The newspaper is the sea; literature flows into it at will.
–Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument,” 1895
If the resplendent posters betrayed their secret,
we would be forever lost to ourselves …
–André Breton, Soluble Fish, 1924
On the morning of January 23rd, 1920, Tristan Tzara brought dada to Paris. Louis Aragon took the stage at the Palais des Fêtes, read Tzara’s poem “Le Géant blanc lépreux du paysage” and then made a surprise announcement: “Zurich Dadaism in the flesh will now interpret one of his works for you.”
Tzara walked on stage, picked up a newspaper, and commenced reading an article while, in the wings, André Breton and Aragon rang electric bells to drown out his voice. The mixed crowd of artists, journalists, and civilians, bemused and slightly bored until that moment, reacted violently.
In Memoirs of Dadaism, Tzara recalls: “This was very badly received by the public, who became exasperated and shouted: ‘Enough! Enough!’ An attempt was made to give a futuristic interpretation to this act, but all that I wanted to convey was simply that my presence on the stage, the sight of my face and my movements, ought to satisfy people’s curiosity and that anything I might have said really had no importance.”
Tzara’s stunt was part of the first of the Literature Fridays organized by the poets Louis Aragon, André Breton, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault. These events were conceived very much in the dada spirit of confrontation and shock pioneered so successfully by Tzara and others at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich during World War I, but by 1920 it was becoming more and more difficult to antagonize audiences.
The crowd at this event had sat quite calmly through a lecture on modern painting by André Salmon, Jean Cocteau reading the poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob and Francis Picabia creating and then erasing a drawing in chalk. Indeed, it was not until Tzara produced his newspaper that the crowd reacted with the violence and anger that signifies avantgarde success.
Perhaps Georges RibemontDessaignes captures most vividly what was at stake in this spectacle: “the resultant indignation of the public which had come to beg for an artistic pittance, no matter what, as long as it was art, the effect produced by the presentation of the pictures and particularly of the manifesto, showed them how useless it was, by comparison, to have Max Jacob’s poems read by Jean Cocteau.”
Curiously, the memoirs of the participants and the analyses of later critics often cite this as a key moment in the development of dada, but they do so almost exclusively from the point of view of the audience. RibemontDessaignes maintains that “the crowd is willing to accept anything in an art which is translated into works.
But it does not tolerate attacks on reasons for living” (110). By reading the newspaper instead of producing an original work of art or manifesto, Tzara had pulled the rug out from under the artist and essentially called into question all of the humanist values associated with artistic production.
Drowning out his voice with those intolerable bells, the performance is explicitly antihumanist and certainly antilyric. No doubt the whole spectacle was an assault on the audience, but what of Tzara himself and the other participants? What did the newspaper mean to them? Why would Tzara make his debut in Paris by reading a newspaper?
I believe the answer to this question is, quite simply, that the newspaper is the urform of the historical avantgarde and of modernism itself. Benedict Anderson argues that modern nations are always “imagined communities,” fictions produced more by media than facetoface experiences.
For an individual to link his or her interests to millions of others that he or she has never met and, indeed, to people whose interests might well be antithetical to his or her own, requires a mediating force.
The daily newspaper provides just such a link, for while every reader is isolated and individual, there is the overwhelming consciousness of mass ritual: “What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned?
At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life” (35–6).
This powerful abstract tie serves to bind people into a nation, and it is necessary because the people of modern nations share so very little: they are not related by unbreakable kinship ties or geography, nor do they necessarily share the same religion or see themselves as part of a sacred cosmological order.
However, if the ritual of reading binds heterogeneous individuals into a cohesive group consciousness, the paper itself performs a similar kind of black magic for its own contents, incorporating an anarchic array of stories, notes, advertisements, and announcements that have no intrinsic connections with one another into a single totality.
For Anderson, this is a product of the modern conception of time: “The date at the top of the newspaper, the single most important emblem on it, provides the essential connection–the steady onward clocking of homogeneous, empty time.
Within that time, ‘the world’ ambles sturdily ahead” (33). The newspaper thus organizes its contents according to a rational rule of chronology with no deeper principle for essential relationships or meanings, just as it organizes its readers into a coherent group who share a daily ritual but perhaps little or nothing else.
Modern, of course, literally means “of the moment,” and the force of this concept animates the newspaper, making both its contents and its readers literally modern. Anderson argues that the modern nation was a product of reason and capital, negating the role of the sacred and the cult values of language underpinning theocracies and monarchies.
Rather than the sacred hierarchy, the modern nation depended on ever extendable but ultimately abstract secular links forged by media like the newspaper. Just as the nation was thus redefined by reason, capital, and media, so the work of art became a commodity and lost its combination of cult value and sacred insight under pressure from the same forces.
Walter Benjamin observes that arts like painting once functioned mostly as cult objects in religious rituals, and even when that cult function disappeared, they retained a sacred aura since they existed as individual, unreproducible works housed in a particular place.
To see them meant a journey of almost religious significance. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin observes that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition … and in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced.”
Serially scattered throughout the world in books, recordings, or newspapers, works of art could mean anything and affect people in new ways without the fetters of received interpretations maintained by institutions. In essence, mechanical reproduction made all art potentially serial, ubiquitous, and disposable, much like the newspaper itself.
Indeed, the newspaper itself seems almost pure mechanical reproduction that liquidates any art whatsoever. While Benjamin seems positively optimistic in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in “The Storyteller,” he traces the demise of story as the liquidation of firsthand experience; his analysis is deeply related here as well to aura and opposes the auratic wisdom of the story to the mechanical information of the modern newspaper.
For Benjamin, story is grounded in oral culture. The good storyteller provides wisdom about the world, but does so in the context of lived and local experience. The good story is simple and immediate, and we understand this in our ability and desire to repeat it to others.
It does not isolate listeners, but draws them into a concrete communal experience. In essence, Benjamin imagines oral story traditions as auratic. Like the work of art that can be viewed in only one place, these exchanges of story take place facetoface in communal moments, and thus each is in some way unique.
Benjamin writes: “A man listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even a man reading one shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader.” Even when written down, the spirit of story remains that of the oral tale, in that it eschews the extensive explanations and complications characteristic of the novel, such that “among those who have written down the tales, it is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the many nameless storytellers” (84).
If the story fosters lived community and wisdom, the newspaper, like the novel, marks the death of experience overwhelmed by technologies of information: “Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation” (89).
The specificity and particularity of the newspaper story ironically destroys Benjamin’s idea of experience, since “[t]he value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new” (89). The newspaper thus presents a continuous onslaught of information in such detail that it is far beyond the capacity of any single memory to retain it.
Unorganized by wisdom or insight, unrepeatable, it becomes a ceaseless inhuman flow, characteristically modern. In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin seems truly nostalgic for the simpler and more immediate forms of the story, though he cautions against this attitude.
But in spite of this caveat, he suggests that technology has destroyed experience, overwhelming the human: “For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power” (84).
