Martin Green—New York 1913

Martin Green
New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant
(1990)

[4] ...I derive some terms from Susan Sontag's essay on "The Aesthetics of Silence." She there discusses modernist art primarily, but she uses a vocabulary alien to ordinary
[5]
aesthetics. Her terms belong more to religion than to anything else. She says that, "Every era has to reinvent the project of 'spirituality' for itself." She defines spirituality in various ways which converge on the idea of ultimate value, or a religious transcendence of "the world," and continues, "In the modern era, one of the most active metaphors for the spiritual project is 'art.' The activities of the painter, the musician, the poet, the dancer, once they were grouped together under that generic name (a relatively recent move) have proved a particularly adaptable site on which to stage the formal dramas besetting consciousness . . .":

Well, I loves me some Susan but based on this retelling I'm quite confused as to just how a religious transcendence of "the world" follows quite so directly from any staging of those pesky formal dramas which are always besetting consciousness and sowing general mischief about the psyche.

these are, I take it, the dramas or crises of protest which express our need to transcend the ordinary conditions of life, the limited expectations and temperate temperatures with which we ordinarily pursue even artistic and intellectual concerns.

It would be simpler to say that we create what we need, but then there would be no transcendence and no spirituality to bandy about; and there would be formal dramas prominently involved only where we have either too much or not enough of them.

As so often, the Millennial usage of "drama" cannot have been intended, but honestly, for this Millennial, drama is drama, and I could pretty much do without it in art as in life, since I've found it equally hazardous in the one capacity as in the other, and for more or less the same reasons.

The point seems to be, in any case, that these artists didn't just need what they created. They reeeallly needed it baaad.

Thus she sums up the history of modernism in three anecdotes, about Rimbaud, about Wittgenstein, and about Duchamp, who turned away from poetry, philosophy, and painting to gunrunning, hospital work, and chess, respectively. She calls this their choosing silence, as far as their talents went, and she goes on to make the choice of silence characterize much of modern art, saying that that choice has become "a major standard of seriousness in contemporary aesthetics." And thus, "Modern art's chronic habit of displeasing, provoking, or frustrating its audience can be regarded as a limited, vicarious participation in the ideal of silence . . ."

What they needed so badly, then, was to displease, to provoke, to frustrate. Or rather, they needed to throw this particular shade on that audience which was theirs.

Does this sound to anyone else like the path of spiritual transcendence? Because it sure does not sound that way to me.

... I will note only that this paradox—not the paradox of Sontag's formula, but the facts it explains—an enthusiasm for art that expresses itself in silence, creates special problems for me as an interpreter of these events.

We're sorry, the problems you are trying to reach are not at this number. Please hang up and ground your analysis in earthly concerns rather than spiritual ones, and weigh these artists' actions more heavily than their words. Before redialing, move to a safe location where neither the artists themselves nor their commercial intermediaries nor their plebeian fanpersons can contact you directly.

The spirit of 1913 was an enthusiasm for communication.

Cool. So like, smoke signals, journal articles, leitmotifs, or what?

At least that was what the public prophets announced and what their audience thought they were getting—

Umm-hmm. But what did they actually get?

more and livelier exchanges of new ideas and hopes of mutual help. But some of the ideas thus welcomed turned out to be unhopeful and unhelpful,

Hey, it happens. Live by the communication, die by the communication.

or positively sardonic about art and politics. ... They led quite quickly to the dissolution of the spirit of 1913. To take care of that complexity, I
[6]
shall try to distinguish between the spirit of the times, so generous, hopeful, and experimental, and the ideas that spirit took up, but obviously that distinction can become tricky.

... For the moment I want to return to Sontag's idea of art as a metaphor for the spiritual project. I want to suggest that another such metaphor in modern times has been politics—at least a radical, populist, politics, such as those that inspired the Paterson Strike. Has it not been by participating in such politics that many people of our century have achieved, at least ideally, the experience of transcending the limits of the individual self?

One would hope, but there is the ever-present danger of the reverse.

...

[7] If we understand spirituality or transcendence in this extended sense, we can apply it to many of those involved in one or the other of our two events, and we can say that the spirit of 1913 was an aspiration to transcend what most people accepted as ordinary and so inevitable. It was the ordinariness of capitalism and liberalism and class hierarchy, in the case of the IWW strike; and in the case of the Armory Show, it was old forms of art, appreciation, and beauty. But the radicals in both cases said no to certain "facts of life."

