By 1974, the New Sensibility, no less than Burden, was alive and prospering, a position that it continues to hold in American culture. The New Sensibility still causes controversy even as it has become ubiquitous. In its best emanations it remains both outrageous and outstanding.
John Cage, who was there at the beginning, was still up to his old tricks in 1974. Now in his early sixties, he decided to return, in a sense, to the silence of 4’33”—but with a change, of course. He would include spoken words, more or less, in his new piece, Empty Words, presented at the Naropa Institute in Boulder in August. Cage averred that there were twenty-seven different things you could do with/to a sentence. He chose as his base text Thoreau’s Journals (mainly sentences dealing with music and sound). He parsed, splayed, split, and did all sorts of other things to the sentences, using the method he derived from the I Ching. The results were then transcribed into four “lectures,” with each subsequent lecture more disjointed than the last. In a radio interview prior to the performance, Cage suggested that potential concertgoers without tickets need not worry if the concert was sold out. Just wait outside for a short time, he advised. Plenty of seats would soon become available.
With good reason. The concert was, in effect, an A-bomb dropped on syntax. Silences of inordinate length were punctuated by what seemed to be an occasional bird call. Cage read, with his glorious basso voice, such things as the following: “Bou-a the dherlyth gth db tgn-phl ng.” This “nonsyntactical writing” was meaninglessness—in all languages, he proudly declared.
The lecture had been scheduled for two hours. The audience grew restive toward the hour-and-a-half mark, some began to laugh, some to yell, while others tossed objects onto the stage, engaging in their own forms of entertainment to fill the silence. Allen Ginsberg feared for Cage’s safety, so along with some pals he formed a protective cordon around the artist. Cage confronted the audience with an apt summation of his career and of the logic of the New Sensibility: “I know what limb I’m out on, I’ve known it all my life.” He further urged the audience to open itself up to boredom and meaninglessness. This had long constituted Cage’s royal road to creativity and freedom—it could change the world by opening minds and thereby dethroning militarism and totalitarianism. In Boulder, Cage had failed to open many minds. But his audience had become part of the performance, a key element in the aesthetic of the New Sensibility.1
A year later, Lou Reed shocked audiences with his latest album. He had been a member of the Velvet Underground, which began as a sort of house band for Andy Warhol. They would play while Warhol films were projected behind them. A rock poet of considerable talent, with an effectively monotone voice and prickly demeanor, Reed had sung of heroin highs, copping drugs, transvestites, and the grit of despondency. In the process, miraculously, listeners felt liberated. But in his album Metal Machine Music (two discs!), he took a new turn. Reed offered an explosion of feedback from two guitars, each tuned in an unusual manner. The music sounded like a massive traffic jam, horns blaring, brakes screeching. In its own manner, the “music” was as much a drone as Cage’s earlier music had been, but without the mesmerizing effects. Some wondered if the album was a sick joke or prank, perhaps Reed’s angry settlement of a contractual obligation with a record company. Maybe Reed was following in the footsteps of the avant-garde, taking Cage’s excessive minimalism into the realm of excessive maximalism. Reed claimed that Metal Machine Music “would clear the room” and that he had not even fully listened to it himself.
The result, opined music critic James Wolcott in Rolling Stone, was “a jab of contempt,” a “droning, shapeless provocation.” The New Sensibility, after all, had been enshrined for years now; could this sort of excess (“like the tubular-groaning of a galactic refrigerator”) be expected to upset anyone? To Walcott it seemed, then, a bit “old-fashioned.”2
Wolcott raised a significant question, applicable to the New Sensibility or to any avant-garde. At what point might they become repetitive and exhausted? And there are other questions, first raised in the introduction, to be answered: Does excess have its limits? Is the New Sensibility anything more than a mere product to be consumed? On the one hand, it could easily be argued that the excess today—in confessionalism, violence, sexual explicitness, blurred genres—that had its origins in the New Sensibility has grown stale, trite, and commodified. On the other hand, and this is my own view, the New Sensibility, ushered in with Cage’s excess in minimalism and maximalism back in 1952, remains vibrant today and is essential to creative growth, despite obvious misfires. The excess of the New Sensibility is to be celebrated, not as a simple end, but as a process, an experimental imperative for finding new truths, new critiques, and going in new creative directions. Although this book has concluded with 1974, the New Sensibility lives on, with ever new emanations.
Punk music, which exploded on the scene in the early 1970s and continued throughout the decade, was certainly an ode to excess. Or at least to energy and noise—and to rebellion, decadence, and liberation. In its highest moments—with groups such as The Ramones, Television, and The Stooges—it could be excitedly anarchic: an apocalyptic, Dionysian ritual made flesh. The surging energy of punk often swerved in dangerous directions. Thanks to excessive intake of drugs, on the part of both the performers and the audience, shows were often calamitous. Performers challenged the audience—and vice versa—with vehemence and violence. Fights broke out regularly. Iggy Pop vomited onstage, staggered in a drug- and drink-infused haze, and sometimes fell into the audience. Occasionally, he was covered with blood yet still pumping out his songs. For all of its obvious excess, in some ways, punk was also a return to roots, to the early days of rock, when the lyrics were simple and the musicianship rudimentary—a sort of eternal return.3 Punk also offered a sense of community and liberation, a refusal to bow to constraints and expectations.
