[Reviewer Wikström examines this well-known cultural critics
massive, ambitious, yet flawed study of post World War II U.S. culture
and its influence.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ART’S SOCIAL FORMS  
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Josefine Wikström
April 1, 2023
Radical Philosophy
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_ Reviewer Wikström examines this well-known cultural critic's
massive, ambitious, yet flawed study of post World War II U.S. culture
and its influence. _

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_The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War_
Louis Menand
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 978 0 37415 845 3

During the past decade there has been an intensified debate in
mainstream art criticism about the tension between art’s freedom and
free speech. In this debate art’s freedom has been accused of being
under severe threat by, on the one hand, ‘cultural Marxists’
concerned with identity politics and social justice, and, on the
other, by alt-right fascists’ promoting a nationalistic art and
culture. Both, it has been argued, threaten art’s freedom. But what
is meant by this concept here? Although art’s freedom together with
free speech is a given in liberal western democracies, how can this
concept be understood? More specifically, is the freedom of art as
pure and cleansed of all connections to a societal ground as its
liberal defenders try to argue?

From the standpoint of western philosophy, art’s freedom – or
rather its autonomy – can be traced back, for example, to Friedrich
Schiller’s _Kallias Letters_ (1793), written to his friend Gottfried
Körner a few years after the French revolution. Here Schiller
constructs an analogy between beauty – represented in art – and
the autonomy of the free will as formulated in Immanuel Kant’s moral
writings, making beauty into ‘freedom in appearance’. This idea
that art gains autonomy through its form, which then becomes an image
of freedom, continues throughout modernity in writers, thinkers and
intellectual movements as different as _l’art pour l’art_ and the
Frankfurt School, Oscar Wilde and Theodor Adorno, including
influential American art critics in the Cold War period like Clement
Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.

Another way of interrogating the idea of art’s freedom is to focus
on the country that has been more than any other historically
connected to the idea of freedom, and on a period in its history when
this was particularly the case: the USA in the time of the ‘free
world’. The latter is a term mainly associated with ‘The Truman
Doctrine’, derived from a speech by the then president, Harry
Truman, in the spring of 1947, which is often regarded as announced
the beginning of the Cold War. The speech is partly reprinted in Louis
Menand’s latest book, _The Free World: Art and Thought_ _in the Cold
War_. Truman famously characterises liberal democracy as a way of life
distinguished by ‘free institutions, representative government, free
elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and
religion, and freedom from political repression’, in contrast to the
way of life of the totalitarian state that ‘relies upon terror and
oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the
suppression of personal freedoms’. The task that Menand sets himself
is to investigate the art, culture and thought that was produced in
this geopolitically tense historical moment. It’s a huge object of
study so it is no surprise that the book spans 800 pages. But it has a
sharply defined timeframe and geographical location: from the
introduction of Truman’s doctrine to the end of the Soviet Union in
1991, all viewed from the standpoint of the USA. Despite this scale,
most examples in the book cover the 1950s to the 1970s, which is also
reflected in that it opens with a chapter on the end of the Second
World War and ends with a chapter on the final days of the Vietnam
War.

Written in 18 poetically titled chapters – ‘Object of Power’,
‘The Free Play of the Mind’, ‘Northern Songs’ and so on –
the book digs into art practices, intellectual movements and cultural
phenomena such as Action Painting, New Criticism, the Civil Rights
Movement and underground paperback publishing. Although North American
phenomena – and this is one of Menand’s main points about art and
thought in the free world – these ideas and thoughts are
transatlantic in nature, mostly because of the way the Second World
War ended, and therefore must include France, England and their
colonies and former colonies. The title of each chapter effectively
functions as an aphorism that Menand unfolds or argues for through a
method explained in the preface as containing three parts: firstly,
‘the underlying social forces – economic, geopolitical,
demographic, technological’ of a period, secondly, ‘what was
happening “on the street”, how X ran into Y’, and thirdly,
‘what was going on in people’s heads’. The result of this rather
classically chosen method is that most chapters begin with well-chosen
statistics on, for example, the number of students enrolled at a
university within a certain decade, the number of technological
apparatuses a middle-class family owned in the USA in 1955, how many
countries were colonies and how many were liberating themselves, and
then moves on to specific individuals (primarily men), such as John
Cage, James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Andy Warhol and George Orwell,
to name only a handful of those whose lives are unfolded in minute
detail in the book.