This falls flat. I would think that no truly radical critique of capitalism and liberalism and class hierarchy could proceed from first normalizing any of these conditions; whereas there is always at least a facile case for considering art, even the most conventional or outmoded kinds, as enhancements of ordinary life.

One might even suggest that what they said no to was ultimately the same in both cases—in one important sense, it was ultimately the nineteeth-century bourgeois state as it had come to be seen by its intellectuals after the middle of the century and first of all in France. Of course the revolt against academic art was often remote from the revolt against factory wages and discipline, and I don't want to melt down those differences, but I suggest nevertheless that there was a connection, and one which was strongly felt in New York in 1913.

Well, as always, what was strongly felt and what was do not necessarily coincide. But in this case the point is just about incontrovertible.

Everyone must agree

I'm having a bit of trouble, actually.

at least that modernism and revolution are both forms of nay-saying: they deny what is and has been in the name of what should be; and therefore both are forms of spirituality.

Seriously? Sounds more like idealism mixed with skepticism. Which is admittedly is pretty much what I'm all about, along with a stiff cultural cocktail drink which is, it is true, often (if imprecisely) filed under this very heading of modernism. To wit, it may well be that this particular modernist episode was all about denying what is and has been in the name of what should be, but there are plenty of archetypal modernist artists (Picasso? Schoenberg?) for whom outright denial of what has been was unthinkable, i.e. for whom the assertion of what should be was affirmative of both the past and the future.

More exactly, they can be forms of spirituality, when their partisans are intense enough in their enthusiasm and large enough in their views.

Of course. Lots of things can be. But was they?

It is not appropriate to use such language about artists and politicans, however modern and radical, when they are concerning themselves, as they often must, with questions of technique, or of individual prestige, or of sectarian advantage. The same is true, after all, of people of religion, when they are absorbed in credal definitions, [etc., etc.]...Spirituality can be attributed only to certain phases of their lives.

Moreover, one should note that Sontag calls art only a metaphor for the spiritual project; and that is all I claim for politics.

Ok, this is where I always want to slam the book shut and toss it out of a moving train somewhere in that really shitty area between Commerce and Pico Rivera. If all that can be claimed is that all this heavy shit about transcendence and spirituality is merely a ten-dollar metaphor, then what is the point? Metaphors don't paint, protest, or consume.

...

Quoting Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform:

[21] To an extraor-
[22]
dinary degree, the work of the Progressive movement rested upon its journalism . . . It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind.

Well, if modernist art was animated by an enthusiasm for communication and the Progressive movement by its journalism, then maybe I'm neither a Modernist nor a Progressive after all.

[22] [Lincoln] Steffens more than anyone else invented the new journalism. When he joined the New York Commercial Advertiser in 1897, he had determined to change the paper and to create a new kind of newspaper writing. He hired new reporters and charged them to "see a murder as a tragedy rather than as a crime, a fire as a drama rather than as police news, and so on. These new journalists were mostly recent graduates from Harvard or some other Ivy League college; they aspired ultimately to write "literature"—it was one of their favorite words...

Ugh. Count me out.

[36] Sherwood Anderson says that when he first heard of Gertrude Stein, she was being praised with genuine admiration, for having put something over on the public. The idea (which is not appropriate to Stein, even after one has met all her intentions sympathetically) is that an artist may be an unscrupulous showman and self-publicist, while preserving a secret core of truth untainted.

Basically every atom in my body disagrees with this idea, and there is much, MUCH more to be said about this, even now with fifteen years of bloggerel lurking in the right sidebar. But most of it will have to wait for future reading projects to receive any more sophisticated treatment than I have already been able to give it.

Duchamp as well as Stein was treated generously in this country because—though not only because—they were seen as showmen. ...

America was the land of showmanship. ... In The Wine of the Puritans Van Wyck Brooks called [P.T.] Barnum "a colossal figure, who vividly illustrates typical American traits." He is "a shrewd American casuist," like Rockefeller and Brigham Young. Theodore Roosevelt said we should take many pictures in the Armory Show "no more seriously than we take P.T. Barnum's mermaids." And this, though dismissive, is genial and in its way admiring.

