Meaning, Moratorium

For today's blog we invite scholar Miguel de Baca to write about Arakawa's Still Life, 1967 and Joseph Kosuth's 'Titled (A.A.I.A.I)' [Meaning], 1968. Both works were shown on the occassion of Castelli Gallery's 1969 show, Art for the Moratorium, a benefit exhibition organized in collaboration with the Moratorium Committee to raise funds to ask for a moratorium for the Vietnam War. 

 

The front page of the New York Times dated October 16, 1969, is halved by a central line extending from masthead to foot. On the right-hand side of this neatly bifurcated composition is news about the recent Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a major protest held the previous day. A headline reads: “Vietnam Moratorium Observed Nationwide by Foes of the War,” followed by a smaller, secondary one further down the page: “Opponents React: Many Show Support for Nixon by Flying Flags Full-Staff.” Other contents on this side of the page include a large photograph of Minnesota Democrat Senator Eugene J. McCarthy addressing protestors in Bryant Park in Manhattan and other news about either the protest or the battlefront.

On the left-hand side of the page, we see the day’s other news: the Mets beat the Orioles, the Somali president was assassinated, the Rochester diocese ousted a priest and a Roman Catholic bishop’s synod convened to discuss ‘strain’ on the Church, an oil policy reform bill was scrapped in Washington, and a vote was held in Congress on whether President Dwight D. Eisenhower would appear on the dollar (he did—a coin minted from 1971-78).

Consider once again the front page’s crisp central line, an economical border between the news about Vietnam and not-Vietnam. Does the right half of this page pertain in any way to the left, and vice-versa? Under what conditions might we understand meaning to telegraph from one side to the other, to cross over? Hold these questions in mind; I will return to them later.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about Castelli Gallery’s exhibition, Art for the Moratorium, to benefit the organizing committee for the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Specifically, I analyzed Jasper Johns’s Moratorium poster, an offset lithographed riff on his Flags paintings, that showed an American flag in reverse colors of green, black, and orange, instead of red, white, and blue. A political commentary was not necessarily overt on Johns’s part but, as I maintain, the reversal of the expected tricolor arrangement resonated with a growing and increasingly mainstream opposition to American policy in Vietnam. The poster remains one of the most enduring artistic visuals of the antiwar movement.

In addition to Johns' poster, there are two other artworks from Art for the Moratorium that warrant a closer look given the exigencies of the day: Arakawa's Still Life, 1967 and Joseph Kosuth's 'Titled (A.A.I.A.I)' [Meaning], 1968, one artwork among his First Investigations, 1966-68. These artworks, although very different, represent an emerging conceptual style following the formal reductions of minimal art. Each analyzes the nature of language and meaning and engages a more expansive dialogue with the fraught politics of the late 1960s.

To start, Arakawa’s Still Life helps us comprehend the self-defeating quality of strictly rational linear thought. The predominating visual feature is the phrase “A LINE IS A CRACK” stenciled at the center of the canvas. At the lower left is a small diagram with the following information, “Title: Still Life,” “Name: Arakawa,” and “Date: Feb. 01, 1967”. The phrase is an homage to the artist’s friend and most important interlocutor, Marcel Duchamp, and possibly in reference to the elder Frenchman’s artwork Three Standard Stoppages, 1913-14. In Duchamp’s work, three separate, one-meter-long strings were dropped onto three canvas strips, to which they were then adhered. As one can imagine, once the strings landed, they had the appearance of random curves. Each of the threads is still one meter in length, but the work undermines the conventional, straight-line standard of measurement. Contours of these lines were later projected on glass, where they then had the appearance of cracks. Arakawa was deeply impressed by the premise of Duchamp’s work, that is, a revolution against absolutist thinking. As he wrote in a later polemic, “A Line is a Crack, Separated Continuums, Early Lines Paintings Untitled”: “For an individual to avoid absolutism he must question his beliefs, his coices [sic]. Yet even a critical choice contains an implicit belief which can only be confirmed or neutralized through investigation [and] modification.”

