In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

212 13 art in revolt On the eve of Duchamp’s apotheosis at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a new generation of Dada-like art began to percolate from unseen corners of America. Not knowing this, Duchamp was inclined to protest the absence of artistic rebels in postwar America, which he viewed as awash in the retinal art of Abstract Expressionism. “There is no spirit of revolt—no new ideas appearing among the younger artists,” he said.1 Although Duchamp did not see it, an indigenous American revolt, to be called “neo-Dada,” emerged in the 1950s. One of its early appearances —as if a replay of Duchamp’s mustache on the Mona Lisa—was the day in 1953 when Robert Rauschenberg, age twenty-eight, erased a drawing done by the Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, titling the blank image, Erased de Kooning Drawing. Neo-Dada, with its American roots, arose as a second wing of the avant-garde. With no money to go on, it was a lesser twin to the avantgarde establishment, which was based in the museums and galleries of upper Manhattan. Duchamp had become a part of this uptown establishment , as had the Abstract Expressionists, the Surrealists, and a circle of curators, critics, and dealers who still looked to Europe. It was only a matter of time before some wag spoke of “black-tie Dada,” a world of tuxedos and evening dress, art galas and gallery receptions. As the poorer cousin, the avant-garde world of neo-Dada had different roots, percolating out of lower Manhattan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.2 It also bubbled up from an obscure North Carolina venue, the experimental art school Black Mountain College, which would exert a significant influence on the alternative art scene of 1950s New York City. Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 upon John Dewey’s learning theory (basically, the idea of learning by making things, and by students critiquing and managing their own curricula). The school met in a ymca lodge in the Blue Ridge Mountains, later moving across the valley to its own facility by a wooded lake. From the start, its painting program art in revolt || 213 was led by Josef Albers, former head of the Bauhaus school in Germany, after Albers had migrated to the United States. When Albers left, tapped by Yale University, Black Mountain College drifted in a more radical, antiaesthetic direction. That final push was helped along by two important figures , the musician John Cage and the visual artist Robert Rauschenberg. As the older of the two, Cage had already begun to create an antiaesthetic in music. In 1938 he invented the “prepared piano,” an instrument with objects stuck between its strings to create non-conventional sounds. A former student of the German atonal composer Arnold Schoenberg , Cage wanted to go further, much as Jarry had said, to “demolish even the ruins.” Like the anti-aesthetic in Dada art, or the Theater of the Absurd, Cage wanted to make anti-music, which was based on chance sounds. Beginning in 1948, Cage taught at Black Mountain College, where he met Rauschenberg who, before the school closed in 1957, had risen to be its chief artist in residence. Rauschenberg became Cage’s art advisor. When they both moved to New York City, it was Cage who became a professor —thus making him the most important influence on the arts. He became an impresario for the young artists. He taught at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, where a new generation of visual artists gathered around him.3 Cage argued that true “art” was based on anarchic processes, yet he did not seem to harbor the Parisian cynicism of a Jarry or Duchamp. Cage based his artistic nihilism on the I Ching and Zen Buddhism, both of which pictured the cosmos in a state of chance events and flux. Rauschenberg, in contrast, was a bit more like Jarry. It was to describe Rauschenberg and his rather seedy art—his “combines” of street detritus—that Artnews invented the term “neo-Dada” in 1958. When Duchamp arrived in New York in 1942, Cage was already moving in Manhattan’s avant-garde circles. He met Duchamp at Guggenheim’s social events in 1942. Privately, Cage admired Duchamp from a distance, but remarkably, he and Duchamp would not have a serious discussion for another twenty years (and that was about chess, not art). Professor Cage’s influence on New York’s neo-Dada...

Share