 inches. Whereabouts unknown.

account of Dubuffet than with the reparative understanding of Bataille. Rather than attack the symbolic order (as Dubuffet would have it), the art of the insane is concerned to find such a law again, even to found it again—at the very least, to recompose “its empty form, its absence.” Often this is what insane artists behold in horror—not a social world that is too fixed, that they wish to contest as such (again as posited by avant-gardist logic), but a symbolic order that is not stable at all, that is in crisis, even in corruption (in the etymological sense of “broken up”). Far from anti-civilizational rebels as Dubuffet first imagined them (“insanity represents a refusal to adopt a view of reality that is imposed by custom,” he asserted), these artists are desperate to construct a surrogate civilization of their own, a stop-gap order in default of the official one perceived to be in ruins.68 (fig. 1.22) In early September 1950, almost a year after the first exhibition of art brut in Paris, Dubuffet visited the Prinzhorn collection in Heidelberg. “I was one of the first to see it after the war,” he recalled. “I spent three days going through it. I was disappointed.” Dubuffet did not specify his disappointment other than to say that

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1.22 JOSEF GREBING, Calendar for My 20th Century–Chronology for Catholic Youths and Maidens, n.d. Pencil, pen, and watercolor on paper. Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg.

only a few artists “exhibit true creativity.”69 Although this assessment does not correspond with his notes taken on the visit (which surfaced only in 2006), it does align with his dismissals of child drawing as “dictionary” and graffiti as “copying.” Whereas Dubuffet once projected “invention” and “freedom” onto the art of the insane, he now saw conventionality and constriction. His notes confirm this avantgardist bent: drawn to images that feature excessive disfigurations (he deemed the drawings of Hermann Beehle and Johan Knüpfer “très bien” and “extrêmement

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bien” respectively), he was indifferent to images that develop elaborate systems (he dismissed the fantastic cities and complex calendars of Josef Grebing as “sans interêt”).70 In short, Dubuffet favored works that appeared to subvert order and disparaged others that attempted to reconstruct it. Several months after the disappointment of his Prinzhorn visit, Dubuffet shipped his collection of art brut to the United States, where it remained for over a decade. This move was spurred by practical problems, as the collection had become difficult to conserve (it had grown to some 1,200 works by over 150 artists), and the company formed in 1948 to oversee it (which included such luminaries as Paulhan, André Breton, Charles Ratton, Henri-Pierre Roché, and Michel Tapié) had fallen into infighting (Dubuffet dissolved it at this time too).71 And yet, as we have seen, the project was also plagued by conceptual difficulties, such as the uncertain relation between the brut and the insane and the contradictory implications of both (again, did they represent utter freedom from convention or complete submission to it?).72 Perhaps, too, Dubuffet no longer required external exemplars of the brut; perhaps he believed that now his own work might best advance this ideal. (It did not hurt that he had achieved a modicum of success, financial as well as critical, by this moment.)73

Brut 4: “My Paste Is a Being” Dubuffet intimated a fourth version of the brut, which he did not name as such. Essentially the category shifts from an anti-cultural outside beyond official art to a phenomenological ground for art making and viewing alike—in effect, from a primitivist other to a modernist process. The first inkling of this brut appeared in his hautes pâtes that mix in heterodox materials such as earth, gravel, and sand to achieve the thick facture for which they are named. Begun in May 1945, or two weeks prior to his prospecting in Swiss sanatoria, these paintings were first shown a year later at the Galerie René Drouin under the name “Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie, Hautes Pâtes.” “Mirobolus” evokes mirabilis, Latin for wonderful, while “Macadam” refers to John C. McAdam, the inventor of an asphalt (which Dubuffet also used); immodestly enough, the title thus suggests an imaginary company that makes wonders out of non-art stuff.74 Most viewers disagreed. The first presentation of the

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1.23 JEAN DUBUFFET, Mirobolus Blanc, 1945. Oil with pebbles, sand, glass, and rope on canvas, 18 1⁄8 × 15 inches. Private collection.

hautes pâtes was attacked not only verbally in the logbook but also physically in the gallery: two paintings were slashed and six others damaged. (In an ironic twist for an anti-authoritarian artist, Dubuffet had a guard posted.) (figs. 1.23, 1.24) Satirical in spirit, many of the Macadams take up social types, such as a man in evening clothes or a woman on a promenade, only to bring them low with the muddy materials that comprise them. As a group, then, they suggest “a painting of modern life” updated from Baudelaire, with modern life now mocked rather than celebrated. Will to Power (1946) presents a mustachioed male with a stubby torso, big head, and teeth fashioned from pebbles; despite its Nietzschean title, this “uncivil character” appears more naked than nude, more farcical than forceful.75 (fig. 1.25) A few of the Macadams convey a debasement that exceeds satire (these tend to be female subjects). As the title suggests, Madame Mouche (1945) is as much insect as woman: arms raised, bald head in profile, naked torso straight on, her embedded face seems to scream out of the mud. Another naked woman looks directly out at us with a mad gaze; though named Minerva, the Etruscan goddess of art and wisdom, she calls up Medusa instead. In Nietzschean fashion Dubuffet aimed to reset the charge of these classical poles. (fig. 1.26)

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1.24 JEAN DUBUFFET, Monsieur Macadam, 1945. Oil with pebbles and tar on canvas, 28 3⁄4 × 23 1⁄2 inches. Private collection.

1.25 JEAN DUBUFFET, Volonté de puissance (Will to Power), 1946. Oil with pebbles, sand, glass, and rope on canvas, 45 3⁄4 × 35 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

The brutification of social figures is only the thematic program of the Macadams; Dubuffet declared his formal purpose in a short text written for the exhibition that was eventually called “Rehabilitation of Mud”: along with the degrading of the high, the title implies, there is also a redeeming of the low.76 Yet the two operations must be thought together, for what Dubuffet seeks is precisely a confusion of values. In cultural terms the hautes pâtes debase lofty painting, but they also elevate muddy paste. At the same time, in pictorial terms they raise up the ground (Dubuffet often worked on the horizontal), but they also threaten this verticality with collapse (these pictures are very heavy).77 “Rehabilitation of Mud” proposes a further confusion of high and low terms too: Why prize fur as a luxury and not tripe? Dubuffet asks. Why covet necklaces made of shells and not of spiders? “Don’t dirt, trash, and filth, which are man’s companions during his whole lifetime, deserve to be dearer to him, and isn’t it serving him well to remind him of their beauty?”78 Intended to shock or at least to disgust, this provocation tests our assignment of value, which it frames as a fetishistic operation, that is, as the investment of special worth in

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1.26 JEAN DUBUFFET, Minerve, 1945. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 36 1⁄4 × 25 5⁄8 inches. Whereabouts unknown.

arbitrary things that do not intrinsically possess it. Why sublimate some materials and not others, and why desire some products and not others? In the end Dubuffet does not side with either term, sublimation or desublimation, value or valuelessness; rather, he wants to keep the two in tension, which is to say in a state of “permanent deformation and reformation.”79 “What the wizard finds so thrilling,” Dubuffet writes in “Notes for the Well-Read” (1945), another key text of this moment, “is to transform: beauties into beasts, beasts into beauties. This is a highly instructive procedure.”80 It is also a precisely equivocal one; again, his aim is to render values uncertain and viewers ambivalent. (fig. 1.27) This emphasis on transformation was lost on critics of the hautes pâtes, who saw only defilement. This is “consciously scatological painting,” one remarked, while another wrote, famously, “After dadaism there is, to be sure, cacaism.”81 For these critics such dirty painting was a mere scandal in the expected manner of the avant-garde, that is, again, a quasi-infantile gesture against the order of renunciation and sublimation that Freud posited as the basis of civilization. Yet the hautes pâtes also tap into a second understanding of the scatological. As mentioned earlier, for Freud the anal stage is one of symbolic confusion; the infant, he argued, does not distinguish much between such disparate things as a turd, a penis, and a baby. Further, the prototype of all art-making, his associate Ernest Jones claimed, is our infantile shaping of excrement.82 In his hautes pâtes Dubuffet suggests a return to this mythical first painting where value and meaning are in flux, and he would often do the same in subsequent work. “The basic action” of the painter is “to besmear,” Dubuffet insisted, and to besmear is not only to deform but also to reform; “all you need is mud.”83 Here, then, his mud, his haute pâte, appears as a middle term, an equivocal term, between feces and paint, spiders and jewels, nature and culture. And it is this in-between-ness that this version of the brut explores: after all, brut means raw as in “unrefined” (as in unrefined sugar or oil), not raw as in “uncooked,” which is cru. As Lévi-Strauss, an early advocate of art brut, would soon argue, the raw or cru is opposed to the cooked or cuit as nature is to culture. As the brut partakes of both cru and cuit, it equivocates between these opposites. (Dubuffet infused his texts on art brut with culinary tropes, and he liked that his hautes pâtes were not chemically stable, that they oozed “hippo sweat.”)84 In short, the brut troubles the structuralist binary of cru and cuit even before it was proposed. And it disturbs

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1.27 JEAN DUBUFFET, Mouleuse de café (Woman Grinding Coffee), 1945. Oil with plaster, tar, and sand on canvas, 45 3⁄4 × 35 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

other oppositions as well: neither literal nor metaphorical, neither figurative nor abstract, the brut is pledged to keep not only material and process but also value and meaning unfixed. “What the wizard finds so thrilling is to transform.”85 In October 1947 Dubuffet staged another exhibition at Drouin, this one called “Portraits,” under the ironic banner “People Are Far More Beautiful Than They Think.” If the brut disfiguration in the Macadams is satirical, in the Portraits it is caricatural, even grotesque. Like his masks from the 1930s, these are portraits in name only: many of the subjects, literary friends and acquaintances primarily, can be identified by the titles alone, most of which are riddled with misdirection in any case. His subjects did not actually sit for Dubuffet; instead, with “resemblance cooked and candied in memory,” he depicted them in a way that conformed with his private nicknames.86 For example, his old friend Georges Limbour, dubbed crustacé, appears with crab arms and shell torso. (fig. 1.28) Of course, such creatureliness features in physiognomic studies from Albrecht Dürer through Giambattista della Porta to Charles Le Brun and beyond; here, however, it serves not to naturalize character but, on the contrary, to denature it.87 The Portraits thus advance a paradoxical form of anti-portraiture: according to Dubuffet, a portrait “works well” only if it is “hardly a portrait”—more, only if it “blocks likeness,” even “shatters” it.88 This is to turn portraiture away from its traditional pursuit of a particular individual appearance toward a brut presentation of an “elementary human figure.”89 Evident here again is his predilection for the general, yet, like most caricature, the Portraits actually equivocate between the specific and the typical: Limbour is not lost as a subject so much as he is mostly disfigured and partly renamed. Dubuffet spoke of the Portraits as “effigies,” which are rough models of particular persons usually made to be damaged or destroyed in protest or anger. As in his graffiti images, representation and destruction, facing and defacing, iconophilia and iconoclasm, converge. (fig. 1.29) If the Portraits attack portraiture from within, the Corps de dames (1950) do the same with the nude. For Dubuffet this genre was bound up with “a very specious notion of beauty (inherited from the Greeks and cultivated by the magazine covers),” and he uglified it along the lines laid down by Manet, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse. Of course, the nude was also bound up with a very traditional notion of form, and Dubuffet brutified it even more than such predecessors had done.90 Although he

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1.28 JEAN DUBUFFET, Limbour crustacé (Limbour as a Crustacean), 1946. Oil with sand on canvas, 45 3⁄4 × 35 inches. Hirshhorn Museum.

1.29 JEAN DUBUFFET, Maast à crinière, Portrait de Jean Paulhan (Maast with Mane, Portrait of Jean Paulhan), 1946. Acrylic and oil on board, 42 7⁄8 × 34 5⁄8 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

flattened his male Macadams in his muddy paste, they are still upright in composition, and though he deformed his male Portraits, they retain a semblance of identity. Not so the Corps de dames, which are usually splayed outward to the point of illegibility. (fig. 1.30) Returned (in his euphemistic words) “to the healthy horizontal, the wholesome barren state,” these women are bodies without name or selfhood; buried in flesh and entombed in paint, the Corps appear thoroughly misogynistic.91 And yet, as Andrea Maier has argued, they are also pressed to the surface and distorted in outline in a way that makes them difficult to grasp visually, let alone to possess imaginatively; even if inadvertently, Dubuffet frustrates the assumed male gaze.92 Also, despite the reduction of woman to matter, the signs of sex are not so clear: scratched in cartoonish fashion, the simple indications of breasts and vaginas are often lost in the haute pâte. In fact the Corps do not treat woman as lacking; she is a signifier of power, not castration, in a way reminiscent of the prehistoric Venuses

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1.30 JEAN DUBUFFET, Le Métafisyx (Corps de dame), 1950. Oil on canvas, 45 3⁄4 × 35 1⁄4 inches. Centre Pompidou.

that likely influenced the series.93 Further, just as Dubuffet wanted the Portraits to equivocate between the individual and the typical, he wanted the Corps to equivocate between the particular and the general: “It pleased me (and I think this inclination must be fairly constant in all my paintings) to juxtapose the very general with the very specific, the very subjective with the very objective, the metaphysical with the grotesque trivial. One is considerably reinforced by the other, I feel.”94 Dubuffet sought this ambiguity in other genres too. On the one hand, he worked with the given categories, landscapes and still lifes as well as portraits and nudes; on the other, he passed readily from one genre to another, and sometimes conflated them in the process. “A man, his physical person,” Dubuffet commented of the Portraits, “is a small world like any other, a landscape”; conversely, his landscapes are sometimes textured like rough bodies, as if surfaced in rawhide. (fig. 1.31) This slippage in genre supports a slide in scale, mostly between micro and macro views, whereby “a minute particle of earth” might appear as “a vast expanse of land” and vice versa.95 It also sets up a play with surfaces and supports, which Dubuffet sometimes conflates as well. Although he flattens figures in his early and middle series of paintings, he pushes grounds (fields, walls, and tables) forward in his later series, such as the “Géologies,” the “Texturologies,” and the “Matériologies.” In this way Dubuffet implies a connection between substance and support, physical surface and pictorial plane—a connection that is both literal and ambiguous.96 “Observe that walls hardly differ from the ground, except that they are vertical,” he once commented. “For me they function as virgin surfaces, opened up for me to project upon them what the spirit inspires, in the same way I do with tables.”97 Here his stated goal is a relay, not a collapse, between spatial orientations, vertical, horizontal, and oblique. This uncertainty extends to the disposition of his painting in general. On the one hand, despite the aggressive use of non-art materials, Clement Greenberg asserted that Dubuffet preserved the upright easel picture, while, on the other, Leo Steinberg argued that he prepared the shift to another order of image-making altogether, “the flat-bed picture plane,” as also explored by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Actually Dubuffet split the difference between the two: contra Greenberg, he disturbs the verticality of the easel picture with his insistence on ground, even as, contra Steinberg, he does not simply plunge painting into the horizontality of the

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1.31 JEAN DUBUFFET, Le voyageur sans boussole (Traveler without a Compass), 1952. Oil on board, 46 1⁄2 × 61 inches. Centre Pompidou.

flatbed paradigm. (fig. 1.32) Often the result is precisely the oscillation between the two registers that Dubuffet in fact sought—between the “natural” orientation of the easel picture (with its residual paradigms of window and mirror) and the “cultural” orientation of the flatbed picture (with its explicit use of found images), between the “opticality” associated with the former model of painting and the “textuality” associated with the latter (in this respect too the brut hesitates between cru and cuit).98 Even the spaces of picturing and writing are not so distinct in Dubuffet: “I have always preferred to depict the landscape vertically like a wall,” he once remarked. “The wall seems to me like a book, a large book on which one can write, and which one can read.”99

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1.32 JEAN DUBUFFET, Table de forme indécise (Table of Uncertain Form), 1951. Oil on board, 28 3⁄4 × 36 1⁄4 inches. Private collection.

As with genres in particular and painting in general, so with representation: Dubuffet remained within the category even as he sought to transform its terms. To this end he approached mimesis through analogy as much as by resemblance; that is, his subjects are evoked through physical association as well as by iconic representation—a wall by way of plaster applied to the canvas, say, or a ground by way of dirt mixed in with the paint.100 With its emphasis on physicality, this kind of mimesis aims to be immediate, which is not the same as literal.101 As with his juxtaposition of the specific and the general, Dubuffet plays with the contradiction between painting steeped in material and painting open to transformation. And he introduces a third tension as well: even as this version of the brut is centered on materiality, it is also addressed “to the mind.”102 Dubuffet attempts to reconcile materialist and idealist positions in this manner; his paintings are “landscapes of the brain,” he claims,

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that “aim to show the immaterial world which dwells in the mind of man: disorder of images, of beginnings of images, of fading images.”103 At the same time this brut is phenomenological in thrust, as Hubert Damisch, its most important exegete, argued long ago. For Damisch, who was a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dubuffet conformed to “one of the clearest tenets of phenomenology, namely that natural perception engages all the senses at the same moment and that each gives us access to the world in its unity and sensorial plenitude.” In this account Dubuffet performs a painterly version of “the phenomenological reduction,” the bracketing of cooked concepts for the sake of raw percepts. “If Dubuffet refuses for art to be a celebration for the eyes,” Damisch argues, “it is because he places it at the originary level of sensation, before the distinction of senses.”104 Hence his partial undoing of the figure–field opposition—an opposition long thought to be essential to the structure of perception and representation alike—is undertaken in an attempt to return both activities to “a wild, primitive state.”105 Hence, too, the ground that concerns Dubuffet most deeply is not pictorial or even formal; according to Damisch, it is “the primal, constitutive stuff” that the body shares with other things, whereby our flesh is enfolded in the flesh of the world. What could be more grounded, more brut, than this corporeal materialism?106 One reason why Dubuffet elides genres and conflates grounds is to “maintain the figure in a position of the general concept.”107 In a sense he is committed not to a medium-specificity of painting but to a medium-generality of art; “the role of the artist,” Dubuffet asserts, “is precisely to blur normal categories, to disrupt them.”108 He violates the basic law against the mixing of genres only in order to address a more fundamental intuition that the genres were imposed on an initial condition that was impure both materially and conceptually (this is what Jacques Derrida termed “the law of the law of genres”).109 It is this primal “ambiguity and confusion” that Dubuffet wished to reclaim.110 This position speaks not only to his phenomenological aim “to restore to the eyes and the mind ingenuity and freshness,” but also to his desire to override divisions—of genre as well as gender, of figure and ground as well as subject and object.111 Further, this position allows him to imagine a first painting in a way different from the smeared one proposed in psychoanalysis.112 In “Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy” (1952) Dubuffet described this brut materialism in animistic terms: “I see no great difference

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(metaphysically, that is) between the paste I spread and a cat, a trout or a bull. My paste is a being as these are.”113 And in “Anticultural Positions” (1951) he gave this animism a primitivist twist: “The so-called primitive man loves and admires trees and rivers, and has a great pleasure to be like them. He believes in a real similitude between man and trees and rivers. He has a strong sense of continuity of all things.”114 It is this primitivist animism that guides his peculiar humanism, which he also adumbrated in “Notes for the Well-Read”: “If you want to produce a humanist work—and of course, you do—you’ve got to let in that wind of unity and continuity that blows through the world of man . . . The world forms a huge, continuous broth, which has the same taste everywhere—the taste of man.”115 This phenomenological version of the brut is materialist in reception as well as production. In fact Dubuffet seeks to solicit our engagement in the painting, even our participation in its process. “The painting will not be viewed passively, scanned as a whole by an instantaneous glance,” he insists, “but relived in the way it was worked, remade by the mind and, if I may say, re-acted.”116 On this point, however, this brut departs dramatically from its other incarnations. Recall that Dubuffet regarded the arts of children, the common man, and the insane as indifferent, if not oblivious, to the viewer; more, this relative disregard counted as prime proof that each was “unscathed by artistic culture.” This final version of brut, on the contrary, is directed wholly at its audience, and in this respect it is not simply recaptured for modernist art, for its culture of material, process, and participation, but already dedicated to it, already acculturated by it, from the start. To this extent, then, the brut is no longer brut, at least as initially defined. The phenomenological version of the brut seems the most emphatic of all, rooted as it is in the materiality of art work and body alike. “Behind things, and under figures,” Damisch argues, Dubuffet reveals that “there is nothing but the ground.”117 What could be more secure? Yet this brut is also unstable, intrinsically so. For in the phenomenological account form emerges from flux and falls back into it incessantly. Although this movement alone does not disqualify it for Dubuffet— after all, he sought “permanent deformation and reformation”—it is not clear how, with its “profusion of tracks, signs and inscriptions,” such a ground could ever be considered pristine.118 “Do we ever really erase anything?” Dubuffet asked Damisch in 1967. “We believe we are erasing; everything is indelible.”119 In the end he came to

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see that his tabula rasa was overwritten, that his zero degree of art was no such thing, that no artist (no person) could be unscathed.120 His relentless search attests to the sheer difficulty of a brut basis; the act of beginning again and again erodes the very possibility of a simple origin.121 In a last note to Damisch from August 1984 Dubuffet makes a final attempt: “One is led to negate everything, to deny understanding any type of relevance, to discard every notion, starting with those of truth and knowledge (it is absurd to imagine that one being could know another), and finally to negate being.” And at this point he claims the persona of Robinson Crusoe that Damisch had offered him seventeen years before, only then to feel the ground beneath him wash away: “No island left at this point. Isle sunken. No more Robinson. Such is the morose message you’ll find in the bottle.”122 In his late writing on the subject Dubuffet floated a trope for the brut that repositioned it radically; he rotated it from a ground to stand on securely to a “pole star” to move toward asymptotically: “It is the direction in which we walk that matters . . . There is no end of the road, no end in sight.”123 Ultimately, then, Dubuffet understood the brut as an “ideal pole,” and perhaps it was an impossible limit concept from the start. “Pure art brut,” he admitted already in 1968, “would not know how. . . to exist.” And again: “The man without culture—therefore integrally asocial—we all agree, does not exist. He is a utopian vision.”124

Coda: The Brut as Operation Like the informe in Bataille, the brut in Dubuffet can also be understood as an operation, and in this respect it has different versions as well. First, as we have seen, to brutify is to equivocate. An equivocation of terms is not the same as an opposition: though Dubuffet first insisted on binaries such as the brut and the cultural, he soon argued that oppositions like the sane and the insane and the normal and the pathological could not be maintained. (“Who is normal?” Dubuffet asks in 1949 at the close of “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art.” “Just where is he, your normal man? Show him to us! Can the act of art . . . ever be normal?”)125 Neither is an equivocation of terms a mere reversal, which keeps the structure of any binary in place, nor is it a simple collapse. Rather, Dubuffet writes in 1954, “I am drawn simultaneously and

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alternately to opposite poles,” and the point of this brut operation is to pressure such polarities, “to test the resources of their oppositions and combinations, in order to multiply the shared boundaries and lines of communication among them.”126 By the time of “Asphyxiating Culture” (1968) Dubuffet underscored “this constant double valence of all notions.”127 This was the early moment of deconstruction, the tools of which Dubuffet did not possess (and no doubt would have rejected if he had). Nevertheless, he did hold to the principle of “opposite reverse sides,” which suggests at least an intuition of such a critique.128 Second, to brutify is to exnominate. Recall that Dubuffet defined the brut only negatively—as not the folk, the naïve, the amateur, the child, the common man, or the insane. Eventually, however, he recouped this failure: his inability to name the brut became its refusal to be named. The brut involves “arts that have no name,” Dubuffet insisted; more, it is an “art that does not know its name.”129 This became another motif of his writings: “Things have names only for those who see them from without, for those who are foreign to them. Those who are inside can no longer name them.”130 In this way the brut shifted from a defensive negation to an active exnomination, a stripping away of names that complemented its phenomenological bracketing of concepts. This is largely why Damisch deemed Dubuffet “the antiDuchamp”: whereas Duchamp moved to nominate art (the urinal is a Fountain because the artist declares it so), Dubuffet worked to exnominate it; and whereas Duchamp injected the arbitrary into his process, Dubuffet stressed the motivated in his practice.131 Dubuffet also posited exnomination as an operation of his art. “My weapon (painting) functions as a machine to abolish the names of things,” he wrote in 1957, “to knock down the partitions that the mind erects between different objects.”132 Exnomination thus speaks not only to his commitment to medium-generality but also to his resistance to interpellation in the sense given the word by Louis Althusser; to be brut is to ignore hailing by power or to reject defining by authority.133 This refusal became another theme of his writings—“art hates to be recognized and greeted by name”—yet it also brought a problem of its own.134 Already in “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art” (1949) Dubuffet had shifted the brut from the “anti-cultural” to the “irregular” (as in irregular army), which positioned the brut less as exterior to culture (as with the insane) than as resistant within it.135 Almost two decades later, in “Make

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Way for Incivism” (1967), he defined the brut as the uncivil, even the asocial.136 And, a year later in “Asphyxiating Culture,” he distinguished the asocial from the antisocial, for he now understood that the anti-social might only reinforce the social: “In the antisocial, there are two in conflict, one element reacts against the other; whereas in the asocial, one of the two is eliminated; there is no longer any reaction; there is nothing and no one. It is alienation.”137 Even as Dubuffet reiterated his belief that “the natural and normal processes of the creation of art” are revealed purely in alienated work alone, he also acknowledged that such artists are often kept “behind the padlocked doors of an asylum,” that they are “in fact people for whom all is lost.” And this limit state—“they are in the grips of the human condition reduced to its minimum, to its most elementary point”—is registered in the “half-anonymity” of the truncated names assigned often to them (e.g., Alcide, Liber, Gasduf ).138 Here the brut as exnomination took on a different inflection: no longer a resistant position but a privative condition, no longer oblivious to power but dominated by it. For Dubuffet at this point the brut artist was indeed lost, and brut life was one with bare life. This returns us to a question that has haunted this chapter: How did Dubuffet reconcile his critique of nomination with his own naming practice, or his critique of interpellation with his own cultural appropriation of the child, the common man, the insane, and the destitute? Might his critique serve as a preemptive defense against his acculturation of art brut, even against his own assimilation as a great artist? In many ways this acculturation was the avenue to his success, one that, on his own terms, is difficult to distinguish from his failure.139 Perhaps in the end we are left to see Dubuffet as a signal modernist not in spite of his double binds but because of them—double binds of a transgression that reinscribes the law, of an outside to official art that extends its purview, of an anti-aesthetic that acculturates the brutes, in short, of a project that equivocates between subversion and foundation, only to come to rest in recuperation.

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2.1 Georges Bataille in the Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux, 1952.

2| Georges Bataille and His Caves In the previous chapter we followed Jean Dubuffet as he pursued an entrée into art by way of a departure from it, through the positing of an art brut somehow unscathed by official culture. Here I turn to a related search for a new ground of postwar practice, the one taken up by Georges Bataille, and it is no less paradoxical. (fig. 2.1) In his case the ground is projected not as an outside to artistic culture, as in art brut, but at its origin, in the caves of prehistoric man. For Bataille this meant Lascaux above all, the famous site in the Dordogne region discovered in 1940. A photograph shows him there in 1952 when he was fifty-eight years old. Pen in hand and notebook in lap, Bataille sits on a craggy rock in a long overcoat and looks up at the paintings in the entrance to the cave known as the Hall of the Bulls. Clearly staged, the photo is an image about the writing of images, one that might recall representations of Saint John transcribing his visions on Patmos. Yet Bataille gazes into the prehistoric past, not the apocalyptic future, into the beginnings of man, not the end of days. Or does he? In his mind the two converge. A little later Bataille proposed a film about the caves, jotting down the first of his notes on two postcards from Lascaux. His scenario (which was never produced) opens with a range of ritual practices concerning the dead, from “primitive funerary festivals” to “Italian mortuary chapels”—so many instances of burial that philosophers at least since Vico have taken to distinguish our species from other primates.1 Quickly, however, Bataille shifts from these foundational activities of human culture to lurid scenes of “animals killing each other,” of men killing animals, and finally of men killing men, at which point he underscores another practice specific to humankind: “Man is the only animal that kills its kind obstinately and furiously.” A “war scene,” which we associate with the recent world conflagration, is followed by a conjuring of an absolute night, which we understand as the total darkness of nuclear annihilation, a global threat since the American obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki several years before. “Everything quiets,” Bataille writes, and then in a jump cut across vast stretches of time he continues: “The sun arises on an earth on which life has yet to appear.” In the final section of the scenario, after “millions of years” have

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passed, life slowly returns to this blighted world in the form first of microbes, then of vegetation, and finally of bugs, fish, birds, and fauna. Yet this is only the old life come again, driven as it is by “a passion for destruction” (C 104). A final note reads: “An immense variety of small animals and insects tear each other to pieces.” Again and again in the 1950s Bataille connected the “eventual extinction of human life” with its full emergence, which he took to be announced, however ambiguously, in the paintings at Lascaux and other caves of the Upper Paleolithic period. (In his time the Lascaux images were dated to circa 30,000 bce; now the estimate is somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 bce.)2 This link between prehistory and posthistory is unexpected, and apparently it surprised Bataille too. In a lecture in January 1955, again with the discovery of Lascaux and the threat of annihilation in mind, he has only this to say: “I am simply struck by the fact that light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us” (C 87). His was a generation of French intellectuals that, before World War II, had pondered the Hegelian proposition that the end of history had come, schooled as they were by the influential Hegel exegete Alexandre Kojève in this thesis. The great difference is that, after the Holocaust and the hydrogen bombs, this end was no longer hypothetical. It was the specter of the actual death of man that prompted Bataille, as it did others at this time (such as the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion), to speculate on the possible origins of the human.3 “For us,” Bataille wrote in 1955, “a new but indefinite time is being born” in a manner similar to the first dawn (L 26). What is the ambiguous time that Bataille evokes here? What is involved in his montage of prehistory and posthistory, of the caves where humans first created and the ruins through which they now wandered? In what ways was the remote ascent from animality called up by the recent descent into barbarism? Well known as a “dissident Surrealist” in the Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s, Bataille is less familiar as a controversial thinker in the 1930s and 1940s, who, skeptical of both the fragile socialism of the Popular Front and the rigid Stalinism of the Communist Party, explored “the psychology of fascism” with an ambivalence that remains troublesome to this day.4 However, after the turpitude of the Occupation, the devastation of the world war, and the horror of the Shoah, the 1950s presented a different conjuncture, and Bataille redirected his thought, in large part through a turn to questions of prehistory. To a degree this shift was provoked by the 1952

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2.2 Abbé Henri Breuil (right) at Lascaux, with a colleague and the young discoverers of the cave, 1940.

publication of Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art by the Abbé Henri Breuil, the preeminent prehistorian of the previous generation, who gathered his extensive research on the Franco-Cantabrian caves in this volume (Breuil was the first expert to be called to Lascaux after its discovery). (fig. 2.2) Reviewed by Bataille a year later, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art guided his own thinking on prehistoric art, even though he disagreed with many of its conclusions. Several essays on the subject preceded his Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux, or the Birth of Art, which appeared in spring 1955, and a few more texts followed it (including his final book, the sketchy Tears of Eros, written in 1959, when Bataille was already ill, and published in 1961, a year before his death). Bataille renders the distant past of the caves very present in the pages of Lascaux. There is great immediacy in its lively prose, which he made almost melodramatic for the popular readership that his Swiss publisher Albert Skira hoped to

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2.3 Detail of the brown bull in the Axial Gallery, Lascaux.

attract, as well as in its deluxe photographs, which were the first color images of Lascaux to be published. Together the prose and the photos take us on a virtual tour of the cave as if we were alongside Bataille.5 “I insist upon the surprise we experience at Lascaux,” he writes early in the book, and later he comments: “Line and color have been left miraculously untouched by passing ages. Our response to this art is so direct that we lose all idea of time” (L 15, 47). Bataille summons a powerful aura here—aura in one sense given the term by Walter Benjamin, a sudden coincidence of the very remote and the very near.6 (fig. 2.3) Not just a publishing ploy, this effect of immediacy is essential to the thesis of Lascaux, for Bataille insists not only on the presentness of the animals depicted on the walls and the rituals performed in relation to them, but also on our participation in the “miracle” of humanity initiated there.7 If Lascaux represents the birth of art and man alike, it is an origin that must be recovered, even re-enacted, in the present. “Lascaux asks us to no longer deny what we are,” Bataille argues; through its contemplation “we can finally gauge” what our identity is (C 85, 59). Note the past–future temporality here; it is a “preposterous” tense that recurs in his writing on parietal art. The registers of knowing and unknowing are also ambiguous, yet one thing is clear: however resisted or repressed, the essential mystery of our humanity lies encrypted in the caves. This, then, is my thesis. Prehistoric art suggested to Bataille an origin that both repositions the role of the ritualistic in art and recovers the importance of the sacred in society, an origin story that, if reclaimed, might help postwar man to cope with his “passion for destruction,” that is, “to live on par with death” (C 104, 172). Such is his version of positive barbarism.

Coherent Disorder In the introduction to Lascaux Bataille focuses on practices that distinguish Homo sapiens from his Neanderthal predecessors, and art is foremost among them. This is already announced in its subtitle, “The Birth of Art,” and throughout the book the cave images are presented as aesthetic creations, with the animals often photographed as single figures (which they rarely are in situ).8 (fig. 2.4) “The miracle occurred at Lascaux,” Bataille writes early on; it is “our first sign of art and also of

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man” (L 11). Consider the priority here: it is as though man were the outcome of art, not the other way around.9 Previously Breuil had claimed “aesthetic activity” at Lascaux and other caves, as had his colleague Fernand Windels, who dubbed the Hall of the Bulls “the Sistine Chapel” of prehistory (other spaces were also given churchly names such as Nave and Apse), but it is Bataille who designates art to be the distinctive practice of Homo sapiens.10 If his Neanderthal predecessor also possessed a basic set of tools, a primitive form of language, a consciousness of death, and a version of burial, “the fact remains,” Bataille argues, “that we know no work of art” (L 145–46) before Aurignacian man of the Upper Paleolithic period (circa 40,000– 30,000 bce).11 Yet, as we will see, if the “birth” of the human is punctual for Bataille, the “passage of animal to man” is a threshold that can be traversed in both directions again and again. In the first instance Bataille frames art as a “protest” against “utilitarian activity,” so this epochal shift is also one from a world of work alone to a world of play as well. (In some respects Bataille rethinks Homo sapiens in terms of the Homo ludens of Johan Huizinga, whose celebrated book of that title was published in 1938.) Only a few years before Lascaux, in the first volume of The Accursed Share (1949), Bataille had articulated his theory of a “general economy,” according to which the central problem for any social order is not how to solve scarcity but how to discharge surplus (this is “the accursed share” that must be spent in games, festivals, and potlatches, as well as art), and his rejection of the primacy of the utilitarian continues in Lascaux. Bataille makes this case not only in general terms—“Only ‘Man who plays’ adequately and precisely counters the Neanderthal ‘Man who works’”—but also in specific relation to parietal art—“Only play, and not some practical purpose, could have prompted” the cave paintings (L 35).12 By “practical purpose” Bataille means any imagined control over the depicted animals by means of representation; “the calculative simplicity of magic explains nothing” about the images for him. The cave paintings are not utilitarian in this way; in fact many arise from “gratuitous doodlings” and “unintelligible signs,” and so are not even mimetic in the first instance. This reading leads Bataille to see the pictures as discovered as much as invented—as inspired by natural contours, colorations, and cracks (including bear scratchings) in the walls: “It is plain that the art of imitating the outer aspect of animals by means of painting or engraving could not have been put to use before it came into

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2.4 Second “Chinese” horse in the Axial Gallery, Lascaux.

being and, in order to be, had first to be found in the course of accident, chance, or play” (L 35). His emphasis on the ludic and the aleatory bespeaks a modernist aesthetic; one thinks of the Surrealist embrace of chance and accident in particular. A parallel position was also advanced in art-historical inquiry of the time. In 1956, only a year after the publication of Lascaux, Ernst Gombrich delivered his Mellon Lectures on “the psychology of perception,” in which he argued, famously, that “making comes before matching,” that is, that the making of a representation, with its conventions of depiction (which Gombrich calls “schemata”), precedes the matching of the representation to the world, with its criteria of verisimilitude.13 However, in Lascaux, Bataille suggests, again in a manner consistent with his old Surrealist milieu, that finding precedes both making and matching. In a sense Lascaux is the ultimate found object.14

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2.5 Map of the Lascaux cave.

After the introduction Bataille tours the principal sections of Lascaux one by one. (fig. 2.5) He is concerned first with the composition of the pictures, or rather the lack thereof, especially in the Hall of the Bulls and the Axial Gallery. (fig. 2.6) The first space, an expansive cavern, is dominated by a “cavalcade” of horses punctuated by a few massive bulls and smallish deer, while the second space, a tight cul-de-sac, presents a range of animals, mostly horses and bulls again, but also cows, ibexes, asses, bison, and a bear, some of which appear in the Nave and the Apse as well (these are accessed through a passage to the right of the Hall of the Bulls).15 To different degrees figures overlap or are superimposed in all these spaces, which suggests to Bataille (who follows Breuil here) that the pictures were produced “over an extended period”; often, too, almost “every available patch” of wall is used (L 53, 110). Along with a confusion of figures, then, there is a disorientation of the viewer. Especially

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2.6 The Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux.

in the Axial Gallery “action splits, scurries in every direction,” and images appear on the ceiling in ways that defeat “any possibility of unity” (L 74). (figs. 2.7, 2.8, 2.9) These characteristics—overlapping, superimposition, all-over-ness, multidirectionality—defy the basic principles that we take to underlie pictorial composition, such as a clear opposition of figure and ground, a careful relation of center to edge, and a consistent point of view (again, no one perspective, or sequence of perspectives, is assumed).16 The effect is contradictory—Bataille coins the oxymoron “coherent disorder” (ordonnance désordonnée)—and it leads him to propose a performative basis for the pictures, which were made, he argues, in “a rite of evocation” that was sacrificial in impulse (L 73, C 77). “The actual doing embodied the entire intention,” Bataille asserts, and the repeated drawing of the animals (“they would not erase or cover the older images”) was central to the ritual—hence “the confusion

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2.7 top left: Animals between the first and second bulls in the Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux. 2.8 top right: Ceiling of the Axial Gallery, Lascaux. 2.9 bottom: Second bull in the Hall of the Bulls, Lascaux.

2.10 Bison riddled with arrows in the Nave, Lascaux.

of the figures” and related effects (L 129, C 50, 77). This “doing” occurred in a shamanistic trance, Bataille speculates, which also rendered the artists “indifferent to the state of the cave wall after a drawing” (C 50). Thus, if we assume that the pictures are compositions intended for viewers like us, we get them entirely wrong. The essential thing was not the coherence of the images but the apparition of the animals—to make them present in rites performed in a deep darkness pierced only by wavering torchlight. In a sense, then, the picturing is magical, but again not in the utilitarian way advanced by Breuil, who saw them only as a “ritual preparation for big expeditions” (C 50).17 For Bataille the apparition is not a controlling but a conjuring, and the imaging is less referential than visionary. (fig. 2.10) “The moment the animal is seen is a passionate moment,” and the animals are relatively well formed because they have “to be, in a sense, rendered present in the ritual” (C 50). At least this is his initial explanation. Note that, unlike many other theorists (Benjamin prominent among them), Bataille sees no division between ritual and art. In fact he deems it crucial that art recapture this ritualistic basis.18 I have suggested that parietal art challenged basic principles of pictorial composition, but that might be a modernist projection of my own, for these principles

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2.11 Bison, man, bird, and rhinoceros in the Well, Lascaux.

were not in place to be challenged. Certainly the images in Lascaux and other caves follow certain conventions; for example, after Breuil, Bataille notes the “twisted perspective” of some of the animals (according to which bodies are presented in profile while heads or horns are turned three-quarters or full-face). But for the most part Bataille highlights the elaboration of implicit configurations found in the walls because it is not clear what mimetic schemata (in the Gombrichian sense) existed as yet. In an important text from 1969 Meyer Schapiro argued that the cave wall was not regarded as a pictorial field; even if scraped down, its surface was not smoothened, its extent not bounded, and its figures not ordered. Such a prepared support was “an invention of a later stage of humanity,” one that “accompanies the development of polished tools in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages and the creation of pottery and an architecture with regular courses of jointed masonry.”19 This field was a precondition for such conventions as the transparency of the picture plane and the illusion of spatial depth, neither of which pertains much in cave painting. Not only is the image not seen as fully distinct from its support, but the image is not understood as entirely separate from its referent. In effect, the wall is treated less as a ground for representation than as a membrane for conjuration: animals are not represented from the outside world on the wall so much as they are made present from a spirit realm through the wall.20 In short, the act of painting is less mimetic than evocative, and the primordial convention that art exists, first and last, to be beheld is here not primordial at all.21 It is this apparent status as a near tabula rasa, which Bataille does not fully articulate, that allows him to claim Lascaux as the very birthplace of art, as a “miracle” that precedes and so trumps all other “fresh-sprung arts,” such as those of ancient Egypt and Greece, so privileged by Gombrich and countless others (L 130). “At Lascaux nothing had to be broken, nothing needed undoing,” Bataille writes. “Lascaux was the first doing, the first step, the beginning” (L 130).22 But what kind of beginning of art is so ambiguous about basic matters of form and composition? And what kind of beginning of man is so equivocal about fundamental distinctions between the human and the animal? (fig. 2.11)

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Three Enigmas In Lascaux Bataille confronts three enigmas that he places at the heart of prehistoric art. First enigma: Why are the animals represented with such grace while the humans are rendered so crudely? Why exalt beasts and debase men in this way? This dichotomy is a matter of artistic will, not technical skill: “Apparently, man from the earliest times could have depicted his brethren with the same precision he used with animal images; he did not want to do this” (L 107). Bataille describes the animals as conforme (well-formed) and the humans as informe (formless); it is as though for prehistoric man animals were human and humans animalistic.23 This counterintuitive hierarchy is registered in the number of figures too, as humans are rare in Aurignacian art (when Bataille wrote, only about seventy-five images and objects from this Upper Paleolithic period were known to be extant). Second enigma: What is signified by the figures that combine anthropomorphic and zoomorphic features (which are even rarer than the crude human ones)? (fig. 2.12) If the first dichotomy in representation indicates an originary difference between man and animal, do these therianthropic creatures point to a persistent affinity between them? Or does the combination of features bespeak another relationship altogether, a volatile compound of identification with the animal and obeisance to it? Third enigma: What exactly is at stake in the famous scene, located in an obscure shaft in Lascaux known as the Well, involving a disemboweled bison and a supine man, who, significantly, is ithyphallic (his penis is erect)? What possible mystery is invoked there? Let me take these riddles one at a time. Bataille mentioned the first enigma—the “shocking duality at the beginning of figurative representation”—well before the discovery of Lascaux (C 40). It appeared initially in his 1930 review of a book titled Primitive Art (1930) by Georges-Henri Luquet, the pioneer in the study of the art of children (whom we encountered with Dubuffet), and already there Bataille claimed this dichotomy as a key to “the psychology of prehistoric man” (C 44).24 However, a long pause in this line of thought ensued. Bataille took up related questions in the 1930s and 1940s, but not this exact one, and he returned to it only in 1952 when Breuil published his Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art. This book prompted Bataille to three texts in quick succession—an unpublished lecture in 1952 and two articles in 1953—followed by another

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2.12 Drawing after “The Sorcerer” at Les Trois Frères.

talk in 1955 just prior to the appearance of Lascaux. Yet even after the publication of the book this enigma reappears in his writings; it is a contradiction that Bataille does not resolve but only repeats, with slight variations. This repetition-with-a-difference conforms to the pattern of mythic narratives according to Lévi-Strauss, and clearly this riddle had mythic force for Bataille. Perhaps he wanted not to solve the enigma so much as to reactivate it, precisely as a myth. In any case it is essential to him—and, he believes, essential for us—to puzzle over its terms; what it is to be human is hidden there.25 Both before and after Lascaux Bataille also considered prehistoric figures of women, most of which are tiny sculptures in stone or ivory, such as the celebrated Venuses of Willendorf and Lespugue. (Just over four inches and just under six inches tall respectively, they are named after the towns in Austria and France near which they were discovered.) (figs. 2.13, 2.14) Although not nearly as conforme as the animal pictures, these female figures are not quite as informe as the male ones (“they form

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2.13 “Venus of Willendorf,” c. 23,000 BCE. Oolite, 4 2⁄3 inches.

a third world,” Bataille says vaguely). Nevertheless, he argues, the women have two points in common with the men: “their human aspect is also suppressed” and “emphasis [falls] on their sexual organs” (C 68–69). He accepts the standard claim that the figures represent an ideal of maternal fertility, but notes that “here idealization tends in the direction of what to us is deformity” (L 123). Not only are they “steatopygous Aphrodites” whose breasts, hips, and buttocks are exaggerated, but some are also headless, and, if they possess a face at all, “it is a sheer surface, without eyes, mouths or ears” (L 123).26 In our modern idea of feminine beauty those parts of the body are sublimated (like Freud, Bataille calls them “the secondary sexual characteristics”), yet the prehistoric Venuses have nothing to do with such sublimation; on the contrary, the “exaltation” of these features “inextricably links the beauty of the body with its sexual activity” (C 115, 110).27 It is as though this beauty existed before or outside sublimation, but not, clearly enough, before or outside sexual difference, which is remarked by the opposition between the ithyphallic men and the steatopygous women.28 Bataille does little with this opposition, however, focused as he is on

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2.14 “Venus of Lespugue,” c. 25,000 BCE. Ivory, 53⁄4 inches.

the riddle posed by both male and female figures: why do the humans appear “negated” in comparison with the animals, the men rendered featureless and the women faceless, and this during the very epoch when human beings had attained, for the first time, an aspect similar to ours as distinct from the apes? Why this figural deformity at the time when human form was finally achieved?29 Within this riddle of dichotomous images of humans and animals lies another enigma, our second one, for the human figures are also divided internally: while most are reduced and schematic, some are hybrid and complex. Again, in the first type of representation both male and female figures are mostly stripped of human features, often including the face, which Bataille reads as a sign of an extreme devaluation of the human. In the second type, however, the figures are granted a few human attributes; more importantly, they are also clad “in the glory of the beast” (L 116), which Bataille takes to be an enormous elevation of the human. If the stick man in the Lascaux Well exemplifies the first, reduced type, the strange creature known as “The Sorcerer” in Les Trois Frères, a cave well south of Lascaux in the Ariège department, represents

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2.15 Line drawing after a bison-man at Les Trois Frères. 2.16 Line drawing after a bison-man at Les Trois Frères.

the second, hybrid type. Both incised and painted, this figure, two-and-a-half feet tall, is neither vertical nor horizontal (Breuil understands him to dance or to prance), a posture that places the Sorcerer ambiguously between the human and the animal in orientation, and his features are also mixed: whereas his beard, legs, feet, hands, and sexual organs are relatively human, his antlers and ears derive from a stag, and his tail from a horse (his owlish face is especially odd, and his outward gaze is very rare). Typically, Breuil reads the Sorcerer in functionalist terms as a “Spirit controlling the multiplication of game and hunting expeditions” (C 64), yet his status is not clear. In fact nothing is certain about this figure, who embodies a confusion that is also sexual (his penis appears to curve up and outward from his anus). Is there an unknown logic, a pensée préhistorique, encoded in this complex image?30 In any case, such hybrid figures are male, which points to a gendered division of roles in prehistoric art, at least according to Bataille: women represent the physical realm of sex and reproduction, while men preside over the sacred realm of eroticism and death. Two other figures at Les Trois Frères are also animal–human hybrids, mostly bison from the waist up and partly man from the waist down; both are ithyphallic as well. (figs. 2.15, 2.16) One of the creatures, just a foot high, appears more bison than

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2.17 Line drawing after commingled animals at Les Trois Frères.

man, and, like the Sorcerer, he is neither vertical nor horizontal. The other creature, only eight inches high, is more vertical, which is to say more human in posture. After Breuil, Bataille understands him to play a musical bow (sometimes Bataille also slips into anecdotal accounts) and, in doing so, to lead the animals that appear before him in an “animal symphony” (L 160). Yet the actual welter of bison, horses, and reindeer is far less composed than the term “symphony” suggests; clearly this is less a composition of pictorial figures than a repetition of ritual acts. (fig. 2.17) Bataille credits this bison-man with “a promise of triumphal domination” but stipulates that, as with the Sorcerer, such dominion comes only “on the condition that [his] humanity be masked” (C 63). This last paradox soon emerges as a key to the second enigma that all three figures at Les Trois Frères pose for Bataille. Again, he insists that they are removed from any utilitarian purpose; the Sorcerer in particular signals a “no to the man-who-works” (L 121). More, Bataille detects here an “apology” for the disruption that human labor brought to the animal world, as if “amends” were required for the “real power” that “calculating deliberation” had won for emergent man (L 121). Obviously Bataille projects this sense of contrition, which he needs in order to explain why prehistoric man would hide his features behind an animal mask—why,

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at the very moment that he achieved his human aspect, he would conceal it “as though he were ashamed of his face” (L 115). This is the paradox that the hybrid appearance of the shamanistic figures at Les Trois Frères registers for Bataille. The second enigma confuses Bataille more than the first, or rather he shares in the confusion that he sees encoded in the therianthropic figures, a confusion that Bataille ascribes to the ambiguous status of the animal for prehistoric man. In the first instance the animal represents “raw life” (L 37), “that other world of wildness, of darkness,” which man “sheds” in order to become human at all—to become the man not only of work and prohibition but also of art and play. It is this animality to which man “reverts” at times of sacrifice, festival, and the “rite of evocation” that is the painting of the cave walls. In other words, man establishes this animality only at the moment of his emergence from it; all at once the animal is defined as other to “the stifling regularity of the human order,” and this in turn sets up animality as the condition to which man regresses when he thrills to transgression and “overflows into savagery” (C 65). The “passage of animal to man” is thus not simple, nor is it final, for it can be reversed. Moreover, in its new difference from the human, the animal also comes to represent other figures of alterity to man, not only the dead but also the divine, which are not very distinct at this point (it is for this reason that Bataille refers to the Sorcerer as a god). In this way, then, the animal is positioned both below man and above man, at once subhuman and superhuman, subordinate and sovereign.31 It is no wonder that the Sorcerer and his confrères appear confused: they exist not only between man and beast but also between man and god. This ambiguity may be irreducible; certainly for Bataille it expresses an ambivalence toward certain animals that is fundamental to prehistoric people. “They loved them and they wanted them,” he writes. “They loved them and they killed them” (L 75). This paradox brings us to the third enigma, which is encrypted in a small group of pictures in the Lascaux Well. For Bataille as for many others, these are the most significant—the most strange, the most sacred—of all the images in the FrancoCantabrian caves; he calls them “the measure of this world” and “the holy of holies” (C 137). To the right stands a bison just under four feet long. Its intestines balloon out of its large body; as if bewildered, it twists its small head to take in this wound. In the center under the bison is an elongated stick figure of a supine man with the tiny head of a bird. Arms outstretched, he appears to be dead, but his penis is erect.