He drives this point home with the poignant image of a small and frail human body facing the horrors of the trenches. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin formulates this same observation in terms of aura, remarking that technology itself is the acting subject, taking up its human objects in an orgy of destruction:
“Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way” (242).
Industrialized warfare allows for genocidal destruction between people who never come facetoface, just as the newspaper offers an imaginary community for individuals who will never encounter each other. Just as no one could fully comprehend, articulate, or overcome the horrors of mechanized warfare, the limits of the human body are dwarfed by the unlimited scope and unending flow of the newspaper.
Avantgarde artists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, F. T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and André Breton all use the newspaper to define their work as modern. The inclusion of this overwhelming and massproduced, mechanistic, chaotic, and ephemeral form as a venue for manifestoes, a raw material for poetry, a subject or material for painting, marks their art “modern.”
It does so as synecdoche, the newspaper standing in for the liquidation of aura–human scale–in communities, nations, war, economics, a vast amplification of information volume and speed. There is something more in it, too. As Benjamin would have it, the wisdom of story is replaced with the flow of information, and that observation could well stand for the entire phenomena of modernism.
In essence, and as I will argue in what follows, the deep paradigmatic structures of older narrative and visual forms are dispersed into the endlessly metonymic surfaces of mechanically reproduced media. Synthetic Modernism Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque redefined painting in the years just before World War I.
They began by shattering Renaissance perspective into shimmering fields of conflicting perspectives, volatizing their subjects. No single pointofview could truly capture reality, and so the artist must imagine multiple possibilities in a single stroke.
These faceted canvases were soon invaded by the world itself, as Braque and then Picasso began to paste in wallpapers and newspapers. These readymade fragments played the role of shadows, lines, and pigments of an image, the profile of a guitar, the contents of a wine glass, while simultaneously remaining what they are: massproduced media, the world not represented, but inserted, into the picture.
In her remarkable book, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage, Christine Poggi explains just how the newspaper differs from the other materials Picasso used, and why they are such a ubiquitous element in his collages.
She describes the newspaper as the ultimate reproducible media, echoing Benjamin’s insight in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” when she observes that the newspaper “embodies the principle of reproducibility in utter negation of the unique or privileged object, for any copy of a newspaper is as good as any other.”
The use of newspaper is thus a mark of technological modernity that undoes the cult value of a picture. The inclusion of the newspaper punctures the aura of painting, though it doesn’t fully liquidate it. Yet if a Picasso collage nonetheless remains a unique work, the newspaper also draws it into the ephemeral world of consumer culture.
As Poggi puts it, the newspaper “challenges the durability of the work of art, traditionally defined in opposition to the ephemeral products of mass culture. It redefines the creative act as a manipulation of iterable, arbitrary signs, like those of writing. And it also thereby implicitly points to the conventionality of seemingly original, spontaneous signs for the revelation of the self; such as sketch like brush strokes or heightened color” (153).
While Picasso and Braque revolutionized pictorial representation, they could hardly have chosen more ordinary subjects. While other artists marked their modernity with the invocation of motorcars and airplanes, cubist subjects almost always remain focused on the ordinary world of everyday life: the café table, the wine glass, the pipe, the newspaper, domestic interiors, music, or portraits of friends.
Yet these subjects are only seemingly conservative, serving to mask a deeper insight. The speed and complexity of the world did increase because of modern technologies, but the immediate impact was not that suddenly one raced across the continent in a car or flew in planes. Instead, the fact that others now did such things changed the size of the world and our perception of it.
One might never leave the café table, but the table now looked different. The play of perspectives in cubist portraits literalize the insights of philosophy (Henri Bergson) and science (relativity), suggesting that every object exists only in perspective.
Shattering the single pointofview, the paintings show sliding, shifting possibilities from which to grasp the subject, none complete in itself. The effect is also to overwrite the illusions of depth, so important to the illusion of painting, as a window into reality.
The cubist world has some depths, but these move and shift in profound relativity: the same mass can be read as transparent or opaque, for instance, depending on how one enters the picture. To view a cubist painting is not to be drawn in, but for the eye to skim the surface. Suddenly the world looks far flatter.
It is just this jittery, sliding eye that also defines the world of the newspaper, as it reports more of the world from less coherent perspectives. The newspapers depicted in cubist paintings and the fragments of newspaper glued to the surface of the canvas both mark the media that is closest to the cubist sense: a volatile world.
In The Picasso Papers, Rosalind Krauss points out that just as analytic cubism presented multiple perspectives of a single object simultaneously, the newspaper collages of synthetic cubism present a dialogic mass of voices at once without resolving them.
Krauss drives this point home with a careful reminder of Bakhtin’s obsession with Dostoevsky–and that modern master’s obsession with the newspaper: While Bakhtin has no interest in Dostoevsky’s biography as an explanatory fulcrum for his analysis, this journalistic practice, which requires that everything be treated in the context of the present and that issues of causality be constantly suspended, is not unconnected to Dostoevsky’s invention:
“his love of the newspaper, his deep and subtle understanding of the newspaper page as a living reflection of the contradictions of contemporary society in the crosssection of a single day, where the most diverse and contradictory material is laid out, extensively, side by side and one side against the other,” is not an explanation for Dostoevsky’s artistic vision, but rather itself explained by that vision.
This suggests exactly why the form of the newspaper is opposed to those older practices of fine art painting or lyric poetry. In these genres, the role of the artist is to create and control an absolute subjectivity ordering the chaos of the self and the world.
However, in the slippery surfaces of modernism, so aptly captured in the chaotic chance of the newspaper sheet, no such single pointofview is to be found. This insight is most clearly expressed in Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of the differences between the book and the newspaper in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
According to McLuhan, the press is unlike the book precisely because it does away with the single author’s pointofview in favor of a riotous mosaic of voices with which the reader must participate: “Up to this point we have discussed the press as a mosaic successor to the bookform.
The mosaic is the mode of the corporate or collective image and commands deep participation. This participation is communal rather than private, inclusive rather than exclusive.” McLuhan could just as easily be describing the cubist canvas that demands we skate across its flat surfaces with far deeper and more active participation than more unified forms could possibly support.
He continues to see the newspaper as a vast plane of imaginary possible connections so clearly formulated by Benedict Anderson: “But the press is a daily action and fiction or thing made, and it is made out of just about everything in the community. By the mosaic means, it is made into a communal image or crosssection” (189).
Like Tristan Tzara, Picasso then too presents himself as that most modern subject, the reader of newspapers. Let us go back and take Tzara at his word when he says that he wanted his gestures, his actions, to convey his message.
Essentially, he stands on stage and tells us that in the midst of the deafening, mechanical cacophony of everyday life, “the artist reads the newspaper.” This becomes more plausible when we remember that the press was the only established mass medium at the time, and the papers of the early twentieth century were a good deal different than the papers we know today.
Though radio was coming and film was already gaining the high ground, it was the newspaper and its cousin, the illustrated advertising poster, which had changed the face of cities at the end of the nineteenth century and still defined the first decades of the twentieth.