The chapters are not structured chronologically or thematically.
Rather each says something specific – sometimes contradictory to
other chapters – about art and thought in this period. Menand, a
staff writer at the _New Yorker_, lets the Chekhovian and creative
writing class slogan, ‘show, don’t tell’, lead him. The
consequence is an almost novelistic book in which the reader sees
Baldwin walking the streets of his childhood in Harlem and, later in
life, hears him speak as a renowned writer to fellow writer as well as
woman abuser Norman Mailer in a café in Paris in the mid 1950s.
Menand makes the reader feel the smell of Jackson Pollock’s paint,
follow the thoughts of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the boat to New York
and experience the fraught love affair between Isaiah Berlin and the
Soviet censored poet Anna Akhmatova as if standing in the doorway.

Menand’s method is standard in journalistic reportage and mainstream
biographical storytelling. It ascribes to a logic that the parts make
up a whole. As such it stands in contrast to the method propagated by
Karl Marx in his critique of political economy, or to Walter
Benjamin’s thesis on art criticism in romanticism, as well as to Max
Horkheimer’s idea of critical theory, in which the entry point of a
study is the concept, or as Marx famously puts it, a method in which
one goes from the ‘abstract’ to the ‘concrete’, where the
concrete is not the given but the determination of the abstract.
Menand is not a Marxist or a critical theorist, so it is not
surprising that he does the opposite, at least at the level of each
chapter, where biographical details, colour of clothes and other
minute details are pushed to the forefront to tell something. But at
the level of the composition of the entire book, Menand structures the
chapters in a way which creates something similar to the procedure of
going from the abstract to the concrete. This makes the book more
worth reading. ‘Empty Sky’, ‘Northern Songs’ and ‘Vers La
Libération’ are, on the one hand, intimate stories about George
Kennan, the diplomat behind The Truman Doctrine, the Beatles’ arty
and cheeky interviews and the articles by Betty Friedan that led up to
the second wave feminist movement in the USA in the mid 1950s; on the
other hand, these chapters are also titles or aphorisms that together
make out a more abstract and often conflicted idea of the concept of
art’s and thought’s freedom in the Cold War. Since people, rather
than themes, move in and out of different chapters, and in that way
connect them – Jasper Johns, for example, appears in one chapter in
relation to Cage and Cunningham, and turns up in another on Warhol and
pop art simply because he attended the latter’s well-known parties
– the book also constructs a coherent and meaningful narrative
between individuals and events that would not necessarily have been
thought together before. Menand also says he wrote the book to
understand his childhood and early adulthood. Not dissimilar to how an
analysand creates a narrative of their childhood in the psychoanalytic
session, here it is the historian of ideas, Louis Menand himself, who
lies on the couch and reconstructs the years of his early life. The
question is: are the reconstructions true?

Apart from the essayistic composition of the chapters, the strength of
Menand’s method of showing rather than telling, as well as his
bricolage composition of chapters, is the surprising but illuminating
way in which he often brings together two ideas or lines of thought.
For example, in the chapter ‘The Human Science’, he places
Lévi-Strauss’ concept of culture as structure – and in effect
Structuralism as a new discipline in the USA concerned with how things
get their meaning and function in a system of signification – next
to the major internationally touring exhibition _The Family of Man_,
curated by MOMA’s director Edward Steichen in 1955. _The Family of
Man_ was curated like a photo-essay with all kinds of photos and
techniques placed non-hierarchically next to one another, not
dissimilar to how signification in Lévi-Strauss’ structure takes
place via function and place. ‘_The Family of Man_ was sometimes
edited according to the venue. … But the overall design required
balance, and the fact that, apart from country and photographer, there
was no identifying information about the pictures depoliticized most
of the images. Every image was generic – which, of course, was the
point.’ In other chapters Menand simply juxtaposes two persons or
phenomena next to one another to make a point. Some of these have been
brought together before. In ‘Emancipating Dissonance’ Menand, like
uncountable art historians before him, situates John Cage, Merce
Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg next to one another to say
something about a specific atonal method in composition, painting and
choreography making. In ‘Commonism’ he puts the analytical
philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto next to Andy Warhol. Other
combinations are more unusual, like when he opens one chapter with
John F. Kennedy’s speech on freedom after the Berlin Wall had fallen
and continues without much comment to Isaiah Berlin’s two concepts
of liberty, before then tying these ideas of freedom together with new
printing technologies, such as the soft back book and its utilisation
by underground publishers of erotic books. Each phenomenon in
Menand’s book has been written about on its own before, but by
simply situating them next to one another, without much comment or
explanation, Menand manages to say something new about how he
understands the idea of freedom in this period.