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(This is no contradiction for Bataille, for whom eroticism and death are bound up with each other, and both are essential to the sacred.) Beneath the bird-man is a straight line like a post topped by a schematic profile of another bird, and there are two other lines that resemble barbed arrows or spears—a short, broken one at the feet of the man, and a long, solid one that cuts across the hindquarters of the bison. Finally, to the left is a partially eroded rhinoceros, which seems to trot away, tail raised, from the scene. In fact it is not clear that the figures form a group, let alone a scene (for Bataille the rhinoceros is irrelevant); though they do not exhibit the “coherent disorder” of other animal images, they hardly comprise a neat composition. For Breuil, however, the Well scene is the only true composition in all Lascaux. He even reads it as a pictorial record of an actual event, “a fatal accident during a hunting trip” (L 137); the bison, wounded by the man or the rhinoceros or both, has killed the hunter whose broken spear lies beside him. Once again Bataille demurs, at least in part (for there is a referent for him here too); “only a deeply religious intention could have motivated this figuration,” he argues (C 170–71). This intuition leads Bataille to draw on the account presented by the prehistorian Horst Kirchner, for whom the man is a shaman “in the throes of an ecstatic trance,” the bison is his sacrifice, and the bird on the post is its guide to the other world.32 Yet Bataille finds human death in the scene as well, and “the death of the man (we can in fact only see a dead man in the fallen figure) is linked to the death of the animal” (C 171). Stricken with guilt for his sacrificial murder, the man offers up his own life “as a compensation offered by chance or perhaps voluntarily to the first victim” (C 171). It is this alleged encounter with death touched by the sacred that prompts Bataille to see the Well scene as an inaugural moment of religion: “This representation invites him who faces it to draw a fundamental power from the contemplation of death, the power to live on a par with death, which is proper to religions of all times” (C 172).33 When Bataille returns to this scene a few years later in Erotism (1957), he sees it explicitly in terms of sacrifice and expiation, yet when he recalls it one last time in The Tears of Eros (1961), he deems it “essential to go beyond this” account.34 However, this beyond is little more than a final surrender to the essential mystery of the Well. “It is not really a question of solving this enigma,” Bataille writes. “Being the first enigma posed by humans, it asks us to descend to the bottom of the abyss opened in us by

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eroticism and death” (T 50).35 Here, to the primordial conjunction of death and the sacred, he adds the “paradoxical accord” between death and sexuality, as figured by the dead man with the erect penis (T 52). For Bataille that accord is paradoxical only if we fail to see that all these states—death, eroticism, and the sacred—serve to restore the fundamental continuity that the advent of human life disturbs. “Death means continuity of being,” he argues in Erotism, a continuity that life interrupts inasmuch as “reproduction leads to the discontinuity of beings” (E 13). However momentarily, eroticism puts us back in touch with this continuity because it is “a violation of the very being of its practitioners” (E 17). And, finally, the sacred is also “the revelation of continuity,” especially when we bear witness to its most charged occasion, “the death of a discontinuous being,” during the “solemn rite” of a funeral (E 22). Bataille is fervently on the side of continuity too; as though in a last testament to his life project, he writes in The Tears of Eros that “what we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain” (E 19).36 Let me indulge in a speculative aside. For centuries traditionalists located the origins of Western art in ancient Egypt and Greece. For Gombrich and countless others before him, a “miracle” occurred when the Greek kouros stepped free of the Egyptian block as though of its own independent will and, with a slight twist of contrapposto, charged the human figure with a new animation. At this moment sculpture became free in several senses of the word, and Western art was launched on its teleological pursuit of lifelikeness. For Bataille, however, prehistoric Lascaux undercuts this old humanist story of art; again, the caves are the site of “the first doing, the first step, the beginning” (L 130). Certainly the informe and hybrid humans of Lascaux and Les Trois Frères present very different postures for the human—the first supine, either entranced or dead, the second suspended between the horizontal and the vertical, perhaps between beast and god, in any case quite other than man as traditionally imaged. So too do the prehistoric enigmas of the stick man and the Sorcerer displace the classical riddle of the human posed to Oedipus by the Sphinx. (The Sorcerer appears almost to combine Oedipus and Sphinx in one impossible form.) The answer to the riddle is still “man,” but the question bears less on what distinguishes the human from the animal than on how they are bound together in the sacred. Finally, in this ur-mythology the wounded bison in the Well preempts the Greek Minotaur as well. (Bataille regarded the scene as a sacrifice of a bull, perhaps

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2.18 MYRON (?), Minotaur, mid-5th century BCE. Roman copy, marble, 32 1⁄4 inches.

the inaugural bullfight, and his own quest in the caves constitutes an intellectual tauromachy).37 Whereas the Minotaur, the product of a bull and a woman (Queen Pasiphae of Crete), was seen as a monster by the ancients, it was redeemed as a figure of the unconscious by the Surrealists. (figs. 2.18, 2.19) In his writings on prehistory Bataille revises both readings of the Minotaur in turn: the labyrinth where the monster is trapped becomes the cave where man emerges, and the probing of a private psyche becomes the recovery of a collective sacred.38 This speculation can be stretched further. The Well scene is akin to a primal scene, the Freudian term for the scenario in which a child witnesses sex between his parents in a way that suggests his own creation. This witnessing is enigmatic—is it a memory, a fantasy, or a combination of the two? And the uncertainty of the vision renders it spatially complex; as in a dream the child is both a viewer outside the

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2.19 MAN RAY, Minotaur, 1933. Gelatin silver print, 5 7⁄8 × 9 1⁄4 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

scene and a participant within it (he is excited by it too). For Freud the primal scene is so fundamental as to be phylogenetic, a universal schema that we elaborate on in our own ways. In a sense the Well scene is even more universal than the primal scene, for here, according to Bataille, mankind imagines its own coming into being.39 And as in Freud we are both spectator and an actor in a way that is at once seductive, traumatic, and enigmatic; more precisely, it is seductive and traumatic because it is enigmatic.40 “The impact of the scene, its value as well, are intensified by its ambiguity,” Bataille writes; it “introduces a dramatic element into an art where drama, though latent everywhere, seldom takes form” (L 110). For Bataille the Well scene is intrinsically contradictory, given that it “den[ies] what it is usual to affirm,” i.e., the human, and “shows what is ordinarily veiled,” i.e., the sexual (L 124). And, again, like a mythmaker according to Lévi-Strauss, Bataille offers up various versions of the enigma because he is not able—or not willing—to resolve the contradiction.41

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From Subversion to Re-Creation I noted that Bataille first addressed “the psychology of prehistoric man” during his dissident Surrealist years, only to put it aside for more than two decades (a period of latency similar to the one undergone by Dubuffet with the art of the insane). In the 1940s Bataille did address related matters, especially in his projected trilogy The Accursed Share, which was concerned with three topics above all—expenditure (volume 1), eroticism (volume 2), and sovereignty (volume 3). However, only the first book appeared as such in his lifetime (in 1949), while the second was put aside, then rewritten, and finally published as Erotism (in 1957).42 Although none of these themes was new for Bataille—he wrote about expenditure as early as 1933, eroticism pervades his fiction, and sovereignty was central to his reflections on Fascism and Nazism— they took on renewed urgency during World War II and in its aftermath. Since they bear directly on his postwar thought at issue here, I want to touch on three concerns of this prewar writing: the impulse behind representation, the advent of the human, and the centrality of the sacred. When Bataille reviewed Primitive Art by Luquet in 1930, the primitive was not clearly distinguished from the prehistoric, and both were still associated with the child. Thus Luquet developed an account of primitive art based on his prior argument about the drawing of children: initially guided by an “intellectual realism” based on “internal models,” this art eventually accedes to a “visual realism” oriented to external objects. In his review Bataille rejects this narrative. The image-making of both the primitive and the child is governed, he argues, not by “intellectual models” or visual referents but by destructive drives. “The origin of figurative representation” involves reckless “scribbles” made by “dirtied hands” that are moved to change the object violently, whether it be “a wall, a sheet of paper, or a toy” (C 40). As support for this thesis Bataille offers a few drawings by a young French girl (the daughter of his friend the artist André Masson) and various graffiti by Abyssinian children (found in an Ethiopian church by his friend the ethnographer Marcel Griaule). From this sketchy evidence Bataille proposes that the primitive and the child come to mimesis accidently, and that their “scribbles” point to a transitive model of picturing that proceeds “through a series of deformations”: “the destroyed object (the paper or the wall) is altered to such a point that it is transformed into a new object—a

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horse, a head, a man” (C 41). Two points should be underscored here. First, for Bataille the child is indifferent to the distinction between support and image—a claim that he would make for the cave painters too. And, second, he concludes his idiosyncratic account of representation with a bold extrapolation about art in general: “Art . . . proceeds in this way by successive destructions. Insofar as it liberates libidinal instincts, these instincts are sadistic” (C 41).43 At the time this argument was part of his polemic against art understood in terms of sublimation, which Bataille saw as the cultural corollary of the “erroneous” elevation of the human in idealist philosophies (V 20). His local target was the Surrealism of his enemy twin André Breton, an aesthetic that Bataille disparaged as a mere “game of substitutions.”44 Key for us, however, is the notion that representation and destruction are bound up with each other, that drives are liberated in the “alteration” of the image-object (which is not mimetic in impulse), and that these drives are sadistic. They are likely masochistic too, that is, if we take the subject to be “liberated” along with the object, as Bataille did.45 In his Documents texts Bataille broached a second theme pertinent here, the advent of the human. Consider his famous note from 1929 about the ambiguous status of our big toes. On the one hand, this appendage is the one most differentiated from its counterpart in the ape, and thus qualifies as “the most human part of the human body” (V 20). More, as the anchor of the human foot, the big toe establishes “a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud,” the vertical posture that distinguishes us from the horizontal orientation of other animals (V 20). On the other hand, the big toe is planted in the ground, even stuck “in the mud,” and so it recalls us to our base materiality while we are alive and our “brutal fall” when we die (V 29, 22). (Bataille evoked this base materiality with commissioned photographs of gnarly toes by Jacque-André Boiffard.)46 Hence the conflicted responses that many cultures have to toes in particular and to feet in general, responses that swing between attraction and repulsion, veneration and shame. (Bataille takes the practice of bound feet in traditional China to express both extremes at once.) Implicit in “The Big Toe” and related texts is an origin story of man, which proleptically counters the one told by Freud a year later in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).47 In his outlandish account Freud imagines a single moment when man became man—when he rose from all fours to two feet—as though this evolution

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happened all at once. According to Freud, the transformation in posture produced a revolution in sense; suddenly the anus was hidden and the genitals exposed, smell was devalued and sight privileged. Just as importantly, this new orientation of man inaugurated a new dispensation in sex and sensibility. Sexual frequency became regular, not periodic (as it is with most other animals), men and women learned shame (as each confronted the genitals of the other directly), and this coincidence of regular sex and persistent shame impelled them to form the heterosexual couple. Thus, Freud claims, was the family born and society founded. Bizarre though this heterosexist tale is, it is central to his fundamental argument (noted in the previous chapter on Dubuffet) that civilization depends for its existence on “order, beauty, and cleanliness,” that is, on a reaction-formation against the primacy of anal eroticism and olfactory interest. The origin story intimated by Bataille is radically different. There is no foundational moment of heroic elevation; on the contrary, “a complete verticality is never attained” (V 83). “The total equilibrium of forms to which we are habituated— phallic erection and regular beauty”—is always threatened, and, again, at essential moments—when we sleep, when we have sex, and when we die—we return to the horizontality of the animal (V 75). Although Bataille agrees with Freud that “human morality is linked to the urge to an erect posture that distinguishes the human being from the anthropomorphic ape” (V 36), he opposes Freud on the consequences of this precarious uprightness. For Freud, when man rises and reveals his genitals, he is ashamed of this exposure, whereas for Bataille, when man stands up and retracts his anus, he admires this posture and experiences an “aversion” for “the previous, stooped man and monkeys, then the entire animal kingdom” (C 73).48 In short, for Freud sublimation, renunciation, and repression are necessary for human society, even constitutive of it, whereas for Bataille we are always threatened by anal disorder, and we are badly mistaken if we believe that we can rise above our base materiality.49 These views on the nature of representation and the advent of man are extreme, notoriously so, but Bataille was also provoked by the cultural politics of the late 1920s and early 1930s—not only by his disputes with Bretonian Surrealists but also by the advocates of the retour à l’ordre, the widespread call after World War I to put all disruptive modernisms aside in favor of a traditional humanism. Bataille wanted nothing to do with this reactionary return, and he attacked its kitsch classicism again

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2.20 Announcement of Acéphale, a journal edited by Georges Bataille, June 1936.

and again.50 However, after the absolute destruction of World War II, his radical positions did not hold the same charge, and the militant anti-humanism of his prewar thought moderated into the exploration of the human-as-enigma in his postwar writings. As it did so, the valence of signature concepts like the informe and the base shifted as well. Finally, Bataille also revised his view of the sacred. Already in his dissident Surrealist days he regarded sacrifice as “a human action more significant than any other,” yet during this period he attended mostly to its effects on the individual—its “radical alteration of the person” and its release of his “heterogeneous elements” (V 73).51 However, by the mid-1930s the dominance of Fascism and Nazism prompted Bataille to stress the importance of the sacred for the collective; in fact he came to see sacred experience as essential to any social integration. Thus he dedicated two

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projects to its reactivation: the first, Acéphale (1936–39), was a strange secret society cum abortive publication scheme, while the second, the Collège de Sociologie (1937–39), was a failed philosophical society, and both were undertaken, in part, with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, whose Man and the Sacred (1939) was a key text for Bataille.52 Paradoxically, for all three thinkers, what animates the sacred and binds the social is ambivalence—the “elementary phenomena of attraction and repulsion” (CS 11).53 “There is a polarity in the sacred that corresponds to this polarity of society,” Caillois insisted in a 1938 text on brotherhoods. On the one hand, the taboos that define the sacred support “social cohesion”; on the other, the sacred depends on periodic violations of the rules of life” for its lifeblood (CS 152). (fig. 2.20) In this respect Bataille and company followed Marcel Mauss, who had already addressed the withering away of the sacred in modern society. Yet for the socialist Mauss this disenchantment was a progressive development, whereas for Bataille and Caillois it was a social catastrophe.54 For models of sacred experience they looked not only to “so-called primitive societies” but also to conservative institutions such as “churches, armies, brotherhoods, [and] secret societies”; in fact the Collège de Sociologie aimed to be “an elective community” in its own right (CS 11). This is where the politics of Bataille and Caillois became most problematic. Again, the Collège emerged at a moment of crisis (the precarious Popular Front government of Léon Blum had fallen in July 1937), and quixotically Bataille and Caillois presented this fledgling order as a hermetic alternative to both social democracy and Stalinist Communism: “Revolutions of a different sort must necessarily result from the present crisis of democratic governments,” Bataille insisted (CS xix). It is no wonder that the Collège fell apart with the outbreak of the war, no wonder, too, that its equivocal attitude to Fascism and Nazism was questioned both then and later.55 Nevertheless, even as Bataille and Caillois understood that these ideologies had perverted the sacrificial dimension of society, they also believed that they had tapped this neglected source to radical effect, and the Collège argued that other political systems must do so as well, albeit in different ways. For Bataille this task remained urgent after World War II with the triumph of corporate capitalism on the one side and Stalinist Communism on the other, neither of which allowed a place for sacred experience. What does all this have to do with the caves? Again, it was his encounter with prehistoric art that led Bataille to revise his understanding of representation, the

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human, and the sacred, and to do so in a manner that he believed to be pertinent to this postwar predicament. Thus he came to see representation not as destructive but as apparitional, not as a deforming of the object but as a making present of the other, even a making “marvelous” and “sovereign.”56 And rather than undercut an arrogant humanism, the informe and the base became terms with which to understand the ambiguous status of the human. If man still did not rise up once and for all, as in the origin story in Civilization and Its Discontents, at least he was no longer stuck in the mud, as in the advent tale in “The Big Toe.” In a sense, for the postwar Bataille the human was to be realigned with the Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères, neither high nor low but somehow both, equivocal, beastly and sovereign by turns, for such is his essential nature. Why did Bataille consider the reactivation of the sacred so necessary to postwar society? First, he placed sacred experience in direct opposition to the instrumental reason that had produced the world war, the Holocaust, and the Bomb. Lascaux “invites us to remember a time when human beings only wanted superiority over death,” Bataille argued, not the “utilitarian mastery” that is “peculiar to our times” (C 173). The subjugation of other creatures was the epitome of this debased rationality; “for us animals are things, which we precisely are not” (C 75).57 What Bataille leaves unspoken here is that human beings were also treated as beasts in the Holocaust. Implicitly, then, to reawaken a sense of the sacred alterity of the animals, so vivid in the caves, was also to work against this horrific reduction of human life to mere thingness.58 Second, Bataille believed that eroticism must be recharged along with the sacred. “Between prehistory and classical antiquity, sexual life went astray,” he writes in The Tears of Eros; it “lost its sacred character” and “became ankylose because of war and slavery”—it was only in the Paleolithic era, Bataille asserts, that mankind “seems to have escaped the horror” of such conditions (T 74, 59). This grand statement is his version of the Fall, and it is the opposite of the Christian one: the catastrophe is the dimming of sexuality, not its discovery. Bataille sought a path to the reversal of this dimming in the caves where eroticism was first celebrated. For Bataille the fate of religion was reciprocal to that of eroticism: it lost its erotic character and was reduced to “utilitarian morality” (T 74), the complement of the “utilitarian mastery” that he had already decried. In his view the erotic and the sacred are bound together

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because both depend on “the alternation of taboo and transgression” (E 71). Neither the erotic nor the sacred should be “settled” (réglée), for it is the “pattern of reciprocity” between taboo and transgression that animates both (E 212).59 On the one hand, taboo gives transgression its force, while, on the other, “transgression does not deny taboo but transcends it and completes it” (E 63).60 For Bataille the dissident Surrealist, transgression was an act of subversion of the law. However, after the war it too was positioned differently: it became a means of the reinscription of the law, or at least of an accommodation with it. “The chief concern in [the] earliest days” of the caves, Bataille argued now, was “to bring work and play, prohibition and transgression, the profane season and the riot of holiday, into a kind of delicate equilibrium” (L 38), and so, he implied, must it be the chief concern again in the latest days, which, threatened by nuclear holocaust, might also be the last days. At the end of his life Bataille stressed the utter necessity of this “continual re-creation” of taboo and transgression. Without such renewal he feared that we would not be able to cope with our “passion for destruction”; only through a recovery of sacred experience might we learn “to live on a par with death.” And art had a key role to play here: again, in Lascaux Bataille conceives art not only as a protest against utility but also as an act of “exuberance” (L 27, 24), as a way to discharge the excess energy that any economy must “spend without profit.” For Bataille there were only two opposed ways that this discharge could occur—“gloriously,” as in art, or “catastrophically,” as in war (AS 21, 23). Finally, according to Bataille, to recover a sense of the sacred was to reclaim a relation to sovereignty. Recall his account of the double position of the animal of the caves as both beast and god. Crucially, in neither position is the animal subject to taboo: the animal as beast is below the law, and the animal as god is above it. In acts of transgression and in performances of ritual (such as those recorded on the cave walls) man is in touch with both positions—with the instinctual world of raw sensation on the one hand and with the heterogeneous world of divine sovereignty on the other.61 And from this double perspective man can see through the law, so to speak; that is, he can see that, first and last, it is a matter of power seized and authority proclaimed. For Bataille we must come to terms with this fact: that law is founded on violence more than on justice, on might more than on right. In his Acéphale program he not only underscores this tragic complicity but also affirms it. For obvi-

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ous reasons Bataille was more circumspect after the war, yet he still believed that the question of sovereignty, especially its dynamic whereby violence and law are intertwined, could not be ignored. Fascism and Nazism had produced “an acute reactivation of the latent sovereign agency” (V 149), Bataille insisted; now this agency had to be transformed, not denied, as social democracies had attempted to do.62 At the same time one could not return to “the religious and royal edifice” of the past; “we can only go further,” and one way to go further was to go back—to revisit the caves, “to make them . . . live again in ourselves” (AS 228, L 50). Not in the manner of “the eternal present” proposed by modernist humanists like Sigfried Giedion, but in the mode of “an indefinite time,” a preposterous time, in which the present recaptures the prehistorical in a “continual re-creation” of the erotic, the sacred, and the sovereign. Thus the way to stave off the imminent end of man was to turn to his putative origin. Such is the positive barbarism proposed by Bataille. This is why Bataille stresses our participation in the caves, however imagined it must be. “Something touches us, we are stirred by it, as though in sympathy with the rhythms of a dance” (L 130). The “indefinite time” of the caves can be our time too, he argues, if we are somehow able to re-enact its enigmas as our mysteries, and use this mythical past to rejuvenate our world. Unlike Dubuffet, Bataille understands that this ground is unstable from the start, and he makes a virtue of this quality: the birth of man and art is a “perpetual birth”; there is no one beginning but only “a beginning-again” (L 10). Rather than resolve the riddle of the Well and the Sorcerer, Bataille invites us to use the “obscure contradiction” therein “to guarantee” a regenerative “disorder in our thinking.” That these images constitute “the most tragic . . . among the enigmas of our species” is precisely their value: they can help us come to terms with the equivocal position of the human (T 52). Yet to conclude here is to leave Bataille on his own terms. If, to his great merit, he “brought to light the hidden link between bare life and sovereignty,” Giorgio Agamben has argued, Bataille also left it “entirely bewitched in the ambiguous circle of the sacred”; that is, he did not think the connection specifically enough in political terms.63 To be sure, Bataille intimates a relation between the camps and the caves: both are sites of sacrifice, of limit experience.64 But that view might be both offensive and apolitical, for in the end sovereignty is about actual power more than it is about sacred experience. This point is underscored by Jean Améry, resistance member,

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torture victim, camp survivor, and eventual suicide, in At the Mind’s Limits (1966). In a passage that is a partial riposte to Bataille, Améry argues that, at its extreme, sovereignty find its truth in a “murderous self-realization” that takes the form of “the radical negation of the other.”65 Finally, closer to our concerns here, there is the question of transgression to confront once more. I have argued that, unlike Dubuffet, Bataille is conscious of the paradox that transgression completes taboo; hence it does not become a double bind for him as it does for Dubuffet. But does Bataille move beyond this logic of transgression as the reinscription of the law in order to arrive at conception of its remaking? The task is not simply to restore the law, as transgression usually does, but to reinscribe it differently, not simply to delight in disorder anarchically or to clamp down on it repressively, but to turn its disruption to a new configuration of community. Such is the opportunity in any period of great turmoil—to turn political emergency into structural change. What form might this “moral creation” take? Bataille points us to this crucial question but not to a valid answer.

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3.1 Asger Jorn in front of his painting Letter to My Son, 1956–57.

3| Asger Jorn and His Creatures In the late 1940s several young artists in Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam came together under the name “Cobra,” an acronym of the cities where they were based as well as a tribute to the snake they adopted as a totem. Already during World War II a group of painters and sculptors in Copenhagen had formed around the magazine Helhesten (Hell Horse), which was edited by Asger Jorn (he was twentyseven when the first issue appeared in 1941).1 (fig. 3.1) Encouraged by this example, three upstarts in Amsterdam—Constant Nieuwenhuys, Karel Appel, and Corneille— launched “the Experimental Group in Holland” in 1948 with a magazine called Reflex. Finally, in Brussels, where Surrealism lingered as a force, young writers directed the scene, especially Christian Dotrement, who would soon edit the eponymous magazine Cobra. Jorn met Constant in the fall of 1946 and contacted Dotrement the next summer. By late 1948 the three were able to forge a coalition, one that, as fragile as it was intense, lasted a little more than three years. Despite ample evidence of the Stalin purges, the three refused to abandon Communism, and they insisted on dialectical materialism as essential to artistic experiment. They were linked, too, in their opposition to both formalist and functionalist positions in modernist art and architecture. Jorn reacted against his training under Fernand Léger and his association with Le Corbusier in Paris, and Constant turned against his Dutch forebears in de Stijl. At the same time Jorn and Constant wanted to depart from Surrealism, aspects of which—a painterly automatism above all—they adopted nonetheless.2 “By means of this irrational spontaneity,” Jorn wrote in the first issue of Cobra, “we get closer to the vital source of life.”3 Does the aim of “the vital source of life” make Cobra a belated Expressionism, one inflected by primitivism and Surrealism, or is there a distinctive program to be extracted from its different practices, a Cobra idea? Its concern with the arts of tribal people, children, and the insane is familiar from prewar avant-gardes, and the Cobra involvement with folk culture—Jorn in particular was fascinated by Nordic myths, Viking monuments, medieval frescoes, rural churches, as well as flea-market

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3.2 KAREL APPEL, The Cry of Freedom, 1948. Oil on canvas, 39 1⁄2 × 31 1⁄2 inches. Fondation Karel Appel, Amsterdam.

paintings—does not specify the group adequately either. However, one attribute does distinguish Cobra: its special penchant for the animal or, better, the creaturely. Such, in any case, is my thesis here.4 Consider The Cry of Freedom (1948) by Karel Appel. As often with Dubuffet, the painting presents a figure full in the canvas. (fig. 3.2) Barely contained by the cage of the frame, this semi-avian thing is made of a patchwork of hot reds, yellows, and oranges relieved by swatches of cool blues and greens. The schematic head, its simple features blocked out in flat black, confronts us as if in terror. The asymmetrical wings are deformed and useless; though they are pink like flesh, they resemble stubby claws, and they fail to protect the tiny body, which is propped up on three spindly legs. Neither bird nor animal nor human, it is all three: a newfangled beast whose “cry of freedom” seems to announce a damaged past as much as a transformed future. It is as though the Angelus Novus (1920) of Paul Klee, made soon after World War I, were reborn not long after World War II, but changed from an apocalyptic avatar to a mutant phoenix.5

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3.3 CONSTANT, Erotic Moment, 1949. Ink and watercolor on paper, 23 1⁄2 × 24 1⁄4 inches. Fondation Constant, Utrecht.

Or consider Erotic Moment (1949) by Constant, a watercolor produced in the same year as his polemic “Our Own Desires Build the Revolution,” which was published in the fourth issue of Cobra. (fig. 3.3) A lewd picture dominated by fecal browns, it appears to show two figures commingled sexually, in a Bataillean eroticism that transforms discrete bodies into charged parts that are ecstatically exchanged. A wild-eyed creature raises its arms exultantly; one arm begins as an obscene nose, the other ends in a paw of three digits. Meanwhile its partner, head thrown back, sticks a penile tongue into its mouth, despite the fact that this figure is marked as female by the large vulva located at its center and the long wave of hair down its back. Although gender ambiguity is a staple in Duchamp, Giacometti, and others, the force of this confusion is different here: not a frustrated search for the lost object of sexual desire à la Bretonian Surrealism, but an unbridled expression of revolutionary passion à la Cobra. How to understand such figures, which are altogether typical of Cobra art? A first clue can be found in a 1948 manifesto by Constant, who frames the postwar

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condition, in dialectical terms, as a “total collapse” that might yet permit a “new freedom,” as long as artists “find their way back to the first point of origin of creative activity.”6 In his own search for a zero degree of art (a move we are familiar with by now), Constant, like Dubuffet, champions “expressions from the untaught”—again, the modernist trio of primitive, child, and insane (who are well represented in Cobra). But then, like Bataille, he refers enigmatically to postwar man as “a creature” and delivers this striking definition: “A painting is not a construction of colors and lines, but an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these.”7 Here Constant overturns the formalist formula of modernist painting presented sixty years before by Maurice Denis (“Remember that a painting—before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote—is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order”), and intimates that the creaturely is a cipher of the confused aftermath of the war, of a “broken down” condition in which “limitations . . . are dissolved”—in effect, a condition of emergency.8 Jorn rises to the challenge: “We must portray ourselves as human beasts,” he writes Constant in 1950.9 Jorn identifies with the creaturely as fully as Bataille does with the animal. If we pull back for perspective, we can see Cobra as an artistic intervention in the postwar debate about humanism, one that engaged preeminent thinkers of the time, above all Sartre, who insisted that his existentialism was a humanism, and Heidegger, who dismissed both viewpoints as metaphysical.10 For far too long, Heidegger argued, Western thought had defined the human in its difference from the animal (the familiar distinction that man possesses language and reason, whereas the animal does not), and this “anthropological machine” subjected the natural world to instrumental abuse. At the same time Heidegger refused any celebration of the animal as a counter-term to the human; whereas the stone is world-less and the animal is poor in world, he declared famously, man alone is world-making. Elsewhere Heidegger charged Rainer Maria Rilke, in his eighth Duino Elegy, with the gross misunderstanding that animals are closer to Being than man is, however blinded man might otherwise be.11 Had Heidegger known Cobra, he would have condemned it on the same grounds, for it too valued the animal as more immediate than the human to “the vital source of life.” Not only do the pained expression in The Cry of Freedom and the primal ecstasy in Erotic Moment proclaim as much, but so does the symbol of the movement as a whole, the cobra about to strike.

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3.4 ASGER JORN, Wounded Beast II, 1951. Oil on board, 39 1⁄3 × 36 1⁄4 inches. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark.

Yet this creatureliness is no simple recovery of a lost nature, for it also attests to the denaturing caused by the world war, the Holocaust, and the Bomb. Sometimes Cobra creatures convey an irredeemable anguish. This is especially strong in Jorn, who stresses vulnerability in his figures, not, like Constant, voluptuousness. Wounded Beast II (1951) is another misshapen bird from the Cobra menagerie, also painted full in the frame and pressed close to the picture plane. (fig. 3.4) With a large head atop a little body, it appears in profile under a black sun, its whiskered beak haggard, its yellow eye crazed, its wings like limp flaps of dead flesh. This is not the only painting in which Jorn turns the eagle, the emblem of state power par excellence, into a terror-struck bird of prey. In this version, however, the world at large appears wounded, as the facture of the painting ravages everything within its range. Here Jorn answers the Constant call for a painting as “an animal, a night, a scream, a human being, or all of these.” In fact this definition (if anything so anti-formal can count as such) speaks to his Cobra practice in general, and frequently his version of the creaturely is “all of these”—a nocturnal animal and an anguished human in one. This is our first clue as to what the creature is in Jorn. Although the word once referred to the Creation of God, here it resumes its modern meaning as an aberration produced by man. Like Prospero’s Caliban or Frankenstein’s monster, the creature is not a natural animal but a distorted human, an object of power first and a figure of freedom only second, one that emerges as such only when “limitations” are “dissolved.” To borrow the Bataillean language of the previous chapter, the creature in Jorn suggests an impossible hybrid of beast and sovereign.12

Human Animal Jorn frames his work of this period in Expressionist terms as an attempt to reclaim a primal unity before any psychic repression or social division, and in the FreudoMarxist idiom of the time he ascribes this fall to a bourgeois class order. Yet his painting is not truly Expressionist: usually his gestures, both depicted and painterly, express little more than futility as gestures, as marks of presence or vehicles of feeling.13 Meanwhile, his philosophy is a hodgepodge of original notions and received ideas. The bad object of this thought is monolithic enough, “the classical tradition,”

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by which Jorn means all European culture given over to Apollonian form, and here, of course, he follows the familiar critique presented by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). On the other hand, its good object is multiple: sometimes Jorn calls it Dionysian rhythm, but he is just as likely to associate it with tribal art or folk culture, Taoist philosophy or dialectical materialism. First and last Jorn advocates any expression that advances materialist vitality over idealist fixity (once more he is affined with Dubuffet and Bataille). In this regard Jorn acts in the name of Scandinavian culture above all; in his view the Nordic is the great other to the classical, at once marginal to it and subversive of it.14 In particular he champions the pagan vernacular of the North developed by the peasantry in opposition to the official Christianity of the South imported by the nobility. It is this commitment that drives not only his Cobra practice, both visual and textual, but also his project to reclaim the idea of the Nordic from its racist abuse in the negative barbarism of the Nazis. This project would later include his founding of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (it lasted but four years), which oversaw his plan for up to thirty-two volumes devoted to “10,000 Years of Nordic Art” (only six of these were completed, and only one published in his lifetime). The vandal, especially the Viking, is his great anti-classical hero.15 It is this passionate anti-classicism that accounts for the extreme ugliness of his art, which Jorn pits with great relish against normative beauty (this is another point held in common with Dubuffet and Bataille). Already in a 1947 text titled “Apollo or Dionysius” Jorn proposes Dionysian rhythm as a counter to Apollonian form in such a way that the Dionysian not only animates the Apollonian but also overwhelms it. Again this line of thought follows The Birth of Tragedy, where Nietzsche presents Apollo as “the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis” and Dionysus as its “shattering.” If “individuation is the root of all evil” for Nietzsche, so it is too for Jorn.16 This is evident in his painting, which often stages its own modernist deconstruction of the opposition of figure and ground, the principle of individuation in picture-making. But it is also strong in his philosophy, which involves a critique of bourgeois distinctions in society as well as an advocacy of collective forms of art. His practice as a whole suggests a Marxist repurposing of the reactionary idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art.17

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3.5 ASGER JORN, Untitled (Raphael’s Angels), c. 1949. Ink on postcard, 3 1⁄2 × 5 1⁄2 inches. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

In fact all his Cobra production is a concerted attack on classical aesthetics, which for Jorn is also to say on classed aesthetics.18 Well before his Situationist reworkings of flea-market paintings known as “modifications” and “disfigurations,” he produced Cobra deformations of the classical tableau (if only in postcard size), and he did so primarily through creaturely eruptions. (fig. 3.5) “We are for decomposition,” Jorn wrote as early as 1947, “the destruction of classical composition.”19 What the classical tableau means here is simple enough. “A well-composed tableau is a whole contained under a single point of view,” Diderot wrote in the essay on composition in his Encyclopédie (1751–72), “in which the parts work together to one end, and form by their mutual correspondence a unity as real as that of the members of the body of an animal; so that a piece of painting made up of a large number of figures thrown at random on to the canvas, with neither proportion, intelligence nor unity, no more deserves to be called a true composition than scattered studies of legs, nose and eyes on the same cartoon deserve to called a portrait or even a human figure.”20 It is against this idealist model of the integral painting—which,

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significantly for us, turns on the analogy of “the body of an animal”—that Jorn poses his materialist pictures of disruptive creatures. The creaturely in Jorn is thus a matter of form as well as content, and it bears importantly on reception too, for to disrupt the ideal composition of the tableau is also potentially to disrupt the ideal composure of the viewer.21 Jorn has other targets in his sights as well, such as the tableau as reinstated by the reactionary protocols of Socialist Realism. Like some of his colleagues, he called his Cobra work “painterly realism” in defiance of such party-line painting.22 Two points should be underscored here. First, this decomposition is not due to any lack of skill (any more than the informe figures in the caves are for Bataille). Schooled in composition under Léger, Jorn performs a calculated deskilling of the tableau, to which end he puts his own uncouth facture, which is sometimes spiked with comic graffiti and scrawled text—further violations of the integral picture. Like his Danish predecessors Egill Jacobsen and Richard Mortenson, Jorn releases color from drawing, and his palette favors the dim light of the Nordic over the bright clarity of the Mediterranean.23 Especially in his Cobra years he paints a sublunary world of nocturnal creatures, as in The Moon and the Animals (1950); sometimes, too, as in Wounded Beast II, he places his formless figures under a black sun. (fig. 3.6) This is to advance another basic confusion, here of day and night, and another détournement of the classical, here of its Apollonian clarity. Second, this critique is not nihilistic: Jorn launches it largely from within the tableau, for only within this format can it be truly effective. Thus, as much as Jorn challenges the tradition of the tableau, he is also invested in it (here is another affinity with Dubuffet, to which we will return). “The future is made through relinquishing or sacrificing the past,” Jorn writes in “Detourned Painting” (1959). “I want to rejuvenate European culture. I begin with art. Our past is full of becoming. One needs only to crack open the shells.”24 Already at the moment of Cobra, then, his goal is the détournement of painting, not its destruction. And yet this détournement is brutal, given that it breaks with most of the classical criteria noted by Diderot: single point of view, pictorial integration, “true composition,” and so on. It also targets most of the academic genres of traditional painting. (As we have seen, this is true of Dubuffet too, yet whereas he overrides the genre divisions of painting in the service of a “general concept,” Jorn does so in the interest of a collective practice.)

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3.6 ASGER JORN, The Moon and the Animals, 1950. Oil on board, 18 1⁄2 × 24 inches. Pierre Alechinsky Collection.

The creaturely disturbance of landscape is already announced, in composition, palette, and title, in Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist Is Proved by Their Existence (1939–40), in which Jorn attempts to turn the idioms of Picasso and Miró toward his own disruptive ends. (fig. 3.7) Yet his subversion is less static and more radical a decade later in Shameful Pastoral (1952) where the ordering of space is undone by the hybrid creatures that swim, fly, and graze through it. (fig. 3.8) Traditionally the pastoral designates a scene in which common folk serve as a foil for elevated subjects, but here there is only a commingling of mutants, most of which are painted in the pinkish white of human flesh and all of which possess too many heads, legs, or wings. Together they enact the “shameful pastoral” of the title in a way that indicates a final rotting of this classical ideal of rural life.25 Jorn also undoes the exalted genre of history painting from within, most directly in his series of “Historical Pictures” (1949–50). He mocks all nobility of action in titles such as Nelson Orders the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 and Foreign Ambassador Presents a Jet Fighter to the Nation as a Gift, and the depicted scenes

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3.7 ASGER JORN, Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist Is Proved by Their Existence, 1939-40. Oil on canvas, 29 1⁄2 × 39 1⁄4 inches. Vejle Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

derange the ideal figures of history painting as well. (figs. 3.9, 3.10) In Nelson Orders the Bombardment heads are dominated by maws and faces are plunged into bodies, while the protagonists of Foreign Ambassador resemble so many bats and harpies.26 Although both paintings call to mind a monstrous crucifixion by a Hieronymous Bosch reborn as an Expressionist, Guernica is the proximate precedent. Yet the view of history in Jorn is even more caustic than in Picasso, precisely because it refuses any redemptive pathos; even its humor is scabrous. This nastiness is also strong in The Retreat at Dybbøl, 1864, a muddy mess of a painting, in which the putative subject, the defeat of the Danish army during the Second War of Schleswig, is imagined as an animalistic regression. (fig. 3.11) As in his other mock history paintings, Jorn treats a past episode as a scene not of edification but of degradation, one that seems personal as well as national (this is often the case with Dubuffet too). As the mad gazes of the creatures suggest, this dark world is given over to an atavistic anxiety, a primal paranoia of predator and prey. The series of “War Visions” from the same years (1949–50) is no less horrific. Like Wounded Beast II, The Eagle’s Share I

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3.8 ASGER JORN, Shameful Pastoral, 1952. Oil on board, 63 × 41 1⁄4 inches. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

3.9 ASGER JORN, Nelson Orders the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, 1949–50. Oil on board, 19 × 24 inches. Whereabouts unknown.

transforms this emblem of state, which cuts across the opposed ideologies of the twentieth century, into a multi-headed dragon, all eyes, talons, and teeth. (fig. 3.12) “There is a rage and a fear in this painting,” Jorn remarked in retrospect, “that I have never felt since.”27 In 1957 Jorn began Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or the Mad Laughter of Courage, which he toiled over intermittently till 1972; roughly ten by sixteen feet, it is his largest painting. (fig. 3.13) The title refers to the terrible battle of attrition waged by German and Soviet armies outside Stalingrad in 1943, a turning point in World War II, and the painting shows a scarred terrain of strokes and scrapes, in which the bright yellow and blue scribbles only highlight the icy white and black expanse. Here the horrors of the modern period have rendered history painting null and void, as Stalingrad is a world scored and scratched into illegibility, a painting in which representation (originally it included imagery) is pushed beyond abstraction into destruction (we saw this connection in Dubuffet and Bataille as well).28 Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely in its illegibility that Stalingrad can be said to succeed as a history

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3.10 ASGER JORN, Foreign Ambassador Presents a Jet Fighter to the Nation as a Gift, 1949–50. Oil on board, 24 × 29 1⁄2 inches. Whereabouts unknown.

painting, for it captures the withering away of such experience (recall Benjamin on this new poverty: “who really knows how to tell a story” anymore?).29 Here Jorn executes a negation of history painting as well as a détournement of abstraction, the one through the other: on the one hand, history painting is both cancelled and preserved; on the other, the language of Abstract Expressionism is compelled to evoke the very history that it otherwise declined to depict. Given the importance of the human figure to the classical tableau, Jorn does his greatest damage in this genre, and again it comes largely through the creaturely. Consider Interplanetary Woman (1953). (fig. 3.14) A white mess topped by a misshapen head with yellow eyes, she looms like a comic ghost subject to a gravity different from our own, while the weird thing below her, painted in alien yellow, suggests a shrunken offspring. (Jorn often includes such homunculi in his images, again as if to mock any “principle of individuation.”) Our gaze is sluiced around the picture along with the paint, in a Dionysian rhythm that roils any Apollonian form and

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3.11 ASGER JORN, The Retreat at Dybbøl, 1864, 1950. Oil on board, 24 × 29 inches. Whereabouts unknown.

effects a visual nausea. Even more creaturely is the figure in You’ll Never Get Me Alive (1954), a monster with a huge maw. Here as elsewhere Jorn pushes proper form toward obscene formlessness—obscene in the sense that this figure almost exceeds its frame, almost overrides the scene that stages it.30 This reading is supported by the note that Jorn, along with Dotrement, scrawled on the back of the painting (at the time the two friends were tuberculosis patients at a sanitarium in Silkeborg, Denmark): “To our families and adorable fiancées, to priests, merchants, and all other sharks, we have the pleasure of informing you, in all modesty, of our refusal to participate in the struggle for existence.” It is not only the formlessness of such a creature that disturbs the academic genre of the figure; also disruptive is the intensity of its gaze (not to mention the aggression of its mouth).31 Although this is programmatic in Yellow Eyes (1953), a swirl of acrid colors punctuated by the shrill orbs of the title, it is also active in other pictures of beasts with wild looks that render aesthetic contemplation all but

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3.12 ASGER JORN, The Eagle’s Share I, 1950. Oil on board, 44 1⁄4 × 48 3⁄4 inches. Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Alborg, Denmark.

3.13 ASGER JORN, Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or the Mad Laughter of Courage, 1957–72. 115 × 193 3⁄4 inches. Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

impossible. (fig. 3.15) Let me approach this disruption in this way. For Lacan the fundamental aim of all painting is not to fool the eye with illusion but to tame the gaze with attention, not trompe-l’oeil but dompte-regard. He does not mean our individual vision, at least in the first instance, but rather the gaze of the world, that is, the very light that allows any sentient being to see at all. Lacan describes this ambient light as awful—“pulsatile, dazzling, and spread out”—and it is only by means of images that we can manipulate and moderate its obscene radiance.32 In this painting it is as though Jorn strives to reverse this basic function of picturing as pacifying; it is as if his pictures are obscene also in the sense that they tear at painting understood as a protective screen or a sublimatory scene. This is another primordial convention of art challenged by one of my figures, and Jorn is not alone here (remember the Medusan Minerva of Dubuffet).33 This effect—of painting thrown open, via the creaturely, to the untamed gaze of the world—is intimated in pictures from The Face of the Earth (1948) to Untitled (Faces in a Head) (circa 1960), where the exalted head, the paragon of form in traditional art, the seat of pure vision and lofty intellection, becomes an inchoate ground where form is undone.34 (fig. 3.16)

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3.14 ASGER JORN, Interplanetary Woman, 1953. Oil on canvas, 39 3⁄4 × 32 inches. Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Alborg, Denmark. 3.15 ASGER JORN, Yellow Eyes, 1953. Oil on board, 24 1⁄2 × 20 1⁄4 inches. Galerie van de Loo, Munich.

Finally, the creaturely in Jorn often calls up the foul—a further defiling not only of beauty but also of order. He gives generic names like “Brute” and “Troll” to some of his beasts, and invents mythical terms such as “Falbo” and “Aganak” for others. In the eponymous series (1950–51) Aganak shape-shifts as pig, tortoise, alligator, beetle, and so on. (fig. 3.17) This creature suggests a lowly being of pollution, one subject to ritual prohibition. “Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong,” Mary Douglas writes in Purity and Danger (1966), her great text on the operations of taboo. “And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused.”35 Such confusion abounds in Jorn, who seems to take Leviticus, the Old Testament book that lays down the law about unclean food, as a script for his taboo-defying creature-making. Taboos focus on things that frustrate classification, Douglas tell us, and her examples are pertinent here: “Eels and worms inhabit water, though not as fish; reptiles go on dry land, though not as quadrupeds; some insects fly, though not as birds. There is no order in them. Recall what the prophecy of Habakkuk says of them: ‘For those makest men like the fish of the sea, like crawling things that have no ruler’.”36 Why create such lawless beings?, Habakkuk demands of God. In his own way Jorn affirms this disorder with his mutants, which

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3.16 ASGER JORN, Untitled (Faces in a Head), c. 1960. Oil on board, 19 3⁄4 × 27 1⁄2 inches. Petzel Gallery, New York.

3.17 ASGER JORN, Life, 1952. Oil on board, 15 3⁄4 × 23 5⁄8 inches. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark.

are almost the opposite of totems. If totems are animal avatars used by a social group to separate its members, these creatures effect the opposite of such speciation. For example, in The Moon and the Animals the bird on the left is semi-reptilian, with scales on its head, while the animal on the right is semi-human, bipedal as it appears to be. And in Shameful Pastoral humans seem to combine with animals and both with fish and plant life in a violation of the most fundamental distinctions of all.37 Here the Diderotian ideal of the tableau as a perfect body is not merely defied—it is defiled.

Positive Negation What moves Jorn to produce such creatures? Already toward the end of the war his paintings are dominated by creaturely masks, which he associates generally with primitive art. In order “to express psychic experiences in dramatic form,” Jorn writes at this time, tribal artists “bring before the face a mask, which is wholly

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different from a face. A totally new creature comes into being, neither animal nor human.”38 At this point Jorn still refers such representations to “human psychic needs”; in other words, he sees them in existential, even ontological terms. However, he also suggests that his motives are particular: even as “the folk tales and myths speak of monsters, fantastic animals and signs,” Jorn tells Constant in 1950, “they are always symbols of people, of real phenomena.”39 Certainly the Cobra period was a time of great strain for Jorn personally; in extreme poverty he developed tuberculosis, which kept him in the sanitarium from spring 1951 to fall 1952. It was also a period of great tension politically; as evoked in The Pact of Predators, Jorn viewed the NATO agreement of April 1949 as a locking-in of the treacherous antagonism of the Cold War (he produced several works on the theme of entangled enemies during this period). (fig. 3.18) And the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 pointed to yet another world conflagration, which threatened to be final because nuclear. Jorn evokes both registers of crisis, private and public, through his creatures, which often appear sickly or mutant; sometimes, too, they are foul in the sense given by Douglas. (fig. 3.19) His central text on these matters is “The Human Animal” (1950–51), which Jorn was prompted to write by critics who associated him with Kafka (he had translated several Kafka stories into Danish a decade before). Here Jorn rejects the dominant account of Kafka as an existentialist, a reading that depoliticized the writings in his view. Rather than clichés of angst, Jorn sees characters such as Gregor Samsa in relation to ancient traditions of “the human animal.” He notes that many cultures, in Europe and America as well as Egypt, India, and Persia, represented gods as “half human, half animal”; however, in the Western Middle Ages these same figures were transformed into “devilish representatives of evil.”40 What motivated the reversal? “Why does the dragon continue to be the holy sign of China and the Orient,” Jorn asks (perhaps with the cobra also in mind), “while the dragon killer has become the most popular symbol of the West, the symbol of the struggle against ‘evil’?”41 This is a Bataillean question, and, like Bataille, Jorn insisted on the transitive nature of value. The truth of the human animal, he insists, is “a continuous movement from state to state, from good to evil and back again.”42 Although this truth was occluded in modern culture, it is glimpsed by Kafka, who transforms some of his characters “into an animal state” in order to reveal it. For Jorn the creatures in Kafka are plagued by a failure to love altruistically, that is, to bond socially (there is

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3.18 ASGER JORN, The Pact of Predators, 1950. Oil on board, 46 3⁄4 × 48 1⁄4 inches. Esjberg Kunstmuseum, Denmark.

a missed encounter between people in each of the stories that he translated). Certainly this creaturely metamorphosis is a form of punishment, as it is in many folk tales (Jorn refers to Pinocchio in particular), but it is also a matter of “pleasure, even redemption,” since it involves a release not only from “the fear of the bestial” but also from “the curse of the good.”43 (Recall that Bataille saw a similar release in the therianthropic figures in the caves such as the Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères, a figure that also fascinated Jorn, who included it in The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune [1957], his study of such beings in cult and myth.) (fig. 3.20) Jorn terms such creaturely transformation a “positive negation” of the human, one that discloses “the dynamic relativity of good and evil.”44 Clearly he intends this negation in his work too. It is his primary response to the Cobra call to tap “the vital source of life” and to touch “the origin of creative activity.” At the same time it is his distinctive version of the materialist equivocality that we saw in Dubuffet and Bataille too (we will see it again in Paolozzi and Oldenburg). However, Jorn answers this call in a manner that suggests that this source has become both remote from us and distorted by us.

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3.19 ASGER JORN, The Golden Swine, War Vision, 1950. Oil on canvas, 19 3⁄4 × 39 1⁄2 inches. Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark.

Let me elaborate on this positive negation of the human through two juxtapositions. First, I will set Jorn alongside Bataille on the human animal in the same years, with an eye to a particular aspect of Bataillean thought broached in the previous chapter. Then I will consider Jorn in light of recent reflections on the creaturely as a symptom of a crisis in the symbolic order, reflections that are indebted to Bataille and anticipated by Jorn. Once again these two concerns converge on the enigmatic question of origins—here the origins of sovereignty and law. Although Jorn did not cite Bataille, he did know some of the writings, and they do share several commitments: a rejection of classical humanism, in part through an exploration of the informe; a critique of all idealisms (which for Bataille included the elevated idea of Surrealism advanced by Breton, and for Jorn the academic painting of Surrealism associated with Magritte); and a notion of art as expenditure (if Bataille theorized excess, Jorn practiced it: his output of paintings and writings was enormous).45 Most salient here, however, is a common fascination with the human animal. As we know, this interest was reignited for Bataille in the early 1950s by the publication of Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art by the Abbé Henri Breuil. In the prehistoric images in southern France and northern Spain, Bataille argues, we see not only “the birth of art” but also “the passage from animal to man.”46 Yet this “decisive step” is a paradoxical one, for sometimes humanity is “not clearly distinguished from

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3.20 A spread from Asger Jorn, Guldhorn og lykkehjul (The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune), 1957.

animality” in the caves, or, more precisely, sometimes early man “disguised” his humanity at the very moment he claimed it: recall the stick man in Lascaux with the face of a bird or the horned men at Les Trois Frères with the heads and hooves of bison and stags.47 “What seems to be fundamental is the rejection of our face,” Bataille notes; Paleolithic man “masked the face of which we are proud, and he flaunted that which our clothes conceal,” that is, his sex. In the very instant that man “prevailed” over the animal, he “apologized” for the domination and blurred the difference.48 Thus, according to Bataille, was the status of the animal fraught for early man: positioned above the human as well as below, the animal was seen as “more holy— more holy, which is to say more sacred, more divine.”49 “Nothing is more common” in prehistoric art (and, Jorn would add, in non-classical art) than the representation of “a god in the form of an animal”: for early man “the animal had . . . [a] divine quality that the human form could not have expressed.”50 Again, this enigmatic connection between animal and god is a leitmotif in Bataille, who was fascinated by the shared

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alterity of beast and sovereign to man, and Jorn was too, if less explicitly.51 At times both thinkers frame this “heterogeneity” in ontological terms; recall that for Jorn the equivocal “truth” of man resides in “a continuous movement from state to state.” However, this ontological orientation was pressured by historical events: just as Bataille first focused on sovereignty during the period of Fascism and Nazism, so Jorn foregrounded the creaturely soon after the catastrophes of the world war and the Holocaust and in the midst of the everyday terror of the Cold War, which is also to say during the continued failure of European humanism to address such disasters. It was this predicament that led Jorn, like Bataille, to seek “a new, true foundation” for artistic culture and human society alike.52 This leads us to the creaturely in recent discourse. Over the last two decades the Bataillean question of the connection between animal and god, beast and king, has returned in critical theory. As developed by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben, this inquiry is concerned with the foundation of law and the nature of sovereignty, both of which are markers of “the passage from animal to man.” More precisely, it is concerned with the lack of any solid basis for these institutions (which renders the passage anything but definitive), at least any basis that is not produced in violence, the sheer violence of self-authorized power. It is this paradox that intrigues these philosophers: that the beginnings of law and sovereignty might lie in an exception to the just rule that they otherwise purport to secure and to represent. Before his death in 2004 Derrida devoted his seminars to the beast and the sovereign.53 What interests Derrida is that, even though the two are opposites—the one lowly, the other supreme, the one beneath the law, the other above it—they share an exteriority to human society, which has often led the one to be represented in the guise of the other: the prince as wolf, the lion as king. The most celebrated instance of this unexpected convergence is the image of the ruler as Leviathan in the eponymous tract by Hobbes of 1651, though Bataille would point to cave paintings and Jorn to Scandinavian carvings. His volume on twelfth-century stone sculpture in southern Sweden includes a representation of a king gnawed by two lions and another bitten by two snakes, which we might take to image this belonging-togetherin-opposition of sovereign and beast.54 (fig. 3.21) In any case, it is in this “mutual attraction” of the two that Derrida seeks a key to the greater mystery of the foundation of law, or, again, the absence of any such basis.55

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3.21 A spread from Asger Jorn, Skånes stenskulptur under 1100-talet (12th-Century Stone Sculptures of Scania), 1965.

Here Derrida is close to Agamben, who elaborated on sovereign power and bare life in Homo Sacer (1995). “Bare life,” Agamben writes in a well-known definition, is “the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who may be killed and yet not sacrificed.”56 This man is sacred only in the antithetical sense of the word long lost to us, that is, he is accursed, at the mercy of all. In Roman society homo sacer was the lowest of the low, yet as such he was also the complement of the highest of the high. “At the two extreme limits of the order,” Agamben writes, “the sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns.”57 Essentially, what the doubling of sovereign and beast is in Derrida, the doubling of sovereign and homo sacer is in Agamben—a riddle that points to how power is founded in a primordial yoking of violence and law. And it is this “knot”—the ruler as “the point of indistinction between violence and law,” “the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence”—that both thinkers attempt to tease out.58

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This is not a new riddle. It is central to Western political thought from Aristotle on man as the political animal, through Hobbes and Rousseau on the passage from the state of nature to the commonwealth and the social contract respectively, to Benjamin on the inextricability of law and violence, Bataille on the heterogeneous status of the sovereign and, above all, Carl Schmitt on the exception to the law that founds the law.59 In Schmitt this exception is not a primordial act lost in the mists of time; it recurs whenever a government declares a state of emergency and suspends its own judicial codes. This is largely why we have seen a Schmittian turn in political theory and cultural criticism in recent years, for once again we live in a time when emergency is more the norm than the exception.60 Where is the creaturely in this discourse? As Eric Santner defines it, the eruption of the creaturely in art or literature signals a decreation in the human order, a crisis in which life appears “abandoned to the state of exception/emergency.”61 This is close to Agamben on bare life, yet, almost alone in this discourse, Santner thinks this condition from the position of homo sacer—from the place of the beast, as it were, on “the threshold where life takes on its specific biopolitical intensity, where it assumes the cringed posture of the creature.”62 In his own way Jorn evokes such a condition for us. For Santner this cringe is produced by “exposure to a traumatic dimension of political power,” when life becomes a direct matter of politics and politics penetrates the very matter of life.63 Such penetration is obscene, to be sure, but in its very deformation of the subject it can also be revelatory, for power is revealed in this exposure, and potentially it is revealed as groundless (or at least as not grounded in justice). Unlike the beast, then, the creaturely is not the double of the sovereign so much as the object-turned-witness of its violence. There is a political knowledge to be gained here, and, paradoxically, perhaps a revolutionary delight as well (Benjamin speaks ambiguously of “the ecstasy of the creature”).64 “What I am calling creaturely life,” Santner writes, “is the life that is, so to speak, called into being, ex-cited, by exposure to the peculiar ‘creativity’ associated with this threshold of law and nonlaw.”65 Might this excitement be related to the pleasure that creatures in Kafka enjoy along with the punishment that they endure? Certainly Jorn summons this contradictory affect in creatures such as Falbo II (1951), a painting subtitled “The Cry of the Beast.” (fig. 3.22) Again, for Santner the creaturely cringe is not only “undead” but also “excited,” and in one painting Jorn calls a similar gesture both

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3.22 ASGER JORN, Falbo II (The Cry of the Beast), 1951. Oil on board, 29 1⁄4 × 23 3⁄4 inches. Canica Art Collection, Oslo.