Newspapers were both a good deal more diverse, numerous, and important than they are today, carrying items both political and sensational, but also serialized novels, crime reporting, gossip, manifestoes, editorials, announcements, and, of course, advertisements.
The avantgarde itself communicated with its public through the newspaper, where they placed announcements for their spectacles, and they depended on the publicity of the reviews they received from journalists to keep the energy of the scandal active long after the events and exhibitions themselves had ended.
Indeed, it is difficult to imagine dada without the publicity of newspapers, and it comes as no surprise to learn that Tristan Tzara for years employed clipping services to send him every mention of dada to be found in the world press.
The ubiquity of the newspaper as a mass medium was made possible largely through technological improvements in printing and fundamental changes in the financing of papers. Prior to 1860, newspapers were printed one sheet at a time, and this timeconsuming process forced most papers to publish only once a week.
Subscriptions to these papers remained the primary source of revenue, and this made them expensive, putting a daily paper out of the reach of most ordinary citizens, who would instead share papers at cafés.
With the development of rotary presses that could print on continuous sheets of paper, along with the cultivation of extensive advertising revenues as a primary source of income, the paper could become a ubiquitous and affordable medium literally blanketing cities.
Entrepreneurial publishers like Moïse Millaud in France quickly realized the greater potential of the daily newspaper, and the changes that such production would entail not only for production and distribution, but for content as well.
According to René de Livois, by the 1860s, French newspapers were on the cusp of creating the first real walltowall mediascape in Paris: It was obvious that the public asked only to be served, and that there was a large market to satisfy.
The newspapers couldn’t go after these customers unless the price was reasonable and they could address everyone instead of limiting themselves to educated, if not erudite, readers. To reach this goal, the entrepreneurs of the press substituted the “quantity press” for the “quality press.”
To augment circulation, they lowered the price for subscriptions and the price for individual issues which made the newspaper competitive in every market. Simply, it is necessary only to have access to a welldeveloped and organized distribution network that extends its reach to even the smallest places.
Girardin [publisher for La Presse] attempted to apply this concept, but was unable to fully realize it. For him, it was out of the question that a newspaper could dispense with quality literary and political contributions and devote itself completely to popular subjects and sensational items. Millaud would be the one to take that step.
De Livois’s account underscores the attitude to the new popular press as a threat to literature, truth, and social control, and we should note with interest that the fact of a lower price becomes a metaphor for a lower standard of content in his account.
Daily publication coupled with the affordable price and efficient distribution created the possibility for a mass audience, and with it, the perceived debasement of quality that attends the introduction of any mass medium.
Rather than offer a consistent and reasoned political point of view, or attempt to present serious literature, Millaud’s Le Petit Journal would cater to any sensationalism, and with its innovative rotary presses cranking out a continuous catalog of hype and scandal, would achieve sales of close to half a million papers some days with serial novels like Les thugs etrangleurs and sensational crime reporting (276).
Though Millaud was perhaps the most innovative, he was hardly alone. “In 1860, there were 500 publications in Paris, and almost another 1000 in the rest of France. The press conquered the public. Reading newspapers became a real need, but it was not interest in politics that created this infatuation” (272).
Rather, it was the sensational pleasures of advertising hype and scandal that were the driving force of newspapers. The sheer number of newspapers published in Paris, New York, and other major cities by the end of the nineteenth century is astonishing.
Along with advertising posters, which depended on similar technological developments, the façades of anything from newspaper kiosks to entire commercial buildings were transformed into anarchic riots of competing texts.
Indeed, the macrocosm of these shocking urban façades is perfectly mirrored in the microcosm of advertising pages at the back of every newspaper and illustrated journal. It is in these façades and newspaper pages that the dialectic of the commodity form is most brutally evident in the new mass medium of print.
On the back pages of any newspaper or illustrated journal, advertisements for any conceivable product or service make their appearance with no formal order. The grossest metonymies and parataxis reign. It is in these pages that one would be not at all surprised to find that most proverbial collection of objects: the umbrella, the sewing machine, and the dissecting table.
However, while this profusion of commodities presents the reader with an intoxicating catalog of material plenitude and excess in every form, it is all caught in the deadening sameness of the commodity form itself.
If every object cries out to the reader, each is also yet another example of a massproduced sameness that constitutes the rise of modern everyday life, expanded but flattened. While the rule of chance and excess is so clearly visible in these advertising texts, there is a similar dialectic at work in the columns of type that constitute the rest of the paper.
Here, too, there is a profusion of difference: serial fictions jostle with actual news; sensational crime stories with sentimental novels; gossip and editorials with paid announcements and avantgarde manifestoes.
However, despite the vast differences in this bewildering profusion of genres, all of it is presented in the relentless march of invariable columns. The sameness of the newspaper layout (like the flatness of the cubist canvas) liquidates, at the level of form, the differences so evident in the varied genres of the contents.
The contradictions and excesses of this form, its shameless commercial purpose, and its utter ubiquity were met with little enthusiasm by the romantic and symbolist artists and critics of the nineteenth century, already so threatened by the relentless march of capital.
Perhaps Charles Augustin SainteBeuve offered the first and most famous of these attacks in his essay, “Industrial Literature.” Noting that papers would often carry advertisements or announcements for books their own reviewers panned, he was left to exclaim, “How can you condemn something you are two inches away from?
How can you call detestable and baleful something proclaimed and paraded two inches further down as the wonder of the age?” SainteBeuve’s protest highlights the irrationality inherent in newspapers. However, it would be left to the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé to write the most frequently cited critique of the newspaper in his essay, “The Book: A Spiritual Instrument.”
Published in 1895, it is remarkable how Mallarmé anticipates our own contemporary obsession with surfaces and depths, so important to the critique of modernist visual art and postmodernist literature alike. Put in the simplest terms, Mallarmé objects to the flatness of the newspaper: “Every discovery made by printers has hitherto been absorbed in the most elementary fashion by the newspaper, and can be summed up in the word: Press.
The result has been simply a plain sheet of paper upon which a flow of words is printed in the most unrefined manner.” Opposed to “the newspaper with its full sheet on display,” Mallarmé celebrates the mysterious depths of the book:
“Yes, were it not for the folding of the paper and the depths thereby established, that darkness scattered about in the form of black characters could not rise and issue forth in gleams of mystery from the page to which we are about to turn” (82).
Instead of the book’s mysterious depths in which any “motif has been properly placed at a certain height on the page, according to its own or to the book’s distribution of light,” the newspaper “inflicts the monotonousness of its eternally unbearable columns, which are merely strung down the pages by hundreds” (82–3).
Mallarmé’s brilliant analysis takes the criticism SaintBueve and others were directing at the content of newspapers and rearticulates it explicitly at the level of form. Essentially, Mallarmé is horrified at the random juxtapositions created by the dense and relentless columns of newsprint and their attendant advertisements.
Here, the form has effaced the hand of the artist, making meaning dependent on chances dictated by nothing other than haste and cost efficiency. Worse yet, the newspaper destroys the intimate experience of reading, making its riot of words immediately available for anyone.