I'm fine with this advice, actually. I might even venture that my approval of it follows necessarily from a moral rejection of the showman ethic. But it is neither genial nor admiring. I'm calling Ivory Tower Bullshit on that sentence. Anyone who's not a literature professor can see the contempt and aggression in this remark; and if you're a practicing/working artist it veritably leaps off the page at you and thumbs its nose.

Americans cultivated the attitude of admiring anyone who prised an admission fee out of them, especially if they suspected an element of fraud; and they associated this with the West.

This is bit bizarre and somewhat book report-y, but it is believable, unfortunately.

...

[38] The artists of modernism broke free by an insurrection within the realm of art, a coup d'état that made an enemy enclave within culture. Picasso and Matisse painted pictures incomprehensible, and insulting, to the bourgeois even as connoisseur. One might almost say they confiscated his sense of sight; at least they poisoned the reassuring pleasures of visual aesthetics for him—those of landscape and sexual loveliness, as well as those of pictures. This was a guerilla war against the bourgeois class and its hegemony, its representatives in the ateliers, its Renaissance traditions, and its Greek and Roman heritage. The great talents in a sense refused to be adults and citizens; they allied themselves to children, to primitives, to madmen, and against the dominant gender, race, and class. They denied reality via their denial of realism.

So, here are all of the familiar Articles of Impeachment against the modernists. The attempts already made by Green to reclaim modernism as a spiritual and/or political movement, along with the less profound (and equally unconvincing) analysis of it which finds its deepest meaning in a mere departure from normalcy, all of this, however you feel about it, leans into understanding modernism as fundamentally deviant or abnormal or negative, and leans away from understanding it as affirmative, as foundational, or even just useful.

The denial of realism, despite the aptness of the term, specifically seems to me the clearest instance of a tendency which is also affirmative to at least some degree; this beyond a mere consequentialist or formalist argument that every so-called denial contains, by implication, an affirmation too. Green notes that Stein, "as we know, argued that she was using words as abstractly as the cubists used paint" (182), and that "art must decentralize composition and present objects in a form that itself becomes an entity, as the cubists did" (108), but he can see in this type of work, apparently, only a negation of realism, a poisoning of pleasure, a refusal to grow up, an outright confiscation of the bourgeois connoisseur's sense of sight. This is a clean break not only with the past, for any technique so devoid of affirmative impulses can have no future either. Without overstating the future that Modernism has gone on to enjoy, I do think subsequent events give the lie to this assessment of the first waves.

As so often, a baldfaced polemical takedown would stand these "modernists" in better stead than does the conceit to scholarly neutrality. For one thing, the takedown has a better chance at maintaining coherence because it is uninhibited, whereas a studied neutrality is constantly maneuvering (usually awkwardly) around things that cannot be said. For another, the takedown forces the reader to confront the more contentious issues head-on, whereas the ostensibly neutral account is more of a blank slate on which to project existing beliefs and understandings. When the refusal of adulthood and citizenship, e.g., is presented as a dry preliminary fact, it gives the reader all the permission they need to dismiss the movement from the start, should they happen to think (as many people do) that these are, if not always positive, then at least necessary developmental landmarks.

Development and citizenship, spirituality and transcendence, resistance and revolution...these are big questions, whereas the literary abstraction of words into sounds is a small question. The abstraction-versus-realism polemic is a pimple on the proverbial ass of politics. No responsible authors

want to melt down those differences

between art and politics, yet still, few of them are reluctant to

suggest nevertheless that there was a connection, and one which was strongly felt in New York in 1913.

As so often, there is a simple colloquial axiom which cuts right across and through all this talk of denial, poisoning, and confiscation to succinctly press the strongest objection: it is much easier to destroy than to build. Which is to say, one might be suspicious of the motives here attributed to these artists in light of the means by which they were pursued: that is, detailed, painstaking, deliberate, and profligate means; the maximalism against which a later Minimalism was to be (or thought to be!) a backlash.

(It must be noted in passing that what I am calling "motives" are complex and often intractible, whereas by "means" I refer to actions; actions, that is, which speak louder than so many words. Here is another colloquial axiom which looms large, and a properly methodological problem, perhaps, demanding a methodological critique. I am anxious to flesh out this critique; but because I am not a practitioner of this particular methodology myself, I had better confine my critique to rhetoric, no?)