“timid” and “proud.”66 (see fig. 0.7) This particular creature might be taken to cower or to defy or, like the Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères, to do both at once. The creativity at the threshold of law and nonlaw can also take the form of critique, for the fault lines in a political system are revealed there—“fissures or caesuras in the space of meaning,” gaps in the symbolic order, which might be turned into points of purchase where power can be resisted, or at least rethought, where “new social links” might be imagined, or old displaced ones recovered.67 Certainly this was the case for the aforementioned philosophers, who, despite different political orientations, all witnessed the workings of power during times of crisis. Hobbes wrote Leviathan during the English Civil War (again, his book appeared in 1651); Rousseau conceived The Social Contract as the authority of European kings and princes began to crumble (his text was printed in 1762); Benjamin published his “Critique of Violence” in 1921, in the wake of the destroyed German Empire and in the midst of Freikorps rampages; and Bataille debated the nature of sovereignty as Fascism and Nazism spread through Europe. It is also no accident that Derrida, Agamben, and Santner reflected on this subject during the regime of George W. Bush, which produced two flawed presidential elections, the deception of the Iraq War, the debacle of the Iraq Occupation, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, rendition to torture camps, and all the rest—in short, an intermittent state of emergency that Obama used discreetly and Trump indulged wantonly. During this extended time, for all the discussion of “failed states” elsewhere, the American government came to operate, routinely and destructively, as a rogue (a rogue, Derrida reminds us, “does not even respect the law of the animal community, of the pack, the horde, of its kind”), and in this capacity it threatens us all, however unequally.68

Peculiar Creativity The historical conditions for the recent discourse on the beast and the sovereign are clear enough, but what are its implications for our understanding of Jorn? If the creatures in Kafka are prewar examples of “the peculiar ‘creativity’ associated with this threshold of law and nonlaw,” the creatures in Jorn stand as postwar instances.69 As announced in the emblem of the snake, this excited animality is active in Cobra at

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large, where, again, its force is ambiguous—a sign of “total collapse,” a portent of “new freedom,” or both at once.70 Recall Constant in his manifestos of 1948 and 1949: on the one hand, we “need to break the bonds which have kept us within the social system”; on the other, such “limitations” are already “dissolved.”71 Or consider Jorn in Luck and Chance (1952), where he underscores “the ceaseless dialectic” not only “between ethics and aesthetics” but also “between the establishment of law and lawbreaking.”72 Sometimes Jorn aligns with Benjamin and Bataille on these matters: “Law creates lawbreaking,” he writes, “lawbreaking creates law.”73 At other times he seems to channel Schmitt: “It is the exception that proves the law of rule by renewing it.”74 At the very least his understanding of “the ceaseless dialectic” of lawbreaking and remaking allows Jorn, like Bataille, to escape the double bind of transgression that often traps Dubuffet. Of course, as with Dubuffet, his violations of painting might be taken to reinscribe its laws. For the most part, however, Jorn effects a détournement of this art, which he gives a Nietzschean inflection: “Détournement is a game born of the capacity for devalorization. Only he who is able to devalorize can create new values.”75 And then he adds the revolutionary twist cited above: “I want to rejuvenate European culture. I begin with art. Our past is full of becoming. One needs only to crack open the shells.” This last line is an indirect quotation of Marx on Hegel (Situationists like Jorn loved such allusions): the dialectic in Hegel is idealist, upside down, Marx argued in an afterword to Capital; “it must be inverted,” regrounded in materialism, “in order to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”76 According to Jorn, painting, long steeped in idealist discourses, had to be “cracked open” in a similar way. Already in “Form Conceived as Language” (1949) he declared that “a materialist art must put art back on a foundation of the senses,” in a manner “common to the senses of all men” (the final phrase is a direct quotation of Marx).77 In effect, Jorn sought to overthrow the old (hierarchical) order of art, but only so that a new (egalitarian) one might be put in place. “Painting is over,” he insists. “You might as well finish it off. Detourn. Long live painting.”78 This is not quite “The king is dead, long live the king,” but it is close: Jorn wants to maintain the authority of art, but only if it is redirected radically, and it is through “sacrificing the past” that it can live again in popular form. Once more he echoes Bataille here, as he does when he insists, in Golden Horns, that symbolic power is not merely symbolic, that it is necessary to the production of sovereignty.

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What did this program entail for Jorn personally? In some ways he carried over the “ceaseless dialectic” of lawmaking and lawbreaking in his life.79 Restless with the social strictures of home and work, Jorn was a creator as well as a destroyer of bonds both familial and artistic (he partnered several times and joined many groups).80 In his practice, too, there was a continual movement between collaborative invention and individual vandalization (which extended well beyond his modifications and disfigurations).81 Involvement in collective work is a through-line in Jorn, from his contributions to the Helhesten group and his collaborations with Cobra colleagues on texts and murals, through his proposal of an Imaginist Bauhaus in 1953 (in part in protest against the functionalist makeover of the Bauhaus led by Max Bill in Ulm), which included painterly and ceramic experiments in Italy, and his founding of the Situationist International with Constant and Debord in 1957, which involved more publications (mostly with Debord), to his launching of the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism and its ambitious scheme of books in the mid-1960s. (fig. 3.23) For Jorn the production of “useful objects” such as murals and ceramics was generative of “social harmony,” and he believed that it was typically Nordic to view art as a “spiritual/intellectual accompaniment to life” rather than an institution apart from it.82 So, too, he saw his collaborative projects, for which he sought resources in media both old and new, as experimental models of a communal order to come. Already before the war Jorn insisted on “the artistic value of banality” and the “symbolic strength” of clichés; in his view both offered a “connection with the fundamental.”83 In this way he intimated a barbarianhood of the banal (remember that Benjamin used the word Barbarentum in his definition of positive barbarism), with the banal here understood as any culture held in common. (For Jorn folk and pop forms had not completely diverged, or, rather, he sought to hold them together in the interest of a common culture.)84 He also looked for the common in banal materials, such as flea-market paintings, that were put down or cast aside (that is what the “ban” in “banal” means—that which is abandoned by official society).85 In 1933 Benjamin could still anticipate a proletarian culture to come; after World War II, with the old working class largely thwarted or misled and no new subject of history clearly on the rise, this hope was more difficult to sustain. Jorn did support anticolonial and anti-war movements, but he was not much moved by feminism (to put

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3.23 A cottage in Bregnerød, Denmark painted by Asger Jorn (left), Carl-Henning Pedersen (middle), and Anders Österlin (right), summer 1949.

it mildly), a blindness shared by most Situationists. In short, his barbarianhood of the banal appears as a stop-gap and perhaps, in hindsight, as a limitation. Yet this assessment leads me to appeal, one last time, to the creaturely as a sign of a fissure in the space of meaning opened up by an exposure to the traumatic dimension of political power. Neither an utter outside, as with the Dubuffetian proposal of the brut, nor an absolute origin, as with the Bataillean exploration of the prehistoric, the creatures in Jorn point to cracks inside the law here and now, cracks that art might reveal, even open up, gaps in the symbolic order that, again, might be turned into points of purchase where power can be resisted or at least rethought, where new social links might be imagined and old displaced ones recovered. Such was his positive barbarism, which remained a project in the literal sense of the word— an insight cast forward to the future because it could not be enacted in the present.

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4.1 Eduardo Paolozzi at a shipbreaker’s yard, Hamburg, Germany, 1961.

4| Eduardo Paolozzi and His Hollow Gods Like Asger Jorn, Eduardo Paolozzi emerged from World War II disabused about the humanist tradition in art, and his response was to perform a détournement of sculpture as brutal as the détournement of painting executed by Jorn. (fig. 4.1) Paolozzi assumed the destruction of the holistic figure of neoclassicism, of course, but he also turned away from the perfect fragment advanced by Brancusi and others. Both models of sculpture, traditional and modernist, were broken, and the question was what to do with the pieces: How to reassemble the figure in a way that would register its undoing in art and history alike? Dazzled by the Miletus Apollo torso in the Louvre in 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke understood its message to be ethical as well as aesthetic: “You must change your life.”1 For Paolozzi, after two world wars, that change had already come, catastrophically, and one had to adapt to this harsh reality in order to survive at all. His figures of the 1950s, which are as creaturely as those of Jorn, are avatars of this survival. (figs. 4.2, 4.3) In the early 1950s Paolozzi was a key member of the Independent Group (IG), a motley crew of artists, architects, curators, and critics forged in the crucible of postwar Britain, the gray austerity of which was heightened by the colorful bounty of American consumerism on the horizon. Paolozzi was active in the New Brutalist wing of the IG, which included Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull, Magda Cordell, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Reyner Banham, among others. By the late 1980s the Smithsons could look back on the “as found” aesthetic of New Brutalism as “a confronting recognition of what the postwar world actually was like”: “In a society that had nothing. You reached for what there was, previously unthought of things . . . We were concerned with the seeing of materials for what they were: the woodness of wood, the sandiness of sand. With this came a distaste of the simulated.”2 Implicitly here the Smithsons cast New Brutalism as a materialist realism against the simulacral order of an emergent culture of American advertising. Yet the IG was also fascinated by this new world, and, with its echo of the objet trouvé, the “as found” aesthetic advanced its own version of image-making. In the case of New Brutalism, however, “the image was discovered within the process of making the work.”3

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4.2 Miletus torso, c. 480–70 BCE. Marble, 52 inches. Musée du Louvre. 4.3 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Cyclops, 1957. Bronze, 43 3⁄4 inches. Tate Museum.

Already in his 1955 definition of New Brutalism Banham had defined these two aims as valuation of materials “as found’” and memorability as an image, but he did not attend to the tension that existed between them, even though it ran through most IG activities.4 Consider “Parallel of Life and Art,” the controversial exhibition curated by Paolozzi, Henderson, and the Smithsons at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in fall 1953. Its disjunctive array of 122 diverse photographs (including aerial perspectives, microscopic enlargements, X-rays, art works, everyday snapshots, and archival images) insisted, equally and oppositely, on both the physical actuality and the imagistic virtuality of the prints on view. (fig. 4.4) Or take the contrast between the two IG exhibits in the famous “This is Tomorrow” show at the Whitechapel Gallery in summer 1956. While the New Brutalist Group 6, which consisted of Paolozzi, Henderson, and the Smithsons, presented “Patio & Pavilion,” a bare wood shed roofed with corrugated plastic and scattered with symbolic relics (it looked to Banham as though it were “excavated after the atomic holocaust”), the proto-Pop Group 2, which consisted of Richard Hamilton, John McHale, and John

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4.4 Installation view of “Parallel of Life and Art,” 1953, Institute of Contemporary Art, London.

4.5 Installation view of Group 6 exhibit in “This Is Tomorrow,” 1956, Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Voelcker, contrived a frantic funhouse on the theme of the new sensorium produced by the mass media.5 (fig. 4.5) Nonetheless, this tension between materiality and imageability was generative. Certainly it led New Brutalist artists such as Paolozzi and Henderson to renew the old practices of collage and assemblage as a rough practice of juxtaposition and superimposition. Collage is “my only method,” Paolozzi remarked, and he extended it to the verbal mélange of his poetry and prose; the same was true of Henderson, especially in his screens clotted with images (S 125).6 The two friends were familiar with Dadaist and Surrealist examples from London and Paris, where Paolozzi lived from summer 1947 to autumn 1949. There, largely through Wyn Henderson (mother of Nigel), who ran the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery in London, they came into contact with central figures in both movements such as Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Alberto Giacometti.7 “That French approach, the need, the passion, to consider and handle things at the same time . . . is very necessary for me,” Paolozzi commented, again with Dada and Surrealism in mind. “The concern with different materials, disparate ideas . . . becomes almost a description of the creative act—to juggle with these things” (S 70–71). Paolozzi applied this juggling to his lectures and exhibitions as well. At the first meeting of the IG at the ICA in April 1952, he presented an Epidiascope projection, without commentary, of a slew of his own collages and tear sheets from mass-media magazines that he later called “Bunk!” (fig. 4.6) For some witnesses of this legendary event, which was a performance of collage in its own right, there was “no order or link” or “logical thinking,” while for others “the lateral nature of the connectedness of the images was self-evident.”8 “Parallel of Life and Art,” which opened in September 1953, also met with a divided response: some viewers saw it as a “spider’s web” of representations, while others detected “a poetic-lyrical order where images create a series of cross-relationships.”9 Although his early collages of the mid-1940s recall avant-garde precursors such as Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and Max Ernst, Paolozzi did not merely rehearse Dadaist and Surrealist versions of collage. (figs. 4.7, 4.8) Dadaists and Surrealists were pledged to disruption—primarily public and political in the first instance, private and psychosexual in the second—whereas Paolozzi sought to reflect on such disturbance.10 With materials drawn from war-damaged books purchased cheaply in

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4.6 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Evadne in Green Dimension, 1952. Collage on paper, 13 × 6 1⁄4 inches. Victoria and Albert Museum.

4.7 HANNAH HÖCH, Monument II: Vanity (From an Ethnographic Museum), 1926. Collage with watercolor, 10 1⁄4 × 6 1⁄2 inches. Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg, Germany. 4.8 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Hi-Hohe, 1946. Collage, 9 1⁄4 × 6 1⁄4 inches. Private collection.

London, he sometimes overlaid pictures of classical sculptures with cutouts of contemporary machines (the former were derived mostly from a 1911 textbook titled Modelling and Sculpture by Albert Toft, the latter from various manuals).11 At first these collages also look disruptive, but they are less about collision than superimposition. Paolozzi bores out a figure and replaces a human part with an engine part; though the body is thereby defaced, it is also refaced in such a way that derangement cedes to rearrangement. (figs. 4.9, 4.10) Through imagistic and spatial dislocations most Dadaist collage, such as Tatlin at Home (1920) by Hausmann, aimed to dynamize representation (hence the only semi-ironic homage to the Russian Constructivist here). Again, for Paolozzi that modernity had already arrived, in distorted form, and his collages probe that condition, as if to query whether the postwar subject can still be modeled on the machine, as “the new man” of modernism often was, when that modeling had proved to be so disastrous. (fig. 4.11, 4.12) To substitute a cross-section of a mechanism for a classical head of Zeus or Demeter, as Paolozzi does in collages

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4.9 MAX ERNST, A Little Sick Horse’s Leg, 1920. Collage with gouache on paper, 6 ¼ × 9 inches. Galeria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin.

dated to 1946, is to travesty the modernist cult of machinic gods. At the same time it already raises the question of what might count as sovereign, an important one for Paolozzi, as we will see. The relation of Paolozzi to the Purist montage of Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier is more complicated still. The young Paolozzi modeled his scrapbooks after Ozenfant, even though, like other Purist publications, his Foundations of Modern Art (1925) juxtaposes images of the ancient and the modern as well as the primitive and the futuristic in ways that often appear problematic today.12 Purists such as Ozenfant and Le Corbusier participated in the retour à l’ordre after World War I; in this backlash against prewar avant-gardes, the aesthetic remedy that they offered was essentially a Cubism rectified rationally through architectural geometries of plan and projection. In effect, they aimed to classicize the machine and to mechanize the classical; in Towards a New Architecture (1923) Le Corbusier compared contemporary products (such as a Delage sports car) with classical structures (such as the Parthenon). For Paolozzi after World War II the esprit nouveau of the Purists was hardly new, and his crossing of the human and the machinic had little remedial purpose. The problem was not to humanize the machine—that too could be counted

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4.10 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Stehendes Pferd, 1946. Collage with colored pencil and gouache on paper, 10 1⁄4 × 7 1⁄4 inches. British Council Collection.

a failed project—but to cope with an already mechanized world that was further wrecked by another industrial war. At issue here is the difference between the period notion of the First Machine Age, associated with the 1920s, to which the Dadaists and the Purists reacted oppositely, and the notion of the Second Machine Age, associated with the 1950s, which Paolozzi addressed along with his IG colleagues—that is, the difference between a period transformed by mechanical reproduction and transportation and one about to be changed by electronic imaging and information.13 The Second Machine Age pushed the First into the past in a way that could be represented hyperbolically in terms of ancient history, with the machinic imaged as a classical ruin, as Paolozzi does in his Head of Zeus and Head of Demeter, or even in terms of natural history, with the machinic cast as a petrified landscape, as he does in other early collages.

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4.11 RAOUL HAUSMANN, Tatlin at Home, 1920. Collage with gouache on paper, 16 1⁄8 × 11 inches. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. 4.12 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Head of Demeter, 1946. Collage with colored pencil and gouache on paper, 9 3⁄4 × 7 inches. British Museum.

This is a precocious instance of a paradoxical trope that has become familiar only recently: modernity presented as antiquity, almost as archaeology. Consider his scrapbook Psychological Atlas (1949), a set of forty-odd collages. Paolozzi appropriated the title from a 1948 book about psychophysical stimuli and responses assembled by a science professor named David Katz, and he took the cover from a 1949 catalogue titled Kunstschaffen in Deutschland that documented the art works stolen by the Nazis and salvaged at a “general collecting point” in Munich.14 Except for the physical format and a few captions, little of either source remains. Several of the Psychological Atlas collages juxtapose figures of contemporary life, such as athletes, models, soldiers, and scientists, with animals, buildings, machines, robots, and consumer goods, all superimposed on landscapes and cityscapes that are often ravaged.15 (fig. 4.13) Although the human subjects tower over this ruined world, they appear as embedded in its damaged nature as the other things do. A connection is thus suggested not only between psychological effects and art works but also between destruction and recovery: nature and history, preservation and ruination, converge.

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4.13 A spread from Eduardo Paolozzi, A Psychological Atlas, 1946. Collage book. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Psychological Atlas is subtitled “Histoire Naturelle,” which appears in collaged letters next to a fragmentary text from Kunstschaffen that introduces the art depot. (fig. 4.14) In the first instance “Histoire Naturelle” alludes to a 1926 sequence of thirtyfour collotypes that Ernst based on his frottages (rubbings).16 In Histoire Naturelle Ernst draws on natural history, a popular form of the scientific study of plants and animals, in particular on late nineteenth-century accounts of imagined prehistory such as The World Before the Deluge (1866) by Louis Figuier, which came replete with illustrations of primordial scenes, geological sections, scientific diagrams, and fossil prints.17 These sources date from the period before Ernst was born (1891), which was of great interest to the Surrealists in general, attracted as they were to outmoded things like the arcades, and in subsequent collage novels such as The Hundred Headless Woman (1929) Ernst also used materials from this time.18 With its unexpected juxtapositions of the outdated and the primordial, Histoire Naturelle is an overdetermined evocation of the unconscious, which it presents as both historically specific and utterly transhistorical. Certainly this is how the architectural historian

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4.14 A spread from Eduardo Paolozzi, A Psychological Atlas, 1946. Collage book. Victoria and Albert Museum.

Sigfried Giedion viewed the collage novels in Mechanization Takes Command (1948), a key book for Paolozzi and the IG at large. Tellingly, Giedion described the source imagery as “a great scrap heap of words and misused symbols.”19 Like Ernst, Paolozzi understands natural history as a landscape of ruined things turned into obscure signs, yet the scrapheap that concerns him in Psychological Atlas is less the outmoded nineteenth century than the war-ravaged twentieth century; it is this “second nature” that constitutes his “Histoire Naturelle.” The term “second nature” was developed by Georg Lukács, who, in The Theory of the Novel (1916), underscored how “man-made structures” had come to overlay the first order of the natural world. More, Lukács argued, this second nature was now “petrified” in capitalist modernity: “It is a complex of senses—meanings—which have become rigid and strange, and which no longer awakens interiority; it is a charnel-house of rotted interiorities.”20 For the young Lukács only a great “metaphysical act of reawakening” might bring this second nature “back to life,” and it is this quixotic reawakening that Surrealists such as Ernst attempted, at least according to Walter Benjamin and

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Theodor Adorno (who were influenced by Lukács here). For Ernst and company this second nature was still mysterious, “a world of estranged things” that appeared “as ciphers,” and tapping the “hypnagogic visions” of the unconscious still promised a way to de-reify these petrified meanings.21 With Paolozzi, however, no such awakening is possible: in Psychological Atlas and elsewhere the outmoded has lost its charge, and the unconscious is also a hardened landscape, not only “a charnel-house of rotted interiorities” but also a “facies hippocratica of history.” In short, natural history has become a creaturely thing, a world of decreation (in the sense developed in the previous chapter), a scrapheap of words and symbols beyond salvage.22

Ikons of Survival As he did with collage, the young Paolozzi also worked through key precursors in sculpture. Like others of his generation, he was especially taken by Picasso and Giacometti; by the early 1950s, however, this period of emulation was mostly over.23 At this time Paolozzi was at work on small heads cast in bronze. A characteristic example, Man Looking Upwards (Bandaged Head) (1953), is a bust turned to the right and tilted back to the sky, with only a depression for an eye and a protuberance for a nose to signal a face at all. The patches that form the head also represent the bandages that cover it—his distinctive doubling of subject matter by sculptural process is already apparent—and only the title indicates that there might be human life here. Not an immaculate Newborn of Brancusi, which it otherwise resembles, Man Looking Upwards (Bandaged Head) suggests a survivor in extremis, blinded, burned or otherwise battered, all senses blocked.24 (figs. 4.15, 4.16) Over the next few years Paolozzi also produced little figures in bronze. Cast in the backyard of the Hampstead home of ICA director Dorothy Morland, these homunculi have blobby heads and stubby arms, and, though a few gesture emphatically, it is not clear what they communicate—perhaps only the inability to communicate clearly. The raised arm in Damaged Warrior (1956), for example, is more fossil stump than active salute. “The consuming interest of Paolozzi is with the physiological and psychological limits of man,” Lawrence Alloway, IG convener, curator, and critic, wrote astutely of such figures. “These limits have been widened lately, with concentration

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4.15 CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, The Newborn, 1915. Marble, 6 × 8 × 6 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art. 4.16 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Man Looking Upwards (Bandaged Head), 1953–56. Bronze, 7 ¾ inches. Whereabouts unknown. 4.17 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Man in a Motor Car, 1956. Bronze, 11 3⁄8 inches. Smart Museum, University of Chicago.

4.18 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Windtunnel Test, 1950. Printed papers on card, 9 3⁄4 × 14 1⁄3 inches. Tate Museum.

camps, exposure at sea, the pressure of -45 gravities. It is to find an image of man tough enough and generalized enough to stand up to this environment that Paolozzi is working.”25 With its childish evocation of an ancient charioteer, Man in a Motor Car (1956) suggests one emergent strategy, survival through archaism, as though one way to persist is to mimic a relic or a ruin, that is, to be already dead or long past.26 (fig. 4.17) Man under stress was a central concern of the IG, especially of the New Brutalist wing, and Paolozzi explored the theme in his early collages and sculptures.27 One of his “Bunk!” images, Windtunnel Test (1950), shows a sequence of six US Navy photographs of a test subject under increased gravitational pressure. (fig. 4.18) Paolozzi simply moved the final three photos, in which the man is under extreme force, above the initial three that show him in the early stages of the test, as if to demonstrate that stress is the normative state of the modern subject. Then there is Mr Cruickshank (1950), which was based on a head devised at MIT to measure the effects of X-rays on the cranium.28 (fig. 4.19) Unlike the windtunnel subject,

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4.19 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Mr Cruickshank, 1950. Bronze, 10 1⁄2 × 11 × 7 3⁄4 inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Mr Cruickshank (the Dickensian name was randomly chosen) presents a placid face to a scientific assault, but then this head is only nominally human. Although its incised eyes might call up an ancient bust, here it is the android that has become the new classic. In such pieces the theme of man in duress, even in mutation, is explicit, perhaps too much so. By the mid-1950s, however, Paolozzi had found ways to integrate his subject of survival into the making of his work. For example, in order to produce Shattered Head (1956) he first modeled the bust in clay and cast it in wax, then dropped it on the floor; next he patched the pieces together, like so many shards of an ancient sculpture, and finally cast the fractured shell in bronze. Such sculptures present not only a characteristic tension between fragment and whole, component and composition, but also a distinctive analogy between head and bomb, body and shell. (fig. 4.20) Paolozzi clinched this convergence of theme and process in his next series of heads and figures, which also featured a technique that allowed him to expand the size of his sculptures. “I began with clay rolled out on a table,” he later explained.

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4.20 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Shattered Head, 1956. Bronze, 11 1⁄4 inches. Tate Museum.

Into the clay I pressed pieces of metal, toys, etc. I also sometimes scored the clay. From there I proceeded in one of two ways. Either I would pour directly on to the clay to get a sheet or I would put plaster on to the clay. With the plaster I then had a positive and a negative form on which to pour the wax. The wax sheets were pressed around the forms, cut up and added to forms or turned into shapes on their own.29 (see fig. 0.11) In effect, Paolozzi updated the ancient method of lost-wax casting in a way that circumvented the usual approaches to sculpture or, rather, that combined, in contradictory fashion, the traditional modeled figure and the avant-garde found object. He used ambiguous traces of readymade fragments in order to compose misshapen creatures that partake of both the organic and the mechanical but lack the coherence of either the body or the machine (it is not always clear whether the anthropomorphic is the armature for the machinic or vice versa). (fig. 4.21) In 1958 Paolozzi offered a list of materials impressed in his molds:

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4.21 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Japanese War God, 1958. Bronze, 64 1⁄2 inches. Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

Dismembered lock, Toy frog, Rubber dragon, Assorted wheels and electrical parts, Clock parts, Broken comb, Bent fork, Various unidentified found objects, Parts of a radio, Old RAF bomb sight, Shaped pieces of wood, Natural objects such as pieces of bark, Gramophone parts, Model automobiles, Reject die castings from factory tip sites. Car wrecking yards as hunting grounds (S 81, 83). And he summed up his “action” on this “rubbish”—which, significantly, ranged from remnants of the military-industrial past to fragments from the consumerist present— in a manner that mimics linguistically what he performed sculpturally: “burn cut mold model construct tack destroy & reccombine” (sic; S 85).30 “The word ‘collage’ is inadequate as a description,” Paolozzi remarked of this way of working, “because the concept should include damage, erase, destroy, deface and transform” (S 251). Herein lies his innovation in modernist object-making (as well as his affinity with other artists in this book): to adapt the practice of collage to the tradition of the figure, and thereby to alter both; more, to conceive a form of artistic construction that keeps faith with the fact of historical destruction, not only the ideological ruin of humanist conceptions of man and sculpture, but also the actual devastation wrought by the world war, the Holocaust, and the Bomb. His positive barbarism consists in the attempt to construct out of this condition. Paolozzi delivered his comments on material and method in a talk on “the metamorphosis of rubbish” at the ICA in late April 1958, which alludes to the thirty-seven sculptures that he showed at the Hanover Gallery at the end of the year. Both heads and figures in this large group look damaged, but whereas the heads seem obdurate, the figures appear fragile. With stilts for legs they do not stand so much as they are stuck, feetless, on thin plinths. Most are also armless, so gesture is still stunted, and if they possess genitals at all, they are only craggy boards or little cogs, so they appear sterile as well. “Paolozzi has never made a female figure,” Alloway noted in 1963, yet these creatures are not quite male either. Busted machines that are not even bachelors, they appear nearly degendered, with the degendering here another sign of a denaturing.31 And, again, they are assembled from traces of the world—broken toys and tools, loose nuts and washers—that are imprinted on the sculptures, almost as the sculptures.32 Hollow and brittle, the sculptures thus develop outside

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in, not inside out, and as a result the exteriors do not express any interior, the desideratum of traditional sculpture; in fact they do not seem to express any interiority, any subjectivity, at all.33 One thinks of Benjamin on Klee figures: “They have no inwardness, and that is what makes them barbaric.”34 So what kind of subject do they intimate? A central topic among IG members was Gestalt psychology, which is concerned with how the mind unifies perceptions from discrepant stimuli (“the whole is other than the sum of the parts” is its most famous principle). In an important essay titled “Expendable Ikon,” which appeared in early 1959 (only two months after the Hanover show), the artist–critic John McHale alludes to Rudolf Arnheim, who first applied Gestalt theory to art, and cites the Austrian psychologist Paul Schilder on the “fragmentary associations” that we fold into our body images as infants.35 Similar reflections on the development of the corporeal imago were already made by Jacques Lacan (who refers to Schilder too). At one point in his celebrated paper on the “Mirror Stage” (1949), Lacan likens the achieved ego to a stadium and even a fortress, and in his 1958 lecture Paolozzi also refers to an “architectural anatomy” that guided the making of his figures whereby legs are likened to columns, torsos to towers, and so on (S 85).36 Yet he envisions these parts as both “petrified” and “cracked,” even “shattered”; unlike the infant in the “Mirror Stage,” no coherent body ego is posited here—on the contrary (S 83).37 Moreover, the damage undergone by these figures extends to the senses as well; if eyes, ears, and mouths appear at all, they are represented as broken wheels and the like. (Touch, long deemed the most primitive of the senses, is privileged, and the sheer tactility of the sculptures affects our viewing; and yet, even though we are tempted to read these surfaces with our fingers, the roughness repels us.) Apparently Paolozzi identified with his pieces especially on this score. Certainly he played up a persona that was lumpen and brutish, and he delighted in his role as a deaf mute in a 1955 film by Lorenza Mazzetti titled Together.38 Why, then, did Paolozzi give heroic titles to his sculptures? Apart from a few generic “heads” and “figures,” they include words like “warrior,” “king,” and “god.” Although his personages hardly appear triumphal, not all his titles are ironic; in fact Paolozzi named several pieces after characters in Greek myth, with an emphasis on the defeated and the doomed. He represented the giant Cyclops twice, once as a head with a flattened face and once as a figure whose one eye, blinded by Odysseus,

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is again depicted as a broken wheel (with Cyclops the reduction of the senses is thematic as well). (see fig. 4.3) The Hanover Gallery show also included two versions of Icarus, the mythical incarnation of hubris; given wings by his father, the artful Daedalus, the boy flew too close to the sun, whereupon the wax in his feathers melted and he plunged to his death. In his revision of the story Paolozzi burdens Icarus with a large head in the first version and with massive legs in the second, while in both pieces the daedal wings are mere stubs. (fig. 4.22) According to Paolozzi, either Icarus never flew, never transcended the materiality of body and earth, or he had always already crashed. And here again Paolozzi reinforces his theme with his process: like Odysseus he gouges his Cyclops, and like the sun he strips his Icarus down (in a sense Icarus is the original lost-wax figure).39 Yet the legendary figure that obsessed Paolozzi during this time was a Christian, Saint Sebastian, whom he represented in no less than five sculptures. (figs. 4.23, 4.24, 4.25) A Roman soldier martyred for his newfound faith, Sebastian was a favorite subject in the Italian Renaissance because, as a pagan convert, he provided an occasion for the ideal body of classical art to be repositioned in a dramatic scene of Christian sacrifice. Traditionally Sebastian is depicted as riddled with arrows, and Paolozzi also shoots his saint through with holes; in a paradoxical effect they alone hold his various versions together. Of course, Sebastian withstood his wounds, which is why his image was often taken up as a talisman of protection (especially against plague). “My Saint Sebastian was a sort of God I made out of my own necessity,” Paolozzi remarked enigmatically in 1961, and perhaps this necessity involved a safeguard too (S 92). Perhaps this is what he deemed heroic about all his figures, classical, Christian, and other: damaged to the point of death, they survive, or at least they persist as the stuff of legend. If both man and sculpture were in a precarious state in the postwar period, this damaged condition might be troped as a form of protection (or, again, of persistence). The figure is “a Thing,” Paolozzi stated, again enigmatically, of such pieces (S 138). Could it be that they are built to last precisely because they are as rickety as they are reified, not in spite of this fact? Soon after World War I Lukács argued that the industrial processes of fragmentation and reification had penetrated objects and subjects alike. Here, in the wake of World War II, Paolozzi registers fragmentation and reification at work in the world at large. At the same time he moves to recoup them in his sculptural process; in effect, they become his sculpture.

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4.22 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Icarus (second version), 1957. Bronze, 56 7⁄8 inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

4.23 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Saint Sebastian I, 1957. Bronze, 85 1⁄2 inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. 4.24 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Saint Sebastian II, 1957. Bronze, 83 3⁄4 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. 4.25 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Saint Sebastian III, 1958–59. Bronze, 83 inches. Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands.

These figures can be taken as avatars of survival in another way too, if we understand the imprinting of the world on the sculptures as mimetic of the changed context of human evolution in the modern period. Pertinent here is the classic text On Growth and Form (1917) by the Scottish biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, which came as a revelation to Paolozzi when he discovered it in 1948. (He soon passed the book on to Richard Hamilton, who produced an extraordinary exhibition on the subject in 1951.)40 For Thompson biological forms are determined by forces that are not only internal but external as well; often an apparent deformation within an organism is actually an adaptation to its environment. His celebrated graphs in On Growth and Form chart how “new figures” emerge from “old figures” as a biological form undergoes “a more or less homogenous strain” from the world (“strain” is a recurrent term in IG discourse).41 (fig. 4.26) Clearly this account fascinated Paolozzi, even though he imagined such transformation very differently. In Thompson metamorphosis tends to be mathematically consistent, which is

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4.26 Illustrations from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, 1917.

obviously not the case with Paolozzi, and, unlike Thompson, Paolozzi conjures up creatures in which the organic and the mechanical are convoluted. Again, his “uneasy animals distorted with tekno motors” are ciphers of this complication (S 100). (fig. 4.27) Another text, also championed by Paolozzi, comes into play here. In Mechanization Takes Command Giedion designates “the period between the two World Wars the time of full mechanization,” that is, the time when “it impinged upon the very center of the human psyche, through all the senses,” and he offers an “anonymous history” of this impinging through case studies of such devices as the lock and the reaper and such procedures as the production of poultry and pork (which he terms “the mechanization of death”).42 Giedion draws out two ramifications that are relevant to Paolozzi. The first (mentioned above) is that, by the late nineteenth century, the repetition of objects permitted by mechanization led to a “devaluation of

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4.27 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, AG5, 1958. Bronze, 39 1⁄2 inches. Leeds Museums and Galleries.

symbols,” as craft became deskilled and ornament became rote. The second is that, by the early twentieth century, mechanization had “penetrated the subconscious,” with the implication that the psyche came to be understood as a mechanism, even an automatism, in its own right. According to Giedion, modernists as diverse as de Chirico, Duchamp, Picasso, Ernst, Klee, Léger, and Ozenfant, all of whom were also important to Paolozzi, explored both this symbolic devaluation and that subconscious penetration.43 In his sculptures of the 1950s Paolozzi effectively reads Thompson and Giedion through each other, which is to say that he presents the transformation of the human form “under strain” in terms of a mechanization that had “taken command” in society at large: this impinging on both body and psyche is his primary concern. To pursue this speculative line of thought further, Paolozzi calls up another text that he likely did not read: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In this controversial essay, which advanced the radical theory of the death drive, Freud puts forward the strange hypothesis that, in order to survive, every organism evolves a “protective shield” out of the stimuli that it receives from the world. In his account this shield develops as the surface of the organism hardens into a crust under the force of these stimuli; it is this crust that allows the organism to safeguard the nervous system at its core. “Protection against stimuli,” Freud insists, “is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli.”44 If this connection seems forced, Alloway did not think so. These “figures adapt to the environment . . . by incorporation,” he wrote of Paolozzi. “The texture on the sculptures of the fifties consists of a scrambled anthology of our essential artefacts. The body assimilates these objects, like a wall” (MD 29). As we have seen, Paolozzi associated his lost-wax method with archaeology; here the analogy might extend to paleontology as well. In fact for this artist the ur-sculpture seems to be the fossil; his early plaster reliefs already point in that direction. Such a connection speaks to his concern with sculpture not only as an indexical impression but also as a temporal inscription—as a physical record of an order of time that might exceed the duration of human life as such. Here sculpture becomes a token of a paradoxical survival that outlives man.45 Beyond the Pleasure Principle proposes a dialectic of stimuli and shield, of reception and protection, that sustains all organisms in the natural world. Yet this dynamic also continues in second nature, in a modern environment transformed by

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industrial production and consumption. Indeed, it is all the more intensive in this technological epoch, to the point where, as Giedion asserted, mechanization “impinges upon the very center of the human psyche.” More, this dynamic can be understood to be heightened in the wake of World War II, during which time it becomes less a dialectic than a deadlock: it is as though the war-worn subject were not only fractured by shock but also hardened all the way through. If any art can evoke such a condition, it is sculpture in which the figure is “a Thing,” in which the body is little more than a brittle shield built up, under strain, of literal impressions from a broken world—maybe with no inside at all, no nervous system at its core, to protect.46 Paolozzi points to this reading of his work when he describes the head of his Saint Sebastian II (1957) as “a dome, a shell, partly bent under pressure” (S 86). At the same time he presents the piece as “an anti-mechanism,” that is, he offers it up in symbolic resistance to a mechanization turned destructive; perhaps he even intends his thingly sculpture to possess an apotropaic force. Could it be that Paolozzi brutalized his figures in order to register not only the violence of this process but also to recoup this violence as an impossible form of protection against it (which, again, is to tap into the talismanic aspect of traditional images of Saint Sebastian)? Might this be the “necessity” to which his sculptures of the 1950s respond—as if, in a perverse troping of Christ, what is dead cannot die, or, rather, in a paradoxical updating of Nietzsche, whatever kills one makes one strong? The sculptures of the 1950s suggest two other kinds of “uneasy animals distorted with tekno motors,” the first more beastly, the second more robotic.47 The first group includes some pieces, such as Frog Eating a Lizard (1957) and Large Frog (1958), that evoke a nature that is red in the tooth, as well as others, such as Monkey Man (1958), Chinese Dog 2 (1958), and Krokadeel (1959), that point to a monstrous condition that is neither human nor animal.48 (fig. 4.28) Stuck on four stakes, with a blob for a head and a log for a body, Chinese Dog 2 is less a foreign canine than an alien mutant transformed by nuclear disaster. (fig. 4.29) The same is true of Monkey Man, an obscene figure stripped of most features, as well as Krokadeel, a misshapen head with a flattened face of mechanical imprints, all organs of sense again cast shut. (see fig. 0.8) As the title implies, Krokadeel might be taken to image our reptile brain, a modern reversion to a primordial sensorium. Certainly in all these sculptures Paolozzi shows first and second natures to be utterly confused.49

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4.28 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Large Frog, 1958. Bronze, 28 × 32 3⁄4 × 32 3⁄4 inches. British Council Collection.

4.29 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Chinese Dog 2, 1958. Bronze, 36 3⁄8 × 25 1⁄4 inches. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

For Paolozzi, then, mid-twentieth-century modernity had denatured the human subject in a creaturely way, and this holds for his robotic figures too.50 In 1956 he produced a small bronze titled Robot, which might recall a classical kouros that had suffered a sea change if it were not for its savage head. (fig. 4.30) Thereafter Paolozzi developed the robotic association primarily in busts, not only in Krokadeel, where the creaturely connection is explicit, but also in AG5 (1958), a head that, along with the usual impressions of mechanical debris, is stamped with its title, as though it were a deformed android in an assembly-line of the same. The word “robot” derives from the Czech robotnik or “serf”; first used by Karel Cˇapek in his 1920 play R.U.R., the robot came to figure a widespread fear about a world dominated by machines and masses, or, more precisely, by the masses imagined as mindless machines operated by totalitarian rulers, and it flourished during the Cold War as a scare-symbol of the Communist version of this threat. Although Paolozzi departs from this ideology, the

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4.30 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Robot, 1956. Bronze, 19 1⁄8 inches. Private collection.

robot is hardly a positive figure for him either: far from a prosthetic enhancement of the human (as it was for his contemporary Marshall McLuhan), the robot is a modern Cyclops, a technological man stripped of singularity as well as sense.51 Of course, the view of the human as animalistic or machinic or both has modernist precedents. For example, Frog Eating a Lizard calls to mind Bird Swallowing a Fish (1914) by the Vorticist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, which Paolozzi likely knew.52 (figs. 4.31, 4.32) “The artist goes back to the fish, to strike the fundamental slime of creation,” Wyndham Lewis wrote of such Vorticist sculpture. “The creation of a work of art is an act of the same description as the evolution of wings on the sides of a fish, the feathering of its fins; or the invention of a weapon within the body or a hymenopter to enable it to meet the terrible needs of life.”53 In the midst of World War I the Vorticists thrilled to this convergence of the primordial and the technological; again, in the aftermath of World War II Paolozzi could view it only as a disaster. In similar fashion he countered the Futurist celebration of the conjunction of human and machine, which Marinetti and Boccioni imagined as a fantastic

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4.31 HENRI GAUDIER-BRZESKA, Bird Swallowing a Fish, 1914. Bronze (cast 1964), 12 1⁄2 × 23 3⁄4 × 11 inches. Tate Museum.

4.32 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Frog Eating a Lizard, 1957. Bronze, 14 1⁄8 inches. Private collection.

4.33 MAX ERNST, untitled assemblage, c. 1919 (lost). 4.34 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Jason, 1956. Bronze, 66 1⁄8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

intercourse with automobiles, airplanes, ships, and trains. Whereas technology sexed up the machine for the Futurists, it desexed the human for Paolozzi; whether the rough surface of his bronze figures suggests flesh petrified or machine fleshed, it is the opposite of a desired outcome.54 If anything, then, the creaturely robots of Paolozzi are affined with the dysfunctional assemblages of Dada, of “Dadamax” Ernst in particular. Yet whereas the Ernst mechanomorphs point to a breakdown in the symbolic order at large, the Paolozzi figures assume this broken condition and transform it into a mode of survival.55 (figs. 4.33, 4.34)

God-Making Although many neo-avant-gardes dismissed the figure as retrograde, the IG did not. Already in early 1954 Alloway led a seminar on “the return of the human image in contemporary art,” including “new attitudes both toward ‘man’ and toward the concept ‘image’ produced by new factors—cinema, anthropology, archaeology—in contemporary life.”56 Like others in the IG such as Hamilton and McHale, Paolozzi was not willing simply to cede the figure to popular culture. The best guide to this aspect of his thinking remains his 1958 lecture at the ICA, which was both a gloss on his recent work and an overview of his aesthetic project to date. Although the talk was announced as “Image-Making, God-Breaking,” Paolozzi called it “Image-Breaking, God-Making”; apparently the title cut both ways for him. As with the other figures in this book, representation is associated with destruction, which Paolozzi relates in turn to the divine, that is, to the sovereign. Paolozzi presented his project as a “plastic iconography” (S 81), which he understood not in the conventional sense of “the extension of past literary models” into visual art but as a double engagement with the image-repertoires of popular culture and art history (MD 36). His first aim was to compete with the celebrities and commodities celebrated in the movies and magazines. Paolozzi agreed with McHale that “the ikons of our time are to be found now more in the technological folk arts— the mass media.”57 Hence his emphasis on “the construction of hellish monsters,” such as his robots and beasts, which constituted the “popular core of image-making,” according to Alloway, especially in the form of science-fiction and horror films from

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Hollywood and Hammer studios (S 85, MD 22).58 (fig. 4.35) “In 1958 a higher order of imagination exists in a SF pulp,” Paolozzi asserted. “Does the modern artist consider this?” As for horror, “the evolution of the cinema monster from Méliès onwards,” he insisted, “is a necessary study for the fabricator of idols or gods” (S 85).59 If an image of sovereignty was to be produced in contemporary terms, a source might be found there. As is evident from his Icarus, Jason, and Sebastians, his second aim was to refashion traditional subjects of art history, a project that Paolozzi once described as “historical images re-interpreted to modern requirements” (S 110). To an extent this was also to compete with mass culture, which had already appropriated some of this material for its own ends, in advertisements as well as in movies (Paolozzi pointed to all the films loosely based on Greek myths during this period).60 Like others in the IG, he did not dismiss this commercial production as mere kitsch; he sought not to bring high art low in a parodic critique but to reposition high and low in a horizontal continuum. To borrow the well-known title of a contemporaneous essay by Alloway, this was “the long front of culture” on which Paolozzi operated.61 That Paolozzi, otherwise a poor speller, insisted on “ikon” was not accidental. The term was already in circulation among his IG colleagues, as “The Expendable Ikon” by McHale attests. Given that it yokes the transient and the typological, “expendable ikon” is a near oxymoron, yet McHale argued that the mass-media image “rates the ‘ikonic’ title” to the extent that, through “repetition and persistence,” it achieves “immediate circulation” and “universal scale.”62 Although Paolozzi understood this status to be beyond his reach, some of his ikonic types do overlap with the ones proposed by McHale. Like Paolozzi, McHale pointed to the popular taste for “robots, mutants and mechanomorphs,” which he too regarded as figures of “man under stress with mechanical adaptation.”63 (figs. 4.36, 4.37) As this last phrase suggests, McHale agreed with Paolozzi that such “anthropocentric ikons” might “locate man in the modern world” and even assist in his survival there. “The whole range of the sensory spectrum has been extended,” wrote McHale (who channels McLuhan here). “Such accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images which will match up.”64 Another aspect of iconicity interested Paolozzi even more. A stronger term than “image,” “ikon” evokes deep reverence; after all, a believer sees an icon not as a mere representation of Christ but as a numinous connection to him. To be worthy

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4.35 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, The Ultimate Planet, 1952. Printed papers on card, 9 7⁄8 × 15 inches. Tate Museum.

of the name, an ikon for Paolozzi had to possess a touch of this aura; such power was a cultural “necessity” as well as a personal one. “Early forms of society worshipped an image or a symbol which represented some dominant force,” he remarked in 1965, “and I see something related to this today” (S 141). This last thought is as ambiguous as it is tentative. Did Paolozzi project this symbolic power onto his own work or did he locate it in popular culture at large, perhaps in forms that he might tap? At least in his sculptures Paolozzi was not interested in “the star ikon” as much as McHale and Hamilton, who operated on the Pop side of the IG. Again, rather than celebrities like Elvis and Marilyn, Paolozzi evoked heroes, kings, and gods (in the 1960s terms like “consul” and “bishop” crop up in his titles too). (fig. 4.38) In short, for all his commitment to a cultural continuum of high and low art, he gravitated toward figures of sovereignty. Thus his was a “search for archetypes” of authority as well as ikons of survival (S 95).65 As Paolozzi announced in his 1958 lecture, “image-breaking,” or

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4.36 JOHN MCHALE, Machine-Made America II, 1956. Collage used as cover of The Architectural Review, May 1957. 4.37 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Was This Metal Monster Master–or Slave?, 1952. Printed papers on card, 14 1⁄4 × 9 3⁄4 inches. Tate Museum.

the mimesis of a shattered world, was only the first part of his project; more important was the second task, the complementary one of “God-making.” If “early forms of society worshipped an image or a symbol which represented some dominant force,” might not contemporary people require the same (S 141)? Occasionally in his notes and screen-prints Paolozzi refers to a particular symbol of “dominant force,” the dynamo, which is a generator that converts mechanical energy to electrical energy.66 This allusion calls to mind another salient text, the famous chapter in The Education of Henry Adams (1906) titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” in which the scion of the American family narrates his epiphanic encounter with the massive generators on display at the Paris World Fair of 1900. “He began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross,” Adams writes in his third-person memoir. “One began to pray to it; inherited instinct taught the natural expression of man before silent and infinite force.”67 Just

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4.38 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Konsul and Bride of the Konsul, 1962. Gunmetal. Tate Museum and Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.

4.39 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Diana as an Engine I, 1963–66. Painted aluminum, 64 × 14 × 38 1⁄4 inches. British Council Collection.

as the dynamo was an updated Cross for Adams, so was the Virgin an “animated dynamo,” and in a similar fashion Paolozzi combines old and new figures of power in his ikons.68 In fact some of his aluminum idols of the 1960s, such as The Bishop of Kuban (1962) and Diana as an Engine I (1963–66), resemble dynamos recast and repainted as pop potentates and mod gods. (fig. 4.39) “It is now acceptable,” Paolozzi mused, “to talk seriously about Mickey Mouse as an icon, and even to mention Mickey Mouse and Jesus in the same breath” (S 272). Paolozzi thus continued his iconic project after his shift from lost-wax bronzes to aluminum-part assemblages. Yet the project remained a “riddle” to him, and perhaps it was bound to fail from the start.69 How could a bronze sculpture named after Jason, let alone an aluminum structure dedicated to Mars, be valid after the horrors of World War II? (fig. 4.40) Moreover, how could an artist compete with mass culture at the level of iconic power? And, finally, how could twentieth-century sovereignty

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4.40 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Mars, 1962. Aluminum, 68 inches. Private collection.

be figured at all, except perhaps as monstrous (as Paolozzi often did present it)? Certainly some of his personages are figures of force as well as objects of violence; like Frankenstein’s monster, they elicit both fear and pity. In their own ways, then, they combine sovereign and beast, and in this doubling they are as ambiguous as the Sorcerer of Les Trois Frères in Bataille or The Timid Proud One of Jorn (like the Jorn creatures, the Paolozzi personages often appear “undead” and “excited” at once). This association casts other attributes of his sculpture in a new light. On the one hand, some pieces evoke the most sovereign of monumental forms, such as imperial friezes, triumphal arches, and Roman columns (sometimes with faux inscriptions included); on the other, they turn to mass culture as the vital source of images of domination. Once again the effect is a suturing of culture, both high and low, and of temporality, both primordial and futuristic: His Majesty as sci-fi monster.70 Like these sculptures, monsters are often made of found parts, and it makes sense that, in a 1960 interview, Paolozzi refers to Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the Italian Mannerist celebrated for his allegorical portraits composed of images of fruit, vegetables, shells, books, and tableware.71 Yet more pertinent in the present context is Abraham Bosse, the French artist who devised the classic image of the sovereign for the frontispiece of the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. (fig. 4.41) The figuring of sovereignty is an age-old problem, and Paolozzi takes it up again and again, not only in sculpture but also in collage. As though in a satirical update of the nineteenthcentury psychometrician Francis Galton, his Time cover cut-ups of the early 1950s aim to conjure up “the generic face” of power in his time. Is it represented by a Caribbean dictator or a Russian minister, an atomic scientist or an Olympic athlete, a titan of industry or a star of Hollywood, or does the fact that Paolozzi first compounds, then cycles through, so many candidates suggest that no one figure can qualify?72 (figs. 4.42, 4.43) In the 1950s philosophers as diverse as Georges Bataille, Hannah Arendt, and Alexandre Kojève pointed to a pervasive crisis in political authority, and by the 1970s Michel Foucault argued that power had long since retreated from figural representation into a regime of diffuse discipline and anonymous surveillance. Paolozzi touched on these difficulties in his own way. Along with “the construction of hellish monsters,” he remarked, his “occupation” was “the erection of hollow gods” (S 85). Beyond a literal description, this hollowness points to the emptying out of the old

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4.41 ABRAHAM BOSSE, frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651. Etching.

4.42 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, The Return, 1952. Printed papers on paper, 13 × 10 inches. 4.43 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, One-Man Track Team, 1953. Printed papers on paper, 10 3⁄4 × 8 1⁄4 inches. Tate Museum.

symbolism of power. Consider The King (1957), a tall figure with a monstrous head, a porous trunk, and a spindly crown that resembles an empty wastebasket. (see fig. 0.12) This figure might be taken to echo the about-to-be-dethroned Richard II as he declaims his “sad stories of the death of kings”: “Within the hollow crown /That rounds the mortal temples of a king/Keeps Death his court.” His Majesty the Wheel (1958–59) is another boxy figure of a broken sovereignty whose titular wheel both represents the crown and obliterates the face of the king: split down the middle, this majesty is about to crack apart. (fig. 4.44) Perhaps these old symbols of power cannot survive in a modern age when any hero, king, or god must be viewed ironically, as a Hercules out of work (as Baudelaire once put it).73 But then, per Richard II, sovereignty might always be hollow; perhaps, since it is ontologically troubled, it is ever in crisis. As we saw in the previous chapter, this is the view advanced by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben: founded in a violent act of self-authorization, power has no ultimate ground except violence,

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4.44 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, His Majesty the Wheel, 1958–59. Bronze, 72 inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

4.45 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, The Twin Towers of the Sfinx–State II, 1962. Aluminum, 67 1⁄2 inches. Private collection.

and, when challenged, it cannot help but return there. Might Paolozzi point to this condition, which can be as ridiculous as it is dangerous, in his grandiose structures of the early 1960s, such as Tyrannical Tower Crowned with Thorns of Violence (1961) and The Twin Towers of the Sfinx–State I and II (1962)?74 (fig. 4.45) How else are we to view these sculptures, which are part hieratic figure and part absurd monument? There is a photograph of Tyrannical Tower on a rooftop near Parliament (Big Ben is in the distance), which suggests that Paolozzi felt such figures still haunt modern government. Titled as they are, these pieces intimate that modern power cannot shake its ancient implication in sovereign violence, that, covertly or not, the contemporary state is still bound up in dark politics. In the search for the ikonic, Paolozzi and friends could be almost sentimental about the need for updated fetishes and idols. “The symmetry and grandeur of the structure make it look like a sentinel, or a robot, or an arch, or a tomb,” Alloway commented on behalf of the artist, with Mars in mind (MD 15). Yet at other times

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4.46 SOPHIE TAEUBER, Military Guards, 1918. Painted wood with metal joints, 16 inches. Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich.

Paolozzi regarded these sentinel–tower–tomb pieces as so much “schizo-mekaniko war kitsch,” and the gizmo absurdity of the garishly painted ones does appear sardonic—in one obscure note he refers to the “facietious factor of god king” (sic; S 110, 112). Might Paolozzi mock sovereignty here, as Alfred Jarry did with his Père Ubu character, or Ernst with his trash assemblages, or Sophie Taeuber with her mechanistic marionettes, all so many petty tyrants or paternal authorities banished to the nursery?75 (figs. 4.46, 4.47) The faux-childish aspect of his semi-facetious sculptures is captured in a line that Paolozzi repeats, again like a riddle, in his writings: “Parade of the toy kingdom. Toy as war god God as toy. Tin crucifix Tin king.”76 If his ikonic project seems ludicrous at times, almost a travesty, perhaps Paolozzi intended it as such. Of course, power is often ridiculous, but it is also always dangerous, and we do learn our way into the roles of adult authority in childhood play.77 At one point Paolozzi reimagines his parade of toys as one of “political robots gone criminal” (S 85), and Alloway likens some of his aluminum structures to “war-machines and

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4.47 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Tyrannical Tower Crowned with Thorns of Violence, 1961. Bronze, 72 × 27 1⁄2 × 19 3⁄4 inches. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

torture-instruments” (MD 15).78 In the early 1960s the dictators of World War II were not far removed in time, and there were still egocrats on the historical stage (Stalin died only in 1953, and Mao and others remained very present). If Paolozzi was not settled on the figuring of power, neither was his period.