Implicitly in his metaphors, the virginal book is opposed to the paper whore. For Mallarmé, the quest of the artist for “a hymn, all harmony and joy; an immaculate grouping of universal relationships come together for miraculous and glittering occasion” (80) could only be realized in the depths of the book’s folds.
Mallarmé’s nineteenth century symbolist analysis of flatness meshes in surprising and interesting ways with modernist and postmodernist accounts of this formal property in the work of Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss, and Fredric Jameson.
In his seminal essay from 1939, “AvantGarde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg explains and defends the very distinctions between serious art and popular massproduced entertainment that animated the nineteenthcentury reception of the newspaper as a mass medium.
Greenberg defines kitsch as “popular, commercial art and literature with their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics, Tin Pan Alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.”
As Greenberg’s list suggests, almost every massreproduced kind of art falls into this category. “Kitsch is a product of the industrial revolution which urbanized the masses of Western Europe and America and established what is called universal literacy” (9).
One can hear the sarcasm directed at both the rise of functional literacy and something of the horror at the tastes such mass literacy produced. Like SainteBeuve, Mallarmé, and other critics of mass culture, there is a terrible paranoia about kitsch as a dangerous and counterfeit article:
“Traps are laid even in those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture. It is not enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination towards the latter, one must have a true passion for it that will give him the power to resist the faked article that surrounds and presses in on him from the moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers” (11).
For Greenberg, “press” is certainly a part of the problem, and it shouldn’t surprise us that we find once again the corruption beginning in the sensational pages of newspapers. Like nineteenthcentury critics, what all such forms of mass reproduction and industrial art threaten is authenticity and its attendant quality, autonomy.
Since almost all culture is now produced and mediated in massreproduced forms, Greenberg falls back on symbolist solipsism and hermeticism at the level of form to distinguish an authentic mode for modern art: “It has been in search of the absolute that the avantgarde has arrived at ‘abstract’ or ‘nonobjective’ art–and poetry, too.
The avantgarde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape–not its picture–is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, or originals.
Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself” (5–6). The “avantgarde” Greenberg celebrates here is not what we now think of as the historical avantgarde: futurism, dadaism, surrealism.
For Greenberg, these movements were all corrupt and reactionary forms of kitsch; only the abstraction embodied in the work of the cubists and abstract expressionists, or the symbolist and high modernist poets and novelists, could be considered “authentic” art.
Thus, just as the great theme of the modernist novel was the process of writing novels, so abstract painting became pure to the extent that it became a meditation on its own most obvious formal property. In his essay “Modernist Painting,” Greenberg puts it dogmatically by maintaining that “flatness alone was unique and exclusive to that art … [it] was the only condition painting shared with no other art.”
There is a complex irony here, however, for Greenberg’s celebration of pictorial flatness is simultaneously a quest for the hermeneutic depths denied in kitsch forms: “But the ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous and the sympathetic enter” (15).
This dizzying play of surfaces and depths recalls Mallarmé’s analysis of the newspaper. His objection was twofold: first, that its flatness made it accessible to everyone; second, that its inflexible form in columns negated the intention of the artist.
Yet in a different medium, Greenberg praises the flat surfaces of abstract painting precisely because they keep out the uninitiated and guarantee the pure intentionality of the artist. Animating both the condemnation and celebration of flatness is the obsession with interpretive depths and the fear that they are disappearing in the maw of mechanical reproduction.
In essence, Greenberg redeems the riot of materials and perspectives in cubist paintings by stressing a need for sophisticated interpretive strategies that would provide the one, real meaning of the apparent mess.
He seeks a kind of paradigmatic metaphor in the surface of the canvas that totalizes anything that might appear on it. Yet one could just as easily suggest that the transformations of the world undercut any such metaphoric totalization with an infinite series of metonymic connections, and these are found in cubist canvases, advertisements, and newspapers alike, themselves all metonyms for one another.
Essentially, flatness is the lynchpin of almost all Fredric Jameson’s arguments in his magisterial Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which he defines our own era with “the emergence of a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense, perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the postmodernisms to which we will have occasion to return in a number of other contexts.”
Jameson’s insight shows the continuity in critical obsession with the formal trait of flatness as both a literal fact of media from painting to printing, and even, somewhat counterintuitively, disciplines from contemporary architecture to philosophy.
Jameson, in some ways closer to Mallarmé than Greenberg, equates the flatness of everything from the pastiche of literary style to the façade of the Wells Fargo building, “a surface which seems to be unsupported by any volume” (13).
The loss of those deep volumes in disparate media and genres like music, poetry, and television is the formal expression of a change in our sense of the human, and Jameson labels this loss “the waning of affect”:
The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego–what I have been calling the waning of affect. But it means the end of much more–the end, for example, of style, in the sense of the unique and the personal, the end of the distinctive individual brush stroke (as symbolized by the emergent primacy of mechanical reproduction).
As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self-present to do the feeling. (15)
It is precisely such depth–and the personal style that expresses it in works of art–that Tristan Tzara repudiated with his face hidden behind the columns of a newspaper: his unique and strongly accented voice drowned out by ringing bells.
Further, it is this very depth that Mallarmé celebrates in the experience of reading books: “Thus, in reading, a lonely, quiet concert is given for our minds, and they in turn, less noisily, reach its meaning” (83).
For Jameson, however, the loss of hermeneutic depth is a problem, for it leaves contemporary subjects, both artists and audience, little to do but to slip and slide from one surface to the next, unable, quite literally, to locate themselves in relationship to a larger world.
To explain this, he turns to emphatically concrete geography in the form of Kevin Lynch’s seminal work, The Image of the City: “Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples” (51).
Lynch’s narrative of lost citizens trapped in the mass produced grid of urban development analogically reproduces Clement Greenberg’s analysis of form and painting, but shows us that even landscapes are now alienated.
For Greenberg, the ultimate example of authentic art is landscape itself, with its unique existence in space and time, its being as “something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars, originals” (6).
However, in the face of even architectural mass production, urban landscapes have been reduced in many cases to just the sort of massproduced sameness that makes them perfectly anonymous and fungible. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There is no there there.”
All of this, of course, recalls Walter Benjamin’s formulation of aura as the work of art’s “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be” (220). For Benjamin, it was precisely the technologies of mass reproduction that destroyed such aura, as the massproduced grids of modern cities obliterate the unique in landscape, and this is just one aspect of Jameson’s depthlessness which makes it so hard for the subject to locate itself.
More suggestive yet is Lynch’s insistence on the grid as a particularly troublesome form, especially given its importance to the production of newspapers, the layout of cities, and the themes of modernist painting and other arts.
Rosalind Krauss explains the attraction of grids for modernist painters and the connection of this claustrophobic form to the problems of landscape and narrative. Within its austere bars, we hear “no scream of birds across open skies, no rush of distant water–for the grid has collapsed the spatiality of nature onto the bounded surface of a purely cultural object.”