But what is this concept of art’s, culture’s and thought’s
freedom? Whereas speeches by politicians like Truman or Kennedy are in
the book, as well as accounts of the main philosophical concepts in
the liberal tradition on freedom, such as Berlin’s _Two Concepts of
Liberty_ from 1958 alongside Sartre’s and other post-war conceptions
of freedom, Menand’s concept of art and culture’s freedom is to be
found elsewhere. Firstly and primarily, the idea of freedom Menand
writes about appears in the many artistic and philosophical methods or
procedures shown in the book. In chapter after chapter Menand unfolds,
in a clear prose, artistic and philosophical thoughts and procedures
of the artists and thinkers he writes about: from Franz Fanon’s
distinct ideas of freedom’s relationship to culture and domination
in his 1956 article, ‘Racism and Culture’ – ‘As long as one
group is subaltern, no genuine culture can be produced.’ – to
Cage’s transformation of Stockhausen’s ‘serial composition’
and Rauschenberg’s and Johns’ ‘figural art that was
anti-illusionistic’; from the scattered and fast-forward pace of
Beat literature to the elitist yet universal addressee of the writings
of Susan Sontag. Or George Orwell’s socialist concrete style of
writing as a critique of managerial capitalism: ‘Orwell made jargon,
formula, elision, obfuscation, and cliché the enemies of liberty and
democracy and the symptoms of creeping totalitarianism.’ Seen from
this angle, freedom for Menand is to be found in the making of new
forms, compositions, procedures, methods and choreographies. In other
words, his is an understanding of freedom as closely related to _form_
as that encountered in both Schiller’s and Adorno’s writings on
art.

Secondly, Menand’s understanding of freedom is to be found in the
infrastructures or ecological systems of art and culture: the material
and institutional conditions needed for paintings to be shown, novels
to be read and philosophers to be published. Menand draws a picture in
which the university (from its meritocratic system in the 1950s to its
managerial transformation from the 1970s onwards), independent
journals and publishers, specific visas and exchange programmes for
emigrants in the post-war years, as well as a flourishing art market
and cheap housing, were conditions for the emergence and development
of the artistic, cultural and philosophical methods accounted for in
the book. As such Menand’s concept of freedom is relative, far from
_l’art pour l’art_.

The main way in which Menand’s study differs from others of this
period, apart from its non-academic way of presenting research, is
that it invites contradictions and tensions in the people, movements
and thoughts that are scrutinised. New Criticism’s method of close
reading, with proponents like Cleanth Brooks and T.S. Eliot, was not
separated from society as they liked to think, but conditioned by a
racist and non-democratic southern American ideology: ‘In short,
American New Criticism was founded by writers associated with a
reactionary political and religious program, and under the aegis of a
poet and critic, Eliot, who believed that modern society was, in his
words, “worm-eaten with Liberalism”.’ Following Benjamin Piekut
and other art historians, Menand also shows how Cage, whose musical
scores were open for interpretation by anyone according to his
anarchist ideals, nevertheless despised the versions of them by
Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik.

Despite his attention to such tensions and contradictions, Menand
tends to idealise the culture of this youth, which is understandable
considering the post-liberal times in the USA in which it was written.
Menand writes about the differences between, for example, Aime
Césaire’s idea of freedom and Baldwin’s or Arendt’s or
Orwell’s understanding of totalitarianism, but writing about less
canonised artists and thinkers would have brought the antagonisms more
to the surface. How can, for example, Angela Davis’ and the Black
Panther’s critique of prisons, Herbert Marcuse’s understanding of
freedom and sexual liberty, and Yvonne Rainer’s transformation of
Cage’s score be excluded from a book on art, culture and thought in
the Cold War? Although Menand mentions how the USA publishing system
censored books due to explicit sexual content, he downplays this in
favour of the big formalist experiments of the time. This emphasis on
the ‘good’ stuff makes the book melancholic, romantic and
untruthful at times. I think that this also has to do with the form
and method that Menand employs. His juxtapositions or montages want to
please or reconcile, unlike Benjamin who also deployed montage as a
way of radically showing rather than telling.

The main problem with the book is, however, the almost completely
neglected aspect of capitalism’s transformation during this period,
how this change is related to the decolonisation and liberation
movements taking place in parallel, and how they conditioned the
understandings of freedom that can be found, for example, in Friedrich
von Hayek’s Darwinist writings. As Quinn Slobodian among others have
demonstrated, the Cold War years cannot be understood without seeing
the emergence of supranational and partly undemocratic institutions
like the IMF and the World Bank in parallel to the process of
decolonialisation. By not taking these into account, it is as if
Menand, from his divan, doesn’t go deep enough into his childhood,
into the darker conditions of the ‘free world’ that also paved the
way for the emergence of a neo-liberal undemocratic world order. To
understand the state of art’s autonomy and freedom after 1991, the
rise of fascism as well as the social justice movements of the past
decades, these larger transformations of capitalism’s structure and
institutions need to be taken into account.

* the Cold War
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* art
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* painting
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* Pulture
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* freedom
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* Artists
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