Most of the work related here is singularly unparsimonious vis-a-vis such discernible activist motives as a guerilla war against the bourgeois class. Reconciling such motives with the care and effort invested in the artworks is not as easy as it might seem; not, that is, if destruction is easy and construction difficult. This is not to outright deny the activist element. What it is to say, rather, is that the more care, attention, and resources an artist pours into a work, the less plausible becomes any assertion that it was really about a class war.

Thus Kandinsky's idealism was not harsh or revolutionary enough and was often denied or covered up by something opposite, an apparent renunciation of all the deep, large meanings. Modernist aesthetics is just as well exemplified by this passage of Paul Valéry... "Sometimes I think there will be a place in the future for a literature the nature of which will singularly resemble that of a sport. Let us subtract, from literary possibilities, everything which today, by the direct expression of things and the direct stimulation of the sensibility by new means—motion pictures, omnipresent music, etc.—is being rendered useless or ineffective for the art of language. Let us also subtract a whole category of subjects— psychology, sociology, etc.—which the growing precision of the sciences will render it difficult to treat fairly. There will remain to letters a private domain: that of symbolic expression and of imaginative values due to the free combination of the elements of language." ...

Duchamp and dada, as we shall see, went further than Valéry. Duchamp wanted to subvert painting as a whole. He was profoundly irritated by the whole art enterprise of his time. "All painting, be-
[39]
ginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science." Of course, this was only an aspect of science, and only a mocking version; if he wanted science to subvert nineteenth-century art, he subverted science too. And the mockery was directed as much at himself as at either activity; it was what Duchamp called metairony. Nevertheless, this was the final twist to a long tradition of dissent: a dissent on the part of art from general civilized values, in which painting had taken the lead since the 1890s. As Floyd Dell says, "Fiction itself was discovering from the painters what it itself ought to be. It was felt that writers had ceased to be artists, in a sense in which painters had remained artists."

Well, that remark contrasts rather starkly with the journalism-as-written-by-novelists upon which a certain concurrent movement rested to an extraordinary degree.

Green here adds,

They had brilliantly refused to be in the slightest degree useful to a civilization they hated.

...

[39] Leonardo's pictures have been especially the victims of modernist mockery, above all the Mona Lisa... They drew mustaches on her, to free themselves from him, from "the eternal thief of energies"—a phrase adapted from the attack on Christianity;

Very confused here as to whether they actually used this exact line? Or is Green merely suggesting it retrospectively?

what Leonardo represented, like what Christ represented, was a dead prestige, an unquestionable authority which discouraged new life.

My (quick and dirty) note says:
Not "new life" is "discouraged" but rather the "theft" of "prestige" which like matter is neither created nor destroyed.

Now:
In other words, no one can make you feel unprestigious without your permission, not even old Leonardo.

[66] The latter [Mabel Dodge] tells us that he [Leo Stein] "always fulminated against any art expression that was merely the running of water downhill. ...Leo seemed to be an enemy of gravitation; he required more than just the natural laws when it was a question of art forms. ..."

Most excellent rhetoric! To deny this uphill ethic, one must also deny any downhill essentialism! At which point everything currently marginalized as Against Nature becomes available again!

...

Duchamp:

[104] "I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view." He avoided both marriage and military service, treating both love and war with disdain. And these are attitudes which his disciples are likely to develop.

My note says:
"Likely to develop"? Or likely already to possess?

When it came time for his military service, he took advantage of the partial exemption offered skilled workmen, by training to be a printer. ...

Having endured military service, he joined his brothers in Paris, and lived la vie d'artiste, though making strong inner protests against its clichés: the painter in beret and smock, as he says, with his soul full of beauty and aesthetic theories on his lips, and all the quarrels over precedence and the resentments of bruised egos. He compared life in France to a basketful of lobsters clawing each other. Yet he also said, "In my time we artists were pariahs, we knew it and enjoyed it. But today [in the USA] the artist is integrated," a state of affairs he deplored.

...

