118
PARTISAN REVIEW
The art world's intensified sense of historical conSCiOusness
demands that the processes of making and viewing art become ever
more complex, further and further removed from their primitive
origins. The most ambitious presentation of this linear, progressive,
and evolutionary view of art history is Suzi Gablik's book
Progress in
Art.
She argues that "stylistic change reflects varying modes of cog–
nitive-logical capacity, suggesting that the history of art may be seen
as an evolution in certain kinds of thought processes." The evolu–
tion she traces is from prelogical or mystical mentalities-marked by
a blurring of the distinction between subject and object-toward
more detached, scientific, and objective modes of thought.
"It
is
only in the art of our own time," she writes, "that the logical mecha–
nisms of intelligence have come to their fullest maturity in the sense
of becoming entirely separated from perceptual content. ... " This
requires that the artwork be dematerialized, that it exist essentially
as a mental construct, as pure information.
Can dance achieve a comparable degree of evolutionary com–
plexity? Rudolf Arnheim, commenting on the modern dancer's ten–
dency to initiate movements from the torso, once asked:
Does this mean then , that in the dance the conception of man is
reduced to a biologically lower, precerebral stage? The dancer
seems to be faced with the dilemma that functionally the highest,
specifically human powers of the nervous system control the
organism from the head , while the visible structure of the body
suggests as the center an area that typically produces non-reflec–
tive action, such as in fear, sex, or the lazy stretching of the
muscles.
Of course, primitivists exalt dance for precisely these reasons.
But Cunningham and the postmodernists have attempted to reverse
this evolutionary mandate. Cunningham's dances demand an
unprecedented degree of alertness and mental agility (from those
who perceive them as well as from those who perform them). Carolyn
Brown, for many years a leading member of his company, has com–
mented that Cunningham technique is "designed to develop flexi–
bility in the mind as well as in the body." Is it purely coincidental
that one essential aspect of Cunningham's break with Graham and
modern dance was his reaffirmation of balletic
verticality
(in contrast
!
to the floor-hugging heaviness of the early moderns)?
In a remarkable meditation on the evolutionary significance of
upright posture, the psychologist Erwin Strauss speaks of "the gaze