Metamorphosis of the Figure Both sculpture as survivalist thing and sculpture as sovereign ikon suggest an art work that is hard and fixed. But there is another imperative in Paolozzi that opposes these two—his “obsession with [the] metamorphosis of the figure” (S 83). Along with related tropes such as “metafisikal translations” and “metallization of a dream,” “metamorphosis of the figure” indicates an ideal of sculpture whereby key elements are treated as “multi-evocative images,” such as a sprocket or a wheel that becomes an eye or a crown even as it remains a sprocket or a wheel (S 90).79 In the first instance such transformation is a matter of process. “In the finished casting,” Paolozzi reminds us about his bronze pieces, “the original objets trouvés are no longer present at all” (S 90). Like Picasso, Paolozzi rarely presents found objects as such; he is interested less in the literal than in the figurative, which implies the transfigured too.80 Once imprinted in clay in order to produce molds, these things become “ghosts of forms,” that is, they are lost as things in order to be discovered as signs—hence, again, the attraction of the lost-wax method for Paolozzi. As Alloway commented, this procedure entailed “a mighty act of assimilation” (MD 59), and, though he saw that “aesthetic distance” was thereby bestowed on “familiar objects,” this assimilation was not simply aestheticization. As with other artists involved in brutal aesthetics, transformation in Paolozzi is not the same thing as sublimation; certainly it is not on the side of beauty as conventionally understood. At the same time neither is it “anti-art”; Paolozzi deemed the “nonsensical” aspect of Dada “too infantile” (S 89). “Symbols can be interpreted in different ways,” Paolozzi wrote (in capital letters no less), and he saw this polysemy as conducive to fantasy: “I think that machines and fantasy go together.” He also saw it as conducive to play—he described mechanisms such as clocks as “toy/sites for imaginary ball games”—as well as to pedagogy— one “exercise in the study of the multi-evocative” asked students of St. Martin’s

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College of Art in London to attempt a “breakdown of known images . . . into partly symbolical or entirely symbolical elements” (S 79).81 The majority of his tropes for the metamorphosis of the figure, however, are linguistic; more than once Paolozzi referred to the “mud language” of his sculpture replete with its own “alphabet of elements” and “grammar of forms” (S 83). Clearly this is a language in which the material and the metaphorical are not opposed.82 A further connection exists between the construction of his sculptures and the composition of his texts: often the first involves the arranging of found objects and the second the arranging of given phrases, and a loose grid provides the structure of each. Both Metafisikal Translations (1962), a book of screen-prints that juxtapose images and words, and Nomenclature (circa 1964), an unpublished compilation of notes in ink, stencil, and collaged newsprint, are such “gatherings of terms” (S 106).83 Although the operation of selection and combination informs other aspects of his work—from his early collages and collaborative exhibitions through his Time composites and bronze ikons—Metafisikal Translations and Nomenclature pertain primarily to the aluminum structures initiated in the early 1960s. A given text might mimic an object (some almost read as lists of parts) or describe its making—“spread on the concrete floor of the pattern shop,” one note reads, “these index items are bolted” (S 99, 104). Understood structurally, verbal language has two axes: in order to construct a sentence, we select a word from a vertical list of similar terms (called the paradigmatic axis) and then, according to the rules of grammar, we combine this word with others along a horizontal line (called the syntagmatic axis). For the linguist Roman Jakobson, metaphor is an operation of substitution whereby one figure symbolizes another (e.g., “a rose” for “a love”) and so favors the paradigmatic axis, whereas metonymy is an operation of displacement whereby one figure stands in for another (e.g., “suits” for “business men”) and so favors the syntagmatic axis; accordingly, in his view poetry privileges metaphor and prose privileges metonymy. In both his works and his writings Paolozzi seems to favor the metaphorical-poetic over the metonymic-prosaic, yet often he crosses the two axes; as he commented, “the multi-evocative image demands a prose lyrical style at least” (S 81).84 After all, “the metamorphosis of a column into a figure into a tower,” which describes such sculptures of the early 1960s as The World Divides into Facts, is almost a sentence,

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even a narrative, in its own right. In any case, the aluminum sculptures entail a shift in focus from surface incident to structural assembly, which renders the quasi-linguistic operations of selection and combination all but explicit. “I believe I have adapted to the plastic arts some of the principles of Roussel’s Poetics,” Paolozzi told the critic Edouard Roditi in 1960 (S 86). He means Raymond Roussel, the eccentric French author of Impressions of Africa (1910) and other texts, who prompted Duchamp to produce his own word plays.85 In Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (1935) Roussel explains how he “expanded ready-made phrases . . . almost like objets trouvés, in such a manner as to imagine a whole story” (S 87). By his own account Roussel would select a sentence at random to begin a narrative, and then contrive a homonymous sentence, with a very different meaning, to conclude it; the work of the writing was to connect the two lines via a story, however preposterous it might be. As this procedure transformed arbitrariness into motivation, or, rather, held the two in tension (S 251), one can see why it appealed to Paolozzi. “In most sculpture,” he told Roditi, “the artist limits his task to a relatively simple procedure of metamorphosis”—the cutting of wood or stone, the molding of clay or plaster—in a way that fixes the material in form, whereas he aimed to retain the transformative act in the completed work (S 90). This effect is produced, in his bronze figures, by the sense that the parts are not resolved into the whole and, in his aluminum assemblages, by the sense that the elements might be reordered.86 Often too, in both kinds of work, the figures seem to exist in a hybrid state, with “an architectural anatomy” that is at once anthropomorphic and alien. Salient here, then, is the implicit association with the Metamorphoses of Ovid, whose nymphs and mortals are often changed into nonhuman form, either to be saved (Daphne transformed into a laurel tree in order to escape a rape) or punished (Actaeon transformed into a stag that is devoured by dogs). Perhaps the mythical pretensions of sculptures such as Diana are not so farfetched after all. As noted above, Paolozzi also points suggestively to Arcimboldo as a model for his “metafisikal translations.” According to Roland Barthes, Arcimboldo “does not create signs” as much as he selects them, “combines them [and] permutes them.”87 Even as Arcimboldo seems to operate by metaphorical substitution—“the helmet is no longer like a dish, it is a dish”—he actually “keeps the two terms of the identification, helmet and dish, separate: on one side I read a head, on the other the contents

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of a dish.”88 This back-and-forth between thing and sign is also an essential aspect of the multi-evocative image in Paolozzi. Moreover, like Arcimboldo, he builds from given elements in a way that both holds the parts in tension with the whole and keeps the composition in tension with its opposite—with decomposition in the bronze figures (they might fall apart) and with rearrangement in the aluminum assemblages (pieces might be shifted around).89 For his aluminum sculptures Paolozzi found some parts in stock catalogues and had others produced from blueprints; he then laid out the components and locked them into place: “Assembly decided on the floor of the works,” he noted; “creative decision on several levels. Spontaneity meets discipline and so these simple objects grew in assembly into new positive forms” (S 102).90 (fig. 4.48) Whereas Paolozzi evoked industrial relics in his bronze figures, here he mimicked industrial procedures. “The ship, the aeroplane, the motor-car are all made from components,” he remarked to Hamilton in 1965, so why not sculpture as well (S 139)? Already in 1923 Le Corbusier had asked this question of architecture: Why not base modern design on such formal economy and operational efficiency? Yet, again, Paolozzi was hardly the rationalist that Le Corbusier purported to be; his account of his practice as a “maze of parts and persons like an avant garde power plant” is almost a travesty of Corbusierian logic (S 83, 105). In effect, Paolozzi played on industrial production faux-naively, as an adult imagines a child might; he spoke of his aluminum elements as a “nursery table alphabet” used to contrive a “toy kingdom” (S 108). In another resonant phrase Paolozzi described his aluminum sculpture as a “metallization of the dream.” Here the emphasis should fall less on metallization, which calls up the Futurist reforging of the body desired by Marinetti and company, and more on dream, which aligns Paolozzi again with his Surrealist precursors. In an analogy dear to the Surrealists, Freud described the dream as a rebus of word-images, a picture-language produced by the unconscious through condensation and displacement. Lacan, once an associate of the Surrealists, later recast this operation in linguistic terms, indeed in the very terms of metaphorical selection and metonymic combination proposed by Jakobson. Paolozzi intuited a similar connection between dream-work and language in his sculpture. In his writings he sometimes updates the cherished line of the nineteenth-century poet Lautréamont (as beautiful “as the fortuitous encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table”)

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4.48 Eduardo Paolozzi with serial parts for his aluminum sculptures at Juby’s Engineering Works, Ipswich, England, c. 1973–74.

that underwrote the collage aesthetic of the Surrealists. Almost programmatic in this respect is an aluminum sculpture titled Mechaniks Bench (1963), which consists of versions of carpentry tools presented on a bench as so many “enlarged details of the mechanical world” (S 98). (fig. 4.49) With one object cast from a saw guard and another derived from a model kit, Mechaniks Bench thematizes the acts of cutting and constructing, selecting and combining.91 Some of his favorite motifs, such as wheels and dynamos, are also mobile mechanisms (Paolozzi called them “loco-motifs”) that make other things move as well. However, a tension persists in his notion of sculpture as the metallization of the dream: the metallization is intended to “arrest this flux,” whereas the dream suggests that it should not be so fixed (S 90). This tension touches on a general question in the history of sculpture: To what extent can a spatial art comprehend a temporal event? It also brushes against a specific problem in Surrealist aesthetics: How can an unconscious process like a dream be captured by a calculated act like a sculpture?92 This question bears on a central concern of his project, for Paolozzi sees his “metallized dream” as a “search for archetypes” that stem from collective experience

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4.49 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, Mechaniks Bench, 1963. Aluminum, 69 1⁄2 × 72 1⁄3 × 19 inches. Tate Museum.

(S 95, MD 1). Thus, again, his ikonic imperative continues with his aluminum sculpture; in fact he regards his favorite motifs, such as the wheel, the clock, and the dynamo, as technological emblems of world-historical transformations.93 Here the cryptic note that opens The Metallization of a Dream (1963), his image-text collaboration with Alloway, is suggestive: The theory of opposites or the history of nothing with the suppression of talent involving the wheel of a locomotive, the brain of the dog and crankshaft of a ship. The cylinder head of the aeroplane, the valve of the oven or various domestic articles, new and old. An architecture built up from the tools of a child. The search for archetypes to aid a dream in metal. (MD 5) In the early 1960s Paolozzi repeats the phrase “the theory of opposites or the history of nothing” almost as koan, so how are we to understand its “wirey irony” (S 95)?

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4.50 EDUARDO PAOLOZZI, frames from History of Nothing, 1962. Twelve-minute film.

While “the theory of opposites” suggests a dialectical view of historical change— that it proceeds through negation—the meaning of “the history of nothing” is more obscure. Perhaps Paolozzi understands his metallized dream as a “contribution to anonymous history” à la Giedion in Mechanization Takes Command. “Humble objects have shaken our mode of living to its very roots,” Giedion writes there; they can be taken to register, if not to trigger, historical transformation.94 Paolozzi agreed: “The history of man can be written with objects,” even modest ones like “domestic articles” (S 99), he asserts in a note for History of Nothing (1962), a twelve-minute film of found images mostly of outmoded mechanisms and decorative designs drawn from his scrapbooks. (fig. 4.50) In one sense, then, such a history is “nothing” when compared to traditional accounts of great men and epochal events; it involves a “suppression of talent” (S 102). In another sense, such a history is “nothing” because no single invention (not even as fundamental a one as a locomotive wheel or a ship crankshaft) determines its historical period. “The writing of history has less to do with facts as such than with their relations,” Giedion insisted, and again Paolozzi agreed: his formats of collage and assemblage stage such relations in the form of art.95

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“A collection of human artifacts . . . assembled, edited, rearranged,” Paolozzi writes in one note for Metafisikal Translations; “a living codex of changing references,” he writes in another for History of Nothing (S 98, 100). If the first formulation evokes history according to Giedion, the second conjures up myth according to Lévi-Strauss, and often the two domains, history and myth, do converge in Paolozzi. In The Savage Mind, which appeared in French in 1962 (the same year as Metafisikal Translations and History of Nothing and a year before The Metallization of a Dream), Lévi-Strauss offered his celebrated account of myth as a “living codex of changing references” produced through bricolage. In contradistinction to “the engineer [who] questions the universe,” Lévi-Strauss argued in a famous definition, the bricoleur “makes do with ‘whatever is at hand’, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous.” And, though the bricoleur is alert to the materiality of his “oddments left over from human endeavors,” he treats them as “intermediaries between images and concepts,” that is, as signs in which “the signified turns into the signifying and vice versa,” even as “operators” that “represent a set of actual and possible relations.”96 With his diverse tools and leftover artifacts, with his “mud language,” which is at once physical and semiotic, and multi-evocative images, which speak to different “relations,” Paolozzi is such a bricoleur.97 In fact the Paolozzi enterprise can be understood as mythopoeic in the Lévi-Straussian sense. Paolozzi associated his “method of taking the world apart and reassembling it” with his Surrealist predecessors (S 272). Lévi-Strauss was also influenced by his Surrealist contemporaries, but in the first instance he referred his model of myth to his anthropological precursor Franz Boas, whom he quotes as follows: “It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up, only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments.”98 Bricolage in Paolozzi is also both destructive and constructive in this way; its aim, as he once put it, is to “luminatecoagulate” (S 120).99 Like myth in Boas and Lévi-Strauss, his process is at once iconoclastic and iconophilic, an “image-breaking” that is also a “god-making.” But, again, can “historical images [be] re-interpreted to modern requirements” in this way (S 110)? Can “iconological analysis” truly “keep pace with our century” (S 137)?100 As the Smithsons asked of New Brutalism at large, can a “rough poetry” be dragged “out of the confused and powerful forces” at work “in a mass-production society”?101

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For Lévi-Strauss myth is such a rough poetry, one that attempts to resolve real contradictions in a symbolic manner. But, if the contradictions are real, as indeed they are, they cannot be resolved in myth, poetry, or sculpture, but only registered there— as fragments, rearrangements, breakdowns, gaps. That is what positive barbarism in Paolozzi does; it is not everything, but it is not nothing.

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5.1 Claes Oldenburg in his 14th Street studio, New York, 1967.

5| Claes Oldenburg and His Ray Guns A photograph from 1967 shows Claes Oldenburg in his studio on 14th Street in New York. (fig. 5.1) He is on the telephone, and numbers and notes are scribbled across the wall and the door behind him, on which the words “freuda vincit” are also stenciled.1 The word play is typical of the artist: “freuda” calls up Freud (Oldenburg was an avid reader of psychoanalysis) as well as Freude, German for “joy,” and vincit is Latin for “conquers.”2 So Freud conquers, or joy wins, and maybe eros does too. But then a pesky skull sits atop the exit sign, a Halloween Yorick that suggests that the photo is also a little vanitas, perhaps with the distracted Oldenburg the subject of his own cautionary tale. In any case, life and death are put into play allegorically, and my thesis is that Oldenburg aimed to turn the forces of the latter toward the ends of the former, that this was the primary motive of his positive barbarism. At the same time Freude does not always win in Oldenburg any more than it does in Freud. Oldenburg moved from Chicago to New York in June 1956, and the 27-year-old wrote this promissory note soon after: “My art . . . strives for a simultaneous presentation of contraries.”3 It would proceed in this way too, “in a series of ‘grand symbols’,” (95) that contrasted with one another over the first decade of his mature work: first the street, briefly the beach, then the store, and finally the home.4 Whereas The Street, which opened in early 1960, staged an urban world of destitution and death, The Store, which appeared in mid-1961, explored the opposite themes of abundance and eros; here everyday comestibles and commodities were reshaped as though by bodily drives. Death returned in Bedroom Ensemble, which developed in late 1963, but in the different guise of chic décor, of style as stylization, indeed as reification. Oldenburg then pivoted again, to his soft sculptures, which challenged all things hard and fixed. Thus did he progress by way of contraries—themes of destruction and sex and qualities of rigid and pliant—and in the process he demonstrated that each term calls out for its other. “Motto,” Oldenburg declared on April 1, 1963 (not long before he began Bedroom Ensemble), “things are best if come by from the other side, from their opposite. Such as meaning from non-meaning. Relation from non-relation.”5 This relational way of working is not only dialectical but also

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psychoanalytical, governed as it is by this premise: “I would like to show,” Oldenburg wrote already in the mid-1950s, “that the psychical and the physical are one” (26).6

Death in the Street Newly arrived in New York in 1956, Oldenburg noted his attraction to “vulgar forms of expression, flawed, stunted” (19). “I like beaten, battered things,” he added a year later, and related adjectives (blunt, bare, bleak, barren) recur in his notes of the time.7 “What are my preferences in the real world?” Oldenburg asked rhetorically in 1959. “Present-day primitives: children, madmen, the American cultureless. In general, the bleak, gray face of things not pastoral. Modern man, citified. This is the setting for my mysticism” (87). “The street is nature for us,” he added, which suggests that the urban environment had become a second nature (in the sense developed in the previous chapter), that the environment of industrial production, consumption, and waste comprised the world for Oldenburg (86).8 “Junkyard is beach is street” is a related motto of this early period (99). “A refuse lot in the city is worth all the art stores in the world” is another (10). Clearly he believed that “a primitive” in these cultural wilds would have ample material to work with (113). Note how different this junkyard is from the product-scape of Pop art, to which Oldenburg is too quickly assimilated, and how similar he is to Dubuffet, who was an important influence, as was Céline.9 Oldenburg also responded to imperatives within the neo-avant-garde. Along with his newfound friends Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Lucas Samaras, he was eager to move beyond the Abstract Expressionist painting then dominant in New York. “We are just a little tired of four sides and a flat face,” Oldenburg commented in 1960; “I wish to destroy the rectangle and substitute the ‘medium’ of indefinite form” (127).10 Hence the turn of this group of artists to found objects, assemblages, and happenings, which Oldenburg regarded as “not real theater—but ‘actual painting’” pushed into space “like living sculpture” (117). His first foray in this mode was The Street, which opened on January 30, 1960 in the basement of Judson Church on Washington Square; it appeared alongside a Dine installation titled The House, both under the rubric “The Ray Gun Show.”11

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One inspiration for the scrappy objects that littered The Street came from a book about art classes for kids that Oldenburg found at the Cooper Union library where he worked as a shelver. Dubuffet, a great advocate of the art of both children and graffitists, was also on his mind, as was art brut in general (Oldenburg had seen examples in Chicago).12 For The Street he hewed rough forms out of paper, cardboard, burlap, and wood, much of which was scavenged from the street, and outlined them in black ink and charcoal to make them look charred.13 He also molded lumpen figures out of wire, covered them with newspaper soaked in wheat paste, and dribbled them with casein and enamel. These ragged shapes lined the space and hung from the ceiling while the floor was covered with newspapers, bottles, and other debris. This “panorama of contemporary urban life” included various cars, heads, signs, a barking dog, a display window, a shoeshine man, a bicyclist, a man with a walking stick, as well as motley figures with ray guns.14 However, for all this activity The Street remained a wasteland, a post-apocalyptic world that was also a “personal nightmare” (94). (fig. 5.2) Oldenburg subtitled The Street “A New Realism” (101). “The city is not ordered,” he wrote soon after coming to New York; people and things are “without differentiation,” and his early work blurs private and public realms too (23). Oldenburg did not simply document this urban “formlessness”; he exacerbated it, and this mimetic excess is still evident in the tidier version of The Street staged at the Reuben Gallery in summer 1960 (all but five of the pieces from the Judson installation were lost). (fig. 5.3) Consider his cardboard Mug (1960), which is a cross between a coffee cup and a street bum, with a bandaged mess for a head, a shapeless torso for a body, and an obscene pendant. (fig. 5.4) Although the word “mug” connotes the ugly and the criminal (ugly mug, mugshot), Mug goes further: this portrait of a street person as a broken thing advances a dystopian view of the city as an abject zone of indistinction between subject and object. “A person on the street is more of the street than he is a human,” Oldenburg claimed, and the Bowery in particular is “a devastated area where the people become the equivalents of, say, a rag on the street.”15 However, rather than retreat in disgust, he identified with this lumpen condition; one of his avatars during this time was “the awful rag man” (93). For Baudelaire the rag picker was a figure on the margins of the capitalist economy who was able to find value even in refuse; for Oldenburg the rag man was simply a rag, man reduced to refuse.16

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5.2 Installation view of Claes Oldenburg, The Street, 1960. Judson Gallery, Judson Memorial Church, New York.

Other avatars in The Street, such as the death-headed Street Chick, also presented the city as a place of bare life, and this dark vision runs back to his first days in New York: “What our civilization is is an old, unshaven man with an open mouth whose legs and arms have been cut off, whose tongue has been cut out, whose ears have been cut off, whose eyes have been cut out, who drools as he rolls his way along the asphalt” (22). Recall that this bare life is a principal subject of the positive barbarian according to Benjamin: “the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.” (see fig. 0.9) If the city at large is the setting of “everyday agony” for Oldenburg, “the street is death.”17 Here the new realism of The Street shades into “a winter allegory,” which he acted out at Judson Church in a series of performances titled Ray Gun Spex in

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5.3 Installation view of Claes Oldenburg, The Street, 1960, Reuben Gallery, New York (the artist is pictured with Anita Reuben).

late February and early March 1960 (94).18 The first of these happenings was Snapshots from the City, which Oldenburg termed a “psychasthenic spectacle.”19 “Psychasthenia” is a technical word for a neurotic breakdown, but it can also signify a dissolution of the subject, and this is what Snapshots seemed to stage.20 As captured on film by Stan van der Beek, the performance included Samaras, Patty Mucha (whom Oldenburg married in April), and Oldenburg strewn with rags. Mucha as “the Street Chick” wore a primitivist-Dadaist mask, and Oldenburg as “the Beggar” danced wildly, convulsively, a combination of psychotic and shaman. As Oldenburg described it, audience members saw only “fragments of action, immobilized by instantaneous illuminations,” and these flashes (“the snapshots” of the title) were intended to make them convulse as well (230). There were moans, cries, and howls, as if Oldenburg were possessed and exorcist in one; at the end, as a siren wailed, he collapsed amid the debris.21 (fig. 5.5) To perform “the everyday agony” of the city in this manner was to do a few contradictory things at once. First, Oldenburg saw The Street as “an antibourgeois, anticapitalist cabaret” and the happenings as a form of “mime” (154, 87). This underscores his strategy of mimetic excess, one, affined with the performances of Zurich Dada forty years before, that aimed to intensify the effects of “the city filth, the evils of advertising, the disease of success, [and] popular culture” (126). (figs. 5.6, 5.7)

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5.4 CLAES OLDENBURG, Mug, 1960. Cardboard and wood, painted with casein and spray enamel, 76 × 50 inches. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

“I am a moralist,” Oldenburg commented in language that recalls Hugo Ball, the first ringleader of Zurich Dada. “I would say: face yourself even if it means destruction” (152).22 Yet this excess also worked to defend against these conditions, and sometimes in The Street his rag man assumed the apotropaic guise of a scarecrow.23 Finally, such exacerbation sought to transform these conditions too, at least imaginatively. Above all Oldenburg wanted “to make hostile objects human” (127), that is, to de-reify the alien world of urban capitalism and to reanimate it in other ways.24 The dialectical dimension of his project emerges here, for, even as The Street reduced persons to objects, it also treated things as human (perhaps in its own manner Mug does both). Thus, as much as “the street is death” for Oldenburg, it is also a “festival of the living object,” and this festival is even more pronounced in The Store (89). Already we glimpse his version of positive barbarism, which takes “bleakness” as “MODERN” and aims “to learn how to live with it” and even “to love it” (85).25 Oldenburg offered “the Ray Gun” as a master term for this metamorphosis

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5.5 CLAES OLDENBURG, Snapshots from the City, from the performance series Ray Gun Spex, held within the exhibition The Street. February 29, March 1 and 2, 1960.

whereby an object becomes, if not an animate subject, then at least an ambiguous sign. He first mentioned the Ray Gun on November 2, 1959, while at work on The Street, and he later placed The Store under its aegis too: one note reads “Make Ray Gun Mfg. Co. sign + put in window” (147). Of course, a ray gun is a science-fiction weapon (there is a photo of the young Claes, with his little brother Richard, both costumed à la Buck Rogers, whose radio serial debuted just before Oldenburg was born).26 (fig. 5.8) But the term is an elastic one for Oldenburg; in fact elasticity is what his Ray Gun performs. Along with a multitude of objects he applied the word to drawings, notes, posters, happenings, and spaces. “Ray Gun as the street. Ray Gun as the store. Ray Gun as the factory!” Oldenburg exclaimed about three sites where

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5.6 CLAES OLDENBURG, Elephant Mask (destroyed), 1959, worn by Patty Mucha. Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with latex, 48 × 35 × 27 inches. 5.7 Sophie Taeuber with a Marcel Janco mask at the Galerie Dada, Zurich, 1917.

objects are discovered, bought, and produced, respectively (161). An “obsessive word,” the Ray Gun functions as a magical–performative utterance that not only nominates different things as Ray Guns but also transforms the Ray Gun into different things, and seeks to change them all in the process—again, “to make hostile objects human” (86). (fig. 5.9) What sort of artistic device is the Ray Gun? Oldenburg described it, only semifacetiously, as capacious (“nothing is irrelevant, i.e., anything can be used”), visionary (“Ray Gun was not invented, it was received”), even messianic (“the whole world begins to see as Ray Gun sees”) (155, 102, 93). More prosaically, it diverges from both the readymade and the found object in a manner that became axiomatic for Oldenburg: “An object that is neither readymade nor fabricated readymade,” he proclaimed a few years after The Store. “That’s the rules” (214).27 Unlike the readymade, the Ray Guns aim to be transformative, not tautological; they resist the reduction of art to commodity. And unlike the found object (at least in its Surrealist definition),

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5.8 Claes Oldenburg and his younger brother Richard, Chicago, c. 1940.

they are public, not private; they are not addressed to one psyche alone. In fact Oldenburg imagined the Ray Gun as a “guise” whose metamorphic power extends to subjects and objects alike—to everyone and everything that comes into contact with it. Already with his Ray Guns, then, Oldenburg began to transform the deathly indistinction of The Street into an ambiguous liveliness. Some of these qualities are already evident in Street Ray Guns (1959), a first collection of eight objects in the vague shape of a toy pistol produced in painted plaster and leather and presented in a thin white case. On the one hand, these Ray Guns look like scrap; on the other, arranged in a manner that is not strictly personal, commercial, or museological, they are artifacts with a significance and a value we cannot specify, and this passage from known object to enigmatic sign animates them.28 (That most of these Ray Guns are knobby, like handles as much as guns, formed by the hand for the hand, also enlivens them.)29 Already under way is his project not only to make “hostile objects human” but also “to find the spiritual in the material.”30

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5.9 CLAES OLDENBURG, Street Ray Guns, 1959–60. Eight objects painted with enamel and casein in a painted wood box, 16 1⁄2 × 13 3⁄4 × 4 inches. Private collection.

5.10 CLAES OLDENBURG, “Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun, 1959. Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with casein, 35 7⁄8 × 44 7⁄8 × 14 5⁄8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art. 5.11 LOUISE BOURGEOIS, Fillette, 1968. Latex over plaster, 23 1⁄2 × 11 × 7 1⁄2 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

“Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun (1959) is the dominant object in the series, and Oldenburg first dangled it like a huge hunk of meat (it is roughly three by four feet) from the ceiling of The Street.31 (fig. 5.10) Made of newspaper soaked in wheat paste, shaped over a wire frame, and dribbled with black casein, this obscene blob is both an absurd weapon and a mock phallus, one that is undercut precisely because it is overblown—a deflation-through-inflation that became a common ploy in his subsequent work. Its title also diminishes by doubling (the scare quotes only compound the travesty), and its trigger, a pointy penis, renders the bulbous gun more ludicrous still. In the midst of the Cold War, and in advance of the feminism of the 1960s, Oldenburg pilloried patriarchy as phallic power in both public-political and privatedomestic terms: “Empire” and “Papa” are strung up together.32 (Nine years later Louise Bourgeois hung up her literal version, the famous Fillette, produced in latex over plaster.) (fig. 5.11)

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5.12 CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI, Princess X, 1915–16. Marble, 22 inches. Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska. 5.13 PABLO PICASSO, Head of a Woman, 1932. Plaster, 52 1⁄2 × 25 5⁄8 × 28 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

“Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun is also an early instance of another move characteristic of Oldenburg, which is to combine penile forms with fecal ones. Implicitly this gesture challenges the adult order of genitality with the infantile one of anality. As we saw in chapter 1, Freud regarded the anal zone as one of formal indistinction, which is to say of symbolic ambiguity; the infant does not much distinguish between feces, penises, and babies.33 And “Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun is a confused object: a gun that is also penis, with a handle that oscillates between testicles and breasts, it is (as Oldenburg remarked in another context) “double sexed” (283). There are precedents for this ambisexuality in modernist sculpture. Although Brancusi anointed his Princess X (1915–16), an abstracted bust of Marie Bonaparte, “the eternal feminine,” Picasso declared it a phallus.34 And in his own Surrealist sculptures of his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, Picasso indulged in a similar conflation of penis with nose and breast with head. (figs. 5.12, 5.13) Oldenburg was not above this semi-sadistic play—his Woman’s Leg (1959) is another phallic Ray Gun—but, again, the distinctive aspect of his early work is its mixing of the penile and the fecal, which was already active in his suite of eighteen collages titled Strange Eggs (1957–58).35 (figs. 5.14, 5.15)

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5.14 CLAES OLDENBURG, Woman’s Leg, 1959. Newspaper soaked in wheat paste over wire frame, painted with casein. 38 1⁄2 × 16 1⁄2 × 10 inches. Centre Pompidou. 5.15 CLAES OLDENBURG, Untitled (Strange Eggs), 1957–58. Collage on cardboard, 14 1⁄4 × 11 inches. Menil Collection.

In an influential lecture on “The Meaning of the Phallus” (1958), Jacques Lacan argued that the phallus is a signifier; more, that it is the master signifier because it articulates sexual difference, which governs all other differences, in language above all.36 On the one hand, Oldenburg posits his Ray Gun as a dominant signifier too; like the phallus for Lacan, it is a “copula” that connects and transforms a myriad things, with a magical power that he evoked in this enigmatic formula from 1963: “The Ray Gun image in all is the symbol of the secret image function of the object” (208). On the other hand, Oldenburg seems to mock the supposed mastery of this phallus, its “secret image function,” in large part through the very profusion of his Ray Guns. “It’s just my luck,” he commented in 1969, “that everything comes out like a prick” (327). Worse still, in “Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun and other instances, Oldenburg pitches his phallic signifier in the place of excrement. Oldenburg spent the summer of 1960 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which he regarded as “an obliteration by non-city nature of my involvement with the city street.”37 During this break he focused on another motif that he dubbed a “guise,” this one based on the American flag. (fig. 5.16) Once more Oldenburg transformed

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5.16 CLAES OLDENBURG, The Old Dump Flag, 1960. Wood, 8 3⁄4 × 10 3⁄4 × 2 3⁄4 inches. Private collection.

sundry scraps, many found on the beach, into simple objects, and again he drew on popular culture: if his Ray Guns riff on science fiction, his Flags play with folk art (including the figure of the beachcomber as amateur artist). At the same time he also responded to advanced painting. “The flags are made out of what I take to be the basic pictographic elements,” Oldenburg commented (131). Like the tree or the pier for Mondrian, his flag was a way both to break down a picture to its fundamental horizontals and verticals and to complicate the opposition of figure and ground essential to any image-making—high-modernist ends achieved, in ironic fashion, through folk-art means. Clearly, Oldenburg had the recent flags of Jasper Johns in his sights too, but he troped this precedent as well; whereas Johns reduced a potent symbol to a physical thing, Oldenburg transformed physical things into ambiguous signs. This is the case throughout his work: the literal supports, not stymies, the semiotic (a point of affinity with both Dubuffet and Paolozzi).38 The Old Dump Flag (1960)—the title points to another source of his materials— consists of six pieces of scrap wood attached to a rough plank. Five of the pieces are old dowels (one is cut into two) set on top of each other, end to end, so as to signify

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the red and white stripes of the flag, while a dark block represents the blue rectangle of white stars. Kornville Flag (1960) looks even simpler. (fig. 5.17) Here the stripes are signified by a dirty white rectangle riddled with paint cracks, and the stars by a small gray shingle in the upper left of the panel. Oldenburg attached a little stick to this weathered rectangle in a way that suggests a smaller flag, and this slight addition opens up a mise-en-abyme of banners. At the same time the larger flag is framed by two wood semi-circles, a rough one above and a smooth one below, to imply a circle that could signify earth, moon, sun, or the entire cosmos. Essential to the Flags, then, is less the Neo-Dada redemption of refuse as art (soon to be a cliché of the period) than the semiotic paradox that the more elemental a sign is the more multivalent it becomes. For Oldenburg “everything must have as model a primitive form,” by which he meant not that all things can be reduced to a prototype (much less an archetype), but, on the contrary, that a simple shape can generate different meanings, and conversely that disparate things can produce similar images (99). Along with the Ray Guns, this insight is first intuited in his three Street Heads (1959–60), each of which is a rough oval that can signify any number of referents (“head” is not the first that comes to mind), yet it is developed programmatically in the Flags. “I feel content should be as open as possible, and that is not to say vague” (99). This is a central lesson about “the secret image function” of the object that Oldenburg learned at this time, and it recalls the famous aperçu extracted by Picasso from his Grebo mask while at work on his Guitar constructions of 1912—that an element in a picture or a sculpture signifies primarily not by reference to things in the world but according to its differential position within a contextual system of other elements (for example, a cylinder equals “eye” in the mask but “hole” in the guitar).39 Just as the Ray Guns reduce the object as form in order to open it up as sculpture, the Flags do much the same with painting. At this moment Oldenburg wrote a poem that speaks to this protean dimension. “P......G” (1960)—the title invites us, as in a crossword puzzle, to fill in the ellipses with “painting”—casts this art as a sleeping beauty that “has slept so long/ in its gold crypts/ in its glass graves,” effectively entombed by its conventional frames. Oldenburg urges painting to assume other activities and forms; it is “asked out/ to go for a swim/ is given a cigarette/ a bottle of beer,” even “given the chance to be/ a flag” or “a shirt/ a tie/ a pair of pants/ a suit of clothes.” Here he looks ahead to the subject matter of The Store. “Bolder and

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5.17 CLAES OLDENBURG, Kornville Flag, 1960. Wood, 19 1⁄4 × 17 3⁄4 inches. Centre Pompidou.

bolder/ it becomes anything it wants to be/ a hamburger/ an ice-cream cone/ a newspaper/ a sewing machine/ a bicycle/ impossible inexhaustible p......g.”40 Like the Ray Guns, the Flags suggest a repurposing of the found object that also targets the commodity, which Oldenburg could not escape in Provincetown, a town “focused on the commercialization of patriotism and history.”41 At the same time he deemed this village a fitting place for a fresh start, given that the Pilgrims had landed there before Plymouth Rock, and in his semi-facetious way Oldenburg indulged his own fantasy of primacy. Not just any flag or flag maker, he asserted, “I am Flag. I am Betsy Ross,” and not just any beachcomber, he claimed, “I am Robinson Crusoe” (99, 71). A first man in the mold of Walt Whitman too, Oldenburg does not behold creation so much as he articulates it: “I take the pieces from the shore and make a statement on the order of things” (130).42 And here, however hubristic the act may be, he remakes a first sign with the scantiest of materials: “Two pieces float up to me in the water, asking to be joined. Joining them, I see I have participated in a blasphemy, but I can’t dispose it” (130).

Sex in The Store With his intuition about “the secret image function of the object” developed through the Ray Guns and the Flags, Oldenburg was ready to launch his second major project, The Store. (fig. 5.18) In the end it consisted of nearly sixty sculptures, all made of muslin or burlap soaked in plaster, shaped over chicken wire, and painted with bright enamels—the gaudy colors in marked contrast with the grim palette of The Street. Oldenburg based his objects on the cheap food and clothing on sale in the Lower East Side, and he both produced them in a rented storefront in the neighborhood (107 East Second Street) and sold them there for two months from December 1, 1961 (The Store thus combined studio and gallery). After the “non-city” of the beach, Oldenburg was back in his urban habitat, and again he proceeded by way of contraries: if The Street was filled with trash and haunted by poverty and death, The Store was given over to products and animated by profusion and eroticism. (fig. 5.19) However, like the deathliness of The Street, the eroticism of The Store was no simple matter. “The erotic or the sexual is the root of ‘art,’ its first impulse,”

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5.18 View from Claes Oldenburg, The Store, at 107 East Second Street, New York, December 1, 1961–January 31, 1962. 5.19 Installation view of Claes Oldenburg, The Store, at 107 East Second Street, New York, December 1, 1961–January 31, 1962.

Oldenburg wrote soon after the opening, but this root had become entwined with “fetichistic stuff” (sic; 160).43 Implicitly, then, the fetishism at issue in The Store is double—fetishism as in Freud, the diversion of a sexual aim to a nonsexual object (implicit in Braselette and Blue and Pink Panties, both 1961), and fetishism as in Marx, the investment of an object with a value, even a vitality, that it does not intrinsically possess (several of the Store objects seem almost alive). (figs. 5.20, 5.21) Oldenburg thus pitted the sexual fetish against the commodity fetish so as to pathologize the commercial products that made up his subject matter.44 Or, more precisely, he compounded the two fetishisms in a way that underscored how they were already conflated in postwar consumerism, which thrives on the “sex appeal of the inorganic.”45 This is less to pathologize any product than to accentuate how it is given to us as perverse; certainly the Store objects, fragmented and superimposed as they often are, bear the stigmata of this double fetishization. On the one hand, then, Oldenburg still sought “to make hostile objects human,” to reclaim a magic in materials; on the other, he highlighted how these objects were already estranged almost beyond recognition.46 Simultaneously, he worked to restore “the erotic root of art” and to exploit the “intense satanic vulgarity” of the “fetishistic stuff” that charged it. “This gives the object an intensity, and this is what I try to project” (160). In the first instance Oldenburg pursued this dual project through his subject matter of inexpensive stuff. With a cash register placed prominently in the space and a few objects comprised primarily of price tags, The Store “tries to overcome the sense of guilt connected with money and sales” (161).47 (figs. 5.22, 5.23) At the same time he imbued his things with attributes—cheap, perishable, tactile, erotic—that directly oppose the qualities usually associated with art—expensive, permanent, optical, detached. In spring 1961, while at work on The Store, Oldenburg wrote his celebrated manifesto “I Am For an Art,” which advocates for an active bodiliness in artistic matters, sensuous and sexual, against the passive contemplation of traditional aesthetics.48 And in The Store he worked to deliver on this call—to return desires and drives to art-making according to the formula “Art equals food, and it equals sex” (157). (fig. 5.24) Oldenburg also pushed his dual project in the manufacture of his objects, which he described as an “erotomystical ritual of mixing plaster and pouring” (214).

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5.20 CLAES OLDENBURG, Braselette, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 41 × 30 1⁄4 × 4 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art. 5.21 CLAES OLDENBURG, Blue and Pink Panties, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 62 1⁄4 × 34 3⁄4 × 6 inches. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

5.22 CLAES OLDENBURG, Cash Register, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 25 × 21 × 34 inches. Locksley Shea Gallery, Minneapolis.

Fashioned by hand with the essential help of his wife Patty, the Store products are unique, even eccentric, in vivid contrast with the serial sameness of standard commodities. Already evident in The Street and the Flags, the repurposing of the readymade and the found object is extreme here; once again the point is not the tautology of art as readymade product but the transformation of artwork and commodity alike.49 Through “obsession,” “fragmentation,” and “combination,” Oldenburg sought not only “to individualize single objects” but “to surprise them” into a new category of being. Exactly what kind of body does The Store recover for art? In various texts Oldenburg tries out different tropes, such as the store as sex: “Storage—womb, breast, testicles, any containing part of the body”; or the store as birth: “Form from cast, insides, soft casts (uterus) are all birth parallels, parodies, paraphrases” (161). In the process he confuses genders as well as senses. Is any term primary or even

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5.23 CLAES OLDENBURG, Fragment of Advertisement: 39 Cents, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 29 × 38 × 4 inches. Private collection.

separate, or is his aim precisely to mix and to muddle? “I am for the art of kids’ smells,” Oldenburg proclaimed in his manifesto (175). Here The Store is imagined as a theater of regression where forms are confused, the drives override all other forces, and the more primitive ones, the oral and the anal, take revenge on the more advanced, the phallic and the genital. In this respect Ice Cream Sandwich (1961) can be taken as exemplary: an obscene maw, painted all-American red, white, and blue, it looks like a double-sexed mouth and anus in one.50 (fig. 5.25) Oldenburg associated The Store with incorporation and evacuation. “Store is cloaca, defecation is passage,” he asserted, as is art at large: “The act of art is symbolized . . . by eating, digesting, and defecating” (214). As noted in chapter 1, for Ernest Jones, a close associate of Freud, the prototype of art making is our infantile shaping of feces. Might this be what Oldenburg meant by the “first impulse” of art,

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5.24 CLAES OLDENBURG, Pastry Case, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, in glass case, 14 3⁄8 × 10 3⁄8 × 10 3⁄8 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

5.25 CLAES OLDENBURG, Ice Cream Sandwich, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 22 × 22 × 7 inches.

5.26 CLAES OLDENBURG, Jacket and Shirt Fragment, 1961–62. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 42 1⁄8 × 30 × 6 1⁄2 inches. Centre Pompidou.

and what he wanted to reclaim in The Store? Again in a Dubuffetian way Oldenburg described his sculpture as “Poopy”—“Poopy is my Medium,” he remarked—and some of his Store objects do appear less half-baked than half-digested, “residual objects” passed through the insides of a body (290).51 This is true of Cash Register (1961), which looks as though it were partially dissolved by intestinal acids, as well as Jacket and Shirt Fragment (1961–62) with its fecal browns and blood reds. In such works the clean sheen of the commodity is given over to the visceral viscosity of the body. (fig. 5.26) In fact, just as Oldenburg combines two kinds of fetishisms, he also crosses two orders of consumption; bodily consumption appears to corrode commercial consumption (“corrode” from the Latin rodere, to gnaw). Once more

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Oldenburg undercuts the consumerist dimension of Pop art, even as he also indicates its own (suppressed) anality: “Before Pop there was Poopy” (117). Two points should be underscored here. Oldenburg believed that art “must grow out of . . . impulses that produce real power,” and he tapped the two drives, the oral and the anal, which are the most violent in nature, involved as they are in incorporation and evacuation (90).52 At the same time these two zones are also the most metamorphic; recall that, for Freud, the anal stage is one of symbolic transformation. In this respect the model of these sculptures might not be the fetish after all— that is, if we see the fetish as a thing that fixes desire—for Oldenburg wanted his objects to be “constantly elusive.”53 “My work is always on its way between one point and another,” Oldenburg averred, and to evoke this transit he offered this riff on The Store: cock and balls cock and balls equals tie and collar equals leg and bra equals stars and stripes flag equals cigarette package and cigarettes heart equals balls and triangle equals (upside down) girdle and stockings equals (sidewise) cigarette package equals flag.54 Given that it tends toward the phallic, this “free association” is not so free, yet not “everything comes out as a prick”: there are several “elusive” jumps here between objects and orientations, subjects and sexes. (figs. 5.27, 5.28) Oldenburg mimicked a regression to the oral and the anal not only in The Store but also in the “mama-babble” of “I Am for an Art” and other texts of the time. This is indeed a regression staged “in order to mark out a path back from alienated object relations.”55 Thus his is an attack on the symbolic order only in the first instance; just as important is his search for a different language (at one point Oldenburg termed his idiom “ab-fant,” a play on “infant” that combines “abstract” and “fantastic”).56 That is, the breakdown of the symbolic, the celebration of the formless, is

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5.27 CLAES OLDENBURG, Big White Shirt with Blue Tie, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 46 3⁄4 × 30 3⁄4 × 13 1⁄3 inches. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

5.28 CLAES OLDENBURG, Red Tights with Fragment 9, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 69 5⁄8 × 34 1⁄4 × 8 3⁄4 inches. The Museum of Modern Art.

only an initial move that prepares a ground where object relations might be developed anew, or at least where unexpected signs can be gleaned from everyday stuff— from things seen in the street, on the beach, through a store window—in short, where forms can be “surprised” and made bodily and erotic again. This project is utopian, yet The Store did not pretend to be free of commercial exchange; again, Cash Register presided over the installation. Nor was it oblivious to death; in the midst of this “festival of the living object,” Bride Mannikin (1961) brooded like a ghostly Miss Havisham of the Lower East Side.

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Hard and Soft Oldenburg exhibited several of The Store objects at the Green Gallery in September 1962. (fig. 5.29) This presentation pulled them into the usual frame of the art exhibition, and the success of the show, financial as well as critical, did not sit well with him. “The Store is worn out,” Oldenburg declared flatly in August 1963, and in search of “a new consistency” he relocated to Los Angeles for over a year (208).57 The difference between the two cities struck him strongly. “In New York and Brooklyn, one sees the degradation and terror of production,” Oldenburg later wrote, while in Los Angeles one is aware “only of the finished product.” In this “paradise of industrialism,” he continued, “the object and the home have taken command completely” (263). This insight guided his primary project in LA, Bedroom Ensemble, first shown at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in January 1964.58 (fig. 5.30) Again, although the Store objects are as hard as plaster, many appear to be enlivened by direct involvement with bodily processes. In Bedroom Ensemble, on the contrary, an absolute rigidity pervades, and the body is absented; everything is subsumed by a design logic, and the appeal of the commodity is stripped away. Not public in subject matter like The Street and The Store, Bedroom Ensemble is also not private. Rather, for Oldenburg it represented a new topos of “the impersonal home” where “collective dreams” are processed “through commercial forms” (208).59 Far from rechanneled, consumerist desire freezes here, and the metamorphic imagination let loose in The Store is arrested. On the opposite walls of Bedroom Ensemble are versions of abstract paintings in black and white—horizontals and verticals on the left, four small rectangles on the right—in a style à la Pollock that had become rote.60 This theme of decorative abstraction extends with variations across the faux-functional objects that make up the installation; it is there in the couch, the headboard, and the bed cushions, all upholstered in a zebra pattern (in a nice touch Oldenburg throws a leopard coat over the zebra couch), as well as in the bedside and dressing tables, all painted in a dark design of turquoise blues. The two lampshades complete this abstract décor with shapes that recall metamorphic rock—even metamorphosis is petrified. Decoration subsumes not only early modernist abstraction (the old opposition of geometric and biomorphic models offered by Alfred Barr thirty years before

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5.29 Installation view of “Claes Oldenburg,” September 24– October 20, 1962, Green Gallery, New York.

collapses here) but also the latest pop design (represented by the white fluffy rug on the floor and the black vinyl objet on the couch). Everything in Bedroom Ensemble is governed by “geometry, abstraction, rationality,” Oldenburg remarked, with “nothing ‘real’ or ‘human’.”61 Most artificial are the fake fur and the vinyl, which detached Bedroom Ensemble from the hand of the artist, an effect furthered by the fabrication of the furniture on the basis of engineering diagrams.62 In this way the entire setup is taken “completely out of the functional class,” with no use value whatsoever.63 It is also removed from us physically; when exhibited, it is roped off. Yet Bedroom Ensemble was distanced from the start, based as it was on a newspaper advertisement; that is, it arrived already mediated, a replication less of an actual bedroom than of an illustrated display. (As with the studio and the store in The Store, these two spaces are collapsed, and, when presented at Janis, the gallery absorbed both).64 This picture-become-installation thus exists

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5.30 CLAES OLDENBURG, Bedroom Ensemble 3/3, 1963/95. Wood, Formica, vinyl, aluminum, paper, fake fur, muslin, Dacron, polyurethane foam, lacquer, 10 × 17 × 21 feet. Whitney Museum of American Art.

“somewhere between the actual thing and the representation of it”; it is its own simulacrum.65 This uncertain status is most evident in the foreshortening of the bed and the couch, an aspect of the advertisement that is made literal in the installation. Although Oldenburg called it “a rehearsal of machine style,” Bedroom Ensemble points to a new consumerist stage in capitalist society, one in which the dominant term is less exchange value than display value, and product and advertisement, commodity and sign, have merged.66 A simulacral contagion takes over the domestic scene, and it extends to the cultural domain that once resisted it the most—abstract painting. In a nasty turn in the dialectic of modernist art, an all-over abstraction becomes the template for an all-over décor that spreads from surface to surface like a bacterial bloom. If, not long before Bedroom Ensemble, Abstract Expressionism could claim to express a “new man,” here there is no subject at all; literally no one is at home (the title suggests an arrangement without inhabitants, who would only sully

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it).67 In this light Bedroom Ensemble could serve as a dioramic display in a future museum of natural history: the aspirational American middle-class consumer circa 1963. According to Oldenburg, though, the subject is not absent at all. Bedroom Ensemble, he tells us, was based on two personal experiences; the first (which he does not detail) involved “fantasies around my mother’s dressing table” (262); the second concerned a memory of “a famous motel along the shore road to Malibu, ‘Las Tunas Isles,’ in which (when I visited in 1947) each suite was decorated with the skin of a particular animal, i.e., tiger, leopard, zebra.”68 However, given that both stories are almost textbook examples of sexual awakening (ones that even conform to the diphasic sequence outlined by Freud, the first in childhood, the second, after latency, in adolescence), they come across as false leads. Even if Bedroom Ensemble were imagined as an erotic boudoir or an exotic hotel room, it is a scene less of desire than of its eradication; it is as though Oldenburg had introduced a trace of subjective life, only to erase it all the more thoroughly. Paradoxically, this is also the effect of the implication of the viewer in the scene through the literal perspective of the source advertisement. As both the thing and its image, Bedroom Ensemble renders the order of representation unstable, and this unsettles the viewer in turn: we seem to be both inside the scene and removed from it, as if the bedroom were a phantasm that we inhabit and project at the same time. In this way too the subject appears, but only to be voided; like vampires, we cast no reflection in the mirror.69 After the eroticism of The Store, then, the deathliness of The Street returns in Bedroom Ensemble, yet it appears in a different guise, not the lumpen homelessness of the Bowery but the affluent airlessness of Beverly Hills. In the same year that Warhol produced his caustic silkscreens of car crashes, race riots, and electric chairs under the rubric “Death in America,” Oldenburg offered his own distinctive version: “All styles [are] on the side of Death. The Bedroom as rational tomb, pharaoh’s or Plato’s bedroom.”70 This note, as cryptic as it is grim, implies minimally that the cooption of art as life style is deadly (and here life style is difficult to distinguish from death style), and maximally that style as such, any stylization, is fatal. If mimetic exacerbation in The Store aimed “to make hostile objects human,” the same strategy in Bedroom Ensemble works to the opposite effect.71 And whereas The Store attempted to reconnect subject and object through an “erotico-mystical attraction,” Bedroom Ensemble submits both subject and object to the logic of the

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commodity-sign: its reified world resists any making over (103). It is as though Oldenburg designed the installation as a programmatic demonstration of the limits of his own transformative energies, or of the conditions that his metamorphic art was pledged against, or of both at once. Ever the self-contrarian, Oldenburg pivoted again, from the rigidity of his Bedroom Ensemble to the pliability of his soft sculptures. Although he had shown a few fabric pieces stuffed with kapok at the Green Gallery in fall 1962 (specifically the deli combo of Floor Burger, Floor Coke, and Floor Cone), he took up this line in earnest now, aided by the synthetic materials used in Bedroom Ensemble. In direct opposition to that installation, the soft sculptures suggest that nothing is reified once and for all; this is also implied by his initial principle that “only hard originals are taken as subjects for softening.”72 (fig. 5.31) Oldenburg first developed a piece in cardboard, worked up a version in muslin painted a thin white (which he called a “ghost”), and then produced the final sculpture.73 Although modern artists from Medardo Rosso to Piero Manzoni had experimented with softness, no one insisted on this quality quite like Oldenburg. Oldenburg imagined his softening as “a death blow” to the “functionality” of the object as well as to the “classicism” of sculpture (314). (Even the readymade is a target: Toilet, 1966, is at once a tribute to Duchamp and a travesty of his Fountain.) First, the variability of the soft sculpture is an affront to an art traditionally dedicated to fixity. Second, the soft pieces trouble the usual verticality of the medium with the very force, gravity, that it has always worked to overcome: uprightness is threatened with overturn, and the implicit promise of transcendence with the explicit possibility of collapse. Yet Oldenburg did not regard the effects of gravity as antiformal; in fact he called it his “favorite form creator” (206). Nor did he oppose the formal to the formless, which would only keep that binary in place. Rather, with sly humor he once again developed a subversive “‘medium’ of indefinite form” in which “the formal . . . appears as informal” (201, 328).74 Also, whereas the body disappeared in Bedroom Ensemble, it returns in the soft sculptures, which are governed by an anthropomorphism that involves feeling as much as form. “The body parallels are reinforced,” Oldenburg wrote, “by the use of flesh-like materials (vinyl, for example) and sculptural ‘insides’—hard like bone and soft like fat” (282). Moreover, gravity acts on many of the soft pieces as it does on many of our bodies; they slouch

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5.31 CLAES OLDENBURG, Soft Toilet, 1966. Wood, vinyl, kapok, wire, Plexiglas, on metal stand and painted wood base, 57 1⁄16 × 27 5⁄8 × 28 1⁄16 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art.

5.32 CLAES OLDENBURG, Soft Pay-Telephone, 1963. Vinyl filled with kapok, mounted on painted wood, 46 1⁄2 × 19 × 9 inches. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

and sag the way fleshy humans do. (fig. 5.32) More generally, Oldenburg suggests an entropy—“the object is reduced to nature, left a heap”—that undermines the pumped-up perfection not only of the ideal sculptural figure but also of the shiny new commodity, which is deflated through softening too.75 Softness has other connotations for Oldenburg, but with the Vietnam War one particular association, which plays directly on the phallic verticality of traditional sculpture, came to the fore: the soft as in the flaccid, even the impotent.76 Implicit in early objects such as Floor Cone (1962), this detumescence was explicit in a later

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5.33 Claes Oldenburg with Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 1969. Corten steel, aluminum, cast resin, polyurethane enamel, 291 × 299 × 130 inches. Yale University.

one, the famous Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (1969), which caused a furor when it was placed on the Yale campus, at the invitation of architecture students, at the height of the debacle in Indochina. (fig. 5.33) Positioned in front of the Beinecke Library near a World War I memorial, Lipstick was intended to serve as a platform for speeches, which were meant to be signaled by a telescoping upward of the red vinyl tube.77 There is a loose connection here to Monument to the Third International (1919–20), the great spiral designed by Vladimir Tatlin. Oldenburg intended this reference, which intimates that, fifty years on, capitalist spectacle had effectively displaced Communist dialectics. In addition, Lipstick took the form of a missile atop a tank, which made clear that it also targeted the military-industrial complex of the 1960s. At this point, then, the brunt of his softening included not only the ideal figure but also the public monument, not only the immaculate commodity but also the imperial ego, understood as both individual and national. “The pacifistic implications of the sculpture I accept,” Oldenburg remarked of Lipstick,

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5.34 CLAES OLDENBURG, Life Mask, 1966. Cast Jell-O, ceramic molds, 4 × 10 × 3 1⁄2 inches. Private collection.

and with the phallocratic war machine at work in Southeast Asia in his sights he added, “The USA needs a good softening” (273).78 In 1967, troubled by a country steeped in militarism and consumerism alike, Oldenburg wrote a short text titled “America: War & Sex, Etc.,” in which he cast his work explicitly in terms of a struggle between life and death.79 After the alternations between The Street and The Store and Bedroom Ensemble and soft sculptures, his thought had darkened once more (this turn was announced by his comic-morbid life masks of 1966). (fig. 5.34) With televised violence across the United States as well as in Vietnam, he confronted the limits of his strategy of mimetic exacerbation: “I wrestle to turn terror into form” (286). Recall the 1967 photo of Oldenburg in his studio with “freuda vincit” stenciled on the door. In Freud joy, let alone life, hardly wins in the end, and, given the time stamp of the photo, the skull appears to tip the balance in favor of death.80 Although Oldenburg treated it lightly here, this was a real fear, and he pushed back against it with his aesthetic of “promiscuous form” as best he could.