[106] He [Duchamp] often talked about his love-hate of science, which has induced some scholars to credit him with more command of such subjects than is likely. Looking back, he himself insisted that he never understood non-Euclidian geometry or the fourth dimension. They simply suggested to him games he might play.

...

[108] The years 1906 to 1911 are sometimes called the heroic period of analytical cubism. This was the time when Gertrude Stein worked on her long "novel," The Making of Americans, which also sacrificed many of the colors and forms of conventional fiction, reducing plot and scene and dialogue to a monotonous continuity. She studied Cézanne's Portrait de Madame Cézanne which Leo had bought, and no doubt saw it in the terms he had suggested: that is, seeing Cézanne as a painter like Mantegna (in his Crucifixion) and focusing on his use of color, his simplified forms, and his subordination of the illustrative to the compositional interest. She spoke of Cézanne's revolutionary sense of composition and his realism which superseded that of the objects depicted, and she thought writers had to practice composition that way. She was also ready to say that she was the first writer to get that idea. Works of art were henceforth to have no center, no ideational structuring. Everything was to be offered with equal emphasis. The essential struggle of the twentieth century, she thought, was to be to "flatten" experience—to remove the films of philosophical tradition which clouded the observer's vision.

"I was there to kill what was not dead, the 19th century which was so sure of evolution and prayers, and esperanto and their ideas." To kill the nineteenth century, art must decentralize composition and present objects in a form that itself becomes an entity, as the cubists did. She rebelled against "that socially elevated tone, the orotund authorial voice, the elegant drawing room diction" of nineteenth-century fiction—the details, the descriptions, the plots, the psychological analysis, of for instance Henry James. She pointed out that Proust and Joyce, and she, had no plots.

So how does this comport with the gushiness of p. 5, re: spirituality, trascendence, etc.? The notion that Everything was to be offered with equal emphasis sounds more like an evasion or elision than a transcending. Ditto the wish to "flatten" experience.

Admittedly these latter notions don't comport all that well either with the more colloquial notion of Modernism with which I tend to identify. In such terms, my Modernism is multi-centered rather than de-centered.

[145] Steiglitz was a formalist, believing in a direct equivalence between certain shapes and certain emotions.

Uh...just...what?

Google's #1 for formalism: "excessive adherence to prescribed forms."

So, the equivalence given above would have to be prescribed before anyone could have properly formalistic recourse to it.

(How's that for formalism, mfs?)

...

[156] Above all, there were the Wobbly songs, gathered into the Little Red Songbook (first published in 1909 for a nickel) or sold individually
[157]
on song cards, which were extremely popular. The IWW was proud of its reputation as the union of songs and jokes which marked it off from the AFL.

Doesn't this also

mark it off

decisively
from
the use of words as abstract sounds
?

From
the reduction of plot and scene and dialogue to a monotonous continuity
?

From
the artwork as

a form that itself becomes an entity

?

The first leaflet contained four songs, three of them parodies of Salvation Army hymns; then there was an edition with sixteen such parodies; and the final version had thiry-eight songs and the preamble to the IWW constitution, plus the "Red Flag," the "Marseillaise" and the "Internationale." The subtitle to the collection was Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.

Now here is, apparently, a commonality with modernism. But the means to this end are rather different. If one were something as despicable as an aesthete, one might even say that the means of

songs and jokes

and the means of

a form that itself becomes an entity

are contrary means.

It was often called the Bible of the movement, and there were debates in the Wobbly papers in 1911 and 1912 about whether the songs were not more useful than the pamphlets; Joe Hill naturally argued for the songs.

...

The songs that came out of the West and Northwest were primarily satirical, though of course there were [also] solemn hymns... Another kind of poem and song, such as "Bread and Roses," expresses the eastern, immigrant, socialist side of the Wobbly sensibility. ...it is significant that this is a song for women, while the others are for men. ... This sort of art corresponded better to the hopes of liberal or left-
[158]
wing intellectuals like Percy MacKaye or Hutchins Hapgood: "Self-expression in industry and art among the masses may become a rich reality, spreading a human glow over the whole of humanity . . . from which we shall all be the gainers—in real life, in justice, in art, in love." It also corresponds much more centrally to the painting of the Eight.

...

