BOOKS
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Kooning's
Excavation
contains no specific reference to the urban environ–
ment, it reflects the discord and chaos of the city." Similarly, Garafola says of
the "leotard" ballets: "Balanchine laid bare the anguish of sexual relationships
and the ambiguity of sexual identity. With their chance encounters, mechani–
cal
pleasures, calculated seductions, and abrupt departures, his matings belong
to the lore of the city."
Poststructuralist critics might argue that Ashton's and Garafola's social
interpretations are circular and tenuous: looking for urban themes in the
work of New York painters and choreographers, they find them,
if
only by
inference or suggestion. Yet this is precisely what makes their essays so
valuable. Instead of simply cataloguing the painting and ballet of the period -
the two arts which, along with jazz, truly put New York culture on the world
map in the late forties - they show how the city rhythm worked its way into
the art itself, its forms, its materials and deep structures. These intrepid critics
have the courage of their intuitions. They understand that all interpretation is
metaphoric, even allegorical - a leap from the work of art to some frame of
meaning. They insist that even abstract art has a profound
if
elusive social
basis. Their work demonstrates how all criticism is a form ofcultural history.
When Ashton deals with the sculpture of David Smith or Louise Bour–
geois, or with Pop Art, or with the "assemblages" of Claes Oldenburg (like
"The Store," 1960), her way of 'reading' the social subtext seems fully
justified. With their found materials, Smith, Rauschenberg, and Oldenburg in–
corporated the endless bric-a.-brac of city life, the waste and detritus of urban
living, into their work, just as Frank O'Hara integrated the spontaneous
urban moment into
his
casual-seeming poetry.
One of the great strengths of the city was (and still is) the sheer mass
ofartists occupying the same spaces - the Village, Soho, the Lower East Side
- going to the same bars, galleries, poetry readings, and jazz clubs, seeing the
same little magazines. This has not only engendered groups and cliques of
like-minded friends - the New York poets, the Abstract Expressionists, the
New York intellectuals - but also incited remarkable crossings between the
arts, between the Beats and some jazz performers, between New York
painters and poets, choreographers and composers, choreographers and set
designers, between certain painters and the intellectuals who famously theo–
rized their work. Writers and painters can work alone, though they also may
thrive in the kind of communal environment that supports experimentation.
Performance, on the other hand, is nearly always collaborative; the mixed–
media avant garde of the postwar years was something New York alone
made possible.
Cultural crossover is one of the themes ofJohn Rockwell's exemplary
essay, which is virtually a history of New York's musical life over the last
century and a half. To Rockwell, who writes strongly about both the pop
scene and classical music, New York is the kind ofcity that could produce, out