Not only does the grid thematize the medium of the canvas, it impedes narrative, exchanging development for pure, mechanical repetition. As Krauss puts it, “the absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its antireferential character, but–more importantly–its hostility to narrative” (158).
Those artists who devoted themselves to it, like Mondrian, essentially stopped developing, turning their careers to emphatic repetition. Though not as austere as the grid of modernist painting or the façades of the International style, the newspaper page, too, is essentially a flat grid, and it is in part the ways in which this form manhandles the diverse content that flows into it that horrified Mallarmé with its both inflexible and chance arrangements.
The newspaper’s grid constitutes an eternal return of the same, challenging the autonomy and identity of both authors and audiences, yet calling out to everyone as an imagined framework of community. However, much like Lynch’s urban grid, the flat, regimented forms of the newspaper were blanketing cities all over the world, and this too returns us to the play of surfaces and depths.
Throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, one could find journaux crevés postcards representing individual newspapers. On each, the full, unfolded front page of the paper with its leader was prominently displayed. In each of these postcards, the newspaper is torn and ripped, its page in tatters, through which one can see a photograph of an engraving representing a particular person, figure, or issue connected with the paper.
Read uncritically, this is simply a “dramatic” visual narrative of what we might find “within” the paper. However, given the obsession with the newspaper’s flat and open form, it is difficult not to read against the grain here and note that the newspaper’s columns of dense print serve to cover the photograph, its surface working more to keep us out of the plays of perspectives arrayed in depthless, relentless columns that cover over the unified and deep perspectival image.
Within this visual metaphor, it is necessary to rend the paper and fight one’s way out of its grid in order to reach the real, hidden away at some depth behind it. Indeed, one can hardly look at these postcards and not think of Borges’s parable in which the map becomes the territory–in this case of modern life itself.
Just as to be modern is to be of the moment, and the newspaper is quite literally the most modern form of all, perhaps we should not be so surprised that Tzara not only presented himself to the Paris avantgarde thus as the most modern figure imaginable, the reader of newspapers, his most famous poem would be a formula to read and rend the newspaper.
In early manifestoes by both Breton and Tzara, the newspaper has a privileged place not merely as an image, but also as a source of avantgarde practice. It is in these early invocations of the newspaper that we can first see just how important the form is to the avant-garde’s sense of itself and its practice.
In “Dada Manifesto 1918,” Tristan Tzara exclaims: “Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action.” To become the irrational, transformative, semiotic criminals the manifesto calls for, dada artists employed both visual and verbal collage forms.
Offering a critique of both the depths of lyric subjectivity and the poses of journalistic objectivity, Tzara offers the following recipe for collage poems:
To make a dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left
the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar. (92)
reader of newspapers, his most famous poem would be a formula to read and rend the newspaper. In early manifestoes by both Breton and Tzara, the newspaper has a privileged place not merely as an image, but also as a source of avantgarde practice.
It is in these early invocations of the newspaper that we can first see just how important the form is to the avantgarde’s sense of itself and its practice. In “Dada Manifesto 1918,” Tristan Tzara exclaims: “Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action.”
To become the irrational, transformative, semiotic criminals the manifesto calls for, dada artists employed both visual and verbal collage forms. Offering a critique of both the depths of lyric subjectivity and the poses of journalistic objectivity, Tzara offers the following recipe for collage poems:
To make a dadaist poem
Take a newspaper.
Take a pair of scissors.
Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
Shake it gently.
Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will be like you.
And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar. (92)
This recipe underscores the critical potentials of collage as a method for severing connections of logic and sense, naturalizing repressive and conservative forces. Brilliantly, Tzara brings together both the standardization of modernity associated with mass production in the form of the daily newspaper and the inadequacy of traditional lyric poetry or other art to protest such forces.
Thus Tzara’s transgression is less a critique of the newspaper itself than of the older, romantic conception of the artist as an oppositional figure standing outside of culture with a God’seye view from which to offer the truth of a transcendent self or nature.
Directing the wouldbe dada poet to “copy conscientiously,” Tzara puts the artist at the mercy of chance and the cuts made from the paper. Yet, if we remember Mallarmé’s objection to the paper as a form of chance, Tzara is simply taking the logic of the form to its furthest extreme.
Essentially, the project is one of emptying out hermeneutic depths, leaving neither the poet nor the newspaper a claim for truth. Instead, there is only the chance arrangement of words. This recipe might well be Tzara’s most famous work of art itself, and once again we see Tzara almost in the guise from 1920, the most modern reader of the newspaper.
Though opposed to the kind of depthless and nihilistic chance celebrated by dada, André Breton and the surrealists too would turn to the newspaper as the source for forms of avantgarde practice. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton offers a revision of Tzara’s recipe: “Surrealist methods would, moreover, demand to be heard.
Everything is valid when it comes to obtaining the desired suddenness from certain associations. The pieces of paper that Picasso and Braque insert into their work have the same value as the introduction of a platitude into a literary analysis of the most rigorous sort.
It is even permissible to entitle POEM [emphasis in original] what we get from the most random assemblage possible (observe, if you will, the syntax) of headlines and scraps of headlines cut out of the newspapers.”
The differences between the surrealists and the dadaists are striking. Where Tzara cuts all the semantic connectionsbetween individual words, leaving almost everything to chance, Breton insists on keeping at least fragments of headlines, complete syntactical units.
Instead of joyous nonsense, Breton seeks the illumination of new orders through these strange images. Interestingly, both Tzara and Breton provide examples of the kinds of poetry their recipes produce. Tzara’s does not observe syntax, “spectator all to efforts from the it is no longer 10 to 12” (92) reads one line.
Breton’s method yields something much more lyrical, “A burst of laughter / of sapphire in the island of Ceylon” (41). Though more lyrical than dadaism, this approach to poetry is still a profound and powerful challenge to traditional conceptions of the artist.
Like Tzara, Breton works with readymade words, and chance still plays a profound role. Yet, for all their differences, the fact that both artists turn to the newspaper underscores the influence of the form. By 1924, André Breton and Tristan Tzara had fallen out.
Breton was done with dada anarchy, and he wanted to let everyone know that the time had come for something different. With the publication of the “Manifesto of Surrealism,” he put the avantgarde firmly on a positive program of emphatic and quasiscientific investigation:
“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak” (14). Written at the same time as this first manifesto, Breton’s, Soluble Fish put its plan into practice.
Automatic writing was a key technique of the early surrealists, enabling, they believed, access to that absolute reality between the dream and the real. Breton describes the technique in the first manifesto in exquisite detail, emphasizing the morbidly passive state it demands.
Commanding the wouldbe automatic author to find a comfortable place, he suggests to “have writing materials brought to you,” (29) for apparently the activity of finding them oneself might be too much. Then, stipulating that one forgets about one’s talents, genius, and “everyone else,” Breton commands one to “[w]rite quickly, without any preconceived subject, fast enough so that you will not remember what you’re writing and be tempted to reread what you have written.
