PARTISAN REVIEW
365
think there's any category that is junk in the hands of a talented
artist.
PHILLIPS: You realise what you're doing is paying a tribute
to
great art.
WOOD: That's right. But I've never intended to do anything other than
pay tribute to great art; I just think it can be found in many places.
STANLEY KAUFFMA : I just want
to
ask a question that's on the letter
that was sent out and bring it to the attention of the panelists and the
audience. I don 't think it's been discussed. "Is there a genuine avant–
garde today or has its role been taken over by the media?" I don't
think Ms. Krauss was talking about that. She was talking how the
use of a medium can make a difference in avant-garde art. That's
quite a different subject, as acrylics or plexiglass can be used in
avant-garde art.
First of all, I'd like to know what the question means and then
I'd like, if someone understands it, to try to answer it. "Is there an
avant-garde today?" That's clear enough. "Or has its role been taken
over by the Media?" -I don't know what that means.
KRAUSS: Mr. Kauffman, I was trying to address that question. I was
saying that I think that the avant-garde has absorbed the Media in a
very deep way and the meaning that is now being produced by that
avant-garde-not just in painting and sculpture, but in literature
and the theater as well-is now mostly a recapitulation of the
message of the original media-of newspapers, television, etc.
KAUFFMAN: I agree with a good deal of what you said and I'd just like
to
add a couple of examples in a different field. I wrote a little
something about this lately, that younger German and Austrian
writers, playwrights, poets, novelists, film-makers, who came to
maturity after the Second World War, grew up in a country which
either had no popular culture, or had remnants, tag-ends of a
popular culture they didn't trust. The vacuum had
to
be filled
because children and young adolescents don't live by High Culture.
They live by popular culture and American culture filled that gap
for them: Armed Forces Radio, films, comic books, etc. They then
grew to maturity, nourished in a certain way by popular culture. But
they then ingested it and transcended it and you get plays like Peter
Handke's, in which rock music is exalted into something else. You
get films like Wim Wender's. You get films like the ones that came
from France in the fifties and the sixties. And you get a kind of union
that is one index of what a future could be, toward a solution of what
in this country is largely still a battle. It's almost as if that starvation
period that existed for this young group after the Second World War
