Ashbery, O'Hara, and The Neo-Avant-Garde Manifesto

MARK SILVERBERG Ashbery, O'Hara, and The NeoAvant>Garde Manifesto To be what people call anti-art is really to affirm art, in the same way that an atheist affirms God. The only way to be really anti-art is to be indifferent. Marcel Duchamp This essay is part of a larger project which considers John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and the New York school poets in general, in light of discussions about the neo-avant-garde. Following the work of art critics like Hal Foster, I use the term neo-avant-garde to define those movements of the 1950s and '60s which both revive and revise the achievements of the so-called historical avant-garde (that is, the movements of the early part of the century such as futurism, dada, surrealism). These neo-avant-garde movements—New York school poetry , pop art, conceptual art, etc.—draw on the historical avant-garde's techniques such as collage, montage, assemblage, the readymade, but at the same time are extremely critical ofwhat they came to understand as the avant-garde's ideological orientation, particularly in terms of its antagonistic or oppositional stance. This understanding of the avantgarde is historically specific to the United States in the 1950s and '60s where the avant-garde outsider—whether in the form of absttact expressionist Jackson Pollock, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, or movie star James Dean—was fast becoming an insider and trendsetter, as the mass media reduced cultural radicalism to lifestyle, celebrity, and fashion. At a time when "the break with tradition" had become the tradition and when avant-gardism was reduced to a consumer novelty, a new kind of aesthetic-ideological position needed to be found. In order to look Arizona Quarterly Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2003 Copyright © 2003 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 6 10 138Mark Silverberg more closely at the aesthetic ideologies of the period, this paper focuses on that genre where ideology is often most bluntly articulated: the manifesto. In Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern Janet Lyon argues that the manifesto is the signature genre for avant-garde groups since it is the form which most clearly links the aesthetic and political disruptions of these movements. This linkage can be seen in the way that members of the historical avant-garde adapted what was originally a political form of revolutionary discourse to "signal their own radical departures from bourgeois artistic forms and practices" (5). Lyon and before her Marjorie Perloff in The Futurist Moment (1986) outline many of the typical gestures and strategies of these early manifestoes: their heated, passionate , and often militaristic tones; their angry rejections of the past and calls for immediate action; and their ubiquitous use of the pronoun "we," a gesture which supposedly supports the manifesto's claim to speak for the people. Yet paradoxically, as Lyon notes, while many manifestoes claim to be egalitarian they "create audiences through a rhetoric of exclusivity" (2-3). While the putative purpose of many artistic manifestoes is to set out an aesthetic program, this aim often seems ancillary to the purpose of naming an enemy. Through an usversus -them binary (variously manifested in the oppositional pairings of son/father, life/death, reality/illusion, present/past) the new art is contrasted with an oh form which must be overthrown. Here, for example , is Marinetti's infamous 1909 Manifesto of Futurism: Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia , the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. . . . We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice. . . . We establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene ofprofessors, archaeologists , ciceroni and antiquarians. (21, 22) All these standard militaristic gestures ("the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap"), and many more like them, add up to an image of the avant-garde as an adversary culture, a culture of opposi- The Neo-Avant-Garde Manifesto139 tion. Moreover, as Marinetti makes amply clear, the avant-garde is a marginal culture that seeks to become central—to...