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Promiscuous Form At the outset I suggested that, as Oldenburg explores such contraries as death and sex and hard and soft, he demonstrates that each term calls out for its other. This pertains to his view of subjectivity as well, especially his own: “I am a complex of opposites, a confused mingling,” he wrote in 1959. “One moment the death wish rules, the next the life wish” (79).81 We can refer this resistance to dualism to his biography—Oldenburg was raised in the Christian Science faith, which rejects any dichotomy between spiritual life and physical world—but that alone does not explain his persistent drive to combine and to transform.82 For Oldenburg “the erotico-mystical attraction” of subjects and objects pulled in both directions. On the one hand, he insisted that “objects live,” that they think and even obsess (77, 273). Further, Oldenburg saw art as an essential way into this life of objects. “Art must be obsessive or it has no power,” he wrote in a variant of the Surrealist formula that “beauty must be convulsive or not be” (90). On the other hand, in a move also fundamental to his work, Oldenburg projected subjectivity into things (once more he recalls Dubuffet here). Early on he noted his “animistic empathy with objects,” and over time this projection became a habit of his work: “I animate the inanimate, and I attribute human qualities to nonhuman creatures” (20, 92). In fact Oldenburg performed this “pathetic fallacy” so flagrantly that we are made aware of how pervasive it is in our everyday lives.83 “The subject . . . of my expression,” he remarked in 1963, is “the forms that the living human being can take, in all its parts, mental and physical.”84 (fig. 5.35) “I didn’t set out to upset sculptural values,” Oldenburg also insisted. “I simply set out to project myself into the form.”85 Along with “metamorphosis by substitution of materials” or qualities (for example, vinyl for flesh or soft for hard), this anthropomorphism was a prime device in his relentless transformation of motifs, which he called “promiscuous form” (212).86 In his drawings as well as in his sculptures, Oldenburg commented, “the doubling, the symmetry, refers to the human body, with parallels drawn between the objects represented and parts of the body: ears, eyes, nostrils, limbs, breasts, testicles, etc.” (282). The analogies are often comic— his giant tube of toothpaste becomes a self-portrait as odalisque—and sometimes cruel—his Soft Engine for Airflow (1965–68) is a 1935 Chrysler “flayed as in an

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5.35 Claes Oldenburg with Giant Toothpaste Tube, 1964. Vinyl over canvas filled with kapok; wood, metal, and cast plastic, 22 ½ × 66 × 17 inches. The Cleveland Museum of Art.

anatomical chart.”87 (fig. 5.36) It is not always easy to see the human body contorted into artificial shape and vice versa in these ways. At the same time his promiscuous formalism is a corrosive riposte to the persistent call in fascisms, past and present, to reforge the body phallically.88 This project to connect objects and subjects is most pronounced in The Store. “These are rips out of reality, perceptions like snapshots, embodiments of glances,” Oldenburg said of his fabricated products, and he intended these “eye-clusters” as a “formal model for a kind of visual experience” typical of urban life, which involves “fragmentation, simultaneousness, superimposition” (161). Paradoxically, this mimesis of vision worked to dedifferentiate things more than to distinguish them (recall that this was already a basic principle of The Street). In this respect consider Ice Cream Cone and Heel (1961), which was originally subtitled “fragment of two signs combined.” (fig. 5.37) It is difficult to make out what is what here; seeing is not on the side of clarifying. Rather, as each “eye-cluster” is ripped from its urban setting, it is regrounded in the body of the viewer who snatches it with his or her glance.

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5.36 CLAES OLDENBURG, Soft Engine for Airflow, Scale 5, 1966. Canvas filled with kapok; spray enamel, rope, and wood, 42 1⁄4 × 72 3⁄4 × 14 1⁄8 inches. Hirshhorn Museum.

5.37 CLAES OLDENBURG, Ice Cream Cone and Heel, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 22 1⁄2 × 22 1⁄2 × 6 inches. Private collection.

In another loaded phrase that captures this corporeal involvement, Oldenburg described his Store objects as “birth flesh fragments” “torn” from “the continuity of matter” (154).89 This subject–object connection is brutally direct, and he acknowledged that this “objective expressionism” might border on “object pornography” (207). Yet such expressionism is one with his “new realism,” not its opposite. Or take Two Girls’ Dresses (1961), which evokes a sighting in a store window. (fig. 5.38) Like a double Victory of Samothrace, the dresses are weirdly animated, as if by the mobility of the viewer as passerby. Against a blue backdrop the dresses are painted white and pink; it is as though they are literally fleshed out, as if they partake of our own bodily presence.90 In short, as “embodiments of glances,” such sculptures appear both ripped out visually and incorporated physically, as though our looking had become part of the objects or, conversely, as if in looking we had torn them away and taken them in at the same time.91 This cross-incorporation is an

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5.38 CLAES OLDENBURG, Two Girls’ Dresses, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel, 44 3⁄4 × 40 × 6 1⁄2 inches. Private collection.

emphatic way to connect objects and subjects. It is also a way to play with gender: Oldenburg invites a cross-dressing of spectatorship whereby, through a scopophilia that advertising incites in us all, male viewers slip into female tights and female viewers try on male shirts. Moreover, as his language suggests, his treatment damages the object even as it animates it (the two actions converge in Oldenburg as they often do in my other artists). “The original inspiration of the Store,” he once remarked, “was a butcher shop”; in fact he projected every exhibition as “a place where the parts of the body are displayed” (260).92 As Oldenburg admitted, there is violence in this tearing away and taking in, which speaks to his understanding of vision as a process of breaking up and layering over: “They are shown as fragments (of the field of seeing),” he wrote of his Store objects.93 And yet, paradoxically, in this disruption Oldenburg found an integration: “a unity of fragments is what one sees” (29). At the outset, too, I claimed that his project to undo oppositions was psychoanalytical in orientation. Already with The Street Oldenburg played with the moniker “Dr. Claes Oldenburg, D.P.N.S., Doctor of Psychoanalytical Nature Study” (100). And clearly he was sympathetic to the liberatory thought of contemporary FreudoMarxists such as Herbert Marcuse—“liberate is my desire” is another Oldenburg motto (96). In Eros and Civilization (1955) Marcuse insisted that “regression assumes a progressive function,” and that “the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies”; Oldenburg affirmed both propositions fully.94 During the summer of 1961 while at work on The Store, he read another key text of Freudo-Marxism, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) by Norman O. Brown.95 Much in this extraordinary book resonates with Oldenburg, above all the claim that radical psychoanalysis aims to tap “the energies” of both life and death in order “to abolish every dualism” and to allow “human culture” to be “reconnected with the human body.”96 For Brown art is a crucial ally in this struggle for “the abolition of repression”: “artists are the spokesmen for what is repressed in the present,” he averred, and since “our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood,” they must follow Freud “into the closest anatomy” of infantile sexuality.97 Brown thus conceives art as an anamnesis of the “sources of pleasure” denied by the reality principle of capitalist society, and he insists that one path to this recovery-through-regression is “to become one with objects in the world”—“a project of incorporation” that foregrounds the

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5.39 CLAES OLDENBURG, Watch in Red Box, 1961. Muslin soaked in plaster over wire frame, painted with enamel. 5 1⁄2 × 6 1⁄2 × 6 1⁄4 inches. Collection of the artist.

“primitive oral phase.”98 As we have seen, this is the project that Oldenburg took up in The Store. (fig. 5.39) It is likely that Brown also directed Oldenburg to “the excremental vision” of Jonathan Swift; in any case Oldenburg read Gulliver’s Travels during the summer of 1961 as well (147). For Brown the Swiftian vision is “substantially identical with the psychoanalytical doctrine of the extensive role of anal erotism in the formation of human culture.” “Excrement to the Yahoos,” he added, “is no mere waste product but a magic instrument for self-expression and aggression.”99 The same thing is true of its sculptural substitutes in Oldenburg, and Brown also underscored that the anal zone is one of symbolic transformation.100 “What I rejoice in,” Oldenburg wrote already in summer 1960, “is the discovery of consistencies and similarities. Unities. Or correspondences” (100). “Things look like other things,” he insisted, or, rather, they can be made to appear so (77). That is, they can be forced into similarity in a way that compels a simultaneous recognition of dissimilarity, such that the objects in question are rendered familiar and strange at once. This comic un/likeness was central to his “psychoanalytical nature study,” which is to say his promiscuous formalism. This positive barbarism was his way to begin again, to propose, in the

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5.40 CLAES OLDENBURG, Notebook Page: Olive Closeup, Chicago, 1967. Magazine clipping, 11 × 8 1⁄2 inches overall. Collection of the artist.

combined personae of Robinson Crusoe and Betsy Ross, a world of renewed signs: “two pieces float up to me, asking to be joined.” From the beginning Oldenburg was a compulsive maker of drawings and notes, which he kept in black binders along with clippings and collages; taken together, they constituted a family of forms for his artistic production.101 (fig. 5.40) This active archive supported his ceaseless experiment in outlandish lookalikes, in which his signature devices took on new roles. Oldenburg used softening not only to deform things but also to de-define them in a way that might disclose “unities” across otherwise disparate objects. His style of drawing played a part here too. “My line is soft, blunt,” he remarked early on, “and I will not sharpen it” (81); this was so largely because its looseness allowed him to suggest “similarities” between disparate things (such as a fire hydrant and an electrical plug).102 Yet the primary device in his forced “consistencies” was his play with scale; “correspondences” between big and small,

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Oldenburg commented in summer 1960, are “the paths along which metamorphosis develops” (97). Oldenburg scaled up and down equally, with a Swiftian wit (“Lilliputian” and “Brodignanian” punctuate his notes) that often undercuts the objects in question. To scale down is inherently deflationary, as when he imagines the Guggenheim Museum as a drum set or the Boboli fountain as an espresso cup. Perhaps paradoxically, to scale up can be deflationary too, as when he proposes to substitute a gym shoe for the Mont Sainte-Victoire or an ironing board for the Washington Monument.103 Often this scalar play involves the viewer as well, especially when our perspective is inscribed in his drawings and his objects through extreme manipulations not only of big and small but also of above and below or near and far. Sometimes Oldenburg is the implicated one: he liked to make things “CO lossal” (272), that is, to inflate his initials—his ego—along with his objects (212). And he was self-aware enough to understand this inflation as a narcissistic fantasy of power that he wanted to deflate as well, which, in a cryptic fragment from 1966, he called “The Gulliver complex”: “Giant self-portrait. Monuments like dictators. Sense of my enlargement since a child” (263).104 Thus, even as Oldenburg targeted artistic icons, political monuments, and mass-cultural gods for inflationary deflation, he participated critically in this imperial ego complex too. “My favorite event in New York is, of course, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade,” he wrote in the mid-1960s. “A true ritual how these enormous inflated phalluses are carried down the path of commerce (the Broad way) to inseminate the Store. All our Gods, Donald Duck, Bullwinkle, Underdog, Popeye, the American Deities as in colossal representation” (255).105 Early on Oldenburg set a range of possibilities for his promiscuous formalism— from “identity” through “resemblance” to “affinity”—and his work includes countless examples along this spectrum of un/likeness (22–23). The extreme version of forced similarity is his persistent use of “equals” (both the verb and the sign); his drawings and notes often insist on formulas such as “Pizza equals toilet equals plug equals iron equals switch” (206). Such transformations explain his attraction to components such as light switches and electrical plugs; however, his main equalizer remained the Ray Gun. (fig. 5.41) Again, it is the phallic copula, “the universal angle,” that can connect all things (161). This magical device comprehends classical sculpture (“Two Ray Guns equal one Winged Victory”), great cities (“New York will be

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5.41 CLAES OLDENBURG, display case 6 of Ray Gun Wing, 1965–77. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna.

renamed Ray Gun”), even entire continents (“Africa [is the] largest Ray Gun”), and its slogan—“Annihilate/Illuminate”—suggests how (292, 270). A 1965 watercolor, titled with these words, shows a ray gun “shooting equals” in primary colors (this “jaculation,” Oldenburg tells us, is “the fundamental material of art”): a ray gun turns an ice cream cone into a mouse, then transforms the mouse into a mountain, then turns another ray gun into a female leg, and so on (289). (fig. 5.42) In all cases the equal signs continue beyond the page as though into the world at large. In a Ray Gun jaculation, which is “both destructive and creative,” unlikeness is “annihilated” and likeness “illuminated” (115). Might this annihilation/illumination be a magical attempt to trope the “creative destruction” associated with capitalist transformation, or to commandeer the corrosive abstraction at the heart of capitalist exchange?106 At the same time Oldenburg played down the dangers of his promiscuous formalism: “when Ray Gun shoots no one dies,” he claimed (285). However, the violence against difference in his equations cannot be joked away. “Everything in Oldenburg takes the form of maximum, monstrous equivalence,” the critic Max Kozloff objected in 1967, and the artist saw this risk as well.107 Even as Oldenburg asserted “the inescapability of identification,” he understood that it might involve a “monomania in which the subject, by supreme coincidence, means everything—an inventory of nature in all its states, including opposites” (291).108 Is there a psychotic condition in which everything not only looks alike to a subject but also looks like that same subject, a condition in which the ego is thus found everywhere and nowhere?109 “I am overwhelmed by my imagination,” wrote the self-styled “Mr. Openburg,” “my work is losing its mind” (269, 274). Might this monomania of similitude be a recurrence of the psychasthenic dissolution already glimpsed in The Street? In any case, Oldenburg hoped to be transformed through his transformation of things, and more than once he wished simply to vanish—“to become an ony mouse. A landscape. An object. A voyeur. Anony Mouse. Mickey Mouse” (208). There are at least two ways to understand this “monstrous equivalence,” and as with most things Oldenburgian they are not mutually exclusive. The first is to see it as an acting out of the equivalence of the commodity in the registers of art and psyche alike. “One form leads to another form,” Oldenburg once commented, “and there’s a kind of consistency in the forms.”110 If commodities could speak the truth, they might well say the same thing. The second way is to insist that his promiscuous

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5.42 CLAES OLDENBURG, R[AY] G[UN] = Annihilate/Illuminate, 1965. Crayon and watercolor, 11 × 13 11⁄16 inches. Private collection.

formalism is the opposite of the equivalence of the commodity, or at least that it aims to connect and to transform, not to serialize and to repeat: “to make the hostile thing human,” not to render the human being alien; to “give the object back its power,” not to deplete it further. In this light his “consistency in the forms” (etymologically, to be consistent is to stand together) might be offered up in resistance not only to contemplative art but also to capitalist rationalization. In this light Oldenburg dedifferentiated objects not to render them the same, much less to claim any essence hidden in things, but, again, to open them up to a chain of associations between subjects and objects.111 In various drawings and notes Oldenburg illustrates his mode of “rhyming.” For example, in a 1966 text titled “Afterthoughts” he demonstrates how two simple cylinders can become Mickey ears, which in turn can become a piece of toast or a ping-pong paddle, and so on. In short, dedifferentiation is in the service of de-definition: Oldenburg sought not only “to make an everyday object that eludes definition” but also “to forget the name of the thing.”112 In this respect, too, he opposed the reading of Duchamp that took naming to be the principal “work” in the work of art; like Dubuffet, Oldenburg aimed to exnominate, and his unnaming assumed the form of a play that is both visual and verbal.113 “There is a way to do this though the eyes,” he commented, “another way through sounds,” and his notes and poems are chock full of sound scramblings: Manhattan becomes a mattress, for instance, and America “Mammerotica” (207). This is to “physicalize the sign” as well as to verbalize the object, to eroticize the word as well as to semioticize the thing; to embody language is thus another way to renew object relations.114 In this manner Oldenburg also associated his promiscuous formalism with experimental poetry: “when you see one [thing] you see the other . . . the poetic idea [is] generated by the linkage” (98–99). This forced connection is active in his play with scale (“there is no reason not to treat the omelet like the moon”) as well as in his jokes and puns (214). Again, he loved catachreses that are visual as well as verbal. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Oldenburg read Freud, certainly Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905) and likely The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). He often alludes to the il/ logic of dreams, and his verbal mashups are often akin to the parapraxes detailed in The Psychopathology. For Freud jokes and puns afford us pleasure because they release energy that was repressed, and they often express an aggression against authority that

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brings pleasure as well; clearly both possibilities appealed to Oldenburg. Yet there is also a structural analogy with his work. According to Freud, jokes and dreams are formed by means of condensation, whereby one idea or image constellates different associations, and displacement, whereby the energy invested in one idea or image is shifted to another.115 As noted in the previous chapter, Lacan connected condensation and displacement to the fundamental operations of language as understood by Roman Jakobson, whereby we construct our sentences by recourse to a paradigmatic axis of selection and a syntagmatic axis of combination: hence the Lacanian theorem that the unconscious is structured like a language, as well as the Jakobsonian gloss that poetry privileges metaphorical condensation and prose metonymic displacement.116 Further, Lacan associated the symptom with metaphor (a symptom stands in for a conflict) and desire with metonymy (desire shifts from one object to the next). These connections can help us unpack “the secret image function of the object” explored by Oldenburg. Sometimes his transformations occur by analogy, in the manner of metaphors and symptoms, as is the case with his equations, Ray Gun “jaculations,” and Mickey morphisms; and sometimes they occur by adjacency, in the mode of metonymy and desire, as is the case with the Store clusters of contiguous objects. Sometimes, too, his promiscuous formalism crosses these two axes (we saw a similar crossing in Paolozzi).117 “I like all sorts of physical effects,” Oldenburg wrote as early as summer 1959, “collisions, explosions, glides, starts, stops, etc.” (77). An elliptical note about The Store also points to such conjunctions: “The Bibles of this theater [are] . . . the telephone directory, Roget’s Thesaurus, or any and every form of list, and (it so happened) Stekel’s Sexual Aberrations” (262). Directories and lists are sequences, a thesaurus is a codex of substitutions, and sexual aberrations involve symptoms as well as desires. In this light selection and combination, condensation and displacement, metaphor and metonymy, symptom and desire, are all in play in “the image function” of the Oldenburgian object. In this last note Oldenburg refers to Wilhelm Stekel, a psychoanalytical apostate whose account of fetishism differs from the Freudian one in a way that is also pertinent here.118 Recall that Oldenburg wanted his objects to be elusive, not fixed as a fetish is according to Freud. To adopt a term from Stekel, the Oldenburgian aesthetic is “paraphilic”: it attests to a love (philia) of what is beside (para), a love of taking in and transforming, of making again and moving on.119 In effect, then,

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promiscuous formalism combines the “satanic intensity” of Freudian fetishism with the elusive mobility of Stekelian paraphilia, and, again, its purpose is not only to annihilate/illuminate objects but also to liberate subjects. “Liberate is my desire,” Oldenburg says—not merely to liberate this object or that subject, but to liberate as such. And this desire is democratic in implication: if “The Ray Gun Show” was “an antibourgeois, anticapitalist cabaret,” The Store was “a proletarian declaration or a declaration for the people.” It aimed to demonstrate the possibility of correspondence among things and equality among people.120

Metamorphic and Cenotaphic There remains one more contrary in Oldenburg to address, and it stars Mickey Mouse. After his transformative Ray Gun, Oldenburg identified with this great equalizer, whom he dubbed “Mickey Morphic” as well as “The Sport of Forms” (270, 254). Consider Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals (1969), a drawing that shows Oldenburg with his head topped by an ice-bag beret and surrounded by engineering diagrams of key works. (fig. 5.43) “The objects are shown in the order in which they were made,” he tells us, “reading from left to right from the Good Humor Bar of 1963 through the Geometric Mouse of 1969. They circulate about the artist’s head like the representation of unconsciousness in the comics.”121 Note the repetition of the equals in the drawing (the other signs for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division appear too) as well as the emphasis on the switch and the plug as prime transformers. Along with his identification with switch-plug Mickey, his association of transformation with an unconscious saturated with mass culture is telling, and it appears to come at a cost: not only have signal works become reified templates, but a few drops of blood also dot his forehead, eye, nostril, and tongue.122 “The face is divided in half vertically,” Oldenburg continues allegorically. “One side shows the kindly aspect of the artist; the other his brutal one . . . I alternated between the image of a magician and that of a clown” (346). Mickey often assumed those two guises as well—most famously as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia (1940)—and apparently, like Mickey, Oldenburg feels that he is as much victim as master of his fate.123 This comic-tragic self-portrait suggests

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5.43 CLAES OLDENBURG, Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals, 1969. Pencil, crayon, spray enamel, watercolor, collage, 11 × 8 1⁄4 inches. Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

5.44 CLAES OLDENBURG, System of Iconography, 1969. Pencil, 11 × 14 inches. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

that, when it comes to artists, consumerist capitalism prefers clowns over magicians, and that the fame sometimes granted them might be another form of facelessness: “Anony Mouse. Mickey Mouse.” I began this book with Mickey Mouse, and here at its end he returns. At first Oldenburg saw in Mickey what Benjamin saw—a sport of forms. Recall what Benjamin wrote of the imaginative power expressed in the early Mickey films: “a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon.” In his work Oldenburg cranks this metamorphic magic up; the car becomes the hat, the fruit is a balloon, everything and everyone are potentially Mickey Morphic. Crucially for Benjamin, Mickey allows us to believe that we can survive a civilization become barbaric through such magical transformations. It was different for Oldenburg, at least by the late 1960s when his thought darkened, and his promiscuous formalism gave way to a different model of Mickey—Mickey as

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5.45 CLAES OLDENBURG, Scales of the Geometric Mouse, 1972. Pencil and crayon, 23 1⁄8 × 29 inches. Walker Art Center.

an emblem of a mass-mediated unconscious that is mechanical in its associations, an automatic “system of iconography.” (fig. 5.44) As Mickey became a fixed logo in the Disney Corporation (Walt Disney died in 1966), so too did he become “Geometric Mouse” in the psychoanalytical nature study of Oldenburg; in one drawing the sport of forms has turned into a cenotaphic museum.124 (fig. 5.45) No longer a quixotic knight errant against the dark forces of capitalism, Mickey was now its mascot. This is an abrupt way to suggest that the historical conditions that prompted positive barbarism had changed, that brutal aesthetics was no match for the society of spectacle, that Freude does not win here. I had hoped to conclude on a high note with Oldenburg, or at least on a light one given that he is one of the great comic artists, but he is also a realist. His art, his time—our time—does not allow a redemptive last word.

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Acknowledgments

This book is based on the sixty-seventh A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., in spring 2018; the chapters mostly hew to these talks. My first thanks go to Elizabeth Cropper, dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery, for her generous invitation to give the lectures and for her kind attention during my stay. Thanks, too, to Therese O’Malley and Peter Lukehart, associate deans of CASVA, for their warm welcome and good humor. Elise Ferone sorted the logistics of the lectures with aplomb, and Emiko Usui, Sara Sanders-Buell, and Cynthia Ware did the same with the various stages of the book. Margaret Kurkoski was heroic in her search of images, Kenneth Guay was assiduous with other details, and Michelle Komie, my editor at Princeton University Press, was steadfast in her support from first to last. I also appreciate the care given the design of the book by Mark Nelson, David Zaza, and Michelle Lee Nix of McCall Associates, as well as the production of the book by Terri O'Prey and Steven Sears of Princeton University Press. Tash Siddiqui copyedited the manuscript, and Fred Kameny indexed it, expertly. All the aforementioned showed real patience with my slacker ways. The lectures provided an occasion to catch up with friends at the National Gallery, especially curators Harry Cooper, Molly Donovan, and James Meyer. It was wonderful to see colleagues and students in the audience as well. Yve-Alain Bois served as my modernist super-ego in the auditorium, and Charles Dempsey as my art-historical conscience. I was touched, too, that friends and family traveled from New York, Princeton, and beyond; for Jody Foster and John Ryan to fly across the country was beyond the call of sibling duty. They were part of the lay audience at the National Gallery that makes the Mellon Lectures a unique experience. That members of the general public come to these talks on the Mall calls for a different address on the part of the speaker; certainly it renewed my hope that art history can speak to interested non-initiates. I had that aspiration when I wrote the lectures, and I trust that it is still evident in the book. Although the Mall brings out mixed emotions in me, I deem it an honor to have spoken there.

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Early versions of the talks were delivered at several universities and museums; a request from my friend Miwon Kwon to give three lectures at UCLA in spring 2019 was especially helpful. I was also supported by welcome fellowships from the Dedalus Foundation and the Getty Research Institute, and aided by timely leaves from Princeton University. Special thanks are due to the participants in two seminars devoted to these topics; their questioning was as stimulating as their generosity was humbling. Two groups of interlocutors deserve shout-outs as well, the Ph.D. in the Humanities crew at Princeton (especially Graham Burnett, Andrew Cole, Jeff Dolven, Devin Fore, Brooke Holmes, and Michael Jennings) and the October editorial board in New York (especially Benjamin Buchloh, Leah Dickerman, David Joselit, Rosalind Krauss, and again Yve-Alain and Devin). The Popovich Dinner Club (Sandy, Tait, Jackie, Thatcher, and Gaby) is an inspiration in its own right as is the Seattle Philosophical Society (Thatcher Bailey, Bob Strong, Rolfe Watson, and Charlie Wright). This book is part of an extended study of the twentieth-century avant-garde at times of emergency, a project that is prompted by our own bad new days. To think about these matters at the National Gallery, located between the White House and the Capitol Building, lent an urgency to the lectures for me; at the same time their funding pointed to my own entanglements. My subject is how to create in and out of dire times. Much of the work I discuss is brutal, and some of it revels in this brutality. Here an art historian cannot say of art what a poet sometimes can—that beauty is truth, and truth beauty. But when it comes to my life, which is to say when it comes to my wife, her beauty is my truth, and that is all I have needed to know on earth.

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Notes Introduction: Positive Barbarism 1. Benjamin uses similar lines in “Mickey Mouse” and “Karl Kraus” (both 1931) as well as in “Experience and Poverty” (1933). See Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Throughout this book I cite English translations when available. 2. Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 731–36, here 732. 3. “Experience and Poverty” was published in the December issue of the German journal Die Welt im Wort, the editors of which operated in exile in Prague. 4. This chiasmus has a precedent in Marx, who critiqued The Philosophy of Poverty (1846) by Proudhon in his The Poverty of Philosophy (1847). 5. The fable was inspired by the parable of “The Three Rings” embedded in the 1783 play Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Benjamin returns to some of these concerns (almost verbatim) in “The Storyteller” (1936). 6. Here Benjamin counters the rhetoric of the Right in Germany, associated above all with Ernst Jünger, for whom the World War I front was an ecstatic experience, one necessary to the forging of an armored ego. See Benjamin, “Theories of German Fascism” (1930), in Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927–1934. 7. In another inversion Benjamin argues that this poverty prompts an “oppressive wealth of ideas,” an irrational reaction to the war as manifest in the revival of astrology, chiromancy, spiritualism, and other suspect forms of gnostic knowledge. For Benjamin “this is not a genuine revival but a galvanization,” the dead shocked back to life, a “ghastly and chaotic renaissance.” And it calls to his mind “the horrific mishmash of styles and ideologies produced during the last century,” by which he means the eclecticism of bourgeois culture evident, say, in the mix of building types along the Vienna Ringstrasse. In his view this mishmash attests not to a confident class but to one that has forfeited its own values, and it is thus that it serves as the implicit foil for his subsequent discussion of modern architecture. If the bourgeoisie was culturally impoverished then, Benjamin suggests, how much more so is it now? 8. Stalin had vanquished his political rivals by this time, and many of these constructors were also under attack. 9. The discourse of “bare life,” as developed by Giorgio Agamben, reaches back to Benjamin, who, in “Critique of Violence” (1921), first raises the specter of blosses Leben. See Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 251. 10. In the famous eleventh “Thesis on Feuerbach” (1845) Marx calls on philosophers to change the world, not simply to interpret it. In “The Author as Producer” (1934) Benjamin develops what this principle entails for his contemporaries on the Left. 11. Oddly, Benjamin does not mention Bruno Taut, and he misreads Loos, who advocated for a division between blank public exteriors and plush private interiors. 12. Benjamin returns to a catastrophic view of technology at the conclusion of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–36). 13. Benjamin, “Mickey Mouse,” 545. In this short fragment (unpublished in his lifetime) Benjamin suggests that Mickey “disrupts the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind...In such a world it is not worthwhile to have experiences.” Similar reflections occur in the period that I address in the present book. For example, Lawrence Alloway also notes “the indestructibility of cartoon animals” that “conjure complicated

infernal machines out of nothing in no time at all.” See Alloway, “From Mickey to Magoo,” The Living Cinema 1, 3 (1957), 147–51. On Disney and Benjamin see Miriam Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 163–82, and Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 80–122. 14. In the last paragraph of “Experience and Poverty” Benjamin returns to the question of value and operates a final reversal. From a dream of plenty courtesy of Mickey we are thrust back to the reality of modern poverty, which Benjamin urges “mankind” to greet “with a laugh,” and then he concludes enigmatically: “This laughter may occasionally sound barbaric. Well and good. Let us hope that from time to time the individual will give a little humanity to the masses, who one day will repay him with compound interest.” This laughter has a Nietzschean ring, but the hope (the fantasy) is a Marxist one—that the gold of the initial fable might return as the shared prosperity of a proletarian culture to come. Benjamin did not know that Mickey was based, in part, on minstrel figures. How might this have deepened, hollowed out, or otherwise altered his formulation? See Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 15. Thus did the two world wars prompt different proposals as to how to survive civilization. During and after the first war the Dadaists devised a strategy of mimetic excess; they worked to act out the catastrophe, to exacerbate it critically. After the second war that approach had to be revised: hence the brutal aesthetics that my artists variously advance. (That said, Dubuffet uses some of the same terms as Benjamin; his art brut is a tabula rasa, it starts from scratch, etc.) Like the shock victims analyzed by Freud, positive barbarians after both wars responded, hopelessly, to a trauma that had already occurred; together they suggest a modernism “beyond the pleasure principle.” 16. What Adorno writes in “On the Use of Foreign Words” (also in the early 1930s) seems relevant here: “The power of an unknown, genuine language that is not open to any calculus, a language that arises only in pieces and out of the disintegration of the existing one; this negative, dangerous, and yet assuredly promised power is the true justification of foreign words” (Notes to Literature, volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992], 291). 17. It is likely that Dubuffet and Bataille met at the André Masson studio in Rue Blomet as early as 1922. 18. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 93. Fried specifies painting here. For Dubuffet art brut is produced “for the sole delight of the author.” See his “Art Brut” (1959), in Collection de l’art brut (Chateau de Lausanne, 1976). For Jorn Nordic art also exceeds the conventional purview of art history. 19. Bataille and Dubuffet were both connoisseurs of limit experiences as well. 20. See Freud, “On the Transformations of Instincts as Exemplified in Anal Erotism,” in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977).

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21. The interest in brute materiality was also a reaction to a pop image-world, a society of the spectacle, on the rise even then. See my The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–14. In this respect the present book is a complement to that one. 22. Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read” (1945), in Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 86. As we will see, the impulse to exnominate is also strong in Paolozzi and Oldenburg. 23. “Barbarism,” the dictionary tells us, derives from the root barbar, which refers to “the unintelligible speech of foreigners.” Originally the Greek barbaros meant simply “foreign, strange, ignorant,” and barbaroi “those who are not Greek,” but its sense “darkened” after the Persian wars. Later the Romans applied barbarus to anyone deemed to be without Greek or Roman accomplishments. By c. 1400 the noun also referred to natives of the Barbary coast (this is the source of the Old French barbarin, “Berber, pagan, Saracen, barbarian”). The common meaning of “rude, wild person” dates to the early 1600s. In its different iterations, then, the word encodes an otherness marked variously in language, ethnicity, religion, and culture. 24. See Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951). 25. See Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. Already with Montaigne the binary of civilization and barbarism was put in question. Benjamin revives it here, yet with this reversal: civilization is seen to encompass its own barbarism, even as its condition of possibility. As was frequently the case, Adorno piggybacks on Benjamin. In Dialectic of the Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer, he reads this reversal into modernity: enlightenment becomes its own myth, progress produces its own regression, and with the Holocaust civilization descends into barbarism. In his own reflections Benjamin responds tacitly to Rosa Luxemburg, who, in her “Junius Paper” (1916), posed the ultimatum of socialism or barbarism (this call was taken up explicitly by the radical postwar French group “Socialisme ou barbarie”). With Benjamin, however, positive barbarism is the antecedent of socialism, not its other. 26. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1951), in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 34. Adorno did revise his position in 1963: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream, hence it may have been wrong that no poem could have been written after Auschwitz” (Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [London: Continuum, 1973], 363). 27. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 21. I agree with my artists on this score, especially as a minor beneficiary of the Mellon fortune that has supported this book. 28. For example, Dubuffet was critical of Art Informel, as was Oldenburg of Abstract Expressionism. Soon enough abstraction would be seen as the dominant style of postwar reconstruction culture overseen by the United States. See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 29. This disfiguration targets not only the traditional figuration of classical humanism but also the stereotypical figures of Socialist Realism. If there is a group position on the topic, it is for a third way that is neither abstract nor figurative. As we will see in chapters 1 and 2, this position found support in the art of children, which is figural but not figurative and never abstract.

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30. Paolozzi in Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, ed. Robin Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81; Oldenburg, Writing on the Side 1956–1969, ed. Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder (New York: MoMA, 2013), 99. I discuss the notion of second nature in chapter 4. 31. Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, trans. and ed. Stuart Kendall (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 41. This emphasis on the destructive dimension differs radically from customary views of representation as substitution, sublimation, compensation, and the like. 32. Oldenburg, Writing on the Side, 260. Paolozzi offers a similar motto, “Luminate-coagulate” (Writings and Interviews, 120). 33. Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 77. This emphasis was common in advanced painting of the time. See Alex Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 34. This shift is evident in the difference between the prewar Bataille and the postwar Bataille alone. 35. As discussed in chapter 1, one aspect of brutal aesthetics is to posit a primal confusion that precedes any differentiation of medium and genre. 36. Conversely, the sophisticated could also be seen as savage. As Lévi-Strauss stated in 1952, “The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism” (Race and History [Paris: UNESCO, 1952], 12). With Dubuffet, Paolozzi, and Oldenburg the primitive also inhabits the city. 37. Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 733. I discuss Agamben in chapter 3. Might brutal aesthetics be an indirect reflection on the bare life exposed in the concentration camps? Primo Levi evokes this condition in his own terms in If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf (London: Abacus, 1987). 38. See Amédée Ozenfant, Foundations of Modern Art (1928), trans. John Rodker (New York: Dover, 1952), xii; and Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent van Gogh” (1930), in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 69. Bataille takes the mutilated fingers in some cave paintings as further evidence of a destructive drive in representation. 39. Franz Marc, “How Does a Horse See the World?” (1915), in Theories of Modern Art. A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 178. 40. Whereas the creaturely is sometimes utopian in “Experience and Poverty” (as in Scheerbart), it is usually dystopian here. How is this creatureliness related (if at all) to the figuring of psychosis in psychoanalysis, as in the Wolfman case study of Freud? How is it related (if at all) to the Nazi association of Jews with vermin? Might it register, in a displaced way, the deformation produced by such racist abuse in the victim and the victimizer alike? 41. I think of El Lissitzky in Self-Portrait, commonly known as The Constructor (1924, pictured) and Raoul Hausmann in Spirit of the Time (1919) respectively. 42. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17, 19. The engineer-bricoleur binary has its critics, most importantly Jacques Derrida, who saw the engineer as a myth produced by the bricoleur. See his “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). His deconstruction might be brought to bear retrospectively on the modernist figure of the engineer.

43. Lévi-Strauss writes of “the mytho-poetical nature of ‘bricolage’ on the plane of so-called ‘raw’ or ‘naïve’ art” (The Savage Mind, 17). There are prior examples of bricolage in modernist art, as in Picasso, but they are not brutal in the same way. On the monstrous in Picasso see T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 147–90. 44. With the exception of Dubuffet, they also care little about the art-world maneuvering that animates, or bedevils, that neo-avant-garde. 45. I owe the term homo connectus to Nathan Stobaugh. 46. See Bataille, Cradle of Humanity, 40. 47. There were related calls after World War II too, from positions both conservative (e.g., Hans Sedlmayr) and liberal (e.g., Lionel Trilling). 48. This statement by Jorn from 1947 can be taken as representative: “Bourgeois humanism, and its attendant freeminded objective humanistic principles, fell to earth with a resounding crash with Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933” (“Apollo or Dionysus,” in Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, ed. Ruth Baumeister, trans. Paul Larkin [Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011], 160). 49. Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions” (1951), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 192. Bataille was most explicit in this respect, with Dubuffet and Jorn close behind him. Jorn put it simply: “One is either human or one is a humanist” (“Apollo or Dionysus,” 160). 50. In brutal aesthetics the beautiful is turned toward the sublime, or at least modified by terms associated with it. With respect to art Bataille writes of miracle, Jorn of wonder, Oldenburg of marvel, and Paolozzi quotes the first Duino Elegy of Rilke: “Beauty is nothing other than the beginning of terror, which we just manage to bear.” The prewar Bataille is most extreme in his critique of classical beauty. In 1924 he took up a position as a numismatist at the Cabinet des médailles at the Bibliothèque Nationale, a day job he soon turned to critical advantage. For example, in “The Academic Horse” (1929), published in the first issue of Documents, he considers the “fantastic horses” that appear on Gaulish coins of the fourth century BCE, the “positive exuberance” of which he opposes to the stately composure of the classical horses that appear on Greek coins of the same period. For Bataille the classical steeds are “the most perfect and academic of forms”; they exemplify “the Hellenic genius” for ideality “just as much...as Platonic philosophy or the architecture of the Acropolis.” In classical humanism, Bataille argues, “everything happened, in fact, as if the forms of the body as well as social forms or forms of thought tended towards a sort of ideal perfection from which all value proceeded.” Here he projects an isomorphic relationship among proper forms, art works, philosophical concepts, and social order, and it is this ideality of “harmony and hierarchy,” founded on the classical myth of the perfect body, that Bataille targets above all. As we will see, this bears on the relation to the tableau in Dubuffet and Jorn in particular. See Bataille, “The Academic Horse,” in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents (London: Hayward Gallery, 2006), 236–39. 51. Jorn, “Intimate Banalities” (1941), in Christian Gether et al., Asger Jorn (Ishøj: Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, 2002), 49. Dubuffet: “Remember that there is only one way to paint well, while there are a thousand ways to paint badly: they are what I’m curious about; it’s from them that I expect something new, that I hope for revelations” (Jean Dubuffet 1943–1963: Paintings, Sculptures, Assemblages [Washington: Hirshhorn Museum, 1993], 49). Might brutal aesthetics be the beginning of “bad painting” as a (counter) value?

52. Jorn, “Apollo or Dionysus,” 160. Dubuffet: “If you want to produce a humanist work—and of course, you do—you’ve got to let in that wind of unity and continuity that blows through the world of man...The world forms a huge, continuous broth, which has the same taste everywhere—the taste of man” (“Notes for the Well-Read,” 75). This is the humanism of homo connectus. 53. According to this argument, there will be humanism as long as the human is opposed to the animal or indeed to any other. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 136. 54. Oldenburg, Writing on the Side, 87. 55. Ibid., 127. Although Paolozzi aims for the apparent opposite—to make human things hostile—the actual goal is much the same. 56. Jorn, “Peinture détournée,” in Vingt peintures modifiées par Asger Jorn (Paris: Galerie Rive Gauche, 1959), n.p. 57. The key texts are Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946), and Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (1947), more on which in chapter 3. 58. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). This is what Mark Greif calls “the crisis of man discourse” in The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America 1933–1973 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). The problem for such humanism was not that the human was secure in its essence, as its critics often claim, but, on the contrary, that it was unstable and so must be regrounded. 59. “Every effort must be made to become unstuck,” Dubuffet wrote Hubert Damisch in a letter of August 9, 1968 (October 154 [Fall 2015], 48). This sense of the stuck might also attest to the distance of my figures from anticolonial, civil rights, and feminist movements, more on which below. For Sartre the problem is the sticky or the slimy, the usual translations of the visqueux, which he considers in Being and Nothingness (1943). “The revenge of the in-itself,” the visqueux “symbolizes the sugary death of the for-itself (like that of the wasp that sinks into the jam)... [It] transcends all distinctions between psychic and physical, between the existent and the brute meanings of the world; it is a possible meaning of being” (Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology [London: Routledge, 1969], 610–12). 60. If dialectics means “intransigence towards all reification,” as Adorno defined it in “Cultural Criticism and Society” (31), then all my figures count as dialectical. Yet is transgression dialectical? Sometimes Bataille thought so, but not Foucault in his reading of Bataille (more on which in chapter 1), and Dubuffet often disputed Damisch on this subject too. 61. Bataille, letter of December 6, 1937, to Alexandre Kojève, in Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1988), 124. In my view contemporary art could use a good dose of the negativity of my positive barbarians. From another perspective, however, positive barbarism might be too positive. Although it is not an art of redemption, which aims to “redeem the catastrophe of history,” it still searches for a stable ground, and this search might involve a degree of reconstruction (if not repression). In any case, unlike the “dispossessed” generation of the prewar period, my postwar group aims for a sort of “repossession.” On redemptive art see Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and on dispossessed authors see Denis Hollier, Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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62. As Roland Barthes argued, “In Bataille, value—which rules the entire discourse—rests on a special paradigm, one that is anomic because ternary. There are, so to speak, three poles: ‘noble / ignoble / low’” (“Outcomes of the Text” [1970], in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989], 245). The neutral term that “baffles” a binary, which is close to my use of “equivocal,” is a persistent interest in Barthes (it is one thing that, as a young critic, he meant by “zero degree”). Some of my figures also engage in such baffling, which might explain why the structuralist Lévi-Strauss often appears, mostly as an antagonist, in the present book. 63. However, it is essential to remember this caution from Adorno: “The category of the root, the origin, is a category of dominion. It confirms that a man ranks first because he was there first; it confirms the autochthon against the newcomer, the settler against the migrant. The origin—seductive because it will not be appeased by the derivative, by ideology—is itself an ideological principle” (Negative Dialectics, 155). 64. See Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). On Bataille see Hollier, Absent without Leave, especially 76–93. In his own way Dubuffet sought a path (an exculpatory one?) between the engagement demanded by Sartre and the amnesty advocated by Jean Paulhan. 65. On this link see T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), especially 1–13. 66. Like “writing degree zero,” “art degree zero” might express a fatigue with the ideological warfare that raged from the 1930s through the 1950s. But then, as Barthes writes, “It is when History is denied that it is most unmistakably at work” (Writing Degree Zero [1953], trans. Annette Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1968], 2). In this light might the turn to the brut, the caves, the Nordic, and the like be so many versions of such denial? 67. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 10. 68. This casts the sense of historical stuckness in a different light, that is, it might be taken to register an equivocal relation to “the anomic core” of the law. As Joseph Vogl argues, such “tarrying condenses a critical, crisis-focused relation of deed and inhibition, of action and reason, of law and execution” (On Tarrying, trans. Helmut Müller-Sievers [London: Seagull Books, 2011], 24). 69. This project has three parts, which I have taken up in reverse chronological order: Bad New Days (2015), the present book, and a future volume that will address art and politics in the interwar period. 70. Two of my figures, Dubuffet and Oldenburg, identified with Robinson Crusoe. The identification was ironic for Oldenburg, given that he made it on the busy beaches of Provincetown. And it was paradoxical for Dubuffet, since Robinson Crusoe, as Hubert Damisch points out, is about the careful remaking of culture, not its brut undoing. In his introduction to the collected writings of Dubuffet, Damisch describes his project as a Robinsonade. In his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marx used this term to attack bourgeois accounts of political economy that focus on the individual, but it is also part of his attempt to demystify “the whole mystery of commodities” by reference to another economic order altogether. Damisch implies that Dubuffet aims for a similar denaturing in the cultural order, and the same might be said of my other figures.

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71. See Maria Boletsi, Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 260. I follow Boletsi closely here. As noted, a third meaning, Barbarismus as “a mistake or foreign element in language,” is also active in my figures. (Boletsi points out that there is an error in the English translation of a key line in “Experience and Poverty”: “Hence a new kind of barbarism.” The actual phrasing is more tentative: “Hence a kind of new barbarism.”) 72. See Hansen, Cinema and Experience, 172. 73. Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 197. 74. Eduardo Paolozzi with Lawrence Alloway, The Metallization of a Dream (London: Lion and Unicorn Press, 1963), 5. 75. Both Paolozzi and Oldenburg amassed collections of kitsch, the first called the Krazy Kat Archive, the second the Mickey Mouse Museum, and, as noted, Jorn used such “banalities” as flea-market paintings. 76. Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke/Benjamin/Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 65. Also see chapter 3 below. 77. The denaturing of the figure, especially in Jorn and Paolozzi, is sometimes a degendering too, which suggests that this world without difference is gendered in its own way. As was common during the time, in all my figures “human” and “man” are assumed to be male. 78. Might this positive barbarism be another primitivism at least in this respect—that it (unconsciously) identifies with the colonial “brute,” appropriates that position, and brings it home to the metropole? In this case the “brute” would be effectively denied again, displaced (even subsumed) in this gesture of selfothering. Some of my figures, Dubuffet above all, are drawn to avatars that represent a constitutive outside of the capitalist order—the child, the insane, the destitute—but might they then only help to recover them for this same order? And yet this argument, which is familiar in its own way, elides the very cracks that I aim to underscore here. 79. There is an uptick in interest in artists such as Dubuffet and Jorn, as there is in outsider and folk art. Why this brut moment now? Generally, it might be an art-world version of the antiestablishment wind that blows through contemporary politics. More locally, it might attest to a fatigue with art that is too savvy about insider moves and too mindful of audience participation. Then, too, the question of survivability has returned—but in what form exactly, and whose survival is in question? 80. Less familiar figures of this period are surveyed in the extraordinary exhibition overseen by Okwui Enwezor, ed., Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic (Munich: Haus der Kunst, 2017). Also see Eric de Chaussey, ed., 1945–1949, Repartir à zéro: comme si la peinture n’avait jamais existé (Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 2008), and Frances Morris, ed., Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945–1955 (London: Tate Gallery, 1994). 81. Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” (1952), in The Tradition of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 34. Since I focus on disfiguration, Abstract Expressionism is mostly out of bounds here. It is also still not clear (at least to me) whether its primary aim was a brutal ground for art or a reclaimed tradition for painting. See Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

1 | Jean Dubuffet and His Brutes 82. “A pained lyricism emerged from barbaric means,” Emily Braun writes of Burri, whose painting she describes as “restorative,” even “redemptive” (Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting [New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2015], 37). This points to why his art does not qualify as brutal for me. Piero Manzoni is another matter. He is able to get down and dirty, in large part because he understands the importance of banality—that, in the postwar period, kitsch is a resource for the avant-garde, not its other, as Clement Greenberg had argued already in 1939. But then Manzoni is too involved with kitsch to count as brutal for me. Francis Bacon does not count for another reason: for all his advocacy of painting that acts directly on the nervous system, his is calculated in the extreme.

1. Jean Dubuffet, “Plus Modeste,” Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 1, ed. Hubert Damisch (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 90; “More Modest,” Tracks: A Journal of Artists’ Writings 1, 2 (Spring 1975), 27. All original texts are included in the four volumes of Prospectus et tous écrits suivants; where possible I refer to English translations. Among Dubuffet scholars I am especially indebted to Sophie Berrebi, Andrea Maier, Kent Minturn (who was also generous with references), Rachel Perry, and, of course, Hubert Damisch. 2. Dubuffet continued to deal in wine during the Occupation, which likely involved a degree of collaboration. Rachel Perry is especially good on this topic; see her Retour à l’Ordure: Defilement in the Postwar Work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, May 2000. 3. Dubuffet, “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art” (1949), in Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, ed. Mildred Glimcher (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 104 (translation modified). Dubuffet destroyed most of his work prior to this point, and dedicated much of his energy thereafter to artists he deemed brut. No doubt he relished the irony that brut also designates a type of champagne. 4. Dubuffet, “More Modest,” 27. 5. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture” (1968), in Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings, trans. Carol Volk (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1988), 91. 6. On this strategy in general see Griselda Pollock, Avant-Garde Gambits: Gender and the Color of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), and in Dubuffet in particular see Hubert Damisch, “Entrée en Matière,” Critique 462, 41 (November 1985), translated as “Starting Ground,” October 154 (Fall 2015). 7. Although “we are all...impregnated with culture,” Dubuffet wrote in 1968, “our thought...is to culture what the blade of the knife is to steel...The blade can adopt a subversive attitude; it can aspire to replace its quality as steel with that of pure will to cut” (“Asphyxiating Culture,” 70). As we will see, this is an edge that cuts both ways—that is, at times it undercuts Dubuffet as well. 8. There is also the brut avatar of “the desert clown” of the Algerian Sahara. Between February 1947 and May 1949 Dubuffet made three trips to the French colony, and, though rarely in the desert, he focused on desert scenes on his return to France. In this way he contributed to the French picturing of “the mythical Maghreb,” as Andrea Maier calls it, “an imaginary southern wasteland, beyond the reach of colonial business and colonial law.” See her Dubuffet’s Decade, Ph.D. Dissertation, UC Berkeley, May 2009, 245–46; also see Kent Minturn, “Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut,” Res 46 (Autumn 2004). A large topic in its own right, this is a brutish hybrid of an otherwise familiar Orientalism and primitivism. 9. See Maier, Dubuffet’s Decade, 349–59. As we will see, Dubuffet equivocates between materiality and representation, abstraction and figuration, the literal and the symbolic, and so on. 10. John MacGregor, “Art Brut chez Dubuffet: An Interview with the Artist,” Raw Vision 7 (Summer 1993), 42. This interview, which occurred on August 21, 1976, is retrospective and revisionist, and so must be read skeptically (perhaps more so than I do here). Already in January 1941 there was an exhibition of such drawings staged (as a tribute to Pétain) at the Musée Galliera. Another show of child art was presented at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1947, which Dubuffet reviewed in a short text titled “Petites ailes.” 11. The nineteenth-century Danish art historian Julius Lange ascribed this “law of frontality” to all so-called archaic and primitive art.

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12. My favorite example is Hopscotch, a drawing in china ink dated May 23, 1944. It shows two stick figures who stand alongside a hopscotch court, which is vertically arrayed, with an ellipse at the bottom labeled terre and one at the top ciel. 13. Luquet was discussed in Dubuffet circles, especially the one that met at the André Masson studio in Rue Blomet, which included dissident Surrealists such as Michel Leiris and Georges Limbour, a childhood friend of Dubuffet who authored the first monograph on his work in 1953. See Christopher Green, “Joan Miró and the Infantile Image,” in Jonathan Fineberg, ed., Discovering Child Art: Essays on Childhood, Primitivism and Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 14. Georges-Henri Luquet, Children’s Drawings, trans. Alan Costall (London: Free Association Books, 2001), 3. 15. Ibid., 93, 95. 16. Although the notion of “intellectual realism” predated Luquet, he was the first to see it as a worthy mode of representation in its own right. As we will see in chapter 2, Bataille also took up Luquet, and he used the term “intellectual realism” in his discussion of cave paintings. 17. Luquet: “Visual realism is no less a convention than intellectual realism” (Children’s Drawings, 156). 18. Ibid., 158. 19. Ibid., 35. 20. Ibid., 53, 143. Luquet: “Not only do [children] see the general in the particular, but they even see the individual as general before they see it as individual. Children, and hence the human mind, progresses not only from the whole to the parts, but also from the general to the individual” (147). Dubuffet agreed. 21. Ibid., 105. Note the (neo)Kantian inflection here. 22. Ibid., 106, 109. 23. Ibid., 110. 24. Ibid., 104. 25. See Maier, Dubuffet’s Decade, 191–92, 297–98. 26. Picasso insisted that African sculptures were “more witnesses than models” of his primitivist work; Dubuffet did much the same with child art. See William Rubin, “Picasso,” in “Primitivism”: The Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, ed. William Rubin (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984), 260, notes 64–65. 27. I mean “modernist painting” in the sense developed by Clement Greenberg and elaborated by Michael Fried, for whom “all over” and “facingness” are key terms respectively. 28. Luquet, Children’s Drawings, 156. In one mode of graphic narration a figure is repeated in order to suggest successive moments in a story. Dubuffet adapted it in several works. 29. Freud, “On the Sexual Theories of Children” (1908), in On Sexuality, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977), 196. 30. Claude Lévi-Strauss, with whom Dubuffet would soon be in dialogue about art brut, published his Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. Childbirth was a fraught topic at this moment in France, given anxieties about mixed parentage and falling birthrates. 31. MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 42. 32. Ibid., 43. 33. Dubuffet, “Rough Draft for a Popular Lecture on Painting” (c. 1945), in Jean Dubuffet: Toward an Alternative Reality, 46. Although his early masks and marionettes evoke the folk forms of the carnival, Dubuffet focuses here on the contemporary life of the city (which he also viewed as a “festival”). 34. Related reflections on graffiti appear in his “Préface à l’édition de Londres d’un ‘Court Traité des Graffitis’ de René de Solier,” Les cahiers de la pléiade 1 (April 1946), 45–49.

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35. Brassaï, “Graffiti” and “The Language of the Wall,” in Brassaï–Dubuffet (Cologne: Galerie Karsten Greve, 2011), 7, 15, 9. Also see Brassaï, “Du mur des cavernes au mur d’usine,” Minotaure 3–4 (December 1933). 36. “Dubuffet est un sale con, un foireux, ENCULÉ.” 37. Dubuffet, letter to Paulhan, May 14, 1944, in Jean Dubuffet and Jean Paulhan, Correspondance: 1944–1968 (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 97. 38. See Rachel Perry, Retour à l’Ordure, 56. Some of the newspapers were German, and all count as base material. Then again, even if Dubuffet aimed to draw like a cretin and “to write like a pig” (Dubuffet quoted in Perry, 63), this is hardly true of Messages, and the degradation in play here is a little faux. 39. The question of écriture brute is too large to take up here. The brut is also a kind of bruit, a barbaric noise released into the system of proper French. According to Michel Thevoz, Dubuffet imagined “a utopia, or ‘uglossia’,” which Thevoz defines as “the belief in a first language, a pre-Babel, phylogenticially anterior to the law of the Father, and consequently untouched by any solicitation of power, a primitive language” (“Dubuffet: The Nutcracker,” Yale French Studies 84 [1994], 200). At the very least his attack on language was both anti-bourgeois and antipaternal in aim (his father was a notorious stickler for correct language). “The myth of Beautiful Prose is an essential piece of bourgeois defense,” Dubuffet wrote of Céline. “If you want a direct hit at the caste in power, hit it in the subjunctives, in the ceremonial of beautiful shallow language, in its effete mannerisms” (Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 2 [Paris: Gallimard, 1967], 52). 40. Noël Arnaud, Jean Dubuffet, Gravures et lithographies (Silkeborg: Kunstmuseum Silkeborg, 1961). 41. Although the work does not conform to the Leonardo exemplum, the artist subscribed to it: “Every trace, every stain always evokes something (even several things, and then all the better, that’s when the process of art begins). How could it be otherwise?” (Dubuffet, “Entretien radiophonique avec Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes [Mars 1958],” Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 2, 206). 42. Brassaï: “No firm intention, no creative goal underpins what is a purely muscular activity that defaces the wall: it is just the sudden chance relationship between the holes and a face that brings about the discovery of a similarity” (“The Language of the Wall,” 12). Dubuffet privileges the distracted glance over the contemplative gaze: “The gaze becomes muddled as soon as it pauses” (“Little Chat” [1947] in Jean Dubuffet: “Anticultural Positions,” ed. Mark Rosenthal [New York: Rizzoli, 2016], 72). Dubuffet also aimed to mimic the inattention of both the child and the common man. 43. In his text on René de Solier Dubuffet mocks Freud as “the dream doctor.” He returned to the pisseur theme in 1961. 44. The lithographs were shown in April 1945 at Galerie André in Paris, but not published with the poems until 1950. 45. In a letter of August 4, 1949, to Paulhan, Dubuffet writes abstractly about his resistance to “the Law, the Maker of the Law, and the Policeman” (Correspondance, 597). 46. “Some walls are ugly,” Guillevic writes, “made to hide, to impede,” and sometimes in The Walls the wall is indeed an obstacle that is not only physical but also social-cultural, a line to defy (Guillevic, Les murs, in Brassaï–Dubuffet, 102). Much later Dubuffet glimpsed the political limitation of such transgression: “In a way, I wanted the hostility of the cultural milieu. I wanted art brut to act as an ‘agent provocateur’ in the museum” (“Make Way for Incivism,” Art & Text 27 [1988], 51).