Punk, with its elementary excess followed a path already traveled by Cage, Ginsberg, the Living Theatre crew, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Would these exemplars of the New Sensibility have welcomed punk into the tradition? Who knows, who cares? Norman Mailer praised the expressive power of graffiti in 1974, and John Cage was adored by many in punk music, ranging from Patti Smith to Richard Hell, David Byrne, and Debbie Harry. Other initiators of the New Sensibility refused to go with the cultural flow. Yet Iggy Pop delighted in Allen Ginsberg, and Ginsberg delightedly returned the favor by photographing Iggy.4
The essential excess and subject matter of the New Sensibility thrived during the economic downturn of the 1970s and was buoyed by capitalism run amok during the 1980s. In that period of greed, captured so strikingly in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), excess in art fit snugly—in terms of scale, dismissal of traditional boundaries between high and low, and in profitability. In some cases, as historian David Steigerwald and others argue, where there is a “proliferation of products,” fashion trumps originality or channels it into the mainstream.5 This may be true in some cases, but not in all.
The artist Jeff Koons may be exemplary of the troubled connection between art and commerce, in the New Sensibility being packaged for ready consumption. Before he became a full-time artist, he was a commodities broker. He followed Warhol in terms of literally opening a factory, with scores of employees, to produce art of vast scale, favoring a camp or kitsch sort of style. By the 1980s, he was ubiquitous on the art scene, with works that featured, for example, basketballs floating on distilled and salted water, inflatable toys, and strange sculptures. Perhaps his most infamous work, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), was a set of three pieces, depicting the reigning rock star with his pet chimpanzee. One of the pieces sold at auction for $5.8 million—a feast of excess, at least for the artist. Koons also worked with various media for a series that explored, as explicitly as possible, the sexual pleasure he enjoyed with his wife, Ilona Staller, who was a porn star. That work was shown in a major show at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1991. But, then again, he does sometimes hit the mark with his over the top art, as in his large-scale paintings of tulips.6
In all areas of American culture, from the 1970s to the present, a sense of excess has continued unabated.7 Take the confessional turn. In 1978, historian and critic Christopher Lasch coined the term “the culture of narcissism” as a critique of what he viewed as the increasingly hedonistic and empty culture of the “me” generation with its members’ need to talk self-centeredly about themselves and their “issues.” Confessionalism became a cultural commonplace, with Oprah in the 1980s and then with the nastiness of The Jerry Springer Show in the 1990s. Reality television programs such as The Real World in the 1990s and Jersey Shore more recently, and the bare-all emotional revealing in books by Elizabeth Wurtzel and Emily Gould, have raised gossip and confession to levels of excess heretofore unimaginable. The precursor confessionalism of Sexton and Mailer, once so radical, now appears dainty and subdued. As the decades have unfolded, the confessional imperative (often unedited and spontaneous) has become ubiquitous, thanks also to new technological options—blogs and tweets. Indeed, in 2008 the word “overshare” (to reveal too much in public) had entered into Webster’s New World Dictionary.8
So too had excess in performance (with a violent edge) moved well beyond the confines of Chris Burden’s pieces. Johnny Knoxville and his Jackass cohort (appearing on television and films) demonstrate either how stupid they are for attempting dangerous stunts or how an army of viewers is prepped for the potential vicarious thrill of someone else getting seriously injured. For example, in an early stunt, Knoxville donned an inexpensive bulletproof vest and shot himself in the chest with a .38-caliber handgun. The distance from the violence of Chris Burden to that of Johnny Knoxville may not be that large, but it is significant. At least in Burden’s work, as pondered by critic and poet Maggie Nelson, the audience was implicated in the violence—if in no other fashion than by their refusal to intervene and put a stop to it.9 The passive reception of violence in film (as well as in video games) has reached epic proportions. Consider the popularity of such films as Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005). In the latter, directed by Eli Roth, people are tortured, body parts severed, and gore served up as the raison d’être for entertainment. A recent television program, Fargo, features excellent acting and spirited dialogue. But must each scene of violence go on for a moment or two longer, so that the blood oozes, the pain pulsates with such abandon?