[162] Nineteen thirteen was the year the American Pageant Association was founded, with an annual bulletin, a series of conferences, and an educational program. The first bulletin listed fifty pageants across the country, many of them historical, nostalgic, and picturesque, but some with a strong social conscience and purpose. These were usually instruments of pacification, aimed at immigrants... In the 1913 bulletin, John Collier (Mabel Dodge's friend) said the new pageantry was the forerunner of a civic life based on common consciousness and brotherhood.

My note (re: the last bit) says:
Uh, "narcissism" anyone? Or does "pageant" mean something different in 1913 than now?

[174] The special issue of the magazine Arts and Decoration which prepared the public for the Show included a historical chart of modern art, by [Arthur B.?] Davies. Using three categories, classical, romantic, and realistic, he sorted out the bewildering variety of recent schools into a comprehensible pattern. The romantics included not only Delacroix and Daumier, but Renoir and Redon, van Gogh and Gaugin; the classicals included the postimpressionists, and above all the cubists. This was a powerful piece of propaganda for the cubists, for this was
[175]
the moment (in literature, the moment of T.S. Eliot and T.E. Hume) when the idea of the classical was exciting the avant-garde.

...

[180] The processes of writing history induce us to treat these negative comments on the new art as mere signs of failure on the writers' part—moral, intellectual, or aesthetic failure to meet the painters' challenge. That has certainly been the case with most histories of the Armory Show, which have treated the new art simply as art...and lay all the onus on the audience to approach the new paintings as closely and lovingly as the old familiar ones.

Uh...

If, however, we assume that the new work was different—

Different in the sense of not demanding or deserving close or loving attention?

which the artists certainly said it was—and could not be approached in the same way,

Uh...

then we will pay more sympathetic attention to those who denounced it.

I'm totally on board with this part. Good art can be rejected for good reasons, good for bad, bad for good, and bad for bad...

The hard version of historical-contingency-as-against-essentialism is at least useful as a corrective to the notion that art should not be successful in its own time, and/or that unsuccessful artists can just plan on becoming famous after they are dead and not worry one pube about their own cohort's reception of their work. We just need to keep in mind the twin corrective that every time a work does take off meteorically only after it has been around for a while, this proves just as well that rejection in the immediate term does not equate directly to the artist "making art only for other artists" or "not addressing their work to an audience." (If it can be shown that such an artist really, truly was working in these later modes, and their work takes off anyway, then they the ones that got some 'splainin' to do.)

Those who welcomed and protected it are really less interesting, from our point of view, than the hostile critics who recognized the dangerousness which the artists had tried to build into their work.

Well, I'm out of my depth here, but it's perfectly believable to me that hostile critics could be just as delusional in their perception of danger as so many artists have been in proclaiming the dangerousness of themselves and their work, and that the probabilities of each declaration occurring separately are not so vanishingly small that the probablity of them occurring together can be considered negligible.

...

[181] It is easy for us now to see how [Kenyon] Cox overlooked the group character of modernism, the extent to which all these painters watched each other's work and shared a common, if inarticulate, purpose. But he was not wrong to see that purpose, individual or group, as marked by a stronger will to rebel against bourgeois taste (against the social contract) than the purposes of earlier artists.

Again, I'm out of my depth, but if we're going to make all of this business about destruction and danger relative to earlier artists, then there's not nearly a book's worth of material to be unfurled about these shows.

The modernists wanted to break the habits of sensibility that chained art to its social function of pleasing, diverting, consoling the ruling class, and that wish drove them to a new and deeper alienation. That was a very significant change, and if we have learned to overlook it we are blinder than Cox, not more insightful.

My note to pp. 180-181 says:
Well...this art sure has pleased the ruling class quite well ever since. Is there an expiration date on "purpose"?

