20
ROBERT
JAY
LIFTON
ments has been aptly named "action painting" to convey its stress
upon process rather than fixed completion. And a more recent and
related movement in sculpture, called Kinetic Art, goes further. Ac–
cording to Jean Tinguely, one of its leading practitioners, "artists
are putting themselves in rhythm with their time, in contact with
their epic, especially with permanent and perpetual movement."
As
revolutionary as any style or approach is the stress upon innovation
per se which now dominates painting. I have frequently heard artists,
themselves considered radical innovators, complain bitterly of the
current standards dictating that "innovation is all," and of a turn–
over in art movements so rapid as to discourage the idea of holding
still long enough to develop a particular style.
We also learn much from film stars. Marcello Mastroianni, when
asked whether he agreed with
Time
magazine's characterization of
him as "the neo-capitalist hero," gave the following answer:
In many ways, yes. But I don't think I'm any kind of hero, neo–
capitalist or otherwise.
If
anything I am an
anti-hero
or at most a
non-hero. Time
said I had the frightened, characteristically 20th–
century look, with a spine made of plastic napkin rings. I accepted
this- because modern man is that way; and being a product of my
time and an artist, I can represent him.
If
humanity were all one
piece, I would be considered a weakling.
Mastroianni accepts his destiny as protean man; he seems to realize
that there are certain advantages to having a spine made of plastic
napkin rings, or at least that it is an appropriate kind of spine to
have these days.
John Cage, the composer, is an extreme exponent of the protean
style, both in his music and in his sense of all of us as listeners. He
concluded a recent letter to the
Village Voice
with the sentence:
"Nowadays, everything happens at once and our souls are conveni–
ently electronic, omniattentive." The comment is McLuhan-like, but
what I wish to stress particularly is the idea of omniattention - the
sense of contemporary man as having the possibility of "receiving"
and "taking in" everything. In attending, as in being, nothing is "off
limits."
To be sure, one can observe in contemporary man a tendency
which seems to be precisely the opposite of the protean style. I refer
to the closing off of identity or constriction of self-process, to a straight-