The first sentence will come spontaneously, so compelling is the truth that with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard” (29–30). In just this manner, Breton produced Soluble Fish, one of his most difficult and strange works.
Unlike Nadja and Mad Love, which read alternately as novels, memoirs, or psychoanalytic case histories, Soluble Fish actually performs the irrational world of the dream instead of narrating it. Like these other works, scenes of Paris street life are juxtaposed with fantastic castles and Breton’s obsessions with stones, stars, diamonds, crystals, mirrors, and water.
But these more elemental images are interwoven with dream sequences unfolding through shop windows and billboards, streetlights and factories. In addition, the newspaper plays a prominent role, with an entire chapter playing out Mallarmé’s worst fears about this strange form. In the following section of Soluble Fish, Breton skitters across the surface of a newspaper:
“The ground beneath my feet is nothing but an enormous unfolded newspaper. Sometimes a photograph comes by; it is a nondescript curiosity, and from the flowers there uniformly rises the smell, the good smell, of printer’s ink.”
Breton continues across the surface of the paper, encountering ship movements, place names, and even the folds of the paper itself. He encounters advertisements, “I go on to read a few advertisements, wellwritten ones, in which contradiction plays a lively role; it really served as a handblotter in this advertising agency.”
The newspaper becomes a place, though its skyline is purely commercial: “There is also a remarkable view of the sky, in the very same style as business letterheads showing a factory with all its chimneys smoking.”
The journey over the surface of the newspaper finally culminates in the invocation of the mechanical: “I have only to close my eyes if I do not wish to bestow my attention, which is mechanical and therefore most unfavorable, on the Great Awakening of the Universe.”
These are remarkable images indeed, and they suggest how the newspaper transformed the experience of avantgarde artists, who were defining themselves in relation to media culture rather than nature. Breton demonstrates that the natural world has been covered over or exchanged for the newspaper form.
Unlike the book, which invites us into its dark and mysterious folds, the newspaper unfolds, covering over the world around us. The entire natural world, from the sky above to the flowers below, has been covered with a newspaper through which we now walk.
This is a complex exchange, in which the natural landscape that once inspired poets is exchanged for a mediascape that displaces and reproduces all those older features as a purely cultural construction. If art was once defined as holding the mirror up to nature, Breton projects us into a world in which there are only mirrors, for the newspaper obscures anything it might supposedly reflect, filling all available space–even wrapping itself around a forest he only suspects might be underneath the paper:
“At the bottom of the fourth page the newspaper has an unusual fold that I can describe as follows: it looks as if it has been wrapped around a metallic object, judging by a rusty spot that might be a forest” (60).
Whatever depths there may be in this strange landscape, they are inaccessible behind the surface of the paper itself. Perhaps the newspaper conceals a weapon or a bed behind its unbroken sheet, but Breton cannot move beyond it to find out.
Instead, he travels over and through the paper as it seems to travel and move around him, with its floating photographs. In this landscape, the light which illuminates the larger headline fonts is “celebrated by poets,” (60) perhaps referencing the importance of headlines and newspaper fonts to both avantgarde poetry and painting.
Significantly, politics is a minor part of the newspaper, which Breton stumbles upon late, though with the sinister comment that these “calcium men,” (61) presumably skeletons, are wielding much of the power.
More important to Breton are the images of the advertisements and the commercial metaphors, the news of fashion and the magic of this new mediascape suffused with “the good smell” of printer’s ink (60).
The final paragraph is ambiguous, suggesting, but hardly affirming, the possibility of moving beyond the newspaper landscape, with its “mechanical attention” (61). After all, since the newspaper is itself mobile and concerned with travel, might it not simply sweep its flaneur along with it?
The beginning of the next section would suggest that if the newspaper has not filled the world completely, media covers more and more of it, for Breton leaps not off the newspaper and into nature, but seems to slide from the surface of the newspaper to the surface of an ad as a way to extricate himself from this ubiquitous newspaper: “if the resplendent posters betrayed their secret,” the next section begins, “we would be forever lost to ourselves” (61).
In works such as Soluble Fish, surrealists hoped to revolutionize the world. The dreamworld of plenitude and chance represented in newspapers and advertising promised an existence of freedom and excitement, chance and selfinvention.
Of course, such dream images repressed the brutal conformity of work and the regimented sameness of everyday life that subtend this emerging consumer culture. In essence, one might say that the surrealists demanded that everyday life pay off these promises of freedom and selfinvention found in the media dreamworld.
In part, those promises are encoded into the very form of the paper, with its radical juxtapositions and chance encounters that cut against whatever editorial viewpoint or commercial agenda might animate a given example.
The riot of chance connections and possibilities, even the palpably false promises of advertising, might be recombined to form a critical, utopian statement, revealing and actualizing the desire for a vastly different world–a surreality. Throughout the twentieth century, artists would return to the newspaper, rediscovering and reinventing its attractions and potentials.
While Picasso, Tzara, and Breton defined the major approaches of modern artists to the newspaper, Brion Gysin and William Burroughs would reinvent newspaper collage for a postmodern age. Indeed, Burroughs would go on to create the “cutup” trilogy, but the formal innovation and rediscovery of collage emerged through the work of Brion Gysin, whose reinvention of collage even carries the date, September of 1959.
During that fall, Brion Gysin was alone in his room at 9 rue GitleCoeur, the “Beat Hotel” in Paris, working on his drawings, when he discovered a technique for collage that would transform postmodern literature: While cutting a mount for a drawing in room #15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters’ techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as “First CutUps” in “Minutes to Go.”
At the time I thought them hilariously funny and hysterically meaningful. I laughed so hard my neighbors thought I’d flipped. I hope you may discover this unusual pleasure for yourselves–this shortlived but unique intoxication. Cut up this page you are reading and see what happens. See what I say as well as hear it.
Gysin’s account, frequently retold by everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Genesis POrridge, has become a kind of myth about the origins of postmodernism itself. Encoded in it are both its direct connection to the techniques of the historical avantgarde as well as suggestions of the new directions that collage would take in postmodern literature.
Gysin’s technique is animated by both the destructive impulse of dada and the search for alternative images and possibilities associated with the projects of surrealism. However, Gysin and others would also find new materials, practices, and metaphors to reinvent the techniques of collage for a changing world.
Gysin would see words as literal objects to be manipulated, like paint on canvas, but because he worked with broad strips of newspaper, his collages would be far more narrative than any modernist collage. Gysin would also see collage as a tool, like drugs, for the expansion of consciousness, and this too would give collage both a critical and constructive power beyond anything modernist collage artists had ever claimed for the technique.
Finally, Gysin would connect collage to the traditions of magic, seeing in it the possibility to cast spells that would create and destroy proliferating worlds. In Gysin’s description of his discovery, the materiality of the collage process is emphasized. Gysin, first and foremost a painter, sees the words he is working with as images in their own right, so much raw material that must be seen as well as heard.
In fact, Gysin saw the cutup technique as part of a constellation of techniques including calligraphic painting and permutation poetry that were all as much visual as literary arts: “Word symbols turn back into visual symbols” (46).