Accordingly, Arakawa's artworks are often positioned in relation to the beholder as investigations, mental exercises that question the underpinnings of knowledge. His The Mechanism of Meaning 8. Reassembling. Fig. 8.2, 1963-71/79, drawn from an ongoing series of large-scale canvases asking the viewer to probe their perceptions of art, helps us enter this discussion more fully. At the top of this monumental painting are two squares labeled "A" and "B". Within Square A is a squiggly line and Square B is quartered into four smaller squares, with the lower right-hand corner painted black. Beneath these boxes is the stenciled instruction: "Perceive A as B," and the further information, "Immediately upon recognition of this problem, solution may be provided (triggered by underlying similarity?) by an instantaneous diversion of A into B. If not, the following exercises may aid subsequent transformations." Underneath this, there are five "diffusions," Arakawa's term for visual puzzles, for the viewer to decipher. In the bottom register of the painting there is a rectangle containing three elements: a graphic of a lightbulb, a real, readymade lightbulb socket, and a piece of duct tape with the stenciled words "100 watt," suggesting three expressions of electrical power manifest as light.

The proposed thought experiment takes two pictures - the squiggle and the squares - to be related in an underlying, but not immediately accessible, way. The expressiveness of the looping line in Square A resembles automatic drawing championed by the surrealists as an exercise for applying chance methods to mark-making. André Masson's Automatic Drawing, 1924 is just one convenient example of the method itself. Many avant-garde artists of the day - Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso - employed various automatic drawing techniques that eventually were incorporated into paintings and sculptures.

Square B, with its symmetrical divisions of space, not only refers to chance methods (i.e., the random assignment of the black square to the lower right), but also to the pared down, geometrical aesthetics of the early twentieth century. Here, one might think of Piet Mondrian’s abstract, two-dimensional paintings of the late 1910s and 1920s, compositions that use the grid to relieve painting of its mimetic function and, in so doing, the privileges and hierarchies inherent in the Western tradition of painting to that point.

Both examples, Masson and Mondrian, surrealism and neoplasticism, are, in fact, linked in the history of modernism as utopian movements that sought to access a profound universal visual language. Surrealism was universalist in the sense that it aimed to defeat a repressive world order coming out of World War One, itself an invention of inflexible politicians, in favor of a world of abundant creativity bubbling up from the individual subconscious. For its part, neoplasticism advocated for purity on formal terms: the grid was an essential, infinite, and regularized composition, and the primary palette plus black and white provided an essential, unpolluted color scheme. Like surrealism, neoplasticism had a spiritual dimension, too. Mondrian, for instance, believed that the harmony of pared-back, abstract shapes led to greater enlightenment and the defeat of materialism. To return to Arakawa: Square A and Square B are proposed initially as visual opposites, but in fact, are deeply linked when we introduce the historical context.

Along with Arakawa, Joseph Kosuth was in the late 1960s thinking through the status or nature of art within history and was also deeply influenced by the anti-art ideas of Duchamp. Kosuth’s contribution to the Moratorium exhibition was a large 1968 photostat of the dictionary definition of the word “meaning.” His dictionary panels are accompanied by certificates (not displayed) indicating that the works can be remade for exhibition purposes. This is conceptualism par excellence: the meaning of the work does not inhere in the object itself, which is perfunctory. Rather, it is the idea behind the work that qualifies it as art.

Although Kosuth’s First Investigations were made from 1966-68, he sourced dictionaries from at least a decade earlier. The artwork included in for Art for the Moratorium shows the definition for “meaning” entered in the College Edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, originally published in 1951 and reprinted throughout the 1950s and 1960s until the re-edited Second College Edition was published in 1970. Some of the other selected definitions include “art,” “content,” and “definition.” The artistic proposition of the First Investigations is the repackaging of agreed-upon language from the 1950s and early 1960s for consideration in the late 1960s (and beyond). This was also a political proposition, since it measured the beholder’s respect for precedent (i.e., “conservative”) versus a desire to modify or obliterate the old order (i.e., “progressive”).

The 1960s was a fast-moving decade. In the United States, the early years saw an emergence from the aftermath of World War II and the American victory culture of the 1950s. A young and cosmopolitan President John F. Kennedy symbolized the hope of a generational transition when he and his much-admired wife, Jacqueline, entered the White House in 1961. The Civil Rights Movement was rooted in peaceful demonstration and a new stirring of feminism illuminated a path to greater equality. But over the course of the decade and owing to Kennedy’s tragic assassination in 1963, many Americans lost faith in the ability of leaders to create real change. It became apparent very quickly that social reform did not actually correct the power imbalances underpinning racism, sexism, and other ugly forms of prejudice. As the decade reached its end, little had changed, and some believed that a more radical approach was required.