The fact that there was no “common woman” for Dubuffet points not only to his sexual politics but also to the continued constraint of public space (especially under the Occupation). In graffiti women are often the object of aggression, which is amply demonstrated in Brassaï. Finally, there is a homosocial dimension in this “art de pissoir” (as one critic dubbed The Walls) and throughout “the common man” phase. 47. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 82. 48. Ibid., 83. Maier designates Dubuffet a “liberal anarchist” in Dubuffet’s Decade, 309. 49. Dubuffet, letter to Paulhan, Correspondance, 597. Dubuffet would soon caricature society figures in his Portraits (more on which below). 50. Hubert Damisch, “Dubuffet or the Reading of the World” (1962), Art in Translation 6, 3 (September 2014), 303. 51. Clement Greenberg, “Jean Dubuffet and ‘Art Brut’,” Partisan Review 16 (March 1949), 291. Here Greenberg aligns Klee with Dubuffet. He also elides the proletariat with the Lumpenproletariat, which Marx and Engels defined in this way: “The ‘dangerous class,’ the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.” See Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 48. 52. MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 43. 53. Ibid., 43. 54. On this trip Dubuffet encountered the work of outsider artists like Adolf Wölfli and Heinrich Anton Müller as well as Louis Soutter (a distant cousin of Le Corbusier). 55. Dubuffet often uses the trope of mining in his writings. 56. Dubuffet, “In Honor of Savage Values” (1951), in Res 46 (Autumn 2004), 263. Dubuffet also ruled out tribal art on two counts: it possesses its own traditions (it is “clever,” he added, whereas art brut is “rough”), and it was already tapped by prior modernists. See Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 192. 57. As we might expect, Dubuffet adjusts his definition of the brut according to the polemical requirements of the moment. In “Notes for the Well-Read” (1945), written in the same year as his Swiss trip, Dubuffet opposes the brut to the cultural, the unrefined to the refined. The space-time of this opposition is not clear: the brut is a condition both before culture (unscathed like the child) and beyond it (outside like the insane). 58. MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 42. “I realized that everything is permitted, everything is possible.” It was Budry who gave the Prinzhorn book to him. 59. In February 1946 a show of the art of the insane was staged at the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris. Dubuffet visited his friend Jacques Lacan there as well. 60. “I draw and I paint for pleasure, as a mania, out of passion, and for myself,” Dubuffet writes in “Rough Draft for a Popular Lecture on Painting” (1945), and again in “Art Brut” (1959) he speaks of work done “for the sole delight of the author” (Jean Dubuffet: Towards an Alternative Reality, 43; Collection de l’art brut [Lausanne, 1976]). As I suggested in the introduction, with this ideal Dubuffet seems to defy the primordial convention that art exists, first and last, to be beheld. At the same time this belief contradicts his emphasis, which deepened over time, on material process and viewer participation (more on which below). 61. MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 50. 62. Ibid., 42.

63. Dubuffet, “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art,” 104. The next two paragraphs are adapted from my Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 64. In “In Honor of Savage Values” Dubuffet transforms this aspect of the brut into a criterion of all art: “A work of art is interesting, in my opinion, on the condition that it is a very immediate and direct projection of what happens in the depths of a being.” If the schizophrenic can be an artist for Prinzhorn, “the artist in every case [is] a psychopath” for Dubuffet (261). He projected a deep subjectivity into his other brut avatars as well. 65. Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” 192. 66. This double bind is also pervasive in primitivism. 67. Michel Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression” (1963), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 30. I return to this topic in chapters 2 and 3. 68. Dubuffet as quoted in John MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 303. In this respect insane artists might qualify as the ultimate in positive barbarism since they truly “start from scratch” and “make a little go a long way” (as Benjamin put it in “Experience and Poverty”). But then this positive barbarism would be one with “complete autistic isolation” (Hans Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, trans. Eric von Brockdorff [Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1995], 266). 69. MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 43. Actually Dubuffet spent two days there. See Dubuffets Liste. Ein Kommentar zur Sammlung Prinzhorn von 1950, ed. Ingrid von Beyme and Thomas Röske (Heidelberg, 2015). 70. Gratuitously (or worse), Dubuffet adds that Grebing was Jewish. 71. Dubuffet: “[Breton] saw [art brut] as an extension of Surrealism. I opposed that. I never liked Surrealism...its huge cultural machine” (MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 47). Also see Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 1, 491–98, and Dubuffet’s Incursion into America, ed. Valerie Rousseau (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2016). 72. Another difficulty: Dubuffet created an Annex to separate “problematic cases” such as Gaston Chaissac (MacGregor, “Art Brut Chez Dubuffet,” 46). Chaissac accused Dubuffet of plagiarism, whereupon Dubuffet demoted him to the Annex. 73. Dubuffet recalled the art brut collection in 1961, the same year that Foucault published his Histoire de la folie. Although Dubuffet was skeptical about Foucault in a 1970 letter to Damisch, it is not clear if he read him (see Minturn, “Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut,” 256). However, much in The History of Madness resonates with much in Dubuffet. “We must try to return, in history, to that zero point in the course of madness at which madness is an undifferentiated experience, a not yet divided experience of vision itself,” Foucault argues of the period before the Age of Reason at the end of the eighteenth century. “What is constitutive is the action that divides madness...What is originative is the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason” (Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Vintage Books, 1965], ix). 74. The use of non-art materials was common not only in the art of the insane but also in contemporaneous work by Jean Fautrier and others. Here again we see the gambit of a double move both outside and inside the art world. 75. See Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 2, 422–27. As suggested by the title, Dubuffet read Nietzsche at the time, Daybreak in particular, in which Nietzsche writes, “The love of power is the demon of men.” See Maier, Dubuffet’s Decade, 149–50. “Uncivil character” also anticipates his later definition of brut as “incivism” (more on which below).

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76. The original title of this text was “The Author Responds to Some Questions.” “I would like people to look at my work as an enterprise for the rehabilitation of scorned values,” Dubuffet wrote in 1952, “and in any case, make no mistake, a work of ardent celebration” (“Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” in The Work of Jean Dubuffet, ed. Peter Selz [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962], 64). For some art historians “rehabilitation” conveys “redemption.” See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 140–43, 172–73. 77. Damisch underscored this “systematic humiliation of the traditional means of painting” in “Jean Dubuffet and the Awakening of Images” (1962), October 154 (Fall 2015), 18. Importantly this humiliation impinges, through the use of newspapers and the like, on “the base of our daily life” as well (“Dubuffet or the Reading of the World,” 307). 78. It is perhaps not accidental that Bataille also uses the spider and its web to evoke the informe. As noted, Dubuffet uses the word informe too. How does his use differ? More generally, how does his brut materialism differ from the “base materialism” developed by Bataille two decades before? In Dubuffet the formless does not always oppose the figural or the metamorphic, as it does in Bataille: “Formless does not mean inert, far from it!” (“Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” 63) Rather, it is committed to transformation: “Art Is a game—the game of the mind,” Dubuffet states as early as “Notes for the Well-Read.” “The chief game of mankind. A child looks at a ball of rags—and an idea flashes through his mind: this object is an Indian” (80). This is far from the Bataillean critique of Surrealism as a “jeu des transpositions” (game of transpositions), against which the fixity of his informe was pledged. Finally, like the base, the brut is a lowering but not a devaluing—on the contrary. See Denis Hollier, Absent without Leave: French Literature Under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 137–40. 79. Dubuffet, letter of June 1944 to Paulhan, quoted in Perry, Retour à l’Ordure, 225. Dubuffet seems to agree with Bataille that Surrealist aesthetics are too sublimatory, yet unlike Bataille he does not celebrate desublimation: “Art has as little to do with the cravings of sex as with those of the stomach” (“Notes for the Well-Read,” 82). 80. Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 84. 81. Renaud, “Arts: Jean Dubuffet,” Paroles françaises, May 18, 1946; Henri Janson, “Le Peintre en boniments,” Le Canard enchainé, May 15, 1946. 82. See Freud, “On the Transformations of Instincts as Exemplified in Anal Erotism,” in On Sexuality; and Ernest Jones, Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Ballière, Tindall & Cox, 1912), 432. As we will see in chapter 5, there is cacaism in Oldenburg too. 83. Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 77. 84. Dubuffet in Michel Tapié, Mirobolus, Macadam & Cie: Hautes Pâtes de Jean Dubuffet (Paris: Galerie Drouin, 1946), 28. 85. Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 84. On cru and cuit see Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), trans. John and Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). The brut is an undoing, not a deconstruction, of this opposition (Dubuffet is no more a poststructuralist than he is a structuralist). In the triangle of the raw, the cooked, and the rotten, the brut might be analogous to the rotten, which Lévi-Strauss defines as “a natural transformation” in “The Culinary Triangle” (in Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik, Food and Culture: A Reader [New York: Routledge, 2008], 37). This text might also help to explain why Dubuffet uses so many culinary tropes. “Placed between nature and culture, cooking...represents their necessary articulation,” Lévi-Strauss argues. “It partakes of both domains,

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and projects this duality on each of its manifestations” (42). But then the brut is not intended as a third term in this way. Perhaps it is less a mediation than a scandal in the manner of the prohibition of incest according to Lévi-Strauss, which appears to be at once natural (i.e., it is universal) and cultural (i.e., it is specific to man). 86. Announcement for “Portraits” at the Galerie Drouin, October 1947. 87. “Caricature” derives from the Italian verb caricare, to load or to burden. In effect, caricature works to load the appearance of an individual to the point where individuality is lost. See Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 258. 88. Dubuffet, “Little Chat,” 71. This text was written for the “Portraits” show. See Minturn, “Physiognomic Illegibility: Jean Dubuffet’s Postwar Portraits,” in Jean Dubuffet: “Anticultural Positions”, 54–65. 89. “In portraits you need a lot of general, very little of specific” (ibid.). Dubuffet found anti-individualistic models of art in nonclassical sources, such as Egyptian sarcophagi, Chinese imperial figures, and medieval coins. See Dubuffet, “Notes du Peintre– Portraits,” in Georges Limbour, Tableau bon levain à vous de cuire la pâte (Paris: René Drouin, 1953), 91. Politically, most of the writers featured in the Portraits were neither Right nor Left. 90. Dubuffet, “Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” 64. Here again Dubuffet did not use models, which he associated with the tradition of the nude. This is also why he eschewed the customary appellation “Corps de femmes.” 91. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 79–80. “Horizontal” also has sexual connotations. 92. As Andrea Maier argues, “The Venus pudica has been fully unveiled, only to be made unapproachable” (Dubuffet’s Decade, 300). Dubuffet was no feminist, to be sure; for example, he railed against Simone de Beauvoir when The Second Sex was published in 1949. 93. There is an unexpected resemblance between Le Métafisyx (Corps de dame) (1950) and the Venus of Hohle Fels, an ivory figure c. 35–40,000 BCE—unexpected because the latter was discovered only in 2008. As we will see in chapter 2, Bataille also pitted such prehistoric beauty against the classical norm. 94. Dubuffet, “Notes du peintre,” 93–94. Just as the Portraits are both faced and defaced, the Corps are both embodied and disembodied. Dubuffet called them “generic images” (a term Luquet used for child drawing), and this generality is sometimes expressed in both the Portraits and the Corps as a creatureliness. 95. Landscapes “have an uncertain, unsteady scale” (“Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” 71). 96. See Damisch, “Work, Art, Artwork” (1962), October 154 (Fall 2015), 20. “This painting, from its beginnings, was bound up with the earth, with the soil, and this is true right through to its composite ingredients of asphalt, tar and gravel, clinker, compost, lime, plaster, cement, etc.” (ibid., 23). 97. Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 124. His masculinist rhetoric here is anything but ambiguous. At the same time Dubuffet aims to transform major categories. “Minor art suits me just fine,” he attests in “Little Chat” (70). Is there any connection to “the minor” as a subversive category of writing as advocated by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975)?

98. On opticality see Clement Greenberg, “The New Sculpture” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961); on textuality see Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). Steinberg mentions the natureculture opposition there. As Rachel Perry argues, Dubuffet was interested in “outdated techniques and labor” more than in new media (Perry, “Paint Boldly! Dubuffet’s DIY Manual,” October 154 [Fall 2015]). 99. Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 3, 124. In Dubuffet both opticality and textuality are often overwhelmed by materiality. 100. Alex Potts calls this approach a “materialist monism” (Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013], 133–53). Brut materialism differs from other modernist materialisms, such as the Russian formalist baring of the device and the Anglo-American formalist concern with medium-specificity. Dubuffet: “It is a matter of the specific behavior of the material used and, if you will, to its disposition” (“Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” 63). Again, it is a materialism that is both literal and ambiguous, even allusive. For example, colors “act through the mechanism of their own references. Thus, a certain brownish tone evokes the color of earth, another the fur of an animal, the skin of a sausage” (“Notes for the Well-Read,” 76). 101. Dubuffet: “Painting is a language much more immediate, and, at the same time, much more charged with meaning” (“Anticultural Positions,” 196). 102. Ibid. 103. Dubuffet: “This brewing of two orders supposedly foreign to one another, the discovery that they are perhaps not so foreign as one had believed, attracts me very strongly” (“Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” 71). 104. Damisch, “Dubuffet or the Reading of the World,” 312 (italics in the original). Perhaps Dubuffet also aims for a state before the distinction of the sexes (more on which below). Damisch edited the collected writings of Dubuffet and wrote several essential essays on the artist. 105. Ibid., 308. “It disposes the eye to take up again its original relation with the Earth.” For Damisch Dubuffet invites the mind to go “to the bottom of things,” to reconnect “its primal relation with the world” (310). 106. I borrow “the flesh of the world” from Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind” (1964) and “corporeal materialism” from Maier in Dubuffet’s Decade, 340–42. 107. Limbour, Tableau bon levain, 94. 108. Dubuffet, letter to Jacques Berne, in Jean Dubuffet: Lettres à J.B. (Paris: Hermann, 1991), 1. 109. See Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” Glyph 7 (1980). 110. Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 2, 148–49. “I hold out for confusion,” Dubuffet writes in “Notes for the Well-Read.” “I also like the embryonic, the ill-fashioned, the imperfect, the mixed.” “You grope your way backwards!” (86, 67). 111. Dubuffet, letter to Jacques Berne, 1. 112. The first painting might also be the last: “My concern is therefore—and this is the question that is constantly raised when elaborating a painting—to test up until what point I can comfortably take the denaturing, beyond which the sites evoked would vanish” (Damisch and Dubuffet, “Writings and Correspondence: 1961–1985,” October 154 [Fall 2015], 15). “I like things carried to the extreme limits of what is possible” (“Little Chat,” 71). On limit concepts see the introduction.

113. Dubuffet, “Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy,” 63. Already in “Notes for the Well-Read” Dubuffet imagines art that is produced by trout, snakes, and birds (20). 114. Dubuffet, “Anticultural Positions,” 193. 115. Dubuffet, “Notes for the Well-Read,” 77. In “Paris Circus” (1962) Damisch writes of an opposition in Dubuffet between “humanizing” and “inhumanizing” (October 154 [Fall 2015]), 28). Might homo connectus flip here into an object-oriented ontology, a concern with la vie sans l’homme (which is in fact a Dubuffet title)? 116. “The canvas,” Paulhan agreed, “ceases to be a simple image in order to become an event” (“A propos de critique d’art,” Les Temps modernes 13 [October 1946], 181). 117. Damisch, “Dubuffet or the Reading of the World,” 308. 118. Dubuffet, “Lettre à René Auberjonois,” Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 2, 240. According to Damisch, Dubuffet was concerned to “prevent the figure from taking this or that particular form” (“Starting Ground,” 67). Even the late “Hourloupe” series equivocates between “full and empty, being and non-being, figure and field.” 119. Damisch and Dubuffet, “Writings and Correspondence,” 45. 120. These are the terms that Dubuffet uses in “Art Brut 1959.” 121. “Is it necessary for him to search even further,” Damisch asks, “below the ground, to scratch down to the subsoil?” (“Dubuffet or the Reading of the World,” 311). 122. Damisch and Dubuffet, “Writings and Correspondence,” 58. Dubuffet was critical of Foucault, but might he allude here to the famous image of the footprint of man washed away at the end of The Order of Things? 123. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 73. 124. Ibid., 9. 125. Dubuffet, “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art,” 104. Dubuffet again questions the distinction between sane and insane art in “In Honor of Savage Values” (1951), a text written for a show of five brut artists in Paris. This prompts three questions I cannot answer at present. First, had Dubuffet read Georges Canguilhem whose The Normal and the Pathological appeared in 1943? “One calls madness anything that deviates from the norm,” Dubuffet writes in “In Honor of Savage Values” (263). Second, did he anticipate the anti-psychiatry movement in France in the 1960s (associated with Deleuze and Guattari, among others), and then, implicitly, respond to it in his texts of that time? “All that madness can say of itself is merely reason, though it is itself the negation of reason,” Foucault writes in Madness and Civilization. “In short, a rational hold over madness is always possible and necessary, to the very degree that madness is non-reason” (107). Finally, does the brut, does Dubuffet, escape this catch-22? 126. Dubuffet, “Quelques Peintures” (1954), in The Work of Jean Dubuffet, ed. Selz, 86. 127. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 38. As noted at the outset, Dubuffet sought this equivocation; its very ambiguity is what gives the brut its edge. Perhaps his ultimate equivocation appears in “Asphyxiating Culture,” where Dubuffet defines art brut as both “nourishment” and “subversion” (57). In some way the brut is an attempt to recover the liminality of the madman, such as existed in the medieval period according to Foucault: “He is kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly symbolic position” (Madness and Civilization, 11). 128. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 40.

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2 | Georges Bataille and His Caves 129. Dubuffet, “Rough Draft for a Popular Lecture on Painting” (46), and “Notes to the Well-Read” (80). Among such arts he lists speaking, walking, blowing smoke, seducing, dancing, roasting a chicken, giving and receiving. But then in 1976 he states, “It’s not possible to be totally free of culture. Even the idea of language is part of culture. The idea of walking on two legs is culture. Without it you’d be a dog, but even dogs are culturally conditioned to some extent” (MacGregor, “Art Brut chez Dubuffet,” 50–51). In an almost Mallarméan manner Dubuffet suggests that to name is to destroy: “When we do, we scorch the thing like a sunburn” (“Little Chat,” 66). 130. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 61. 131. “Duchamp, the consummate Hegelian, said that art no longer had any internal necessity; it was now a pure convention,” Damisch argues. “Why did Dubuffet look at the work he collected under the label of ‘Art Brut’?...It’s because these works were driven by necessity. There was no audience...Dubuffet too was obsessional, driven, or wanted to be. He constructed his own ‘necessity’” (Yve-Alain Bois et al., “A Conversation with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 [Summer 1998]), 10. 132. Dubuffet, “Empreintes,” Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, volume 2, 148–49. 133. See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971). 134. Dubuffet, “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art,” 103. 135. Ironically, the initial settings of the art brut collection were rather elite—first the basement of the Galerie Drouin in the Place Vendôme, and then a greenhouse in a house rented by the publisher Gaston Gallimard. 136. Also ironically, this text was written for a large exhibition of art brut at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris in April– June 1967. Another term for “incivism” might be “resistance,” or, in contemporary parlance, “becoming-ungovernable.” 137. Dubuffet, “Asphyxiating Culture,” 90. Two other operations of the brut are extreme versions of exnomination: deculturation and exacerbation. Dubuffet comes to see that “there can only be subversion before an established order” (81), that is, that there are limits to transgression. So rather than posit a before or an outside to culture, he begins to pose two other options. The first is a Nietzschean “faculty of forgetting” (94): “In my gymnasiums, we could institute classes of degraded culture” that would teach “inattention, impropriety, confusion,” he writes of such deculturation (“Demagnetization of Brains,” Asphyxiating Culture, 97, 98). The second is an attack on culture from within through mimetic excess—through “brutalizing words and principles,” he says of such exacerbation (100). This move “against culture” “consists of worsening it, making it as bad as possible, implementing its most worn-out, devalued clichés, and heating them, so to speak, as alchemists used to heat things, to the point at which they explode” (97). 138. This “half-anonymity,” which was a common practice in publications of the art of the insane, suggests more than a protecting of privacy. 139. Dubuffet was not only a prospector of art brut but a colonizer as well (from the Latin colere, to inhabit, cultivate, protect, honor with worship). “Art Brut is far as possible from [André] Malraux’s ideas,” Dubuffet insisted, yet it can also be taken to extend the purview of the musée imaginaire greatly (MacGregor, “Art Brut chez Dubuffet,” 47).

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1. Georges Bataille, “Note for a Film,” in The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. and trans. Stuart Kendall (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2005), 79–85; hereafter abbreviated as C in the text. In his writings on Lascaux Bataille already imagines the cave paintings as apparitions projected on a screen, that is, in quasi-cinematic terms. Most of the texts cited in this chapter appear in volume 12 of his Oeuvres Complètes. I have benefitted from many experts on Bataille and/or prehistory, including Georges Didi-Huberman, Suzanne Guerlac, Denis Hollier, Stuart Kendall, Carrie Noland, Spyros Papapetros, Lucy Steeds, Steven Ungar, and especially Maria Stavrinaki. 2. Bataille offers this date in Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux, or the Birth of Art (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1955), 27; hereafter abbreviated as L in the text. The 1994 discovery of Chauvet Pont d’Arc, dated to c. 31,000–26,000 BCE, also undercuts the historical primacy that Bataille claimed for Lascaux. 3. See Sigfried Giedion, The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1957). Also see Spyros Papapetros, “Retracing The Eternal Present (Sigfried Giedion and André-Leroi Gourhan),” Res 63/64 (Summer/Autumn 2013). 4. See “The Psychological Structure of Fascism” (1933) and related texts in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985); hereafter abbreviated as V in the text. 5. Maurice Blanchot underscored this presence (which quickly became a cliché in writings on the caves) in his review of Lascaux titled “The Birth of Art,” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). The presentation of images in Lascaux departs dramatically from the subversive use of photographs in Documents, the dissident Surrealist journal that Bataille edited in 1929–30. 6. Whereas Benjamin understood photography to undercut aura, here photography produces aura. 7. Carrie Noland is especially good on the emphasis in Bataille on process and participation in the Lascaux pictures. See her “Bataille Looking,” Modernism/Modernity 11 (January 2004). 8. One model was Le Musée imaginaire (1947) by André Malraux, who presents a diversity of artifacts as art, in large part through the decontextualization allowed by photography. Although Bataille also decontextualizes, his concerns often exceed and sometimes counter the aesthetic. 9. “What later distinguished Homo sapiens is not consciousness,” Bataille writes characteristically, “but the mastery of the work of art. The Mousterian man knew nothing about art” (C 149). 10. Fernand Windels, Lascaux, “Chapelle Sixtine” de la préhistoire (Montaigne, Dordogne: Centre d’Études et de la Documentation Préhistoriques, 1948). For the assimilation of cave paintings into art history, see Noland, “Bataille Looking,” 138–39. 11. I am concerned with what Bataille believed then, not what prehistorians know now, many of whom do argue that Neanderthal man produced a kind of art. On the other hand, Bataille anticipates some recent accounts, at least in part. For example, he posits “at the opening of the Upper Paleolithic Age...a sudden spurt of development both in an evolutionary sense and in a numerical one: this upsurge would have been hinged with the birth of art” (L 19). Similarly, David Lewis-Williams posits a cognitive leap in this epoch—an advance in consciousness that corresponds with an advance in art, language, social hierarchy, and burial practice. See his The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002).

12. Put simply, in the universe of Lascaux according to Bataille, on the one side is the human world of work, which is supported by prohibitions, and on the other is all that stands in opposition to this human world, not only “raw life” but also transgression, death, and the sacred, all of which is represented by the animal. Yet even this basic binary is not stable, for man falls on both sides, as do his signal creations such as art, play, festival, and eroticism. As we will see, despite the intention of Lascaux “to develop the antithesis of animality and work” (L 125), the human–animal divide is hardly absolute; it is not even a divide since man is both animal and not-animal. This duality can hardly be articulated, let alone resolved, though Bataille comes close in Erotism: “As taboos came into play, man became distinct from the animals,” he writes there. But under the secondary influence of transgressive acts, he is put back in touch with the violence of sex and death (“under whose sway animals are helpless”), and he draws “near to the animals once more.” “It appears,” Bataille speculates further, “that this secondary accord between man and the animals, this rebound, as it were, belongs to the era of the cave paintings” (Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986], 83; hereafter abbreviated as E in the text). 13. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). For Bataille making, or, better, marking, is almost opposed to matching. See Whitney Davis, Replications: Art History, Archaeology, Psychoanalysis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 14. Picasso visited Lascaux in 1940 where he is said to have proclaimed “We have invented nothing.” 15. Again, note the churchly nomenclature, which advances a connection between art and religion, one that Bataille transforms dramatically. 16. Bataille disputes Windels in particular here; see Noland, “Bataille Looking,” 144–45. 17. Most of the depicted animals were not prey, which undermines the argument about the importance of hunting (but not necessarily the argument about sacrifice). 18. I have in mind the Benjamin of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–36), which insists on the break between ritual and art. Yet in the same essay Benjamin suggests, in a way that resonates with Bataille, that anti-aesthetic avant-gardes such as Dada had revived a quasi-ritualistic dimension in art through an insistence on the innervation of the body though the direct impact of form. A similar claim might be gleaned from his essay “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” (1929). My thanks to Maria Stavrinaki for this distinction. 19. See Meyer Schapiro, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs” (1969), in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Styles, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 1, 3. André Leroi-Gourhan disputes this lack of framing in parietal art in The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Paleolithic Cave Painting, trans. S. Champion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 19–37. 20. Here too Bataille anticipates David Lewis-Williams, who describes the paintings as “‘fixed’ mental images” that are redone in ritualistic fashion, with the wall understood as a membrane between worlds (The Mind in the Cave, 193, 253).

21. With Dubuffet we saw how the art of the insane might also trouble such an assumption. See chapter 1, note 60. According to the German prehistorian Johannes Maringer (whom Bataille read), “It is simply impossible that this art should have been intended, in these locations, to give pleasure to the eye of the beholder; the intention must always have been to veil it in mysterious secrecy.” See his The Gods of Prehistoric Man, trans. Mary Ilford (London: Phoenix Press, 1960), 75. 22. Like Dubuffet, the young Bataille did all he could to attack the classical tradition; here he moves to undercut classical antiquity as the privileged origin of art. And yet to locate this origin in the Franco-Cantabrian caves is still to insist on a Western beginning. 23. On the informe/conforme distinction see Suzanne Guerlac, “The Useless Image: Bataille, Bergson, Magritte,” Representations 97 (Winter 2007). Oddly, Bataille calls the animal images “naturalistic,” which contradicts his argument that they are not referential. That said, he also calls them “miraculous” and “marvelous” (more on which below). 24. Bataille mentions this “stupefying negation of man” in another text c. 1930, a review of “The Frobenius Exhibit at the Salle Pleyel,” written for Documents but not published. 25. Prompted by Breuil, Bataille was also provoked by Lévi-Strauss, who published The Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949, which Bataille reviewed in Critique in January 1955 (this text was later incorporated in the second volume of The Accursed Share). Here Lévi-Strauss proposes his own theory of “the passage from animal to man” via the fundamental prohibition against incest. For Bataille, however, the primary taboo focused on the dead, that is, on the need of protection from them—in short, on the sacred. And it is not prohibition alone that produces the human; transgression and eroticism also distinguish man. 26. According to Bataille, “There is one exception to the rule [of informe representations of the human] and, what is more, it dates back to the early Aurignacian. A tiny head of a young woman, carved in mammoth ivory...known, inappropriately, as the ‘The Mantled Figurine’,” also known as the Venus of Brassempouy (L 124). 27. Bataille: “The erotic character of women, if it exists, is not separate from their fecundity...There is no accordance between the erotic image and the human image” (C 203). 28. However, in “The Lespugue Venus,” an unpublished text of 1958, Bataille mentions a “minuscule figure (it is 3.7 cm tall)” from the Lake Trasimeno region in Italy that is “unequivocally a phallus” (C 113). The same might be argued about the Lespugue Venus. Bataille was close to Lacan, who presented his woman-as-phallus thesis in “The Meaning of the Phallus,” delivered as a lecture also in 1958. Yet the male/female binary does not map onto the human/animal relation. Neither conforme nor informe, “female figures form a third world, as much as opposed to the world of men as to that of animals” (C 68). Incidentally, for Leroi-Gourhan the arrows and wounds in Lascaux are markers of male and female sexual difference (Treasures of Prehistoric Art, trans. Norbert Guterman [New York: Abrams, 1965], 172–73). There is recent speculation that many of the cave pictures of Lascaux vintage were painted by women; despite his own appetite for speculation, this is one that Bataille does not— perhaps cannot—consider.

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29. Some human figures in the caves appear to be bent over, but obviously that depends on the point from which they are viewed or photographed. Some photos render the Sorcerer more horizontal, others more vertical. His mixed posture is usually read in terms of shamanistic trance, yet it could also signify an ambiguous relation to the animal. Bataille stresses the coincidence of art not with the general emergence of Homo sapiens but with the particular posture of upright man. For Leroi-Gourhan this posture freed the arms from the task of locomotion and the mouth from the task of predation and thus prepared the way for both tool-making and speech. It might have also set up the mirroring of body and image, as Bataille suggests: “Art is its distinguishing characteristic,” he writes of the human species, “along the same lines as its aspect, which is both upright and slender” (C 89). 30. Just as there is a pensée sauvage for Lévi-Strauss, there is a pensée prehistorique for Bataille, and for both theorists it does not matter much whether the thought occurs in the primitive or the prehistoric mind or in their own. Yet in Bataille this thought is concerned with equivocal relations, not simple oppositions: he was no more a structuralist than Dubuffet was. 31. Much of the framing of sovereignty by Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben is prepared by Bataille, for whom man “stopped being an animal by giving the animal, and not himself, a poetic image that seduces us and seems sovereign” (L 60). The connection between the animal and the divine is complicated in Bataille. The two are alike, first, because neither is subject to prohibition: “Man abides by interdictions, taboos, to which the animal is never held, which are never at stake for the animal. The interdiction and the taboo represent a distance between man and the divine world” (C 165). And second, because both beast and god are associated with the dead and the sacred: “If the animal world was divine, it was so projected into the unreal domain of death” (C 165). “Divine animality” is another term for sovereignty, which Bataille defines as the condition that is “an end unto itself” (L 126). Moreover, “nothing is more common” in prehistoric art, he argues, than the representation of “a god in the form of an animal” (C 165). Bataille supports this connection through recourse, typical of such research at the time, to two kinds of evidence. The first is an association of prehistory with deep antiquity—“the first gods were certainly animals, and generally animals had to have seemed divine” (C 167), which is how the first kings were represented as well. The second is an association of the prehistoric with the primitive, specifically of cave painters with indigenous hunters. Here Bataille relies on one text in particular, Les Rites de chasse chez les peuples sibériens (1953), by the anthropologist Eveline Lot-Falck, whom he quotes: “‘Wild game is like man, only more godlike,’ says the Navaho, and the phrase would not be out of place on a Siberian’s lips” (L 126). Les Rites appeared in the series “L’Espèce humaine” edited by Michel Leiris, and Lot-Falck was influenced by the anthropologist Anatole Lewitzky, who lectured on shamanism at the Collège de Sociologie on March 7 and 21, 1939. On that occasion Lewitzky, who in 1942 was executed by Nazis for his role in the Resistance, delivered part of his dissertation (written under Marcel Mauss) in which he interpreted the bird masks of Siberian shamans as mediums of a voyage “into the kingdom of death.” See Georges Bataille et al., The College of Sociology 1937–39, ed. Denis Hollier, trans. Betsy Wong (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 248–61, hereafter abbreviated as CS in the text. 32. Bataille quotes Breuil to the effect that the bird figure recalls “the funerary posts of the Eskimos in Alaska or those of the Vancouver Islands” (L 137).

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33. “What they wanted to resolve was the haunting question of death,” Bataille writes of the shamanistic artists of the caves. “They overcame it through identification, through a religious sympathy with their victims” (C 169). 34. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Conner (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), 37; hereafter abbreviated as T in the text. 35. The Well scene prompts a variety of readings from Bataille that track his concerns over time. After a prewar emphasis on the informe (with the stick figure seen as “a kind of waste”), Bataille proceeds to several postwar accounts: the stick figure is understood first as a shaman in ecstasy, then as an “apology” for the very emergence of man as such, and finally as an expiation for murder (C 46). 36. Although Bataille does not cite Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he follows Freud in his argument there that “the aim of all life is death.” 37. In The Tears of Eros Bataille calls the wounded bison in Lascaux “a kind of minotaur” (50). Of course, interest in this figure cut across Surrealism; it appears in Picasso, André Masson, and Man Ray as well as in Bataille and Leiris. For Bataille the sacred lingered in the “sacrificial atmosphere” of the bullfight. In “Miroir de la tauromachie” (1938) Leiris presents the bullfight as a “mythical drama” in which “the divine is present,” a sacred ritual that renders death “voluptuous,” with “the Beast mastered, then killed, by the Hero” (Manhood, trans. Richard Howard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], 63–67). 38. The cave is a multivalent sign for Bataille. For the prewar Bataille the cave exists before architecture; it is a place of sacrificial ritual, not, like architecture, of social control. This meaning persists for the postwar Bataille, but it is complicated further. As the place of the birth of man, the cave is a cradle, even a womb, yet, with the possible extinction of man, it also figures as a bomb shelter, even a tomb. Of course, for Bataille it is always a labyrinth too, only now it opens less onto a regression to the bestial than onto a recovery of the sacred. In a sense his cave is the opposite of Plato’s: if we are enlightened at all, it is only in darkness and through darkness. 39. The classic Freud text on the primal scene is “The History of an Infantile Neurosis” (1914/18). Actually, this is not such a stretch: the primal scene was an important model of Surrealist picture-making, especially for Max Ernst, whom Bataille knew. See my Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). In effect, Bataille turns the uncertainty of origins to advantage: he creates a story that “mythifies” humanity into being. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in “Myth Interrupted,” “foundation is a fiction” and “fiction is a foundation” (Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Conner et al. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991], 55). 40. See Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). As in the primal scene, Bataille detects a confusion between desire, identification, and revulsion in the Well scene, a confusion that psychoanalysis once associated with the hysteric. Recall that for Bataille the cave dwellers “loved [the animals] and they wanted them; they loved them and they killed them.” 41. Bataille suggests no less than five different relationships between the human and the animal: separation of man from the animal as beast (“the animal was less than man, limited to what it was” [C 136]), connection of man with the animal (as “a fellow creature, a friend” [C 135]), effacement of man before the animal as sovereign, partial concealment of man in the guise of the animal as beast, and partial identification of man in the guise of the animal as sovereign. “Apparently, the constant ambiguity of

humanity is originally linked to this duplicity with regard to animals,” Bataille writes; often, too, he speaks of the absurdity of this condition, which can elicit only “laughter” (C 78, 80). As noted, this “constant ambiguity” has a mythic force for Bataille, and perhaps in this sense too: In 1955, the same year Bataille published Lascaux, Lévi-Strauss presented his structuralist account of Oedipus as a puzzling over of the fundamental question, Does man emerge from “one or two,” autochthonously from the earth or genetically from human parents? For Lévi-Strauss a myth repeats a contradiction (with twists, like a neurotic according to Freud) precisely because the contradiction cannot be resolved; in effect, the myth is its paralogical suspension. 42. Bataille also takes up these topics in Literature and Evil (1957). 43. Keyed by the example of graffiti, Bataille and Dubuffet agree on the destructive basis of representation, which differs from the usual sublimatory model of representation in psychoanalysis. Yet Bataille describes the representation of the animals in Lascaux in different ways, as a matter of “blind instinct alone,” on the one hand, and of “coherent disorder,” on the other (L 51). 44. See Bataille, “L’art moderne et le jeu de transpositions” (1930), and “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist” (1929), among other texts. “Base matter is external and foreign to human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations” (V 51). Yet Bataille is also opposed to any inert materialism, which he sees as idealism in disguise. See “Materialism” (1929) in Visions of Excess. 45. For Bataille the hands traced in cave painting sometimes evidence automutilation, which might point to this masochistic dimension. 46. Bataille sees a similar ambiguity in the mouth: on the one hand, it is the seat of articulate speech, our greatest distinction as a species; on the other, it is the site of bestial screams of terror, rage, and suffering. See “Mouth” (1930) in Visions of Excess. 47. Bataille might be taken to respond to Freud if it were not for the near simultaneity of the relevant texts (Civilization and Its Discontents was translated into French in 1934). See Denis Hollier, “About Some Books Which Bataille Did Not Write,” Parallax 4 (February 1997). 48. The narrative is even more complicated: the aversion to the animal comes after a reverence for it, which Bataille seeks to recover (more on which below). 49. While the 74-year-old Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents aims to free man from this anality, the 32-year-old Bataille of “The Big Toe” seeks to liberate its force. In effect, the postwar Bataille projects the discontent with civilization diagnosed by Freud onto prehistoric man, at the very moment that the instauration of prohibitions produces man as such. The difference is that for Bataille the shame stems from the humanity of man, not his animality: “Humanity must have been ashamed of itself at that time, not of its underlying animality, as we are” (E 83). “He masked the face of which we are proud, and he flaunted that which our clothes conceal” (C 61). 50. Bataille is virulent on this point in “The Academic Horse” and other texts; see note 50 of the introduction. 51. Bataille, “The Jesuve” (1930), Visions of Excess, 73. 52. See Georges Bataille et al., The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and the College of Sociology (London: Atlas Press, 2018).

53. Georges Bataille et al., The College of Sociology 1937–39, 11; Hollier paraphrases this thought pithily: “What unites men? The things that repel them. Society stands upon the things that it cannot stand” (CS xix). In a fundamental paradox Bataille and company dedicated the program of Acéphale to “a community creative of values, values creative of cohesion,” yet they located this cohesion in “destruction and decomposition” (“Program,” dated April 4, 1936, in October 36 [Spring 1986], 79). Further, in “The Sacred of Everyday Life” Leiris defined “the psychological sign of the sacred” as “that combination of respect, desire, and terror,” “simultaneously attractive and dangerous, prestigious and outcast” (CS 24). 54. For the Collège, as Hollier states, “a world that was strictly profane lacked the essential” (CS xxiv). 55. Although the Collège was opposed to any “affective foundation” based on “race or language, historical territory or tradition,” it was also conceived by Caillois in Nietzschean terms as “a process of sursocialization” (CS 36). The debate about this equivocal attitude continued in the Bataille revival in the late 1980s. See Carl Ginzburg, “Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Ann C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and Denis Hollier, “On Equivocation (Between Literature and Politics),” October 55 (Winter 1990). 56. Although “alteration” does not appear in Lascaux, it too takes on another inflection for the postwar Bataille: alt not only as in alter (other) but also as in altum (high), that is, alteration as a making sovereign. In a sense, “the demand for a sovereign value, refusing every subordination to interest” becomes his alternative to the Bretonian “marvelous”; it is also connected, via “wonder,” to the sublime (C 102–3). 57. For Bataille our “contempt for animals” stems from our overvaluation of rationality (C 76). At the very least he sought to reinject an ambivalence into a capitalist society given over to the equivalence of commodity. In this respect his version of the sacred is a more radical proposal than the Maussian concept of the gift. 58. In Bataille the creaturely is ontological, not political: it expresses a foundational crisis of man at the point of his emergence as such. But that does not mean that the creaturely cannot also register historical crises, as we will see in the next chapter. 59. “The essence of eroticism is to be found in the inextricable confusion of sexual pleasure and taboo,” Bataille argues in Erotism. “The sacred world depends on limited acts of transgression” (108, 68). A Christian dimension seems to persist in Bataille, along the lines of Paul in Romans 7:7: “I would not know what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet’.” But then a Nietzschean register persists as well: at times his “Birth of Art” recalls The Birth of Tragedy, with its tension between Apollonian individuation and Dionysian shattering (more on which in chapter 3). 60. To the first sentence Bataille adds this footnote: “There is no need to stress the Hegelian nature of this operation, which corresponds with the dialectic[al] phrase described by the untranslatable German ‘aufheben’: transcend without suppressing” (E 36). Yet Foucault, who was critical of dialectical thought, disagreed: “their relationship takes the form of a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust” (“A Preface to Transgression” (1963), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977], 35). 61. “Life beyond Utility Is the Domain of Sovereignty” (The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III, trans. Robert Hurley [New York: Zone Books, 1993], 198); hereafter abbreviated as AS in the text.

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3 | Asger Jorn and His Creatures 62. In 1933 Bataille described “fascism as the sovereign form of sovereignty” (V 153), and after the war too he seems to channel Carl Schmitt, as when he writes of “the religious character of all royalty and the sovereign character of all religious forms,” or of the king as “the creature par excellence of the miracle” (AS 232, 211). That said, the prewar Bataille had a different relation to the question of sovereignty than the postwar Bataille. In “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” (1930), for instance, he considers stone bas-reliefs from ancient Egypt, Persia, and elsewhere that represent regional rulers as human–animal hybrids (V 48). He reproduces one figure that is acephalic, three with duck heads, and another with human legs, snake torso, and cock head. For Bataille these “obscene” archontes are provincial travesties of official state forms. “In an almost bestial way,” he writes, such “Gnostic” hybrids introduced “an impure fermentation” into the “Greco-Roman ideology” of the perfect body (V 46). Paradoxically, according to Bataille, these representations of lawmakers are “lawless,” for they refuse the transformation of the ruler into an ideal form of abstract authority (from which position the ruler can subject his people). In short, the prewar Bataille affirms sovereignty even as he also aims to decapitate it, to render it literally acephalic. 63. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 113. That Bataille could not fully articulate this problematic in political terms is suggested by his difficulty with the third volume of The Accursed Share. 64. “How could the somber and unparalleled experience of the camps not have challenged all notions?,” Bataille wrote in a text published posthumously. “It is in every way and incessantly that one should return to it” (“Reflections on the Executioner and the Victim,” Yale French Studies 79 [1991], 19). Can thingly slaughter and true sacrifice be related in this manner? Was this involvement in the sacred an attempt at expiation? To what extent was Bataille influenced by contemporaneous reflections on the Holocaust, such as the Alain Resnais film Night and Fog (1955) and the Robert Anthelme memoir L’Espèce humaine (1957), where Anthelme (whom Bataille knew) recounts his experiences at Dachau and other camps? 65. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor of Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. Sidney and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 35, 36. “I felt a kind of wretched admiration,” Améry writes of his torturers, “for the agonizing sovereignty they exercised over me” (36).

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1. The catalogue raisonné produced by Guy Atkins is a fundamental resource for the study of Jorn, as is the work of Karen Kurczynski. I have also benefitted from texts by Graham Birtwistle, Niels Henriksen, Kristina Rapacki, and Peter Shield, as well as by the contributors to the special issue of October 141 (Summer 2012) dedicated to Jorn. 2. Constant discusses his relation to various avant-gardes in “Manifesto” (1948), as does Jorn in “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm” (c. 1955), where he makes clear his objections to Expressionism, Futurism, and Surrealism, as well as to formalism and functionalism. Jorn also critiques any division of form and content and any embrace of novelty for its own sake. 3. Asger Jorn, “Discours aux pingouins,” Cobra 1 (1949), 8. 4. Jorn and company hardly invented this idiom. As Guy Atkins writes, “What is now regarded as the typically ‘Cobra’ inventory of forms: strange birds, beasts, wizards, masks, a general melee of zoomorphic and human shapes—such motifs had figured in the paintings of Egill Jacobsen and others since the late thirties” (Jorn in Scandinavia 1930–1953 [London: Lund Humphries, 1968], 86). 5. Famously, Benjamin saw the Angelus Novus as the angel of history-as-disaster in “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). The Cobra connection to Klee is explored in Michael Baumgartner et al., eds., Klee and Cobra: A Child’s Play (Bern: Zentrum Paul Klee, 2011). 6. Constant, “Manifesto,” Reflex 1, 1948; translated in Anna Krogh and Holger Reenberg, eds., Cobra 50 år (Ishøj: Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, 1997), 167. 7. Ibid., 168, 171. 8. Ibid., 171. Denis presented this famous formula in “Definition of Neotraditionism” (1890). In another moment of emergency the Dadaist Hugo Ball made a similar remark about Kandinsky: “Man...becomes an animal...a creature” (Flight Out of Time [1927], trans. Ann Raimes [New York: Viking Press, 1974], 223–24). 9. Part of the Jorn letter to Constant appears in facsimile in Wilemijn Stokvis, Cobra: The Last Avant-Garde Movement of the Twentieth Century (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2004), 243. 10. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946), and Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (1947). 11. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 185; and Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 150–60. Heidegger first presented these reflections in lectures in 1929–30 and 1942–42 respectively. I borrow the phrase “anthropological machine” from Giorgio Agamben: “It functions by excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human” (The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004], 37). 12. In Bataille the animal is also glorious, above man as well as below, whereas in Jorn the creature is mostly inglorious, lost between the human and the beast. Nevertheless, given that this other is still figured as animal, might Jorn, like Bataille, produce his own “anthropological machine”? 13. As Karen Kurczynski argues, his Situationist painting of the late 1950s and early 1960s “demonstrates an explicit irony in relation to the painterly gesture,” with its “direct parody in the form of caricature or vandalism” (“Ironic Gestures: Asger Jorn, Informel, and Abstract Expressionism,” in Joan Marter, ed., Abstract Expressionism: The International Context [New

Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007], 110, 113). On his philosophy see Graham Birtwistle, Living Art: Asger Jorn’s Comprehensive Theory of Art between Helhesten and Cobra, 1946–1949 (Utrecht: Reflex, 1986). 14. According to Jorn, Scandinavian culture was never subject to classical culture and so never provincial in relation to it. See Jorn, “Postscript to 12th-Century Stone Sculptures of Scania” (1965), October 141 (Summer 2012), 77. 15. Jorn and company had already moved to reclaim Nordic mythology from the Nazis with Helhesten (the name of the threelegged beast of death in the Edda). He was especially taken by Didrik the Knight, a legendary figure of Scandinavian strength who derives from Theodirich, the king of the Visigoths in the early sixth century (his final publication project was devoted to Didrik). That said, the vandal is a Scandinavian cliché that Jorn also played with. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 22, 67. “Apollo embodies the transcendent genius of the principium individuationis; through him alone is it possible to achieve redemption in illusion. The mystical jubilation of Dionysius, on the other hand, breaks the spell of individuation and opens a path to the maternal womb of being” (97). Schopenhauer developed the notion of the principium individuationis that Nietzsche draws on here. 17. Jorn is inconsistent about artistic individuality, however. Early on he rails against it as a symptom of bourgeois division, only later to insist on its value as a form of resistance to spectacle. 18. In “Apollo and Dionysius” Jorn also reads classical art as an allegory of class struggle, with “Apollonian ideals, the Elysium of pure thought, true home of the classical ruling class” pitted against “Dionysian ideals, the human and secular principles of fecundity and untrammelled joy” held by “the toiling masses and the oppressed” (Fraternité Avant Tout: Asger Jorn’s Writings on Art and Architecture, ed. Ruth Baumeister [Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011], 154). Jorn was informed by his reading of Engels, especially The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884). Peter Weiss stages this contrapuntal reading of classicism brilliantly in his Aesthetics of Resistance (1975). 19. Asger Jorn, “Notes from the Surréalisme Révolutionnaire congress, Brussels,” unpublished manuscript (Museum Jorn Archive, 1947, 39), quoted in Karen Kurczynski, The Art of Asger Jorn: The Avant-Garde Doesn’t Give Up (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 37. “We propose, in the name of Cobra, to improve old canvases, collections, or entire museums. I have already begun working on canvases by Raphael, Monet, and Braque and Dali” (letter to Constant, quoted in Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn. En biografi. Årene 1914–53 [Borgen, 1994], 207). 20. Diderot as quoted in Roland Barthes, “Diderot, Eisenstein, Brecht,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 71. The trope is an ancient one. In his Poetics Aristotle writes of narrative: “In the same way as living creatures and organisms compounded of many parts must be of reasonable size, so that they can be easily taken in by the eye, so too plots must be of reasonable length, so that they can be easily held in the memory” (Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, ed. and trans. T. S. Dorsch [Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1965], 41). Also see note 50 in the introduction. 21. See Asger Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” October 141 (Summer 2012). 22. Steven Harris reminds me that there was also an immediate target: the Magrittean model of the Surrealist picture with its separation of idea, image, and making.

23. Jacobsen and Mortenson “provoked a salutary crisis,” Jorn writes, “the downfall of drawing in favor of color, triumphant, effulgent” (Lettres à plus jeune [Paris: L’Echoppe, 1998], 89). This describes his own color as well, which, however dim in its light, is often vivid in its contrasts. Jorn also resisted the association of “dark painter” and “nocturnal person.” See, for example, Luck and Chance (written 1952, published 1963), in Asger Jorn, The Natural Order and Other Texts, ed. Peter Shield (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 228. This is to suggest that he disturbed the standard opposition in art history between Northern and Southern styles even as he deployed it. 24. Jorn, “Peinture détournée,” in Vingt peintures modifiées par Asger Jorn (Paris: Galerie Rive Gauche, 1959), n.p. 25. The pastoral was not so remote in Denmark since it had persisted in the bourgeois tradition of Danish landscape. Perhaps the Christian meaning of the pastoral as spiritual guidance is mocked here as well. Certainly Shameful Pastoral is also a détournement of “the peaceable kingdom” imagined in Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf shall also dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and little child shall lead them.” His mutant is also very different from the human animal in the caves as understood by Bataille (more on which below). 26. Perhaps there is a partial precedent in Géricault, who also performed a détournement of history painting, and whose renderings of body parts also challenged the classical notion of the picture as an integral body. Jorn painted his own version of The Raft of Medusa in 1950. 27. Jorn quoted in Andersen, Asger Jorn, 199. In part Jorn was provoked by the 1949 signing of the NATO pact (more on which below). In his texts if not in his pictures, he does not naturalize this antagonism; on the contrary, he presents it in class terms: “The upper class is like an enraged predatory animal, a killing machine, which has been deprived of its prey the day that the revolution has succeeded” (Blade af Kunstens Bog, Volume 3 [1946–49], 206, unpublished manuscript, Museum Jorn Archive). My thanks to Niels Henriksen for this reference. 28. This obliteration calls to mind Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831) by Balzac (whom Jorn greatly admired), only with the effaced nude in the story replaced by a scoured history painting. 29. “Stalingrad is an impossible, failed painting,” Jorn writes, “because what I wish to paint cannot be painted. The struggle between life and death” (quoted in Dorthe Aagesen and Helle Brøns, eds., Asger Jorn: Restless Rebel [Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2014], 265). For more on this work see Karen Kurczynski, “No Man’s Land,” October 141 (Summer 2012). 30. On this sense of the obscene see my “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,” October 78 (Fall 1996). Jorn scrawled the French title, which might also be translated as Over My Dead Body, around the creature. The Kafka text “Resolutions” is apposite here. 31. There is an affinity to Bataille the philosopher of the informe, especially in his texts on the mouth, the big toe, and so on (see chapter 2). In Jorn too these are hardly ideal organs of immaculate speech and pure vision. 32. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 89. For Lacan (as for Heidegger) animals are simply caught in the gaze of the world; they are only on display there. Humans are not so reduced to this “imaginary capture” (103), for we have access to the symbolic, in this case to the screen as the site of representation.

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33. Jorn is opposed to both trompe-l’oeil and dompte-regard: rather than the bird deceived by a picture of grapes, as in the origin story of mimesis in Pliny, we have the creature that looks out as the avatar of the maleficent gaze of the world. Jorn sometimes depicts eyes as if they were holes in the canvas through which the gaze of the world might shine through obscenely. For more on this effect see my “Torn Screens” in Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 34. I have argued that the creaturely can work to undo the picture understood as a dompte-regard or pacifier of the gaze. Sometimes, however, Jorn turns the creaturely into a visual cliché, one that is easy enough to consume, a code of weird hybrids with crazy looks. As noted in the introduction, there is a danger of creaturely kitsch across art and literature in the postwar period. At the same time Jorn embraces kitsch as part of his repertoire. In indirect opposition to the young Greenberg in his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” the young Jorn in his 1941 text “Intimate Banalities” highlights the use value of popular material. What are his “modifications” and “disfigurations” of the late 1950s and early 1960s if not a refunctioning of kitsch pictures (more on which below)? 35. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 53. 36. Ibid., 56. Here is an extended (alternative) translation of his complaint, which bears directly on the question of violence and justice (more on which below): “Why then do you tolerate the treacherous?/ Why are you silent while the wicked/ swallow up those more righteous than themselves?/ You have made people like the fish in the sea,/ like the sea creatures that have no ruler.” 37. Unclean animals are also improper for sacrifice. The threat of this disturbance is felt in Kafka, whom Jorn studied. See Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke/Benjamin/Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 28. Just as the brut in Dubuffet disrupts the cru/cuit binary, the creaturely in Jorn complicates the human/animal opposition. That is, there is a creaturely disruption of genus as well as of genre—and perhaps, as sensed in some Jorn paintings, of gender as well. Might his representation of the creaturely be too dependent on a confusion of male and female? Is there a reactionary force to his picturing of gender, as there is in his writing? See Helle Brøns, “Masculine Resistance: Expressions and Experiences of Gender in the Work of Asger Jorn,” October 141 (Summer 2012). 38. Asger Jorn et al., “Den ny realisme,” in Hostudsillingen (Copenhagen, 1945), n.p., quoted in Karen Kurczynski and Nicola Pezolet, “Primitivism, Humanism, and Ambivalence: Cobra and Post-Cobra,” Res 59–60 (Fall 2011). 39. See note 9. In a similar vein Jorn writes, “Often one can better describe the struggle among human beings, the essential, with fantastic animals...symbols that are common to all” (letter to Constant, 1950, quoted in Andersen, Asger Jorn, 223). 40. Asger Jorn, “The Human Animal,” October 141 (Summer 2012), 56. Freud was also interested in the transformation of god to devil; see his “The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words” (1920). In Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune, conceived in 1950–51 (but published in 1957), Jorn tracks how symbols such as the wheel and the cross shifted over time, often to the opposite meaning (the cross, once an emblem of life, became a sign of death). He also suggests a trajectory like the one sketched by Bataille in his late work on sovereignty, whereby the ancient association of animal and god was suppressed under Christianity.