In an unpublished interview, Gysin would make this even more explicit: “We began to find out a whole lot of things about the real nature of words and writing. What are words and what are they doing? The cutup method treats words as the painter treats his paint, raw material with rules and reasons of its own … there’s an actual treatment of the material as if it were a piece of cloth. The sentence, even, the word, becomes a real piece of plastic material that you can cut into.”
This was not an isolated approach, as late in his life Gysin reiterated the point in almost the same terms: “cutups are taking the actual matter of writing as if it were the same as the matter in sculpting or in painting … and handling it with a plastic manner” (54). For Gysin, words are treated as if they are pure material, rather than symbolic abstractions. Gysin’s insistence on the material existence of words stresses their construction.
In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker notes that literary texts are traditionally presented as unmarked, using a uniform “wall of type” that creates the illusion of a voice speaking. By stressing the materiality of the word, Gysin emphasizes the materiality of the word as itself, all but erasing that illusion of a voice speaking.
This emphasis on the materiality of the word is echoed in Gysin’s comparison of the cutup technique to hashish intoxication, in which the cutup words inspire an utterly somatic experience of literal intoxication–an experience so intense he speculates that those in neighboring rooms would think that he had flipped.
In a later interview, Gysin is even more direct: “It was quite exhilarating, like pot, you know” (qtd. in Miles 195). This description of intoxication is an important sign of how postmodern cutups differ from modernist collages.
Tzara and Breton were first and foremost interested in transforming an objective world of representation. In part, Gysin shares this desire with the historical avantgarde, though he articulates it in particularly postmodern, Burroughsian terms: “The Biological Film, now showing on Earth, can and must be rewritten. It is a lousy movie to be withdrawn Now from the dimensional screen and sent back to Rewrite” (46).
For Gysin, experience is constructed at every level through the processes of representation. To find alternative possibilities, Gysin insists that these scripts must be rewritten, and this would be first and foremost the practice of critiquing and transforming identity: “Science is near enough ready to tell me who he [Gysin] is for me to be much less interested than formerly in him. I could not care less about his socalled talent or lack of it. Brion Gysin is a drag. I am not interested” (46).
Gysin was far less interested in building a profitable, spectacular image of himself as an artist than in escaping identity altogether. Both his relative obscurity and financial straits he found himself in at the end of his life testify to his success, as well as the price he paid for it. Gysin used collage as a tool to carry out a micropolitical deconstruction of his identity.
This project of personal reinvention would at times render him all but imperceptible. The first cutup experiments that began at the Beat Hotel in 1959 would culminate in the publication of Minutes to Go in 1960. This collaborative work was constructed by Gysin and Burroughs, as well as Gregory Corso and Sinclair Beiles, and contained forty cutups.
The book begins with a sort of preamble by Gysin, constructed of cutup material. The marginal perspective and resistant posture associated with the technique is immediately evident:
the hallucinated have come to tell you that yr utilities
are being shut off dreams monitored thought directed
sex is shutting down everywhere you are being sent
all words are taped agents everywhere
marking down the live ones to exterminate
After laying bare the dire situation of living in a completely scripted world, the poem suggests that the book itself is a guide to active resistance: Here and now we will show you what you can do with and to the words . . . slice down the middle dice into sections (4). There is a major difference between these collages and most of those associated with the historical avantgarde and the high modernists–these collages are legible, and they tend to be emphatically narrative.
This is in part a consequence of the technique, for the cutup leaves large sections of text untouched. Instead of the total destruction of meaning associated with dada literary collage, or the precious, isolated image of the surrealist newspaper collage, the cutup technique tends to offer alternative narratives.
Consider one of Gysin’s earliest cutups: It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is like pulling a figure of the air. Six distinguished British women said to us later, indicating the crowd of chic young women who were fingering samples, “If our prices weren’t as good or better, they wouldn’t come. Eve is eternal.”
Miss Hanna Pugh the slim model–a member of the Diners’ club, the American Express Credit Cards, etc.–drew from a piggy bank a talent which is the very quintessence of the British Female sex. “People aren’t crazy,” she said. “Now that Hazard has banished my timidity I feel that I, too, can live on streams in the area where people are urged to be watchful.”
A huge wave rolled in from the wake of Hurricane Gracie and bowled a married couple off a jetty. The Wife’s body was found–the husband was missing, presumed drowned. Tomorrow the moon will be 228,400 miles from earth and the sun almost 93,000,000 miles away. (6)
Though this text has been cut from newspaper articles and magazine advertisements, there remains enough sense in it that it does not feel illegible, but enough of the connections have been cut to create an ambiguity. The first lines no doubt belong with the account of the hurricane with which this cutup begins and ends.
However, the “disaster” is now abstract. Because the next readymade element is a description of commerce, perhaps even an advertisement, it is tempting to read the image of “chic” consumers as the referent of that initial disaster. There is then another odd fragment in which the readymade text articulates the beauty of the model in terms of capital, the “piggy bank” of femininity.
This constructs the series “women,” “beauty,” “credit,” and “capital” and connects it to the “disaster” of the first lines. By the end, the heterosexual couple is destroyed, perhaps associating women with danger again (Gysin was a notorious misogynist, and would certainly have welcomed such a connection) and the exact physical location of the earth in relation to the moon and the sun for a particular day is given. A rewrite indeed, and while there are a number of readings possible, there is certainly sense here.
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the technique is that the words and images of everyday life (a newspaper story about a hurricane, accounts of consumption, advertisements) are turned into a warning about the disastrous consequences of those things, but one that retains enough narrative sense to offer more than a critical position or a deconstruction.
Instead, this cutup provides an alternative narrative that carries the possibilities of a different practice. By knowing exactly where one is–location being emphasized in the last lines–the reader might well attempt to avoid the disaster in the future. The cutups of Minutes to Go take the form of prose, but Gysin went further, creating actual cutandpaste collages of many of his cutups, often in collaboration with William Burroughs.
In almost all of these, he employed the form of a grid, which he created with special ink rollers he had designed himself. Terry Wilson emphasizes this magic side, noting that “the cabalistic grid was incorporated into his work and his paintings … in Islam, the world is a vast emptiness like the Sahara. Events are written: Mektoub. Likewise, Gysin’s empty deserts became written deserts.” The grid thus came to represent the ways in which a magic writing structures and fills a universe.
Yet, in so many ways, Gysin’s grid operates just as the newspaper grid, which strings its columns down the empty paper by the hundreds. It produces the same sort of random and chance juxtapositions, which Gysin names magic. Yet Gysin’s approach to the creation of grids was hardly magic. Indeed, his handmade roller is a roller still, offering a standardized form, not unlike the metal drums of the vast rotary presses of the newspapers.
Working alone, Gysin tended to produce palimpsests like his calligraphic paintings, which reduce language to pure materiality as one letter is overwritten by myriad others. Yet, always the grid itself remains visible. Working with Burroughs, Gysin often collaborated on newspaper collages that incorporated the very same grids.
