Critics From The United States

"Battcock was close friends with Andy Warhol and starred in several of the artist’s films, including "Batman Dracula," 1964 and "Horse," 1965, as well as Gregory Markopoulos' films "Galaxie," 1966 and "Iliac Passion," 1967. He became a special correspondent for Arts Magazine also in 1967. His interest in cinema led him to write articles about other Warhol films such as, “Notes on the Chelsea Girls: A Film by Andy Warhol,” 1967, and “Warhol Film,” 1968. Battcock contributed to the re-definition of what the art world categorizes as art in that many of his anthologies address "new" fields of the aesthetic exploration of media such as film and video."

"In the first reel (of '), you see a close-up of art critic Gregory Battcock as he is receiving a blow-job. Like the silent version, the person who is performing oral sex on him is out of the frame. Battcock looks somewhat bored during the proceedings. He drinks wine and some water. Towards the end of the first reel, he gets a phone call from a friend named Bob who has just returned from the trip. While they are chatting, the camera pans down to reveal the back of the head of someone who is going down on Battcock while he chats on the phone. Battcock tells the guy to come over and see him in about 33 minutes (the length of reel two). At the end of the reel, Battcock tells the guy going down on him that the caller's 'mother finally died'. The guy responds with something along the line of 'Oh, really'. During reel two, Warhol moves the camera --tilting up and down to the guy on the floor whose face is never revealed. There are also some occasional zooms in and out of Battcock's face. At one point, Battcock starts to eat an apple and begins choking. The guy on the floor tells him 'You shouldn't eat so fast.' The film ends without the sexual act being completed (at least from what I can tell..."

"Before man was aware of art he was aware of himself. Awareness of the person is, then, the first art. In performance art the figure of the artist is the tool for the art. It is the art."

"Warhol's art can both subvert (up to a point) formal art and, at the same time, offer socially provocative documents to the ordinary, white, middle-class citizen. Blacks and the poor do not like Warhol's art or movies. Documents that are mainly intended as deliberate references to a predominant white culture cannot incite the imaginations of those who don't give a fuck for that culture in the first place, even if they did understand what it was all about. This inability of Warhol to reach blacks and the poor represents the weakest aspect of his art. Warhol's art implies a certain disgust on the part of the artist for culture — a disgust he shares in common with New Left revolutionaries and progressive activist artists and critics. His latest decision, to stop painting altogether, is a deliberate step in the direction away from culture itself. It is also an inevitable step, as the very notion of art works that possess a quality as items to be traded upon the New York art exchange is incompatible with the socialisation of art. Modern culture is a repressive, police agency. The police function of modern culture has been recognized by Warhol. His paintings of electric chairs, police attacks, most-wanted men, and car crashes all seem to reflect in art the reality of an official culture of repression rather than of life."

"What is video art? How does it differ from commercial television? Is video art linked to such traditional art forms as painting and sculpture? Is it a totally new phenomenon?"

"Video art is art that will stretch the boundaries of the art world."

"(Performance) art is, perhaps, the first art phenomenon to clearly demonstrate that modern art has become antiquated. Modern art is based upon a single assumption. That the artwork is only what it is.It is not a picture or a metaphor for something else. It is, say, a photograph, first and only. Or, perhaps, it is a painting, first and only. This assumption still looms above us all. We automatically accept it. We fall back upon it whenever we have a problem in criticizing, accepting, or understanding a work of art."

"As a design-scientist the artist discovers and perfects language that corresponds more directly to experience; he develops hardware that embodies its own software as a conceptual tool for coping with reality."

"We live in and age of hyper-awareness, our senses extend around the globe, but it's the case of aesthetic overload: our technical zeal has outstripped our psychic capacity to cope with the influx of information."

"Freud spoke of oceanic consciousness as that in which we feel our individual existence lost in mystic union with the universe. Nothing could be more appropriate to contemporary experience, when for the first time man has left the boundaries of this globe. The oceanic effect of synaesthetic cinema is similar to the mystical allure of the natural elements: we stare in mindless wonder at the ocean or a lake or river. We are drawn almost hypnotically to fire, gazing as though spellbound. We see cathedrals in clouds, not thinking anything in particular but feeling somehow secure and content. It is similar to the concept of no-mindedness in Zen, which also is the state of mantra and mandala consciousness, the widest range of consciousness."

"For some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of previously unrecognized relation- ships between existing phenomena, both physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality."

"When we say expanded cinema we actually mean expanded consciousness. Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn't a movie at all: like life it's a process of becoming, man's ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialize in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind."