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41. Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 56. In 1948 Jorn argued that “the single, overall objective” of “European intellectuals” from antiquity to the present is to defeat “the beastly [dyriske], which [it] has very correctly understood as the materialistic. The animal symbols found worthy of being elevated to social symbols have been taken exclusively from the category of predatory animals such as lions and eagles...Thus it is not the aggressive and destructive aspects of the animal kingdom that were detested. No, what is hated is beastly eroticism, fertility, the physical joy of life, the snake in the pants or even better in the garden of Eden” (Magi og Skønne Kunster [Copenhagen: Borgens Forlag, 1971], 130). My thanks to Niels Henriksen for this reference. In his antiChristian way Jorn often deploys “the dragon killer” as a figure of absolute power, and serpents, snakes, and other such creatures as symbols of popular resistance, which thereby take on a sovereignty of their own. A note from Cobra 1 (unsigned but likely written by Jorn) reads: “Le Cobra est un animal de trés haute caste, un seigneur entre les serpents. Il ne mord que s’il est provoqué.” 42. Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 57. 43. Ibid., 56. “We perceived the transformation based on the assumptions of Pinocchio,” Jorn writes, “based on a fear of the bestial. I no longer had this fear” (57). As is his wont, he elsewhere reads Pinocchio in class terms, as a naughty boy who “ventured to the place of material joy...with a group of naughty proletarian children...As a consequence of playing with the beautiful things, all the proletarian children were magically transformed into donkeys, into pull donkeys, sexually aroused donkeys, that were forced to become slaves to the so-called humanistic humans, the lords of mankind in the same way as the renowned Apulieus” (Blade af Kunstens Bog, Volume 3 [Museum Jorn Archive], 239). My thanks to Niels Henriksen for this reference. In Jorn a distinction (not an opposition) can be drawn between the animal as a figure of erotic liberation and the creaturely as a figure of political deformation. 44. Jorn, “The Human Animal,” 56. 45. Jorn had at least one book by Bataille in his library, The Trial of Gilles de Rais, a novel about a notorious child killer of the Middle Ages, but he must have known Documents, and later texts by Bataille exist in the library that Jorn assembled for the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism. A postcard of the “Chinese Horse” in Lascaux, sent to Jorn by Guy Debord on May 26, 1961, with the image signed by Debord as a “Jorn,” also points to an affinity (Museum Jorn Archive; my thanks to Kristina Rapacki). Of course, Bataille was a key figure for the Situationists. 46. See Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, ed. and trans. Stuart Kendall (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2005); Lascaux, or the Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Geneva: Skira 1955); and chapter 2. Jorn alludes to cave paintings in his writings, noting that, though Denmark cannot match the Franco-Cantabrian caves, it does possess animal sculptures. He also posits the possibility of prehistoric sand inscriptions in Scandinavia. 47. Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity, 55. 48. Ibid., 169, 61. 49. Ibid., 165. 50. Ibid., 165, 169. As we saw in chapter 2, Bataille also draws on primitive and ancient art to support this argument. 51. Of course, Bataille and Jorn differ here too. In Bataille early man uses the animal to tease out the advent of the human, whereas in Jorn the creaturely conveys a deformation of the human. In Bataille the animal is about the origins of sovereignty and law, whereas in Jorn the creaturely registers a crisis in both (after Habakkuk, we might say that his creatures are “crawling things that have no ruler”). In Bataille man feels shame before the

animal, whereas in Jorn it is precisely shame that renders him creaturely. Finally, Bataille is ambivalent about sovereignty, whereas Jorn opposes it absolutely. 52. Jorn acknowledged that he was hardly “the right person” for the job (quoted in Aagesen, ed., Restless Rebel, 40). 53. See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volumes 1 and 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, 2011). 54. I admit that this is a tendentious reading. Jorn captions these images with an opposition typical of his thought: in Christian terms the motif represents the dangers of hell, while in pagan terms it suggests the possibility of rebirth. As he does with classical art, Jorn also reads the creatures in Scandinavian art allegorically in terms of class. 55. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, 17. 56. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 8 (italics in original). 57. Ibid., 84. 58. Ibid., 32. 59. See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (1921), in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (1922), trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 60. Radical though the discourses of bare life and creaturely life are, they might be taken to encourage political extremes. If law is groundless in its origin, this might be understood, paradoxically, as a ground for fascism—as an excuse to authorize its naked claim to power, even to naturalize its permanent state of emergency. Conversely, it might be understood as a basis for anarchism—as a way to justify its refusal of all political institutionality. Late in his first book on the subject Derrida touches on a similar catch-22: “Who will dare militate for a freedom of movement without limit, a liberty without limit? And thus without law?...The double bind is that we should deconstruct, both theoretically and practically, a certain political ontotheology of sovereignty without calling into a question a certain thinking of liberty in the name of which we put this deconstruction to work... If ever this double bind...were lifted...it would be paradise” (The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, 301–2). To misquote Kafka, there might be paradise, but not for us. 61. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 22. Although Santner collapses emergency and exception here, emergency is the suspension of law with the promise (or pretense) of its restoration whereas exception is the suspension of law with no such intention. 62. Ibid., 35. 63. Ibid., 12. Conversely, possession of power, or protection by it, can produce the opposite of a cringe. Think, for example, of the phallic posture of the soldier brothers in The Oath of the Horatii (1784) by Jacques-Louis David. Yet there is also strain in this performance; as Lacan insists, no one possesses the phallus. 64. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne [London: Verso, 1985], 201). Elsewhere Benjamin comments on the creatures in Kafka: “What corruption is in the law, anxiety is in their thinking. It messes a situation up, yet it is the only hopeful thing about it” (“Franz Kafka,” Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken, 1969], 132). This, too, suggests that the groundlessness of power might be greeted with hope, not despair, as it is on the part of Habakkuk. 65. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 15. 66. Ibid., 34. Just as the gesture depicted in the painting is at once timid and proud, so the gestures that produced it are both genuine and second-hand.

67. Ibid., xv. For a related reflection on such fissures and caesuras see Joseph Vogl, On Tarrying, trans. Helmut Müller-Sievers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 68. Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, 19. 69. Again, Jorn called them “symbols” of “real phenomena.” 70. See note 6. 71. Constant, “Our Own Desires Build the Revolution,” in Theories of Modern Art. A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 601; “Manifesto,” 171. More prosaically, Constant also balked at a society governed by “the cultural assistant officer and the grocer,” i.e., a society that had become more administered and petit-bourgeois in character (171). 72. Jorn, Luck and Chance, 250. 73. Ibid., 251. 74. Ibid. 75. Jorn, “Peinture détournée,” n.p. 76. Marx, Postface to the second edition (1873) of Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 103. 77. Jorn seeks a foundation for art in “sensation” (as opposed to sensationalism) in “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm.” 78. Jorn, “Peinture détournée,” n.p. 79. Jorn touches on this dialectic in relation to ritual in Magi og Skønne Kunster. 80. “Love and life are the same,” Jorn wrote in the late 1940s. “It is the continuous revolution which is a dialectical synthesis of opposites...Those who do wrong by the dialectic of love do wrong by the dialectic of life, which is the living moment between deed and rest, activity and passivity, giving and taking” (Blade af Kunstens Bog, Volume 3 [Museum Jorn Archive], 216). My thanks to Niels Henriksen for this reference. 81. Jorn, Luck and Chance, 245. 82. Jorn, “Wonder, Admiration, Enthusiasm,” 69; “Postscript to 12th-Century Stone Sculptures of Scania,” 76. 83. Jorn, “Intimate Banalities” (1941), in Christian Gether et al., Asger Jorn (Ishøj: Arken Museum for Moderne Kunst, 2002), 49. 84. However, by 1964 Jorn wrote the following: “Folk art is made by the people [folket] for the people, while kitsch is made for the people by someone who does not belong to the people. Such an exclusive group belongs to an upper class, which uses art in order to force and direct the people with the aid of the cheapest and most brutal of seduction techniques” (“Om Handlingens Kunst,” unpublished manuscript for speech delivered at the Swedish Academy of Liberal Arts on May 30, 1964, Museum Jorn Archives, 8; my thanks to Kristina Rapacki for this reference). His shift in view was likely prompted by the rise of Pop art, which Jorn took to be an expression of American consumerism and power alike. 85. In Homo Sacer Agamben considers the etymology in a way that is apposite here: “He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order” (28–29).

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4 | Eduardo Paolozzi and His Hollow Gods 1. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (1918). Paolozzi read Rilke, whose first Duino Elegy he quotes in a note from the early 1970s: “Beauty is nothing other than the beginning of terror which we just manage to bear.” (Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews, ed. Robin Spencer [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000], 246; hereafter abbreviated as S in the text). I am indebted to many Paolozzi scholars, chiefly Daniel Hermann, Ben Highmore, Diane Kirkpatrick, Alex Kitnick, Richard Morphet, Robin Spencer, and John-Paul Stonnard. 2. Alison and Peter Smithson, “The ‘As Found’ and the ‘Found’,” in Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger, eds., As Found: The Discovery of the Ordinary (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2001), 40. 3. Ibid., 44. 4. Reyner Banham, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Review 118 (December 1955); reprinted in October 136 (Spring 2011), 19–28. 5. Banham, The New Brutalism: Ethic or Aesthetic? (London: Architectural Press, 1966), 65. These exhibits were only two of the twelve included in “This Is Tomorrow,” most of which were staged by non-IG members. “Patio & Pavilion” was conceived by Paolozzi, Henderson, and the Smithsons as a “human habitat” stripped down to two bare “necessities”—“a piece of the world, a patio,” and an “enclosed space, the pavilion.” In effect, it turned Miesian modernism toward positive barbarism. Indeed, the catalogue text for Group 6 at “This is Tomorrow” (1956) reads like a survivalist scenario. 6. As IG participant Toni del Renzio commented in retrospect, “We all had tackboards in our homes or our workspaces where we constantly pinned things up, removed things, and they were always in odd juxtapositions...Artists had always done that but we believed it was a technique” (quoted in David Robbins, ed., The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990], 37). 7. In Paris Paolozzi and Henderson viewed the Mary Reynolds collection of Dada and Surrealist art and met Dubuffet as well. They also exhibited alongside Picasso, Schwitters, and Ernst in “Collages and Objects,” a show curated by Lawrence Alloway at the ICA in fall 1954. 8. Colin St. John Wilson quoted in Eduardo Paolozzi, ed. Richard Morphet (London: Tate Gallery, 1971), 46; Nigel Henderson quoted in Robbins, ed., The Independent Group, 21. 9. Henderson quoted in Robbins, ed., The Independent Group, 25; Henderson, Paolozzi, and Smithsons, “Parallel of Life and Art: Indications of a New Visual Order” (press release, August 31, 1953), October 136 (Spring 2011), 7. 10. Rather than privilege tokens of the social and talismans of the subjective, as in Berlin Dada and Paris Surrealism respectively, Paolozzi explored the increased confusion of the two realms, whether this was prompted by the traumatic effects of the recent war or the seductive promises of emergent consumerism or both. One aspect of this confusion was that aspects of Surrealist collage were assimilated in the presentational devices of postwar advertisement. (This development was limned by Marshall McLuhan in his 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, which was important for Paolozzi and the IG at large.) “It’s no longer necessary for us individually to dream,” J. G. Ballard remarked to Paolozzi in 1971; “the fiction is all out there” (S 199). That said, Paolozzi was affined with Surrealism more than with Dada. In fact he regarded his work as “an extension of radical Surrealism” (S 199), whereas he saw Dada as “a bit hysterical, like a spoiled child’s tantrum of anti-art” (S 89), more on which below.

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11. As with his other collages Paolozzi often retained headings or captions in his source images for his own titles. 12. “A lot of things that interested me were in that book [The Foundations of Modern Art],” Paolozzi wrote in 1985, “things like cars, machines, old aeroplanes. They came from the late 1920s, I suppose, when there was a glory about the machine” (S 70). In the process Paolozzi took up this Ozenfant line as his own (fetishistic) motto: “Looking at organic things as if they were inorganic and inorganic things as if they were organic” (S 323). 13. Reyner Banham published his Theory and Design in the First Machine Age in 1960. On such periodization see my The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). 14. In his introduction Paul Katz invites “the user of this atlas...to re-organize the arrangements” (Psychological Atlas [New York: Philosophical Library, 1948], ix). See John-Paul Stonnard, “Paolozzi’s Psychological Atlas,” October 136 (Spring 2011). 15. There are also a few juxtapositions of exotic and primitive figures with contemporary commodities and brands. 16. Paolozzi refers to Histoire naturelle directly in a 1957 assignment for his students at St. Martin’s School of Art, which he frames as “an exercise in the study of the multi-evocative.” Derived from Paul Klee, the term “multi-evocative” was an IG mantra. See Alex Kitnick, “The Brutalism of Art and Life,” October 136 (Spring 2011), 66. Paolozzi taught at St. Martin’s from 1955 to 1958. 17. As Ralph Ubl argues, Figuier juxtaposed “near and far, large and small, part and whole, texture and form,” deep time and inner nature. For Ubl the Ernst frottages at once register and conceal the objects that shape them; thus does this automatist technique allow the unconscious to come into play. In his collages, however, Paolozzi insists on the agency of the artist to a greater degree than such an account suggests. See Ralph Ubl, Prehistoric Future: Max Ernst and the Return of Painting between the Wars, trans. Elizabeth Tucker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 92–98. 18. See my Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 174–82. 19. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 715. I return to this text below. 20. Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 63–64. 21. Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History” (1932), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos 60 (1984), 118. Ernst uses the phrase “hypnagogic visions” in Beyond Painting (New York: Schulz, 1948), 8. Between Lukács and Adorno, Benjamin also weighs in on second nature: “The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history...is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the baroque cult of the ruin” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama [1925], trans. John Osborne [London: Verso, 1985], 177–78). In Paolozzi “the false appearance of totality is extinguished” again, but it is doubtful whether the image as “rune” still offers a “field of allegorical intuition.”

22. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 166. The “facies hippocratica” (Hippocratic face) is the physiognomy of a person in extremis. This undead state has a perverse liveliness of its own, as Paolozzi suggests in this note from 1958 (which reads almost as a primal scene): “Twisted and pulled still recognizable crashed JUNKER/ part of the anatomy/ fuselage exposed like a wounded beast/ zinc-alloy piece filled with Scottish clay/ Fragment of an autobiography” (S 85). 23. Among other works, Bull (1946) is indebted to Picasso, and the “table sculptures,” in which biomorphic figures confront one another, recall the psychological scenarios of Giacometti. 24. In spring 1953 the ICA staged an exhibition titled “Wonder and Horror of the Human Head.” Curated by ICA cofounder Roland Penrose, it involved a wide array of representations—from shrunken skulls and Venetian masks to art works by Old Masters and modernists, most of whom were Surrealists, with a few contemporaries such as Francis Bacon included. For more on “Wonder and Horror of the Human Head” vis-à-vis Paolozzi, see Alex Kitnick, “Another Time,” Art Journal, 71, 2 (Summer 2012). 25. Lawrence Alloway, “Eduardo Paolozzi,” Architectural Design 27 (April 1957), 133. Here is Alloway on Paolozzi over a year later: “The human image he creates is a figure that obstinately survives violence and change. It is a human being below the level of dog tags, telephone numbers, and street addresses” (“London Chronicle,” Art International, 2, 9–10 [December 1958–January 1959], 36). A consensus on this point developed early on; already in 1953 Robert Melville wrote, “It is as if he were trying to find out if the human look could survive such treatment” (Architectural Review [November 1953], 331). 26. See Kitnick, “Another Time.” One precedent of Man in a Motor Car is The Chariot (1950) by Giacometti. Damaged Warrior and Man in a Motor Car can be seen as a riposte to Fascist gestures and Futurist tropes respectively (more on which below). 27. Man under stress was a particular obsession of Henderson (who, as a pilot during World War II, suffered a nervous breakdown). This is especially evident in his “Strong Man” series, one of which was included in the Group 6 exhibit in “This Is Tomorrow.” Related images also appeared in “Parallel of Life and Art” (1953), curated by the same collaborators, and “Man, Machine and Motion” (1955), curated by Richard Hamilton. 28. This interest persisted in Paolozzi, for example, in his Crash Head (1970). Testing is a concern in Hamilton too; see my “Hamilton Test,” in Richard Hamilton, ed. Mark Godfrey (London: Tate Modern, 2014). 29. Paolozzi, letter of August 5, 1983, to Angelica Rudenstine (S 80). “The wax sheet was a very versatile tool,” Frank Whitford noted. “It could be shaped, cut, bent, torn, fused, welded together and turned directly into sculpture. Unique bronzes could be made by the lost wax method without any intermediate stages” (Eduardo Paolozzi [London: Tate Gallery, 1971], 14). Paolozzi first used found fragments in his plaster bas-reliefs of the 1940s, which were made on the horizontal axis but presented on the vertical. 30. The first six verbs are in capitals. This “verb list” is very different from the famous one produced by Richard Serra nearly a decade later, yet it too foregrounds process. “Reccombine” nicely compounds “wreck” and “combine.” 31. Lawrence Alloway, in Eduardo Paolozzi with Alloway, The Metallization of a Dream (London: Lion and Unicorn Press, 1963), 29; hereafter abbreviated as MD in the text. By and large, though female figures abound in his early collages, Paolozzi concentrated on the mechanization of the male body (“man” equals “male” in his work), while Richard Hamilton focused on the commodification of the female body. My comments on gesture and gender in Jorn carry over to Paolozzi here.

32. Paolozzi favored polythene toys and printed circuits for the details that they offered. He might have taken the sticking of his figures into plinths, feetless, without mediation in space, from Giacometti. 33. On sculptural subjectivity see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977). Of course, this is precisely what classical sculpture lacked according to Hegel (especially in its “sightlessness”); in his Aesthetics he reserves the expression of subjectivity for Christian art. 34. See the introduction. Exteriors with no interiors: perhaps that is why these sculptures convey little (if any) Surrealist uncanniness. 35. John McHale, “The Expendable Ikon 1 and 2,” Architectural Design 29 (February and March 1959), 82–83, 116–117; reprinted in Alex Kitnick, ed., John McHale: The Expendable Reader (New York: GSAPP Books, 2011), here 50. 36. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 5. In 1949–51 at the Central School of Arts and Crafts Paolozzi taught alongside Anton Ehrenzweig, who was at work on his The Psycho-analysis of Artistic Vision and Hearing (1953). Paolozzi also foregrounded tactility in his textiles and prints (it was Ehrenzweig who taught him how to screen-print). Here again there is a difference to note vis-à-vis Dada: in Dada tactility connotes the liveliness of shock (or at least it did for Walter Benjamin), whereas in Paolozzi it evokes a deadness after shock. 37. This “cracked” appearance changes when Paolozzi shifts to aluminum sculpture in 1962, at which point his figures do become “fort-like” (MD 5). Lacan was skeptical of a strong ego, which he saw as the misbegotten imperative of American ego psychology. It is no coincidence that “The Mirror Stage” is followed by “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” (1948) in Écrits. 38. “One lives through the sculpture, though one doesn’t think that” (Paolozzi quoted in Frank Whitford, National Life Story Collection, 1993–95). Incidentally, the eye as a broken wheel is a recurrent motif in the work of the Berlin Dadaists, especially Hausmann. 39. Judith Collins makes this connection in her Eduardo Paolozzi (London: Lund Humphries, 2014). On the “Promethean tragedy” of technology as evoked by postwar sculpture in the US, see Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 40. On Growth and Form informed “Parallel of Life and Art” as well. Paolozzi worked with Hamilton on the proposal for “Growth and Form” but then withdrew. 41. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 272; italics in the original. 42. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 41, 42. This history is “anonymous” because it shifts agency largely from people to products and processes—a view Paolozzi found sympathetic. Others in the IG were also inspired by the book; for example, Hamilton did a series of prints based on the reapers analyzed by Giedion. 43. In this regard the collage novels of Ernst were a special touchstone for Giedion, as they were for Paolozzi. For a brilliant reading of Ernst collages, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

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44. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 21; italics in the original. Freud based his theory in part on the discredited “transformational hypothesis” of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), according to which one generation in a species inherits the evolutionary alternatives developed by the generations that preceded it. However, this epigenetic line of thought is recovered in recent work by Bernard Stiegler and others. 45. In a sense this is the photographic logic of the imprint taken to a temporal extreme. See Walter Benn Michaels, “Photographs and Fossils,” in Photography Theory, ed. James Elkins (New York: Routledge, 2007). 46. Alloway suggests that these imprinted exteriors register “nervous ganglia” (MD 15), but in the collapse of shield and stimuli whether one sees them as all exterior, as I do, or all interior, as he did, makes little difference. “The world of things is not separate from the space of man,” Alloway writes of Paolozzi. “It is man’s symbiote and analogue...Man and environment become, as it were, reversible” (MD 40). Paolozzi adds that his “fabricated idols” appear to “press in the direction of the victims’ nerve-senses” (S 85). This is not the ideal of the direct action of art on the nervous system, which was a staple of the period (e.g., in Francis Bacon); in Paolozzi this nervous system has already hardened. Consider his Contemplative Objects (c. 1951) in this regard: it is as though the “surprising organs” that Marinetti urged modern man to develop for his survival had petrified into surprising remains. In effect, Paolozzi inverts the prosthetic logic of Futurism (which was carried forward in his time by Marshall McLuhan). Here technology does not extend the senses but reifies them, with old industrial parts transformed into a figure that is little more than a broken shield. 47. Alloway links Paolozzi to Rabelais, who in turn was associated with the carnivalesque (by Bakhtin among others), but Paolozzi is more affined with the grotesque, at least as understood by Benjamin in his 1921 text on the subject. The grotesque “does not de-form in a destructive fashion,” Benjamin writes, “but destructively over-forms [überstaltet]” (Selected Writings, Volume I: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996], 280). For Devin Fore this “supercharged mimesis” is characteristic of much interwar art and fiction; see his Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 229. 48. There are two versions of Large Frog and Chinese Dog. 49. Alexander Kluge has speculated about a “third nature,” by which he means a world that is not merely man-made and machineproduced but also driven by structures, systems, and networks that appear almost beyond human control. “If the public sphere, the arts, the relationship to people no longer grows with the complexity of society as a whole,” Kluge warns, “then third nature arises.” See “A Conversation between Alexander Kluge and Thomas Demand,” in Thomas Demand (London: Serpentine Gallery, 2006), 51–112. Was Paolozzi alert to this possibility with his early interest in cybernetics and computers? Consider this remark from 1958: “Giant machines with automatic brains are at this moment stamping out blanks and precision objects, components for other brains which will govern other machines” (S 81). 50. Alloway uses the term “creaturely realism” in The Metallization of a Dream, but not as I do here. In 1958 Hannah Arendt argued that the mechanization of work might result in a reversion to the animal; see her The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 322.

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51. Whereas the robotic exists between the human and the machine, and the creaturely between the human and the animal, the monstrous exists between the not-human and the not-animal. 52. This connection is anticipated by the concrete Seagull and Fish (1946). 53. Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design (1919), ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1989), 65. Ants, wasps, and bees are all hymenoptera. 54. Although Paolozzi attended a Fascist youth camp south of Rimini during the summers of 1936–40, his “metallization of the dream” differs dramatically from the Fascist one. There is a sexualization of technology in the early collages, but it is differently framed from the Futurists, for whom the technologization of nature and the naturalization of technology reforged the subject metallically, that is, phallically, and so removed the male subject from all feminine threat (women represented all threats to them). 55. It is as though, like Odradek in the Kafka story “Cares of a Family Man” (1919), one can only survive in a form that is somehow subhuman. Kafka was a persistent point of reference for Paolozzi. 56. Alloway as quoted in Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–1959 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 141. 57. John McHale, “The Expendable Icon,” 49. Also see his “The Plastic Parthenon,” Dot zero (Spring 1967). This techno-optimism was an article of faith among IG members, who borrowed the notion of “the technological folk arts” from McLuhan; see his The Mechanical Bride. Paolozzi was drawn to McLuhan the mythographer, not the techno-futurist. 58. Paolozzi capitalized “hellish monsters” in the original. “Ikons from Kino” is a repeated line in his writings—a near anagram that suggests the close connection between iconicity and cinema for him. 59. Images (1954) offers one tabulation of his iconography across cultures and technologies: it juxtaposes representations of the Michelangelo David, the boxer Jack Johnson, and a man with a prosthetic arm; of a clock, a round Olmec sculpture, a turreted fortress, and a scientific instrument; and so on. Sometimes his compilations suggest those of Aby Warburg (in whom Paolozzi later became interested). 60. One of the “Bunk!” images is a simple tearsheet of an advertisement for van Heusen ties modeled by Roman soldiers. His Jason actually precedes the movie Jason and the Argonauts (1963) by seven years. This project—to reclaim the old vocation of art, to compete with the iconic power of mass culture—was shared by McHale and Hamilton (see my The First Pop Age). At the same time, in Paolozzi as in Jorn, the brutal can border on the kitschy. 61. Lawrence Alloway, “The Long Front of Culture,” Cambridge Opinion 17 (1959). 62. McHale, “The Expendable Ikon,” 62. The term was not oxymoronic since McHale and Paolozzi believed that the typological figure “persisted” in the transient image. For example, Paolozzi alluded to “archetypal kitsch object[s]” (S 121). 63. Ibid., 54–55. 64. Ibid., 49. Again, Paolozzi was more pessimistic than both McHale and McLuhan about technological media as prostheses. 65. McHale writes of “the star ikon” as exemplified by Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (“one of the richest sources of ikonic gesture available” [ibid., 58]). And both might count as sovereign, Marilyn as a (sex) goddess, Elvis as “the King.” 66. The dynamo is to the second industrial revolution what the computer chip is to the third (Paolozzi turns to this symbol of power by the mid-1960s). 67. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 380.

68. Ibid., 384. For Adams the “value” of the dynamo stemmed from “its occult mechanism”: “He could see only an absolute fiat in electricity as in faith” (ibid., 381). Here Adams describes fetishism as understood by Marx, whom he read “with profound attention,” and it could serve as an early definition of the technological version of fetishism. Paolozzi also wrote of the “machine as fetish” in his notes for his compilation film History of Nothing (S 99), more on which below. One of his more bizarre obsessions was to reimagine the god-smacked Laocoön and His Sons as a car crash, which suggests Gotthold Lessing reread through J. G. Ballard. 69. In a letter of January 1970 to Diane Kirkpatrick, Paolozzi writes, “Hero as a riddle keeps coming back to mind” (S 198). 70. As Paolozzi adapts modern things to a classical technique, Alloway commented, he effects “a dual sense of time.” “The expendable products of the Industrial Revolution mingle with the archaic,” as objects like toys and tools become “seared and corroded, suddenly ancient” (MD 38). Yet in Paolozzi creatureliness is not only oriented toward the deep past; as Alloway suggests, it is also vectored toward the near future. On the one hand, these wrecked machines are relics of an industrial society in ruins; on the other, they are survivors that point to a cyber-informational world to come. On this point see Ben Highmore, “Paolozzi’s Brutalism,” October 136 (Spring 2011). 71. Of course, Paolozzi substitutes tokens of second nature for those of first nature in Arcimboldo, to whom I will return. 72. See Kitnick, “Another Time.” 73. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 29. 74. Paolozzi associated the sculptures of the 1960s with forts, town halls, and cathedrals—all sites of authority (military, civic, and religious respectively). Already in the bronze figures faux inscriptions like glyphs appear in the manner of an “Assyrian mud language written with bronze or wood styluses” as if on “clay tablets unearthed in a sunken empire town” (S 85). 75. With Ernst I have in mind his long-lost Dada sculptures (c. 1919–20) and with Taeuber her little-known King Stag marionettes (1918), some of which resemble the Paolozzi idols. In Head of a Warrior (1933) Picasso also mocked power in a way that might be pertinent here. 76. Eduardo Paolozzi, Metafisikal Translations (London: Kelpra Studio, 1962), 103. 77. Hamilton associates the aluminum assemblages with Meccano, the metal assembly toy for boys of his generation (S 139). These works appear as a combination-compromise between his own bronze figures and the new Minimalist objects then on the rise. 78. This criminality was not abstract for Paolozzi. His father, grandfather, and uncle were interned as resident aliens in Edinburgh at the start of World War II, then drowned in 1940 when the transport ship that was to carry them to Canada was sunk by a German torpedo. Paolozzi was also interned briefly, then conscripted. The phrase Nicht Schiessen Güte Leute (“don’t shoot, good people”) recurs in his writings, as does an image of a biplane with this entreaty painted on its wings. The trope of seeing as targeting also recurs in his early work. For example, while in Paris Paolozzi produced several colored collages of shooting ranges at fair booths, and explosions sometimes punctuate his “Bunk!” images. 79. In his 1958 lecture Paolozzi considers the intrinsic ambiguity of certain object-signs: a watch is both an instrument and an ornament, a door is both utilitarian and aesthetic, and so on (S 81).

80. “The objects are turned into symbols,” Alloway writes, “as the literal stuff of which they were made is transfigured” (MD 59). It was likely Picasso who inspired Paolozzi to assimilate found objects in his bronze figures. 81. See note 16. 82. David Sylvester wrote that the “Parallel of Art and Life” exhibition “shows that a thing can be almost anything once you have removed its name” (“Round the London Art Galleries,” The Listener [September 24, 1953], 512). We saw a move to exnominate in Dubuffet, and we will see it again in Oldenburg. 83. The dictionary defines a “nomenclature” as a “system of names in a particular field.” Paolozzi also invented the term “combinatie” to describe this aspect of his work (S 109). A loose grid is a pervasive structure in his exhibitions, Time mashups, wallpaper designs, and so on. 84. Paolozzi: “The objects USED are selected according to certain rules previously ordained by methods, useful in flexibility and a known range of possibilities” (S 83). Paolozzi substitutes “prose” for “poetic” as used in the press release for “Parallel of Life and Art” (see note 9). 85. There is a thematic connection here as well. Impressions of Africa tells of travelers who, imprisoned by an African king, are compelled to entertain him. In its own way it is concerned with sovereignty. My thanks to Christopher Barrett-Lennard for this point. 86. See Highmore, “Paolozzi’s Brutalism,” 62. Again, the elements in the texts are also rearranged; in a sense they too are prostheses (from the Greek, “placed or added in front of”). 87. Roland Barthes, “Arcimboldo, or Magician and Rhetoriqueur” (1978), in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1985). Three Arcimboldo paintings were included in the 1953 show “Wonder and Horror of the Human Head.” 88. Ibid., 131. Like Paolozzi, Arcimboldo sees art “as a real laboratory of tropes.” “A shell stands for an ear: this is a Metaphor. A heap of fish stands for Water—in which they live: this is a Metonymy. Fire become a flaming head: this is an Allegory” (136). Yet, as noted, Paolozzi stymies such allegorical readings by means of his “mud language.” 89. Ibid., 146. “It is the very method of ‘composition’,” Barthes writes of Arcimboldo, “which disturbs and disaggregates the unitary development of form” (146). “Everything happens as if, each time the head were oscillating between marvelous life and horrible death. These composite heads are heads which are decomposing” (143). The Arcimboldo effect persists in later busts by Paolozzi. 90. Paolozzi tried gunmetal first and then settled on a ductile alloy called LM6 also used for doors, panels, and car parts. 91. The Lautréamont phrase is one basis of the Surrealist formula of collage in both writing and art, and Paolozzi alludes to it often. 92. See my Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). The unconscious has its own insistences (as Paolozzi almost suggests in this note: “Free associational random collected pre-selected” [S 137]). For such indications in Ernst and others, again see Krauss, The Optical Unconscious. 93. Paolozzi: “The wheel to me is important, and the clock. I think this is very significant—I find the clock moving because I find modern science moving. I see it as a sort of heroic symbolism” (S 92). Both are central to his “search for ‘arch-types’” (S 95).

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5 | Claes Oldenburg and His Ray Guns 94. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 3. “History writing is ever tied to the fragment...The fragments of meaning here displayed should become alive in new and manifold relations” (ibid.). Like Paolozzi, Giedion is as interested in types as in styles: “The history of styles follows its theme along a horizontal direction; the history of types along a vertical one. Both are necessary if things are to be seen in historical space” (10–11). 95. Ibid., 2. 96. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17, 19, 21, 18. The mechanic in Paolozzi might be taken to split the difference between the engineer and the bricoleur. 97. In one screen-print in Metafisikal Translations Paolozzi refers the “breakthrough” of his bronze sculptures to his “tikenning with toys”—“tikenning” as in “tinkering,” which is one translation of “bricolage.” Another screen-print describes the assembly of his aluminum pieces as “bric a brac time on the Macadam strip,” a phrase that combines terms from Lévi-Strauss and Dubuffet (S 105). Further, Paolozzi sees sculpture as a “science of the immediate” (S 117), just as Lévi-Strauss understands myth as a “science of the concrete.” Might this “science of the immediate” bridge the aforementioned opposition between materiality and imageability in New Brutalism at large? 98. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 13. In a late text from 1987 Paolozzi writes: “Scholars decipher whole civilizations through their remains. Using these sometimes discarded remains as metaphors gives them extraordinary depths” (S 270). Paolozzi practiced his own curatorial metaphor-making in his 1985 exhibition “Lost Magic Kingdoms” at the Museum of Mankind, as well as in his Krazy Kat Archive, which he described as “an archive of source material of 20th-century objects” (S 271). This archive is now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 99. His notes often underscore his disordered act of ordering (which exists in spirit somewhere between Surrealism and structuralism): e.g., “chart of events catalogue of references map of decisions...diagram of possibilities...layers of culture” (S 125). 100. There is the further complication of the split between the sciences and the arts underscored by C. P. Snow in his 1959 Rede lecture on “two cultures,” which J. G. Ballard evokes, in his 1971 conversation with Paolozzi, when he points to a “social classification into two groups of people: those who work within modern science and technology and modern communications...and those who are outside it...[who] are just members of the studio audience” (S 205). 101. Alison and Peter Smithson, “The New Brutalism,” Architectural Design 27 (April 1957), 113; reprinted in October 136 (Spring 2011), 37. In the “rough poetry” of New Brutalism is there an echo of the “rough beast” of Yeats “slouching toward Bethlehem to be born”? If so, it is a different mythopoeic call for a different historical moment.

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1. The photograph is important to Oldenburg as he put in on the back cover of his Writing on the Side 1956–1969, ed. Achim Hochdörfer, Maartje Oldenburg, and Barbara Schröder (New York: MoMA, 2013); references to this volume appear hereafter in the text. Among other Oldenburg scholars, I am especially indebted to Benjamin Buchloh, Robert Haywood, Achim Hochdörfer, Branden Joseph, Julia Robinson, and Joshua Shannon. 2. As we will see, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) by Norman O. Brown was important to Oldenburg. “Freuda vincit” also plays on the common Dada slogan “Dada siegt” (Dada wins). In a sense Oldenburg is the love child of Freud and Dada. 3. Claes Oldenburg, Store Days (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 54. 4. Oldenburg also listed the garden but dismissed it as too pastoral. 5. Oldenburg in Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York: MoMA, 1970), 192. 6. Oldenburg was explicit about The Street: “It is to use and stress the psychoanalytic nature of art” (95). 7. Oldenburg deemed Dubuffet and Céline “the pioneers of the new shit art” (87). 8. Oldenburg used this term in his own way in 1963: “First nature: nature. Second nature: the street, or asphalt nature. Third nature: the store” (Oldenburg in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 191). Additionally in the early 1960s he wrote: “The bourgeois artist goes to the Museum. Instead of going to the Museum I go to the Store” (160). 9. “Ray Gun rather than Pop art,” Oldenburg insisted (89). “I’m not really so much a pop artist as I am an urban artist— a completely urban artist” (Robert Pincus-Witten, “The Transformation of Daddy Warbucks: An Interview with Claes Oldenburg” [1964], reprinted in Nadja Rottner, ed., Claes Oldenburg [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012], 124). 10. Oldenburg in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 54. A similar fatigue with painting was soon expressed by others such as Donald Judd (who admired Oldenburg). Of course, Judd advocated “specific objects,” not “indefinite forms.” 11. See Robert Haywood, Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg: Art, Happenings, and Cultural Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). 12. His notes from the late 1950s are dotted with references to insane art, art autre, and art brut, and Oldenburg called explicitly for a “combination of ‘psychotic’ or subconscious form with the techniques and materials of the streets...to arrive at a universality of form” (89). Additionally: “The wire and paper method enabled me to make my own form directly and cheaply. The simplicity of the technique and the look of the result satisfied my desire for primitive and organic effects. I wanted to imagine that I was inventing an art that could be followed by any ‘primitive’ of the New York City streets, using the most ordinary, available material” (113). 13. At the time garbage bags in New York were burlap. 14. Achim Hochdörfer, “From Street to Store: Claes Oldenburg’s Pop Expressionism,” in Hochdörfer, ed., Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties (Munich: Prestel Publishing, 2012), 31. 15. Oldenburg in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 195; Oldenburg in David Sylvester, Interviews with American Artists (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 204. On the urban in Oldenburg see Joshua Shannon, The Disappearance of the Object: New York Art and the Rise of the Postmodern City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

16. Oldenburg speaks of his figures as based on the “sandwich man principle” and “composed of street stuff” with “costumes from ads” (118). 17. Oldenburg in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 38, 37. 18. As an English major at Yale, Oldenburg studied T. S. Eliot, and The Street does suggest a Bowery version of The Waste Land; his notes refer to The Street as “the dried-up land” with “fertility waiting underground” (94–95). Oldenburg also alludes to Blake: “My characters are the city-bird-child (chick) and the beggar. Innocence and experience” (158). 19. Oldenburg in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 27. 20. On the latter sense of psychasthenia, which is linked to the death drive, see Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (Winter 1984). Adorno and Horkheimer historicize this drive in Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), 227. In one Dubuffetian drawing to announce a performance at the Rueben Gallery, Oldenburg becomes the city, and its streets are his flattened limbs (see Writing on the Side, 65). 21. Samaras turned the lights on and off thirty-two times to create the snapshot effects, and the audience had to watch the performance through a doorway. 22. In his notes Oldenburg describes the “action style” in Snapshots as “exaggerated caricature” (124; italics in original). The mask worn by Mucha was called Elephant Mask, which suggests another link to Zurich Dada via the masks made by Marcel Janco for its performances. Such Africanisms also feature in “Karawane,” the Dada poem read by Ball on June 23, 1916, after which he, like the ragman Oldenburg, collapsed. A Dada-Pop genealogy might be explored from Ball through Oldenburg to artists such as Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Isa Genzken, and Rachel Harrison, in a way that diverges from the main line from Duchamp through Warhol and beyond. “I think the revolutionary or rebellious aspect is overemphasized,” Oldenburg wrote in fall 1968 (i.e., after the events of May). “I would speak more of ironic accommodation. I am not rejecting present society. I do emphasize the ridiculousness of life even under the best circumstances—its variance with our hopes and ideals” (318). For more on ironic accommodation and mimetic excess see my “Dada Mime,” October 105 (Summer 2003), and Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency (London and New York: Verso, 2015). 23. Oldenburg in conversation with the author, February 10, 2015. 24. If Oldenburg attempts to reverse reification, Paolozzi attempts to exacerbate it, but he does so to the same end. There are other points of dis/similarity between the two. Both adapt the found object in an attempt to recharge the art work (“ikons” for Paolozzi, “fetiches” for Oldenburg). Both combine emphases on sheer materiality and semiotic transformation. Both work out of an urban matrix (the scrapyard for Paolozzi, the street for Oldenburg). And both intimate a breakdown between private and public spheres. 25. This note from 1959 is relevant here: “Man’s future lies in keeping cool and still staying human. Living with and not against the facts of life and of the machine. Not escapism. Materialism” (85). There is also this note from 1965 or 1966: “To be beastly, to be beastly honestly and yet capitalize, capitalize honestly on being beastly. Not giving an inch either way” (254). 26. Richard Oldenburg was the director of the Museum of Modern Art from 1972 to 1994. The threat of atomic annihilation, so immediate for Bataille, had become, by the moment of Oldenburg, one to parry imaginatively into ray-gun powers of transformation.

27. Oldenburg was not alone here. Brian O’Doherty introduced the term “handmade readymade” in “Doubtful but Definite Triumph of the Banal” (1963), and David Deitcher developed the notion in “The Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition 1955–62 (Los Angeles: LAMOCA/ Rizzoli, 1993). Oldenburg does take up found objects in his Mouse Museum, which began in 1965 with “leftovers” from his performances as well as assorted purchases and gifts (more on which below). 28. Street Ray Guns is closer to the collections found in the art of the insane than, say, to La Boîte-en-valise (1935–41) of Duchamp. In fact Oldenburg did title one grouping, fashioned crudely out of plaster and other materials, Schizo Ray Guns (produced in 1959–60, mounted in 1965). 29. “Ray Gun equals right angle equals leg equals handle,” Oldenburg remarks in a riff that slides from geometry to body to tool (151). By 1965, when his Ray Gun Wing was also founded, there were already 258 objects so designated. 30. Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 148. 31. Benjamin Buchloh also sees “a grotesque travesty of a power tool,” which points to an aggressivity in the absurdity (“Annihilate/Illuminate: Claes Oldenburg’s Ray Gun and Mouse Museum,” in Claes Oldenburg: The Sixties, 224). 32. In the first instance “Empire” refers to the Empire State Building, yet there is an implicit allusion to a patriarchal state too, especially when followed by “Papa.” Although this Ray Gun seems unprecedented, there is The Nose (1947) by Giacometti, a phallicnasal gun in its own right that is also suspended. “Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun has a pointy complement in the equally absurd Ray Gun Rifle (1960). 33. See Freud, “On the Transformations of Instincts as Exemplified in Anal Erotism” (1917). 34. A great grandniece of Napoleon, Marie Bonaparte was an associate and benefactor of Freud. A Lacanian would say that Princess X is both woman and phallus, woman as phallus. This approximates how Oldenburg viewed Brancusi; relating his Fireplug (1968) to Torso of a Young Man (1922), Oldenburg remarked, “The Fireplug may represent the body of either sex— the best objects suggest both. By positioning the object, too, one organ of entry to the body or another may be emphasized” (Barbara Haskell, ed., Claes Oldenburg: Object into Monument [Pasadena: Pasadena Art Museum, 1971], 91). 35. In a 1957 poem titled “Coins” that accompanies Strange Eggs, Oldenburg connects these “turds” to money and language, an association made by Freud (see Hochdörfer, Claes Oldenburg, 220). 36. See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud” (1957), in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). Oldenburg is more Freudian than Lacanian, yet in his poems and other texts he too is concerned with the insistence of language in the unconscious. Consider, for example, this note from 1967: “Thing—in Swedish, sak, euphemism for Prick. Dot. Prick, as in Klee. Thats how language cuts us up” (290). 37. Oldenburg quoted in https://www.moma.org/interactives /exhibitions/2013/oldenburg/. 38. The Flags prompted little stories that Oldenburg wrote out in the form of nine “postcards,” some of which correspond to actual objects or drawings. The relevant literature on Johns is abundant; see especially Anne Wagner, “Johns’s Flags,” in A House Divided (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 39. See the classic text by Yve-Alain Bois, “Kahnweiler’s Lesson,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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40. The last three objects—newspaper, sewing machine, and bicycle—recall the paradigmatic objects in Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Duchamp respectively (as though filtered through Frank O’Hara). 41. Oldenburg quoted in https://www.moma.org/interactives /exhibitions/2013/oldenburg/. Clearly he was alert to the special American penchant for guns and flags. 42. Oldenburg adopted Robinson Crusoe as an avatar at this time, and wrote a mock-redemptive, semi-homoerotic scenario involving Crusoe, Friday, Walt Whitman, and a character named Injun; he riffs on Whitman elsewhere as well (e.g., “I sing the bawdy electric” [289]). Although Oldenburg identified with Crusoe in Provincetown, he worked as a dishwasher there, an experience that factored into the making of The Store. His first Store object was also his last flag, USA Flag (1960). 43. The statement reads in full: “The erotic or the sexual is the root of ‘art,’ its first impulse. Today sexuality is more directed, here where I am in America in this time, toward substitutes, f.ex., clothing rather than the person, fetichistic stuff [sic], and this gives the object an intensity, and this is what I try to project. I want these pieces to have an unbridled, intense satanic vulgarity unsurpassable, and yet be art.” 44. See Julia E. Robinson, “Fetish or Foil: The Caprices of Claes Oldenburg,” in Claes Oldenburg: Early Work (New York: Zwirner & Wirth, 2005). 45. “I am more concerned with psychological forces than with economic forces,” Oldenburg insisted (211). In the phrase “the sex appeal of the inorganic” Benjamin anticipated the conflation of commodity fetish and sexual fetish. See Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (1935), in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8. Also see my The First Pop Age. 46. There is no simple liberation. As Adorno once remarked, “the distortions attest to the violence that prohibition has done to the objects of desire” (“Looking Back on Surrealism,” Notes to Literature, Volume I, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 90). 47. This is what Jeff Koons purports to do as well; the difference is that one believes Oldenburg. 48. For Oldenburg as for Jorn this is a matter of classed aesthetics too. In his 1964 interview with Pincus-Witten he stated, “I don’t think the notion of the detached work of art—this aristocratic work of art—is a very useful notion anymore” (“The Transformation of Daddy Warbucks,” 120). “I Am for an Art” was written for the group show “Environments, Situations, Spaces” at the Martha Jackson Gallery in late spring 1961. 49. Oldenburg noted the “irony of the commodity object as art versus art object as commodity” (151). “Their most salient characteristic,” Barbara Rose argued of the Store objects, “is probably their unreproducibility” (Claes Oldenburg, 67). 50. Watch in a Red Box (1961) is another maw. Sometimes in his formal riffs the mouth is the primary interface to the world (e.g., “mouth=hat=banana split”); sometimes it is the anus (e.g., “Anatomy—Ana to my—To My Asshole” [159, 207]). As Buchloh notes in “Annihilate/Illuminate,” it is a world given over to oral and anal drives, one that also refuses the repression of the olfactory (“I am for smells”). 51. “Poopy” was also his nickname for Patty. Like Dubuffet, Oldenburg treats his medium as a collaborator. 52. Freud and associates located the origins of sadism in the oral and anal stages too. As with Dubuffet, both masochistic and sadistic impulses are in play with Oldenburg. 53. Oldenburg, Store Days, 51. I return to this “elusive” quality below.

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54. Ibid. This recalls The Story of the Eye (1928) in which Bataille also crosses different lines of objects or object-metaphors. We saw this crossing in Paolozzi as well. 55. Robinson, “Fetish or Foil,” 21. 56. Oldenburg, “About My Art,” unpublished manuscript, 1968, in Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio Archives, New York. Oldenburg explores “ab-fant” in his poems too. 57. There were other factors: “I experienced a revulsion against my situation in New York, hating my Store (my studio and theater since 1961) on Second Street, my apartment, my body, my wife, everything” (Oldenburg quoted in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 92). 58. Oldenburg developed two other versions of Bedroom Ensemble in 1969. 59. Richard Hamilton also mocked consumerism in his little collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing (1956), but he did so with a delight absent from Bedroom Ensemble. Might the “collective dreams” processed in Bedroom Ensemble relate to the collective fears about the Cold War, in particular the Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and Nixon in 1959? 60. The pictures are hung differently—or rather, indifferently because variously—when they are shown. “I made the Bedroom as a demonstration of my necrophilia. On the walls are pseudoPollocks, yard goods from Santa Monica” (284). 61. Oldenburg, “Notes on Bedroom, 1967,” in São Paulo IX Biennial: Environment U.S.A. 1957–67 (São Paulo, 1967), 92. 62. Oldenburg used these diagrams for his later monumental objects as well. Richard Artschwager made the Formica-patterned furniture. 63. Oldenburg, “Interview,” Craft Horizons (September–October 1965), 55. 64. In effect, Oldenburg built the gallery into the piece, including its Venetian blinds, office door, and gray walls. 65. Oldenburg in Sylvester, Interviews with Artists, 206. 66. Oldenburg quoted in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 93. See Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981). 67. This is in keeping with the grim dialectic that Manfredo Tafuri traces in his Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1979). 68. Oldenburg was eighteen at the time. Oldenburg, “The Bedroom Ensemble, Replica I,” Studio International (July–August 1969), 3. As one might have guessed, Warhol loved Bedroom Ensemble. 69. According to Deleuze, “The simulacrum includes within itself the differential point of view, and the spectator is made part of the simulacrum which is transformed and deformed according to his point of view” (“Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 [Winter 1983], 49). For an argument about how the phenomenological plenitude of space in early Minimalist installations can flip into the opposite—a voiding of the viewer—see Robert Slifkin, The New Monuments and the End of Man (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 70. Oldenburg, “The Bedroom Ensemble, Replica I,” 2. Oldenburg imagined Bedroom Ensemble as the site of a tryst between Marilyn Monroe and JFK, but Marilyn was already dead and Kennedy would soon be, so again the installation takes on a posthumous quality. Bedroom Ensemble is also a “rational tomb” in the sense that it points to a perversion of rationality: Platonic forms become an inhuman geometry, and pharaonic afterlife becomes a death-in-life. See the title chapter of my Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (London and New York: Verso, 2002).

71. Whereas Oldenburg tapped the ambiguity of the tradition of still life in The Store—an offering of food and clothing that is no offering at all—he plays on the slippage between home, hotel, host, and hostility in Bedroom Ensemble. 72. Oldenburg in Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 57. The effect is not always benevolent: “The ‘hard’ version—usually constructed of cardboard—is the mental image one must have in mind to experience the voluptuous, collapsed, soft final result (or victim state)” (314). 73. Although Oldenburg enlivens his objects as he softens them, his “ghost” versions suggest that even inanimate things are somehow mortal. 74. Oldenburg once described the objects in Mouse Museum as “examples of things that have no form, things that have form, things that are trying for form but dont make it.” See Claes Oldenburg, “DRAFT A: The Collection” (n.d.) in Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio Archives, New York. 75. Oldenburg in Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 57. Oldenburg plays on the felt opposition between the (mostly hard) commodity and the (mostly soft) body. The outmoded is also evoked: “I always choose an object just passing from use to museum, such as the coin phone or mechanical typewriter. In general, the cemetery of the passing world, a series of tombstones in mechanical form” (314). “I conclude that this is a celebration of their obsolescence and irrelevance, of their passing into history” (259). 76. Other connotations: “Softening may be seen as pacifist wish fulfillment (soft car, soft gun), endless staying in bed, pleasure, as championing drugged impotence, transvestitism, melting of barriers, subversion, as anti-ambition, as the projection of body, of author’s body, or calling attention to the great neglected formal realm of the non-rigid (airship). Whatever is required—soft is generous” (Oldenburg in Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 57). 77. Originally this was a plastic balloon but it drooped. Graffitied, the piece was removed in March 1970 but later replaced. See Tom Williams, “Lipstick Ascending: Claes Oldenburg in New Haven in 1969,” Grey Room 31 (Spring 2008). 78. “The soft metal lipstick,” Oldenburg commented bluntly, “is a combination of castrated prick and impotent prick” (276). He challenges the hard/soft opposition that is fundamental to many cultures, which identify it with the male/female binary, to the point where they act to excise “soft” bits of the male (e.g., the foreskin) and “hard” bits of the female (e.g., the clitoris). 79. The year 1967 saw the publication of The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord as well. 80. Death preoccupied Oldenburg at this time. For example, on October 1, 1967, his first outdoor sculpture, Placid Civic Monument, a hole six by six by three feet, was dug in Central Park, then immediately filled in. He called this rare Conceptual piece “Monument X,” as though it were a monument against monumentality; it also suggested an unoccupied grave (Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 60). “Grave is a perfect (anti)war monument, like saying no more” (ibid., 62). 81. “Is this too obvious?” Oldenburg worried in the same note. “My work,” he wrote in the mid-1960s, is the “resolution of my contradictions,” but, as we saw with Paolozzi, antinomies cannot be so readily resolved (256). “The Artist, Artist Dog, returns again and again to the unsolved problem,” Oldenburg noted in 1970. 82. See Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 61. 83. Donald Judd made this point in 1965: “By blatancy [Oldenburg] subverted the idea of the natural presence of human qualities in all things,” he writes in “Specific Objects” (Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959–1975 [Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975], 189). Associated

with Ruskin, “the pathetic fallacy” was condemned, along with others such as “the intentional fallacy,” by the New Criticism that Oldenburg encountered at Yale. There he took the side of the French formalist Henri Focillon, especially his The Life of Forms in Art (1942), over the New Critic Cleanth Brooks (see Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 21–22): “The Life of Forms was my textbook in art history when I was at Yale. I think it had a great influence in my thinking” (Interview with Paul Cummings, 1973–1974, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., transcript, 29). Focillon writes of a “maniacal ‘similism’” and a “confusion between form and sign” in Baroque art in a way that resonates with Oldenburg (The Life of Forms, trans. George Kubler [New York: Zone Books, 1992], 58). On pseudomorphism see Yve-Alain Bois, “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes,” October 154 (Fall 2015). 84. Oldenburg in E. de Wilde, ed., Claes Oldenburg (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970), 24. 85. Oldenburg in Sylvester, Interviews, 216. Or again: “What I see is not the thing itself but—myself—in its form” (Oldenburg in E. de Wilde, ed., Claes Oldenburg, 24). 86. Oldenburg, “Studio Notes,” n.p., in Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio Archives, New York. 87. Oldenburg quoted in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 100. 88. See the title chapter of my Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 89. Or, less violently, also c. 1961: “The goods in the stores, the billboards, the signs, wrappers, etc., all these things attract me very much...In presenting them, I wish to imitate my means of perceiving them, as fragments of seeing, in a variety of scales and in a manner of accumulation” (152). Clearly Oldenburg was not content “to undergo the interrogation of the show window” in the manner of Duchamp. See “A L’infinitif” (1913), in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames & Hudson, 1975), 74; and Buchloh, “Annihilate/Illuminate,” 238. 90. An early subtitle for the piece refers to wind, and the dresses might recall the agitated drapery of ancient sculpture that so interested Aby Warburg. If so, it is as though Warburg were transported to the Lower East Side in the early 1960s. 91. Often the motif is ripped out in another sense, literally torn by Oldenburg from an advertisement; in these instances the backdrop is provided by the photographer or graphic designer. 92. Oldenburg in E. de Wilde, ed, Claes Oldenburg, 30. There is an analogy here to production as well as to consumption. Oldenburg alludes to Mechanization Takes Command (discussed in the previous chapter): “Chopd as with food we do. Original assemblyline (de-sembly really) was devised to slaughter pigz— this my memory most likely wrong deliver, out of Giedion” (sic; 289–90). 93. Oldenburg, Store Days, 26. Typically, Oldenburg thinks these visual cuts-and-sutures in linguistic terms as so many ellipses: “the connections are selective, the ellipses highly condensed, spatially and temporally” (quoted in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 48) Yet, like his equal signs, his dots are also the rudiments of drawing and printing. My thanks to Julia Robinson for this point. 94. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 19. By One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse had moved from “liberation” to “repressive desublimation,” a condition that, it could be argued, Oldenburg had surveyed a year before in Bedroom Ensemble. 95. “Reading Brown,” Oldenburg notes on August 21, 1961 (146). In 1966 Brown published Love’s Body, which is even more suggestive in relation to Oldenburg. Rose notes the connection to Brown in her Claes Oldenburg, 64, 70.