Despite, or perhaps because of, its ubiquity, the New Sensibility has retained the power to outrage. Beginning in the late 1980s, as the so-called culture wars began to rage and the conservative and Christian revolution took center stage, there was an angry reaction. On the Senate floor Alfonse D’Amato of New York damned Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, which was a plastic crucifix submerged in Serrano’s urine. The fact that it had been displayed in a museum that had received some funding from the National Endowment for the Arts provoked his anger. The case of the “NEA four” spurred further controversy in 1990. Four edgy performance artists—Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes—had been cleared to receive grants, until a newspaper column revealed the sorts of things that they did in their art. Finley, who had long explored in her performance pieces the status of women in a rape culture, the suicide of her father, and more, became tarred as the “chocolate lady” because she had on occasion covered herself with chocolate during performances. “Art as transgression, or any transgressive act,” wrote Finley, “becomes a Rorschach test for the culture.”10 Such has always been the case with the New Sensibility.
These artists were sometimes outrageous and excessive, willing to push the boundaries of audience expectations and comfort levels. My wife and I were among the first to arrive for a Tim Miller performance in Santa Barbara, and she suggested that we take seats in the front row. I demurred, preferring the relative anonymity and protection of the middle of the small auditorium. Was I right! At one point in the performance, Miller grabbed the leg of a fellow sitting in the front row and proceeded to masturbate himself against it.
There seemed no end to the controversies of the 1990s. Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of sadomasochism further inflamed the culture wars, finally resulting in the cutting off of funding for NEA grants to individual artists. The government exited itself from supporting such edgy art. Liberals (such as Tipper Gore) and conservatives united in their distaste for the excessive violence and misogyny (not to mention crude language) of rap music. Despite occasional lawsuits and public eruptions against specific shows, the art of excess shows no signs of abating.
Excess, as exemplified by the New Sensibility, is not, of course, to everyone’s tastes. When its form is uncontrolled and its performers mostly interested in growing rich and famous, then its cultural presence can be troubling, even degrading. One could also argue that the excess that had once been relevant for shock and artistic progress in the 1960s quickly became numbing, necessitating an upping of the voltage. Given the acceleration in violence (in Vietnam and urban crime) and in pornography (readily available in neighborhood theaters), had Carolee Schneemann’s 1964 celebration of a communal sense of liberation (bodily and spiritually) in Meat Joy (chapter 13) become tame and irrelevant? Paul McCarthy’s critique of it, Sailor’s Meat (1975), was about detachment, denigration, and desperation. Transgressive sex and food consumption were linked like sausages in McCarthy’s work. Aware of the problem of liberation through transgression (cooptation of pleasure by a commodity culture and the postmodern dilemma of finding an outside point for criticism and more), McCarthy critiqued Schneemann’s seemingly naive optimism of freedom through excess. She worked within the folds of the New Sensibility as developed, for example, by Samuel R. Delany. For a tradition to thrive, it must be open to the point of almost breaking.11
There is much in the recent years of the New Sensibility (now, of course, not so new, but ever developing) that should be applauded. The drive for excess and the subject matter of the New Sensibility remain essential for continued cultural openness and creativity. It is at its best, in my view, when vision and execution jibe with an acute appreciation for what historian Roger Shattuck once referred to as the tension between “liberation and limits.” Such balancing upon the high wire of the New Sensibility has made possible television series such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. So, too, the experimental and bounding work of such diverse artists as poets Franz Wright and Anne Carson (whose work defies genres), novelists Ben Lerner and Kate Zambreno, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, photographer Nan Goldin, comedian Sarah Silverman, and rapper Kanye West, to name but a few.
Consider an especially monumental work of excess, as growing out of the tradition of the New Sensibility: Kara Walker’s sculptural piece A Subtlety. The work overflows with meaning and is over the top in scale. A “subtlety” was once a term for sculptural sugary confections made for wealthy folks to admire and then devour. And, with delicious irony, Walker nods toward the reality that the sugar used for much of the sweet things in life, at least into the nineteenth century, came from the backbreaking work of slaves in the Caribbean who produced it for export. Walker’s piece acknowledges this but goes beyond it. The temporary work, which debuted in spring 2014, was exhibited in the soon-to-be demolished Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, a familiar site for New Yorkers. In that building, often under harsh working conditions, workers (mainly African American) had processed the sugar that became a dangerous staple of the American diet. Walker’s sculpture, contained within the immense factory building, was outsized. Using huge pieces of polystyrene as the skeleton, Walker then applied a “skin” made out of sugar (mixed with water for adhesion). The sculpture weighed thirty-five tons and was thirty-five feet high and seventy-five feet long. Although white because of the sugar, the sculpture clearly depicted a mammy figure, full breasted and thick-lipped, sphinx-like, wearing a bandana. The figure’s butt and vulva are fully in evidence. In addition to the monumental mammy sphinx, there are smaller figures of young boys, five feet high, carrying trays. The melting of their sugar bodies is suggestive of bleeding, of centuries of suffering.
The ironies of the piece are obvious. Begin with its title: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. So much for subtlety. This is about representations of gender, about the realities of race, labor, and oppression—about the “blood sugar” appearing on American tables. But the piece is linked to the New Sensibility by its nerve, edge, temporality, bulk, and in-your-face attitude.
Excess tempered by the limitations of history, pain, and an artist’s sensibility in this case made for great art—a feast of excess, if you will.12