Gysin and Burroughs were not alone in their obsession with the newspaper. A whole new generation of fine artists would continue to take it up, ultimately including the silkscreens of Andy Warhol and Shepard Fairey. Yet even at midcentury the move away from abstract expression found painters like Robert Rauschenberg again collaging papers.
John Cage found in the newspaper a key metaphor to understand painter Robert Rauschenberg’s innovative and disturbing collagepaintings of the 1950s, the “combines.” In Silence, Cage writes, “There is no more subject in a combine that there is in a page from a newspaper. Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity.” In addition to the layers of industrial paint and household fabrics, mirrors and taxidermied animals, photographs and toys, clothes and appliances, there are almost always newspaper clippings themselves in the combines.
Rauschenberg’s critics have been at a loss to cope with the semiotic excesses of these works. However, I want to explore how their attempts to articulate the problem of collage address the formal problems of the newspaper itself, and illuminate the end of the newspaper as a generative form for collage. In his recent review of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s retrospective of Rauschenberg’s combines, YvesAlain Bois notes that viewers tend to adopt one of two interpretive strategies which are themselves encoded into the works, “both of which concern readability–or rather, its opposite.”
On the one hand, the works present themselves as vast and simultaneous aggregations of so much material, that one can only stand at a distance, responding to a combine as a work of sculpture–in essence, not reading it. Certainly Rauschenberg himself seems to have made some combines for just this purpose. Minutiae, for instance, served as part of the set for a Merce Cunningham production in 1954.
As Bois has it, “try to decipher the text of a [newspaper] cartoon while doing somersaults!” (245). Bois has little patience for those who would offer a close reading of a combine by seizing on one or more of its details: Any attempt to offer a reading based on these fragments seems both arbitrary and infinite–thus, futile.
Bois reiterates Leo Steinberg’s comment about Rauschenberg’s combines: “We shall have dissertations galore, including perusals of the fine print in the newspaper scraps that abound in Rauschenberg’s pictures.” Bois suggests that the very form of the combines produces this very problem, which he calls suspended viewpoint: “Indeed, in almost all of the Combines through the late ’50s, including even the smallest examples, massive discrepancies of internal scale prevent the beholder from resting assured in a given viewpoint and thus preclude any synthetic reading of the individual works, except of the most generalized nature” (245).
The combine, then, is no different than the newspaper itself when, taken in its totality, is just as unreadable. While this may seem a surprising statement, the work of Kenneth Goldsmith dramatically performs this fact of the newspaper. From the introduction of affordable dailies in the middle of the nineteenth century until the demise of the analog age in the last years of the twentieth century, the newspaper remained the urform of collage.
In a remarkable work entitled Day, experimental writer Kenneth Goldsmith gives us a final permutation, and, the clearest statement of the end of the newspaper form as a defining influence on the future. Reversing Mallarmé’s formal complaint about the form of the newspaper, Goldsmith has put an entire day of the New York Times back between the covers of a book, thus returning it to mysterious and virginal folds: “I am spending my 39th year practicing uncreativity,” he announces on the back cover of Day. “On Friday, September 1, 2000, I began retyping the day’s New York Times, word for word, letter for letter, from the upper left hand corner to the lower right hand corner, page by page.”
Goldsmith’s remarkable work is astonishing at a number of levels. To begin with, it is simply shocking to see the depth and weight of Day, 836 pages of an oversized trade paperback. There are the endless choices of style that confronted Goldsmith, such as how to handle the copy of advertisements, captions, lists, stock quotations, and other information that depends so heavily on the context of nowabsent images.
However, perhaps the most shocking aspect of Day is not to be found in the writing but rather in Goldsmith’s reading. Goldsmith chose Truman Capote’s famous response to Jack Kerouac’s claim that he wrote On the Road in two weeks as the epigraph for Day. Quipped Capote, “That’s not writing. That’s typing.”
However, I’m tempted to respond to Goldsmith that Day isn’t typing at all, but rather an extreme act of reading. Goldsmith has literally read every word of this issue of the New York Times, something that no other reader of a newspaper, no matter how devoted or careful, could possibly do without an immense amount of effort and discipline. He has read every single financial listing, not just those of interest. He has registered every word of every advertisement, classified ad, and legal notice.
In essence, he has given the paper the very kind of attention that only the most careful of readers devote to books. As such, it only makes sense that this practice returns newspaper pages to the folds of Mallarmé’s spiritual instrument, the book. In doing so, Goldsmith recapitulates the very problem of perspective raised by Rauschenberg’s combines, and newspapers themselves.
Readers of the combines, like readers of newspapers, never take in the whole, which is always simultaneously both too large and too small. In his act of extreme reading, Goldsmith has engaged in a stunt of physical endurance that few could match, and fewer would want to even attempt. After all, this isn’t Finnegan’s Wake, but simply an ephemeral paper.
Yet the exact nature of its ephemerality is changing in the face of new technological pressures. Goldsmith’s work is a sign that the newspaper has ceased to function as it did during the heyday of modernism. As early as 1964, Marshall McLuhan predicted the end of the newspaper: “The classified ads (and stockmarket quotations) are the bedrock of the press.
Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold” (186). Indeed, the press as a paper and ink institution is imploding, and Goldsmith has folded the press back into the book, and daily newspapers are reinventing themselves as evershifting, constantly updated web pages.
In comparison to the virtual shimmer of their web incarnations, paper and ink papers now begin to look far more solid and organized, conservative even, than the modernists might have ever dreamed. Given the shifting updates of the web, and the almost immediate obsolescence and inaccessibility of so much web publishing, Goldsmith’s act was only possible with the paper and ink version of the Times.
In this digital age, ads change, or their context with one story and not another isn’t the same for every reader. Perhaps as both paper and ink creations, both the form of the book and the newspaper are far more similar, and far closer to modernism than the virtual world now overtaking and transforming our reading practices.
Beginning with cubists in the early decades of the twentieth century, the newspaper has remained the most important material of collage. Its radical juxtapositions of texts, advertisements, and images, its modernity, its status as a ubiquitous material of everyday life, its ideological functions, and the wealth of material it offers to collage artists makes it the urform of collage practices.
It is remarkable how fineart collage begins with the newspaper, but how flexible it remains as a form. Not only did the historical avantgarde depend on the newspaper as a formal model and a raw material, high modernists including poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams all used it as readymade material and formal model for their work.
Novelists like John Dos Passos also relied on the form, and this continued throughout the century to the 1990s with the work of writers like Raymond Federman and Kenneth Goldsmith. Though the newspaper is often thought of as the media form defining the nineteenth century, with cinema coming to define the twentieth century, twentiethcentury artists depended upon the newspaper form for their formal innovations, and as much as the cinema did have a profound influence on modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, many of the most characteristic techniques of modernism–juxtaposition, montage, fragmentation, simultaneity, etc.–have their origin in the form of the newspaper’s folded sheets as much or more than in the celluloid splices of cinema.