Artists naturally positioned themselves within these turning tides. In the early 1960s, some artists reflected the period’s cool restraint through elegant, sparse forms. Think of Morris Louis’s sensuous, diaphanous veil paintings, for example, or Ruth Asawa’s graceful tied-wire sculptures. When radicalism surged in the late 1960s, however, many artists revolutionized their thinking. Art became a potential form of activism and a necessary confrontation to prevailing structures of power. It is no wonder why Duchamp became celebrated as a role model for these subversive practices. His example prompted artists like Arakawa and Kosuth to interrogate inherited forms of knowledge as the crucial first step toward critiquing absolute authority.

Kosuth’s engagement with activism is well known. In 1969, Kosuth linked up with the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC), a loosely affiliated organization of artists advocating for reforms within cultural institutions. Its now-infamous Open Hearing held at the School of Visual Arts in New York in April 1969 was a wide-ranging indictment not only of the art world, but also the Vietnam War-era at large, and was one of the most visible instances of artist activism in the twentieth century. Just in advance of the Moratorium exhibition at Castelli, and concurrently with the Moratorium march on Washington, DC, Kosuth published the essay “Art after Philosophy” in Studio International (October 1969), one of the earliest theoretical texts supporting the emergent conceptual art. In it, Kosuth argued that the job of the artist was to question the very cultural significance of art. Following Duchamp, Kosuth maintained that it boiled down to language—to say something is “art” makes it necessarily true. Therefore, “artness” is defined by its embeddedness in what we might call discourse: any number of social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that authorize what an art object is and looks like.

That is why Arakawa’s and Kosuth’s appearance in the Moratorium exhibition at Castelli mattered. It gave these artists, and the others on view, an opening to think beyond the modernist paradigm of a politically neutralized, white-walled space, to showcase artwork in the context of a consequential history that surely informed it. Both Arakawa and Kosuth believed that the so-called meaning of art was disseminated into any number of historically contingent tropes. Both believed that confronting the viewer with language could inspire the reimagination of aesthetic experience and bring about new goals and uses for artwork. As with Johns, it is impossible to know exactly whether either of these artists were overtly political in their specific selection of works to contribute to Art for the Moratorium, but it is at the same time believable that, in the radical milieu of the late 1960s, these artworks would not be separated from the anti-authoritarian stance that animated the antiwar movement. For those willing to see it, the Moratorium provided an overarching context, one possible meaning among manifold others, that anchored these seemingly affectless conceptual artworks in a very consequential time and place.

At last, we return to the New York Times front page. Its meaning, too, is more than meets the eye. It presents yet another confrontation with language: maybe not a conceptual artwork unto itself, but notwithstanding a comparable object that puts images and text into juxtaposition and relies on a reader to make inferences about what they see. If you recall, the front page was crisply divided down the middle, separating the items about the Vietnam War and protest from other news. But let us read this page as Arakawa might have as a mechanism of meaning, to think across the dividing line (after all, a line is a crack). Then we would see that, all appearances to the contrary, the day’s “other” front-page news is also all about Vietnam. Tom Seaver, one of the most valuable pitchers in Mets history, was a Vietnam War protestor, which was no timid stance to have in baseball, the most traditional of American sports. The Somali president’s assassination led the coup d’état to align with the Soviet Union, and therefore was a threat to democracy in Africa—in the heated parlance of the day, another ‘domino’ falling to communism. The synod’s investigation on the weakening of the Church was attributed, in part, to the increasing voices of its activist, antiwar priests, who blurred the line between politics and religion. The oil policy reform bill that failed in front of Congress was related to Royal Dutch Shell’s finding of massive oil reserves in Indonesia, requiring the United States to shore up its allies in Southeast Asia. And Eisenhower’s appearance on the dollar coin would have unsettled critics of the former president’s vast American investments in South Vietnam, all of which set the tone for the ensuing conflict in the 1960s. In short, Vietnam was the predominating issue of the day, the context supplying meaning to a full range of its political, social, and cultural happenings.

Revolutionary thinking is to perceive “A” as “B,” to continuously question what we see or read. In 1969, even not-Vietnam meant Vietnam.