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96. Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 52, 21. Oldenburg also invites a reading in terms of object relations. 97. Ibid., 307, 66, 23, 39. “Art seduces us into the struggle against repression,” Brown avers, in partial disagreement with Freud on sublimation (64). 98. Ibid., 60, 44, 43. “The human libido is essentially narcissistic,” Brown writes, “but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself” (46). 99. Ibid., 191, 190. 100. Brown also sees an aggressive aspect in feces; for him it is less a gift (as it is in Freud) than a weapon (ibid., 191). 101. On this image-repertoire see Ann Temkin, “Claes Oldenburg’s Clippings: An Introductory Tour,” in Hochdörfer, ed., Claes Oldenburg. 102. “Great drawing,” Oldenburg once remarked, “has natural ambiguities, natural symbolism” (quoted in Rose, Claes Oldenburg, 157). 103. “There is a war in my work,” Oldenburg wrote as early as 1959, “between monumentalization and dissolution” (86). His monumentalization can be at once satirical and affirmative: “My aim has been to adjust these everyday, small, voluptuous experiences [such as turning on a light or flushing a toilet] to Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar” (268). 104. This riff is another instance: “C.O.—Chicago C.O. Ill.— Claes Oldenburg Illustrated the Great Lakes are my bathroom” (322). And he had other avatars in this line as well—from “Plastic Man” to his faux firm “COmmunication COnCOrd Complex Corp” (6, 277). 105. His monuments mock the semi-infantile condition of capitalist spectacle in which commodities and celebrities often seem to be the only truly public symbols. 106. The notions that capitalism proceeds by way of destruction and abstraction are associated with the economists Joseph Schumpeter and Alfred Sohn-Rethel respectively. 107. Max Kozloff, “The Poetics of Softness,” Reorderings (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 228. 108. Oldenburg in Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 87. 109. Sometimes Oldenburg suggests an ideal of primary narcissism, that is, the state before separation from the mother when the infant seems to be both everywhere (with little sense of an independent world) and nowhere (in the sense that an ego has not yet developed), and when object-libido and ego-libido cannot be distinguished. His interest in the omnipotence of thought, which he knew through Totem and Taboo (1913), is also narcissistic in orientation, as is his fascination with animism and mysticism. My thanks to Ben Kafka and Eli Mandel for discussions of this topic. 110. Alan Solomon, “Interview with Claes Oldenburg,” N.E.T. (National Educational Television), March 1966. 111. “Every work is reducible to a simple form or a few simple forms,” Oldenburg wrote in 1966. “It is the variation of these forms (by any and all means) that produces the subject” (278). This procedure recalls how Hans Arp turned a simple circle into a navel that became his own metamorphic sign of metamorphosis. 112. Oldenburg in “Interview,” Craft Horizons, 31, and in Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 87. 113. Again, the Ray Gun nominates things, but to do so it must first exnominate them. 114. In the title essay of Against Interpretation (1966) Susan Sontag opposes an erotics of interpretation to the usual hermeneutics. Oldenburg had already suggested an erotics as a hermeneutics. “The erotic, the formal excites me all to hell—they

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are the same,” Oldenburg writes as early as 1959. “FORM FORM FORM gives me a hard-on” (85). Pre-feminist as he is at this time, his erotics remains heterosexist; object relations are not renewed enough here. 115. Here too Brown might have guided Oldenburg in his reading of Freud. In chapter 5 of Life against Death Brown calls Jokes “his most significant contribution to the theory of art, although it has not been exploited as such” (59). Certain passages in Jokes read almost as a playbook for Oldenburg, especially those concerning condensation, “multiple use of the same material,” double meanings, “meaning as a name and as a thing,” and “metaphorical and literal meanings” (Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1963], 41–42). “Drawing,” Oldenburg writes appositely, “is sleeping on your feet with lead in your hand” (291). 116. See Roman Jakobson, “Two Fundamental Aspects and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in The Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 81; Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” 117. This statement also recalls Paolozzi: “My literary effects, if any, consist of stringing together images. I analyzed this once because I wanted to become a writer. I found that I was not a writer because I could not proceed horizontally, only spatially” (270). 118. See Wilhelm Stekel, Sexual Aberrations: The Phenomena of Fetishism in Relation to Sex, trans. S. Parker (New York: Liveright, 1971). Like Brown, Stekel underscores the play of condensation and displacement. Also suggestive here is his notion of fetishism as “a curious combination of synthesis and antithesis” (319). Branden Joseph discusses Stekel in “Psychological Expressionism: Claes Oldenburg’s New Definitions of Sculpture,” in Hochdörfer, ed., Claes Oldenburg, 81–84. 119. Stekel writes of a “parapathic ego” and of “parapathia” as “a tyranny of the symbol” (Sexual Aberrations, 323). Oldenburg turns parapathia into paraphilia, which he evokes in this cryptic note: “Parody used personally with stress on para, beside, or a song besides—art being the song” (317). The part object might be the more proximate model of his sculpture than the fetish—it is mobile, more “elusive.” 120. “The main point,” Oldenburg continues, “is lyrical, is celebration” (317). Of course, this celebration remains more personal than political; his “cabaret” is limited in scope. 121. Oldenburg in Haskell, ed., Object into Monument, 131. 122. The ice bag, metamorphic in its own way, also alludes to an incident during the demonstrations around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago when Oldenburg was beaten by police. Perhaps his Batcolumn (1977), sited in Chicago, refers to this event as well to the local baseball teams. 123. In his gloss Oldenburg mentions the Joker, the Batman villain driven by abuse into a life of crime, as well as the contorted self-portraits of the eighteenth-century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt as “analyzed by Ernst Kris,” the art historian cum psychoanalyst (346). 124. Here Mickey seems to represent all mass culture for Oldenburg. When he first showed Mouse Museum in 1972 at Documenta 5, it contained 385 pop objects placed within in a rigid structure based on his Geometric Mouse. “Strange Mickey Mouse equals Death. Equals Tomb for W. Disney” (269). For both Benjamin and Oldenburg Mickey was a figure of survival—for the first vis-à-vis industrial capitalism, for the second vis-à-vis consumer capitalism—but only for a time. This trope was effectively voided by the late 1960s, by which time Mickey figured an imperialist America as much as anything else. See Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, originally published in Chile in 1971.

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

Abstract Expressionism, 23, 118, 196, 223 Acéphale (society and journal), 98, 99, 101 The Accursed Share (Bataille), 76, 95 Adams, Henry, 174 Adorno, Theodor, 9–10, 17, 151, 254n63 African art, 33 “Afterthoughts” (Oldenburg), 242 Agamben, Giorgio, 12, 102, 129, 130, 133, 180, 264n11, 267n85 AG5 (Paolozzi), 163, 167 Alloway, Lawrence, 183, 185, 251n13, 270n46, 270n70; Paolozzi’s “ikons” viewed by, 192; Paolozzi’s monsters viewed by, 171–72; Paolozzi’s sculpted figures viewed by, 151, 153, 157, 164 Althusser, Louis, 17, 68 Améry, Jean, 102–3 Angelus Novus (Klee), 106 Anthelme, Robert, 264n64 “Anticultural Positions” (Dubuffet), 66 Appel, Karel, 105, 106 “Apollo or Dionysius” (Jorn), 111 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 178, 187–88 Arendt, Hannah, 17, 178, 270n50 Aristotle, 131 Arnaud, Noël, 40 Arnheim, Rudolf, 158 Arp, Hans, 143, 276n111 “Art Brut Preferred to Cultural Art” (Dubuffet), 67, 68 Arte Povera, 23 The Artistry of the Mentally Ill (Prinzhorn), 45 “Asphyxiating Culture” (Dubuffet), 68, 69, 255n7, 260n137 assemblage, 143, 196 Atkins, Guy, 264n4 At the Mind’s Limits (Améry), 103 automatism, 164

Beehle, Hermann, 46, 46, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 75, 118, 150–51, 246; Constructivism viewed by, 3; law and violence linked by, 131, 133, 134; past idealized by, 2; positive barbarism viewed by, 1, 4, 9–10, 16, 21, 135, 198; technology viewed by, 3–4 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 164–65 Big White Shirt with Blue Tie (Oldenburg), 220 Bill, Max, 135 Bird Swallowing a Fish (Gaudier-Brzeska), 168, 169 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 111 The Bishop of Kuban (Paolozzi), 176 Blue and Pink Panties (Oldenburg), 213, 214 Blum, Léon, 99 Boas, Franz, 192 Boccioni, Umberto, 168, 171 Bodyguards (Dubuffet), 27, 28 Bosch, Hieronymous, 115 Bosse, Abraham, 178 Bourgeois, Louise, 205, 205 Brancusi, Constantin, 139, 151, 152, 206, 206 Braselette (Oldenburg), 213, 214 Brassaï, 38, 38, 41 Brecht, Bertolt, 2 Breton, André, 51, 96, 127 Breuil, Henri, 73, 73, 76, 78, 83, 84, 88, 91, 127 bricolage, 14–16, 192 Bride Mannikin (Oldenburg), 220 Bride of the Konsul (Paolozzi), 175 Brown, Norman O., 235–36 Buchloh, Benjamin, 273nn31, 50 Budry, Paul, 45 Burri, Alberto, 23 Bush, George W., 133

Bacon, Francis, 23, 269n24 Ball, Hugo, 200, 264n8 Ballard, J. G., 268n10, 272n100 Banham, Reyner, 139–40 Barr, Alfred, 221 Barthes, Roland, 19, 187–88, 254n62 Bataille, Georges, 9, 22, 70, 71–103, 178; aleatory and ludic elements embraced by, 76–77; animality viewed by, 90, 128–29; art and ritual linked by, 79, 81; art and violence linked by, 11; barbarization advocated by, 21, 102; base and informe in work of, 18, 40–41, 67, 84, 92, 98, 100, 127; cave paintings and, 5, 6, 12, 14, 38, 71–84, 90–92, 99–100, 102, 113, 127–28, 129, 178; disfiguration in work of, 10; eroticism and death linked by, 91–92; eroticism and the sacred linked by, 100–101; Homo sapiens viewed by, 75–76; humanism denounced by, 16, 97–98, 127; human uprightness viewed by, 96; Jorn linked to, 111, 117, 125–27, 129, 134, 137; Lascaux Well scene viewed by, 90–94, 102; origin story of, 97; political views of, 19; prehistoric human figures and, 85–90; prehistory valorized by, 5, 6, 11, 12, 14, 17, 137; primitives and children viewed by, 95–96; sacred experience defended by, 98–101; sovereignty viewed by, 101–2, 131, 133; transgression valorized by, 7, 47, 101–3 Batcolumn (Oldenburg), 276n122 Baudelaire, Charles, 52, 197 Beauvoir, Simone de, 258n92 Bedroom Ensemble (Oldenburg), 195, 221–25, 223

Caillois, Roger, 99 Calendar for My 20th Century (Grebing), 50 Canguilhem, Georges, 259n125 Čapek, Karel, 167 Capital (Marx), 134 Cash Register (Oldenburg), 215, 220 cave paintings. See Bataille, Georges: cave paintings and; Lascaux cave; Les Trois Frères cave Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 196, 256n39 C-E-L-I-N-E, Backwards (Oldenburg), 8 Chaissac, Faston, 257n72 Childbirth (Dubuffet), 34, 35, 36 Children’s Drawings (Luquet), 28–30, 32, 34 Chinese Dog 2 (Paolozzi), 165, 167 Chirico, Giorgio de, 164 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 41, 96, 100 Cobra (magazine), 105, 107 Cobra movement, 5, 22, 105–6, 108, 133–34, 135 Cocteau, Jean, 16 Cold War, 18, 19, 125 collage, 15, 146, 171; by Paolozzi, 143, 144, 145, 145, 147–49, 147, 148, 151, 153, 157 Collège de Sociologie, 99 Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (Roussel), 187 Communism, 99, 105 Conceptual art, 23

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Constant, 105, 107–8, 107, 110, 125, 134, 135 Constructivism, 2–3, 10, 14, 145 Contemplative Objects (Paolozzi), 270n46 Cordell, Magda, 139 Corneille, 105 Corps de dames series (Dubuffet), 26, 58, 60, 61, 62 Courbet, Gustave, 26 Cow Jar (Dubuffet), 27, 28 Crash Head (Paolozzi), 269n28 “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin), 133 The Cry of Freedom (Appel), 106, 106, 108 Cubism, 2, 10, 146 “Cultural Criticism and Society” (Adorno), 10 Cyclops (Paolozzi), 140

Dada, 10, 12, 56; artist as engineer in, 14; bricolage vs., 15; collage and assemblage in, 143, 145, 171; First Machine Age and, 147; Oldenburg and, 199–200; Paolozzi and, 143, 171, 185 Damisch, Hubert, 65, 66–67, 68 David, Jacques-Louis, 267n63 “Death in America” series (Warhol), 224 Debord, Guy, 135 Deitcher, David, 273n27 Deleuze, Gilles, 274n69 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso), 36 Denis, Maurice, 108 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 65, 129–30, 133, 180, 252n42, 267n60 de Stijl, 105 “Detourned Painting” (Jorn), 113 The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 17 Diana as an Engine I (Paolozzi), 176, 176, 187 Diderot, Denis, 112, 113 Dine, Jim, 196 disfiguration, 10–11, 16, 18, 45–46, 48, 58, 110 Disney films, 4, 5, 247 Dotrement, Christian, 105, 119 Douglas, Mary, 122, 125 Dubuffet, Jean, 5, 25–69; alienation viewed by, 69; children’s art viewed by, 7, 12, 21, 27–37, 66; “common man” viewed by, 12, 16, 21, 25, 27, 37–44, 66; disfiguration in work of, 10, 45–46, 48, 58; double valence embraced by, 68; early career of, 25; found objects employed by, 15; haute pâte paintings of, 7, 27, 51–67; influence of, 6; insane artists viewed by, 7, 12, 21, 25, 27, 45–51, 66, 95; Jorn linked to, 111, 113, 117, 134; materialism vs. idealism in work of, 64–65; Oldenburg influenced by, 196, 208, 230, 242; painting medium transformed by, 16; political views of, 19; sorcerer’s role claimed by, 14; as strategist, 26, 28; verticality vs. horizontality in work of, 62–63 —works: Bodyguards, 27, 28; Childbirth, 34, 35, 36; Corps de dames series, 26, 58, 60, 61, 62; Cow Jar, 27, 28; Figure in a Country Setting, 49; Green Landscape, 31; Limbour as a Crustacean, 59; Maast with a Lion’s Mane, 60; Madame Mouche, 46, 52; Messages, 39, 39; Le Métafisyx, 61; Minerva, 52, 55, 121; Mirobolus Blanc, 52; Monsieur Macadam, 53; Olympia (Corps de dame), 26; Paysage paintings, 34; Prince Charming, 7; Table of Uncertain Form, 64; Traveler without a Compass, 63; Views of Paris, 27, 30; The Walls, 39–40, 40, 41; Wall with Inscriptions, 42, 43; Will to Power, 52, 54; Woman Grinding Coffee, 57; Woman Pinning Her Hair, 33–34, 34 Duchamp, Marcel, 68, 107, 164, 187, 225, 242, 273n28 Duino Elegies (Rilke), 108 Dürer, Albrecht, 58

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The Eagle’s Share I (Jorn), 115, 117, 120 The Education of Henry Adams, 174 Egypt, ancient, 83, 92 Ehrenzweig, Anton, 269n36 Elephant Mask (Oldenburg), 202 Empire (“Papa”) Ray Gun (Oldenburg), 205–6, 205, 207 Encyclopédie (Diderot), 112 English Civil War, 133 Ernst, Max, 25, 27, 143, 149, 151, 164, 170, 171, 183 Erotic Moment (Constant), 107, 107, 108 Erotism (Bataille), 91, 92, 95 Evadne in Green Dimension (Paolozzi), 144 existentialism, 108, 125 “Expendable Ikon” (McHale), 158 “Experience and Poverty” (Benjamin), 1–2 Experimental Group in Holland, 105 Expressionism, 10, 12, 14, 23, 105, 110

The Face of the Earth (Jorn), 121 Faces in a Head (Jorn), 121, 123 Falbo II (Jorn), 131, 132 Fantasia (film), 244 Fascism, 1, 19, 21, 231; Bataille’s view of, 72, 95, 98, 99, 102, 129, 133; humanism overpowered by, 16 Fautrier, Jean, 22, 257n74 Fauvism, 10 feminism, 23, 135, 137 Figuier, Louis, 149 Figure in a Country Setting (Dubuffet), 49 Fillette (Bourgeois), 205, 205 First Machine Age, 147 Flag series (Oldenburg), 207–11, 208, 210, 215 Fleeing Ghost (Klee), 3 Floor Burger (Oldenburg), 225 Floor Coke (Oldenburg), 225 Floor Cone (Oldenburg), 225, 227–28 Focillon, Henri, 275n83 folk art, 45, 135, 208 Fontana, Lucio, 23 Foreign Ambassador Presents a Jet Fighter to the Nation as a Gift (Jorn), 114–15, 118 formalism, 108 “Form Conceived as Language” (Jorn), 134 Foucault, Michel, 17, 47–48, 178, 257n73, 259n125 Foundations of Modern Art (Ozenfant), 146 found objects and readymades, 11, 15, 23, 155, 202, 208, 225 Fountain (Duchamp), 8, 225 Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art (Breuil), 73, 84, 127 Fragment of Advertisement (Oldenburg), 216 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 36, 41, 56, 86, 93–94; death drive postulated by, 164–65; dreams viewed by, 188; human uprightness viewed by, 96–97; Oldenburg linked to, 195, 206, 213, 219, 224, 229, 235, 242–43 Frog Eating a Lizard (Paolozzi), 165, 168, 169 Futurism, 36, 168, 171, 188

Galton, Francis, 178 Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri, 168, 169 Gauguin, Paul, 26, 58 Genzken, Isa, 273n22 Géricault, Théodore, 265n26 Gesamtkunstwerk, 111

Gestalt psychology, 158 Giacometti, Alberto, 107, 143, 151 Giant Toothpaste Tube (Oldenburg), 230, 231 Giedion, Sigfried, 72, 102, 150, 162, 164, 165, 191, 192 The Golden Horns and the Wheel of Fortune (Jorn), 126, 128, 134 The Golden Swine (Jorn), 127 Gombrich, Ernst, 77, 83, 92 graffiti, 16, 17, 197; Bataille and, 11; Dubuffet influenced by, 27, 37–40, 44, 58 Graffiti (Brassaï), 38 Grandville, J. J., 4 Grebing, Josef, 50, 51 Greece, ancient, 83, 92 Greenberg, Clement, 42, 44, 62, 254n82, 266n34 Green Gallery, 221, 222, 225 Green Landscape (Dubuffet), 31 Griaule, Marcel, 95 Grooms, Red, 196 Gropius, Walter, 3 Guernica (Picasso), 115 Guggenheim Gallery, 143 Guillevic, Eugène, 39, 41–42 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 236–37, 238

Hamilton, Richard, 140, 161, 171, 173, 188, 269n31, 274n59 happenings, 196, 198–99 Harrison, Rachel, 273n22 Hausmann, Raoul, 143, 145, 148 Head of a Woman (Picasso), 206 Head of Demeter (Paolozzi), 147, 148 Head of Zeus (Paolozzi), 147 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 18, 134 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 108 Helhesten (magazine), 105 Helhesten group, 135 Henderson, Nigel, 139, 140, 143 Henderson, Wyn, 143 Hi-Hohe (Paolozzi), 145 His Majesty the Wheel (Paolozzi), 180, 181 History of Nothing (Paolozzi), 191, 191, 192 Hitler, Adolf, 1 Hobbes, Thomas, 129, 131, 133, 178, 179 Höch, Hannah, 143, 145 Hollier, Denis, 19, 263n53, 263n54 Holocaust, 4, 10, 100, 110 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 130 Horkheimer, Max, 17 The House (Dine), 196 Huizinga, Johan, 76 “The Human Animal” (Jorn), 125 humanism, 16–17, 97–98, 127, 129 The Hundred Headless Woman (Ernst), 149

“I Am for Art” (Oldenburg), 213, 219 Icarus series (Paolozzi), 159, 160, 172 Ice Cream Cone and Heel (Oldenburg), 231–32, 233 Ice Cream Sandwich (Oldenburg), 216, 218 Images (Paolozzi), 270n59 Impressions of Africa (Roussel), 187 Independent Group (IG), 139, 143, 147, 153, 158, 171–72 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), 140, 143

Interplanetary Woman (Jorn), 118–19, 122 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 242–43

Jacket and Shirt Fragment (Oldenburg), 218, 218 Jacobsen, Egill, 113 Jakobson, Roman, 186, 188, 243 Janco, Marcel, 273n22 Janis Gallery, 22, 222 Japanese War God (Paolozzi), 156 Jarry, Alfred, 183 Jason (Paolozzi), 170 Johns, Jasper, 62, 208 Jokes and Their Relation to the Subconscious (Freud), 242–43 Jones, Ernest, 56, 216 Jorn, Asger, 5, 11, 22, 104, 105–37; aesthetic conventions repudiated by, 17, 111–12; animality and, 14, 18, 106, 108, 110–24, 131, 133; appropriated images in work of, 15, 21, 135; Bataille linked to, 111, 117, 125–27, 129, 134, 137; Cold War and, 125, 129; disfiguration and disruption in work of, 10, 16, 110, 112–13, 118–19, 121, 122, 124; Dubuffet and, 6; eagles depicted by, 110; erotic imagery of, 107; history painting reconfigured by, 114–18; illness of, 125; as Marxist, 19, 111; mythological inspiration for, 12; Nordic culture linked to, 9, 17, 105, 111, 129, 135; primitive art viewed by, 124–25; substance vs. sign in work of, 8; “triolectics” devised by, 18 —works: The Eagle’s Share I, 115, 117, 120; The Face of the Earth, 121; Faces in a Head, 121, 123; Falbo II, 131, 132; Foreign Ambassador Presents a Jet Fighter to the Nation as a Gift, 114–15, 118; Golden Horns and Wheels of Fortune, 126, 128, 134; The Golden Swine, 127; Interplanetary Woman, 118–19, 122; Luck and Chance, 134; Life, 124; The Moon and the Animals, 113, 114, 124; Nelson Orders the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, 114–15, 117; Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist Is Proved by Their Existence, 114, 115; The Pact of Predators, 125, 126; The Retreat at Dybbøl, 115, 119; Shameful Pastoral, 114, 116, 124; Skånes stenskulptur under 1100-talet, 130; Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or The Mad Laughter of Courage, 117–18, 121; The Timid Proud One, 11, 178; Untitled (Faces in a Head), 121, 123; Untitled (Raphael’s Angels), 112; Wounded Beast, 109; Wounded Beast II, 110, 113; Yellow Eyes, 119, 122; You’ll Never Get Me Alive, 119 Judd, Donald, 272n10, 275n83 Jünger, Ernst, 251n6

Kafka, Franz, 125, 133 Kaprow, Allan, 196 Katz, David, 148 Kelley, Mike, 273n22 The King (Paolozzi), 20, 180 Kirchner, Horst, 91 kitsch, 16, 97, 266n34 Klee, Paul, 2, 3, 25, 27, 47, 106, 158, 164 Kluge, Alexander, 270n49 Knüpfer, Johan, 50 Kojève, Alexandre, 18, 72, 178 Konsul (Paolozzi), 175 Kornville Flag (Oldenburg), 209, 210 Kozloff, Max, 240 Kris, Ernst, 276n123 Krokadeel (Paolozzi), 11, 165, 167

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279

Kunstschaffen in Deutschland (catalogue), 148–49 Kurczynski, Karen, 264n13

Lacan, Jacques, 121, 159, 188, 207, 243 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 270n44 “Landscaped Tables, Landscapes of the Mind, Stones of Philosophy” (Dubuffet), 65–66 Lange, Julius, 255n11 language, as tool and target, 6–9 Large Frog (Paolozzi), 165, 166 Lascaux cave, 5, 12, 71–84, 90–92, 99–100, 128; images of, 73, 74, 77–82 Lautréamont, comte de, 188–89 Le Brun, Charles, 58 Le Corbusier, 2, 45, 105, 146, 188 Léger, Fernand, 105, 113, 164 Leiris, Michel, 99 Leonardo da Vinci, 40 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 251n5 Levi, Primo, 252n37 Leviathan (Hobbes), 129, 133, 178, 179 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 17, 192–93, 256n30, 258n85; Bataille linked to, 85, 94; bricolage viewed by, 14, 192; nature and culture contraposed by, 18, 56 Lewis, Wyndham, 168 Life (Jorn), 124 Life Against Death (Brown), 235–36 Life Mask (Oldenburg), 229 Limbour, Georges, 58, 59 Limbour as a Crustacean (Dubuffet), 59 Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks (Oldenburg), 227–29, 228 Lissitzky, El, 2, 3, 15 A Little Sick Horse’s Leg (Ernst), 146 Loos, Adolf, 2 Luck and Chance (Jorn), 134 Lukács, Georg, 150–51, 159 Luquet, Georges-Henri, 28–30, 32–33, 32, 34, 84, 95 Luquet, Simone, 28 Luxemburg, Rosa, 252n25

Maast with a Lion’s Mane (Dubuffet), 60 Madame Mouche (Dubuffet), 46, 52 Magritte, René, 127 Maier, Andrea, 60 “Make Way for Incivism” (Dubuffet), 68–69 Malaparte, Curzio, 23 Man and the Sacred (Caillois), 99 Manet, Edouard, 26, 58 Man in a Motor Car (Paolozzi), 152, 153 Man Looking Upwards (Paolozzi), 151, 152 Man Ray, 94, 262n37 Man with Flies and Serpent (Müller), 9 Manzoni, Piero, 225 Mao Zedong, 185 Marc, Franz, 14 Marcuse, Herbert, 235 Marinetti, Filippo, 168, 171, 188 Maringer, Johannes, 261n21 Mars (Paolozzi), 177, 182 Marx, Karl, 10, 21, 44, 134, 213, 271n68 Marxism, 19 Masson, André, 95, 262n37

280

INDEX

“Matériologies” (Dubuffet), 27 Matisse, Henri, 27, 58 Mauss, Marcel, 99 Mazzetti, Lorenza, 158 McAdam, John C., 51 McCarthy, Paul, 273n22 McHale, John, 140, 158, 171–73, 174 McLuhan, Marshall, 168, 172, 268n10 “The Meaning of the Phallus” (Lacan), 207 Mechaniks Bench (Paolozzi), 189, 190 Mechanization Takes Command (Giedion), 150, 162, 164, 191 medium specificity, 12, 65 Melville, Robert, 269n25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 12, 65 Messages (Dubuffet), 39, 39 Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver, 276n123 Metafisikal Translations (Paolozzi), 186, 192 Le Métafisyx (Dubuffet), 61 The Metallization of a Dream (Paolozzi and Alloway), 190 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 187 Military Guards (Taeuber), 183 Minerva (Dubuffet), 52, 55, 121 Minotaur (Man Ray), 94 Minotaur (Myron?), 93 Miró, Joan, 114 Mirobolus Blanc (Dubuffet), 52 “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan), 158 misogyny, 22, 60 Mr. Cruickshank (Paolozzi), 153–54, 154 Mondrian, Piet, 208 Monkey Man (Paolozzi), 165 Monsieur Macadam (Dubuffet), 53 Monument II: Vanity (Höch), 145 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 228 The Moon and the Animals (Jorn), 113, 114, 124 Morland, Dorothy, 151 Mortensen, Richard, 113 Mucha, Patty, 199, 202, 215 Mug (Oldenburg), 197, 200, 200 Müller, Heinrich Anton, 9, 257n54 Myron (?), 93

naïve art, 45 Natterer, August, 48 Nazism, 1, 19, 21, 42, 99; Bataille’s view of, 95, 98, 102, 129, 133; “degenerate” art denounced by, 12, 45; humanism overpowered by, 16; Nordic culture perverted by, 111 Nelson Orders the Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 (Jorn), 114–15, 117 Newborn (Brancusi), 151, 152 New Brutalism, 139–40, 143, 153, 192 The New Man (Lissitzky), 3 Newman, Arnold, 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 2, 111, 134 Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 105, 107–8, 107, 110, 125, 134, 135 Nomenclature (Paolozzi), 186 Notebook Page: Olive Closeup (Oldenburg), 237 “Notes for the Well-Read” (Dubuffet), 66, 256n57

Obama, Barack, 133 Obtrusive Creatures Whose Right to Exist Is Proved by Their Existence (Jorn), 114, 115 O’Doherty, Brian, 273n27 The Old Dump Flag (Oldenburg), 208–9, 208 Oldenburg, Claes, 5, 6, 13, 194, 195–247; annihilation viewed by, 15; “contraries” viewed by, 18, 195–96, 230; decorative abstraction in work of, 221–23; disfiguration in work of, 10–11; Dubuffet’s influence on, 196, 208, 230, 242; found objects employed by, 11, 195, 196, 211, 215; humanism viewed by, 17; in Los Angeles, 221, 224; magician’s role claimed by, 14–15; Mickey Mouse figure and, 244, 246–47; psychoanalytic interests of, 195, 206, 213, 219, 224, 229, 235–36, 242–43; ray gun motif of, 200–208, 209, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 244; scalar manipulation by, 205, 237–38; sculptural medium questioned by, 16; sexual imagery of, 195, 205–7, 211–20, 227–28; shared experience and consumer culture linked by, 21; “shit art” invoked by, 7, 272n7; soft sculptures of, 225–29, 231, 232; street life viewed by, 197–201; subject and object linked by, 230–31, 233, 235, 242; substance vs. sign in work of, 8 —works: Batcolumn, 276n122; Bedroom Ensemble, 195, 221–25, 223; Big White Shirt with Blue Tie, 220; Blue and Pink Panties, 213, 214; Braselette, 213, 214; Bride Mannikin, 220; Cash Register, 215, 220; C-E-L-I-N-E, Backwards, 8; Elephant Mask, 202; “Empire” (“Papa”) Ray Gun, 205–6, 205, 207; Flag series, 207–11, 208, 210, 215; Floor Burger, 225; Floor Coke, 225; Floor Cone, 225, 227–28; Fragment of Advertisement, 216; Giant Toothpaste Tube, 230, 231; “I Am for an Art,” 213, 219; Ice Cream Cone and Heel, 231–32, 233; Ice Cream Sandwich, 216, 218; Jacket and Shirt Fragment, 218, 218; Kornville Flag, 209, 210; Life Mask, 229; Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks, 227–29, 228; Mug, 197, 200, 200; Notebook Page: Olive Closeup, 237; The Old Dump Flag, 208–9, 208; Pastry Case, 217; R[AY] G[UN] = Annihilate/ Illuminate, 241; Ray Gun Wing, 239; Red Tights with Fragment, 220; Scales of the Geometric Mouse, 247, 247; Snapshots from the City, 13, 199, 201; Soft Engine for Airflow, 230–31, 232; Soft Pay-Telephone, 227; Soft Toilet, 226; The Store, 18, 105, 200–201, 209, 211, 213, 215–16, 218–22, 224, 229, 231, 233, 236, 243; The Street, 10–11, 195–200, 198, 199, 203, 205, 211, 215, 221, 224, 231, 235, 240; Street Chick, 198; Street Heads, 208; Street Ray Guns, 203, 204; Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals, 244, 245; System of Iconography, 246; Toilet, 225; Two Girls’ Dresses, 233, 234, 235; Watch in Red Box, 236; Woman’s Leg, 206, 207 Oldenburg, Richard, 201 Olympia (Corps de dame) (Dubuffet), 26 One-Man Track Team (Paolozzi), 180 On Growth and Form (Thompson), 161–62, 162 “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin), 10 Ortega y Gasset, José, 16 “Our Own Desires Build the Revolution” (Constant), 107 Ovid, 187 Ozenfant, Amédée, 12, 146, 164

employed by, 11, 185, 186, 191; destruction and image-making linked by, 173–74, 178, 192; Greek myth invoked by, 158–59; iconicity and, 172–74, 176, 182–83, 190; machines and fantasy linked by, 185–86; as New Brutalist, 139–40, 143; science fiction and horror films and, 171–72; sculptural medium questioned by, 16; “second nature” and, 150–51; substance vs. sign in work of, 8; technological imagery employed by, 5, 9, 15, 18; “theory of opposites” of, 18; Thompson’s influence on, 161–62, 164 —works: AG5, 163, 167; The Bishop of Kuban, 176; Bride of the Konsul, 175; Chinese Dog 2, 165, 167; Contemplative Objects, 270n46; Crash Head, 269n28; Cyclops, 140; Diana as an Engine I, 176, 176, 187; Evadne in Green Dimension, 144; Frog Eating a Lizard, 165, 168, 169; Head of Demeter, 147, 148; Head of Zeus, 147; Hi-Hohe, 145; His Majesty the Wheel, 180, 181; History of Nothing, 191, 191, 192; Icarus series, 159, 160, 172; Images, 270n59; Japanese War God, 156; Jason, 170; The King, 20, 180; Konsul, 175; Krokadeel, 11, 165, 167; Large Frog, 165, 166; Man in a Motor Car, 152, 153; Man Looking Upwards, 151, 152; Mars, 177, 182; Mechaniks Bench, 189, 190; Metafisikal Translations, 186, 192; The Metallization of a Dream, 190; Mr. Cruickshank, 153–54, 154; Monkey Man, 165; Nomenclature, 186; One-Man Track Team, 180; Psychological Atlas, 148–51, 149, 150; The Return, 180; Robot, 167, 168; Saint Sebastian series, 159, 161, 165; Shattered Head, 154, 155; Stehendes Pferd, 147; The Twin Towers of the Sfinx-State, 182, 182; Tyrannical Tower Crowned with Thorns of Violence, 182, 184; The Ultimate Planet, 173; Was This Metal Monster Master—or Slave?, 174; Windtunnel Test, 153, 153; The World Divides into Facts, 186 “Parallel of Life and Art” (exhibition), 140, 141, 143 Pasiphae, 93 Pastry Case (Oldenburg), 217 Paulhan, Jean, 39, 45, 51, 60 Paysage paintings (Dubuffet), 34 Perry, Rachel, 39 phenomenology, 65–66 Picasso, Pablo, 33, 58, 206, 209; Dubuffet influenced by, 27; found objects employed by, 185; Jorn influenced by, 114, 115; Paolozzi influenced by, 151, 164 Plane Crazy (Disney film), 4 Pop art, 196, 219, 267n84 Porta, Giambattista della, 58 postmodernism, 23 Prehistoric Painting (Bataille), 73, 75, 85, 101 Primitive Art (Luquet), 84, 95 primitivism, 12, 21–22, 105 Prince Charming (Dubuffet), 7 Princess X (Brancusi), 206, 206 Prinzhorn, Hans, 45, 46, 47, 49 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 251n4 Psychological Atlas (Paolozzi), 148–51, 149, 150 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud), 242 Purism, 146–47 Purity and Danger (Douglas), 122, 125

The Pact of Predators (Jorn), 125, 126 Paolozzi, Eduardo, 11, 15, 20, 138, 139–93, 208, 243, 276n117; aluminum sculptures by, 175, 176, 176, 177, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188, 189; animal imagery and, 14; archetypes sought by, 21; bronzes by, 151–71, 185, 188; collages by, 143, 144, 145, 145, 147–49, 147, 148, 151, 153, 157; disfiguration in work of, 10, 18; Dubuffet’s influence on, 6; found objects and images

Rabelais, François, 270n47 Raphael’s Angels (Jorn), 112 Ratton, Charles, 51 Rauschenberg, Robert, 62 R[AY] G[UN] = Annihilate/Illuminate (Oldenburg), 241 Ray Gun Wing (Oldenburg), 239 readymades and found objects, 11, 15, 23, 155, 202, 208, 225

BRUTAL AESTHETICS

281

Red Tights with Fragment (Oldenburg), 220 Reflex (magazine), 105 Renzio, Toni del, 268n6 Resnais, Alain, 264n64 The Retreat at Dybbøl (Jorn), 115, 119 The Return (Paolozzi), 180 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 108, 139, 253n50 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 56, 211, 237, 254n70 Robot (Paolozzi), 167, 168 Roché, Henri-Pierre, 51 Rodchenko, Alexander, 2 Roditi, Edouard, 187 Romanticism, 47 Rose, Barbara, 274n49 Rosso, Medardo, 225 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 131, 133 Roussel, Raymond, 187 R.U.R. (Čapek), 167

Saint Sebastian series (Paolozzi), 159, 161, 165 Samaras, Lucas, 196, 199 Santner, Eric, 131, 133 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 17, 108, 253n59 The Savage Mind (Lévi-Strauss), 192 Scales of the Geometric Mouse (Oldenburg), 247, 247 Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism, 111, 135 Schapiro, Meyer, 83 Scheerbart, Paul, 2, 3–4, 9 Schilder, Paul, 158 Schmitt, Carl, 131 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 265n16 Schumpeter, Joseph, 276n106 Sebastian, Saint, 159, 161, 165 Second Machine Age, 147 Second War of Schleswig (1864), 115 sexism, 22, 60 Shameful Pastoral (Jorn), 114, 116, 124 Shattered Head (Paolozzi), 154, 155 Sidney Janis Gallery, 22, 222 Situationist International, 22, 112, 134, 135, 137 Skånes stenskulptur under 1100-talet (Jorn), 130 Skira, Albert, 73–74 Smithson, Alison, 139, 140, 192 Smithson, Peter, 139, 140, 192 Snapshots from the City (Oldenburg), 13, 199, 201 Snow, C. P., 272n100 The Social Contract (Rousseau), 133 Socialist Realism, 113 Soft Engine for Airflow (Oldenburg), 230–31, 232 Soft Pay-Telephone (Oldenburg), 227 Soft Toilet (Oldenburg), 226 Sohn-Rethel, Alfred, 276n106 Sontag, Susan, 276n114 Soutter, Louis, 257n54 Stalin, Joseph, 105, 185 Stalingrad, No Man’s Land, or The Mad Laughter of Courage (Jorn), 117–18, 121 Steamboat Willie (Disney film), 4 Stehendes Pferd (Paolozzi), 147 Steinberg, Leo, 62 Stekel, Wilhelm, 243–44 Sternhell, Zeev, 18–19

282

INDEX

The Store (Oldenburg), 200–201, 209, 222, 229, 231, 233, 243; bodily and commercial consumption in, 216, 218–19, 221, 236; commodity and sexual fetishism in, 105, 211, 213, 215–16, 220; The Street contrasted with, 211, 224; violence underpinning, 18 Strange Eggs (Oldenburg), 206, 207 The Street (Oldenburg), 198, 199, 203, 205, 221, 240; death and destitution in, 195–98, 200, 211, 224; disfiguration as realism in, 10–11; inspirations for, 197, 235; mimetic excess in, 199–200, 215, 231; The Store contrasted with, 211, 224 Street Chick (Oldenburg), 198 Street Heads (Oldenburg), 208 Street Ray Guns (Oldenburg), 203, 204 structural anthropology, 18, 56 Surrealism, 10, 12, 15, 105, 230; Bataille and, 22, 72, 77, 95–98, 101, 127; chance and accident linked to, 77; Cobra group influenced by, 105; collage and assemblage in, 143, 146; dreams viewed by, 188, 189; Minotaur figure and, 93; the outmoded and, 149; Paolozzi influenced by, 192; “second nature” and, 150–51 Swift, Jonathan, 236–37, 238 Symbolic Self-Portrait with Equals (Oldenburg), 244, 245 System of Iconography (Oldenburg), 246

Table of Uncertain Form (Dubuffet), 64 Taeuber, Sophie, 183, 183, 202 Tapié, Michel, 51 Tatlin, Vladimir, 228 Tatlin at Work (Hausmann), 148 Taut, Bruno, 251n11 Tears of Eros (Bataille), 73, 91–92, 100 “Texturologies” (Dubuffet), 27 The Theory of the Novel (Lukács), 150 Thevoz, Michel, 256n39 “This Is Tomorrow” (Exhibition), 142 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 161–62, 162, 164 The Timid Proud One (Jorn), 11, 178 Toft, Albert, 145 Together (Mazzetti), 158 Toilet (Oldenburg), 225 Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier), 146 Traveler without a Compass (Dubuffet), 63 Les Trois Frères cave, 85, 87–90, 88, 89, 92, 100, 126, 128, 133, 178 Trump, Donald, 133 Turnbull, William, 139 The Twin Towers of the Sfinx-State (Paolozzi), 182, 182 Two Girls’ Dresses (Oldenburg), 233, 234, 235 Tyrannical Tower Crowned with Thorns of Violence (Paolozzi), 182, 184 Tzara, Tristan, 143

Ubl, Ralph, 268n17 Ubu Roi (Jarry), 183 The Ultimate Planet (Paolozzi), 173 Untitled (Faces in a Head) (Jorn), 121, 123 Untitled (Raphael’s Angels) (Jorn), 112

van der Beek, Stan, 199 Venus of Lespugue, 85–86, 87 Venus of Willendorf, 85–86, 86 Views of Paris (Dubuffet), 27, 30 Vikings, 111 Vorticism, 168

The Walls (Dubuffet), 39–40, 40, 41 Wall with Inscriptions (Dubuffet), 42, 43 Walter, Marie-Thérèse, 206 Warburg, Aby, 270n59, 275n90 Warhol, Andy, 224 Was This Metal Monster Master—or Slave? (Paolozzi), 174 Watch in Red Box (Oldenburg), 236 Whitechapel Gallery, 140 Whitford, Frank, 269n28 Whitman, Walt, 273n42 Will to Power (Dubuffet), 52, 54 Windels, Fernand, 76 Windtunnel Test (Paolozzi), 153, 153 Witch’s Head (Natterer), 48 Wölfli, Adolf, 257n54 Wols (A. O. Wolfgang Schulze), 22 Woman Grinding Coffee (Dubuffet), 57 Woman Pinning Her Hair (Dubuffet), 33–34, 34 Woman’s Leg (Oldenburg), 206, 207 The World Before the Deluge (Figuier), 149 The World Divides into Facts (Paolozzi), 186 World War I, 4, 97, 159, 168 World War II, 4; Bataille’s reflections on, 95, 98–102, 129; Jorn affected by, 106, 110, 117; Paolozzi affected by, 139, 146, 157, 159, 168 Wounded Beast II (Jorn), 109, 110, 113

Yeats, William Butler, 14 Yellow Eyes (Jorn), 119, 122 You’ll Never Get Me Alive (Jorn), 119

BRUTAL AESTHETICS

283

Photography and Copyright Credits

Photo © AISA/Bridgeman Images: 2.14. Arnold Newman/The Masters Collection via Getty Images. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 1.1. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY: 0.1. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 0.10. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris: 4.33. Bibliothèque nationale de France: 2.20. © CNAC/MNAM/ Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY: 1.30, 1.31. Photo courtesy of the Fondation Jean Dubuffet, Paris: 0.4, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, 1.9, 1.10, 1.13, 1.19, 1.21, 1.23, 1.24, 1.25, 1.26, 1.27, 1.28, 1.29, 1.32. Reproduced by permission of the Fondazione Torino Musei. Photo Archive of the Fondazione Torino Musei: 4.9. Photo courtesy of Moderna Museet, Stockholm: 4.11. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 1.11, 1.14, 1.15, 1.16, 1.17. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg: 4.7. Asger Jorn © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA. Anders Österlin © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Carl-Henning Pedersen © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA: 3.23. Bibliothèque nationale de France: 4.26. Bridgeman Images: 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.7, 2.11. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images: 4.41. © 1940 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.8. © 1957–58 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: Paul Hester. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.15. © 1959 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 0.5, 5.6, 5.10, 5.14. © 1959–60 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.9. © 1960 Claes Oldenburg. Photo: I.C. Rapoport: 5.3. Photo: Martha Holmes. Martha Holmes / The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images. Photo courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.5. Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv: 5.4. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.2, 5.16, 5.17. © 1961 Claes Oldenburg. 5.21. Photo by Arthur Freed. Photo by Douglas M. Parker Studio: 5.20. Photo by Gunter Lebkowski; courtesy Onnasch Kunsthandel: 5.38. The Helman Collection. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.25. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.19, 5.28, 5.39, 5.22, 5.23, 5.27, 5.37. © 1961–62 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.24, 5.26. © 1962 Claes Oldenburg. Photo by Rudolph Burckhardt. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.29.

© 1963 Claes Oldenburg. Photo by David Heald for the Solomon

R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.32. © 1963–95 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.30. © 1965 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.42. © 1965–77 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.41. © 1966 Claes Oldenburg. © Hans Hammarskiöld Heritage: 5.34. Photograph Jerry L. Thompson. Photo courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.31. Photo by Lee Stalsworth. Photo courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.36. © 1967 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.1. Photo by Cathy Carver. Photo courtesy of the Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.40. © 1969 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.33, 5.43, 5.44. © 1972 Claes Oldenburg. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.45. Photo: Claude Bornand: 0.6. De Agostini Picture Library / C. Sappa /Bridgeman Images: 2.9. Photo: Don Hitchcock, donsmaps.com: 2.5. © 2020 Donation Jorn, Silkeborg / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA: 3.11. Photo credit Canica Collection. Photo courtesy of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg: 3.17. Carl-Henning Pedersen: ©2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VISDA. Anders Österlin: © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Erik K Abrahamsen: 3.23. Esbjerg Kunstmuseum / Esbjerg Art Museum: 3.18. Photo Galerie van de Loo: 3.15. Photo Gunni Busck. Photo courtesy of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg: 3.1. Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg. Photo: Niels Fabaek: 3.12, 3.14. Photo courtesy of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg: 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.9, 3.10, 3.13, 3.16, 3.19, 3.20, 3.22. SMK Photo / Jacob Schou-Hansen: 3.8. Photo ©Tate: 0.7. Photo Vejle Art Museum, Denmark: 3.7. © 2019 The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 5.11. © Estate Brassaï—RMN-Grand Palais. Photo © Tate: 1.12. © 2020 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 5.13. © 2020 Estate of Robert R. McElroy / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 5.18. © Fondation Constant, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2020. Photo: Tom Haartsen: 3.3. © Hans Hinz—ARTOTHEK: 2.6, 2.8. Hellgoth—ullstein bild / Granger NYC: 5.35. Courtesy of Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. © Nigel Henderson Estate. Photo ©Tate: 4.4. © 2020 Karel Appel Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / c/o Pictoright Amsterdam: 3.2.

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© Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2020. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern

Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 2.19. Mark Kauffman/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images: 0.11. Martha Holmes/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images. Photo courtesy of The Oldenburg van Bruggen Studio: 0.9. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 0.2. © Nigel Henderson Estate. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2020. © The Smithson Family Collection. John Maltby / RIBA Collections: 4.5. Photo: N. J. Cotterell: 4.48. Photo: Olivier Laffely, Atelier de numérisation—Ville de Lausanne: 1.7. © Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg: 1.18, 1.20, 1.22. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY: 4.2. Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism (Asger Jorn/ Gerard Francheschi). Photo: Gerard Francheschi. Photo courtesy of the Museum Jorn, Silkeborg: 3.21. © 2020 Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © Museum für Gestaltung Zürich: 4.46. Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth, unknown photographer: 5.7. © Succession Brancusi—All rights reserved (ARS) 2020. Image © Sheldon Museum of Art: 5.12. The Philadelphia Museum of Art / Art Resource, NY: 4.15. Photo ©Tate: 4.31. © Trustees of the Paolozzi Foundation, Licensed by DACS / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2019: 4.40, 4.50. Photo: akg-images: 4.8. Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY: 4.21. Credit: Bridgeman Images: 4.16, 4.27, 4.30. Photo courtesy of the British Council Collection. Photo © The British Council: 0.8, 4.6, 4.10, 4.28, 4.39, 4.44. © 2019 Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands © Photography Victor E. Nieuwenhuijs, Amsterdam KM 120.736 VN 6x6 (1) Louise Nevelson, Cathedral III, 1959: 4.25. Photograph © 2019 courtesy of The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago: 4.17. Photograph by David Farrell: 4.22, 4.23, 4.45, 4.47. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY: 4.34. Photo courtesy of The Paolozzi Foundation: 4.42. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice 76.2553 PG 200: 4.29. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation / Art Resource, NY: 4.24. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s: 4.32. Photo ©Tate: 4.3, 4.18, 4.19, 4.20, 4.35, 4.37, 4.38, 4.43, 4.49. © The Trustees of the British Museum: 4.12. Photo courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery: 0.12. Photo © Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 4.13, 4.14. Photo: Ulrich Mack: 4.1. Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman Images: 2.12. © Vanni Archive/ Art Resource, NY: 2.18. Photo © Viard M./HorizonFeatures/Bridgeman Images: 2.13. WALT DISNEY / Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy Stock Photo: 0.3.

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PHOTOGRAPHY AND COPYRIGHT CREDITS

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 1952–2019 1952 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

1973 Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (published 1974)

1953 Sir Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (published as The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, 1956)

1974 H. W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture Reconsidered (published as The Rise and Fall of the Public Monument)

1954 Sir Herbert Read, The Art of Sculpture (published 1956)

1975 H. C. Robbins Landon, Music in Europe in the Year 1776

1955 Etienne Gilson, Art and Reality (published as Painting and Reality, 1957)

1976 Peter von Blanckenhagen, Aspects of Classical Art 1977 André Chastel, The Sack of Rome: 1527 (published 1982)

1956 E. H. Gombrich, The Visible World and the Language of Art (published as Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 1960) 1957 Sigfried Giedion, Constancy and Change in Art and Architecture (published as The Eternal Present: A Contribution on Constancy and Change, 1962–1964) 1958 Sir Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin and French Classicism (published as Nicolas Poussin, 1967)

1978 Joseph W. Alsop, The History of Art Collecting (published as The Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked Phenomena Wherever These Have Appeared, 1982) 1979 John Rewald, Cézanne and America (published as Cézanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists, and Critics, 1891–1921, 1989) 1980 Peter Kidson, Principles of Design in Ancient and Medieval Architecture

1959 Naum Gabo, A Sculptor’s View of the Fine Arts (published as Of Divers Arts, 1962)

1981 John Harris, Palladian Architecture in England, 1615–1760

1960 Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, Horace Walpole (published 1960)

1982 Leo Steinberg, The Burden of Michelangelo’s Painting

1961 André Grabar, Christian Iconography and the Christian Religion in Antiquity (published as Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, 1968)

1983 Vincent Scully, The Shape of France (published as Architecture: The Natural and the Manmade) 1984 Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (published 1987)

1962 Kathleen Raine, William Blake and Traditional Mythology (published as Blake and Tradition, 1968) 1963 Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Artist and Individual: Some Aspects of the Renaissance Portrait (published as The Portrait in the Renaissance, 1966) 1964 Jakob Rosenberg, On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past and Present (published 1967) 1965 Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sources of Romantic Thought (published as The Roots of Romanticism, 1999) 1966 Lord David Cecil, Dreamer or Visionary: A Study of English Romantic Painting (published as Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters, Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones, 1969) 1967 Mario Praz, On the Parallel of Literature and the Visual Arts (published as Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts, 1970)

1985 James S. Ackerman, The Villa in History (published as The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, 1990) 1986 Lukas Foss, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Composer 1987 Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons (published 1990) 1988 John Shearman, Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (published as Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance, 1992) 1989 Oleg Grabar, Intermediary Demons: Toward a Theory of Ornament (published as The Mediation of Ornament, 1992) 1990 Jennifer Montagu, Gold, Silver, and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Roman Baroque (published 1996) 1991 Willibald Sauerländer, Changing Faces: Art and Physiognomy through the Ages

1968 Stephen Spender, Imaginative Literature and Painting 1969 Jacob Bronowski, Art as a Mode of Knowledge (published as The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science, 1978) 1970 Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Some Aspects of Nineteenth-Century Architecture (published as A History of Building Types, 1976) 1971 T. S. R. Boase, Vasari: The Man and the Book (published as Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book, 1979) 1972 Ludwig H. Heydenreich, Leonardo da Vinci

1992 Anthony Hecht, The Laws of the Poetic Art (published as On the Laws of the Poetic Art, 1995) 1993 John Boardman, The Diff usion of Classical Art in Antiquity (published 1994) 1994 Jonathan Brown, Kings and Connoisseurs: Collecting Art in Seventeenth-Century Europe (published 1995) 1995 Arthur C. Danto, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (published as After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, 1997)

1996 Pierre M. Rosenberg, From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, Ingres (published as From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, and Ingres, 2000)

2016 Vidya Dehejia, The Thief Who Stole My Heart: The Material Life of Chola Bronzes in South India, c. 855–1280 2017 Alexander Nemerov, The Forest: America in the 1830s

1997 John Golding, Paths to the Absolute (published as Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still, 2000) 1998 Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (published 2000) 1999 Carlo Bertelli, Transitions 2000 Marc Fumaroli, The Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns in the Arts, 1600–1715 2001 Salvatore Settis, Giorgione and Caravaggio: Art as Revolution 2002 Michael Fried, The Moment of Caravaggio (published 2010) 2003 Kirk Varnedoe, Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock (published 2006) 2004 Irving Lavin, More than Meets the Eye 2005 Irene J. Winter, “Great Work”: Terms of Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Mesopotamia 2006 Simon Schama, Really Old Masters: Age, Infirmity, and Reinvention 2007 Helen Vendler, Last Looks, Last Books: The Binocular Poetry of Death (published as Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill, 2010) 2008 Joseph Leo Koerner, Bosch and Bruegel: Parallel Worlds (published as Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, 2016) 2009 T. J. Clark, Picasso and Truth (published as Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica, 2013) 2010 Mary Miller, Art and Representation in the Ancient New World 2011 Mary Beard, The Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from Ancient Rome to Salvador Dalí 2012 Craig Clunas, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (published 2017) 2013 Barry Bergdoll, Out of Site in Plain View: A History of Exhibiting Architecture since 1750 2014 Anthony Grafton, Past Belief: Visions of Early Christianity in Renaissance and Reformation Europe 2015 Thomas Crow, Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814–1820 (published as Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812–1820, 2018)

2018 Hal Foster, Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period (published as Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg, 2020) 2019 Wu Hung, End as Beginning: Chinese Art and Dynastic Time