Now: here, finally, I think we are dealing with something more solid, re: what artists and critics say vs. what is actually happening. The co-optation of this "modernist" moment not just by a minority of garden-variety ruling class airheads but, more significantly, it has been argued, by megacapitalism as a whole, with the collecting and auctioning off of fine art now amounting to somewhat more than a mere pimple on the ass of politics only because of the amount of money changing hands and not at all because of anything about the content of the works, this stands as a perverse but powerful empirical demonstation of several controversial theses at once; a drop in the bin of empirical gathering of evidence as it were, but certainly a fat, splashy drop that has splattered a few stray droplets on the author and on his reader here:

(1) the laws of historical contingency, if that's what they are, apply just as well to altruistic conceits as to arrogations, pretensions, and shared delusions;

(2) in light of (1) (but not only for this reason), the pretense to negation, revolution, destruction, etc. is not profitably pursued via aesthetic means, not even if those means are purposefully simplistic or cursory; this because such pretenses depend every bit as heavily upon unduly essentialistic assumptions as do the most hidebound, gerontocratic, quietist art ideologies;

(3) (this one's not part of my vocabulary at the moment because it hasn't interested me too much and has previously seemed unconvincing, but...) there does seem to be something to this business about art being inherently a ruling class sort of joint, no matter who else might pass through the drawing room from time to time and with what pretensions.

...

[208] In her autobiography, Rebel Girl, Gurley Flynn calls the Pageant "a unique form of proletarian art," but she also speaks, though more discreetly, of its bad effects. She thought that the work for the pageant had hurt the Strike. First of all, it caused jealousy among the workers as to who would be chosen to take part, and then it distracted attention from the Strike, so that the first scabs go into the mills during the Pageant rehearsals, when the picket lines were neglected. Mary Heaton Vorse says that Flynn "Always believed that the pageant had much to do with the failure of the strike. She felt that this disillusionment [with the poor financial results] together with diverting the workers' minds from the actual struggle to the pictured struggle, was fatal."

...

[215] whereas Haywood—just after the event—told the strikers it had been the biggest thing the IWW had ever attempted, Flynn said rather sarcastically that David Belasco would no doubt sign them all on, and she later charged the event with various evil effects. It is perhaps significant that she charged it above all with generating jealousy...and that she laid the blame on the intellectuals. It may be that she herself was jealous and that the intellectuals were the objects of that jealousy.

...

[253] ...the true heirs of the 1913 spirit, in its broadly human engagement, Dorothy Day and William Carlos Williams: those who stayed where they were, both literally and figuratively...and found their work there... They stayed loyal to the engagement our main subjects repudiated; they insisted on combining a spiritual project, in art or politics, with ordinary, local, or traditional commitments—either combining the practice of art with action in service of their fellow men, or combining the agitation for political change with preservation of traditional religious forms and ceremonies.

...

[257] He [William Carlos Williams] took important clues from French painting: "For a hundred years one of the cleanest, most alert and fecund avenues of human endeavor, a positive point of intellectual assistance from which work may depart in any direction." But he also insisted on American subject matter and an Americanist and macho ideology. ...he combined some of the most advanced aesthetic ideas of the Armory Show with some cultural ideas that were retrograde already in 1913.

But one thing which works powerfully to redeem him, even as an artist, is his medical practice in Rutherford. Like Chekhov, he found practical work parallel with his writing, and vice versa. "As a writer I have been a physician, and as a physician a writer." This tied him to ordinary experience,

Is being a doctor an ordinary experience?

and for this there was a close equivalent in the life of Dorothy Day, which makes the big city scene belong to them, and not to Duchamp at all, from most points of view. Williams says, "And my medicine was the thing which gained me entrance to these secret gardens of the self. It lay there, another world, in the self. I was permitted by my medical badge to follow the poor defeated body into those gulfs and grottos . . ." He saw one and half million [sic] patients, and delivered two thousand babies, by his count, between 1910 and 1951.

quoting William Carlos Williams:

[255] "These were the years before the great catastrophe to our letters—the appearance of T.S. Eliot's 'Waste Land.' There was heat in us, a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of primary impetus, the elementary principle of art, in the local conditions. Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot's genius which gave the poem back to the academics. We did not know how to answer him."

Apropos of "g[iving] the poem back to the academics," Green mentions later on that Duchamp published "notes" for The Large Glass. Online here.

[267] He [Duchamp] invented a new physics to explain the laws of The Large Glass, a new mathematics for its units of measurement, and condensed language for its ideas—amusing physics, oscillating density, uncontrollable weight and emancipated metals, etc. In all this, he was following up the ideas of Picasso and his friends (and the model of Alfred Jarry). In 1910 Leon Werth wrote, apropos Picasso, "If geometry owes its certainty to the suggestions of our senses, why not reverse the process and go from geometry to nature?"

Psst, Nassim...gimme that ice cube.