"For some time now it has been clear that intermedia art is trending toward that point at which all the phenomena of life on earth will constitute the artist’s palette. It is the purpose of this chapter to illuminate the direction of that trend and to cite a few pertinent examples. As with all other Paleocybernetic phenomena, the direction is simultaneously toward inner and outer space, the microcosm and the macrocosm. On the one hand, intermedia environments turn the participant inward upon himself, providing a matrix for psychic exploration, perceptual, censorial, and intellectual awareness; on the other hand technology has advanced to the point at which the whole earth itself becomes the “content” of aesthetic activity. The term “light show” must now be expanded virtually to include the aurora borealis, since hemispherical lumia displays are possible in the creation of artificial plasma clouds in space (see color plates), the launching of rockets to generate atmospherical events, or urban environmental generators such as Nicholas Schoffer’s monumental Cybernetic Light Tower, which transforms the skies of Paris into panoramic fantasias of color."

"The intermedia network has made all of us artists by proxy. A decade of television-watching is equal to a comprehensive course in dramatic acting, writing, and filming... the mystique is gone - we could almost do it ourselves. Unfortunately too many of us do just that: hence the glut of sub-mediocre talent in the entertainment industry."

"Anyone who looks at the historical record of the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting this historical record between the years of the late-1960's up to the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968), and Gene Youngblood's reference work Expanded Cinema (1970). Specifically, your (Frank Popper's) books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (1968), Art, Action and Participation (1975) and Art of the Electronic Age (1993) are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today - in your terms virtualized."

"The expression "as right as rain" must have been invented by an Englishman."

"It is the final test of a gentleman—his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him."

"[M]y religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind."

"If the happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts, we are bound to grow happier as we advance in years, because our minds have more and more interesting thoughts. A well-ordered life is like climbing a tower; the view half way up is better than the view from the base, and it steadily becomes finer as the horizon expands."

"I have no patriotism, for patriotism, as I see it, is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."

"The great problems of the world - social, political, economic and theological - do not concern me in the slightest...If all the Armenians were to be killed tomorrow and if half of Russia were to starve to death the day after, it would not matter to me in the least. What concerns me alone is myself and the interests of a few close friends."

"One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright."

"The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth."

"The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism."

"Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness."

"Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible a plea as baseball in Italian."

"No man can think clearly when his fists are clenched."

"For the first time in human history a child is born into a home in which television is on an average of about seven hours a day. In some countries a little more in some countries a little less, but in all industrial countries this is about the situation. And for the first time in human history most of the stories are told not by the parent, not by the school, not by the church, not by the tribe or the community, and in many places not even by the native country, but by a relatively small and shrinking group of global conglomerates who have something to sell. And it changes in a very fundamental way, the cultural climate, the cultural environment into which our children are born, in which they grow up, in which they become socialized, in which they become human beings."

"Growing up with violence, with inescapable expertly choreographed brutality in every home builds not only a kind of desensitization for it, but it also creates a market for violent entertainment by people for whom even what they see on television is not enough, is not graphic enough, is not explicit enough, and some movie productions, some big productions really cash in on that market. What is peculiar about this is that as time goes on, a greater dosage is necessary to satisfy this need."

"You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behavior. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell."

"In one certain way, the therapeutically inclined individual resembles his predecessor, the ascetic. That resemblance can be best sketched historically. Once launched into some activity, conceiving of himself as an instrument of God’s will, the ascetic did not stop to ask about the meaning of it all. On the contrary, the more furious his activity, the more the problem of what his activity meant receded from his mind. … To meet the demands of the day was as near as one could come to doing the pious thing, in this—God’s—world. To trouble about meaning was really an impiety and, of course, frivolous, because futile. For the question of meaning, therefore, neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic type feels responsible, if his spiritual discipline has been successful. The recently fashionable religious talk of “ultimate concern” makes no sense either in the ascetic or in the therapeutic mode. To try to relate “ultimate concern” to everyday behavior would be exhausting and nerve-shattering work; indeed, it could effectively inhibit less grandiose kinds of work. Neither the ascetic nor the therapeutic bothers his head about “ultimate concern.” Such a concern is for mystics who cannot otherwise enjoy their leisure. In the workaday world, there are no ultimate concerns, only present ones. Therapy is the respite of every day, during which the importance of the present is learned, and the existence of what in the ascetic tradition came to be called the “ultimate” or “divine” is unlearned."

"Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life. Therapeutic re-education is therefore at once a difficult and yet modest procedure. It teaches the patient-student how to live with the contradictions that combine to make him into a unique personality; this it does in contrast to the older moral pedagogies, which tried to re-order the contradictions into a hierarchy of superior and inferior, good and evil, capabilities. To become a psychological man is thus to become kinder to the self as a whole, to the private parts of it as well as to the public ones, to the once inferior as well as to the formerly superior. While older character types were concentrating on the life task of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy, modern pedagogies, reflecting the changing selfconception of this culture, are far more egalitarian: it is the task of psychological man to develop an informed (ie., healthy) respect for the sovereign and unresolvable basic contradictions that make him the singularly complicated human being he is."

"Freud’s most important ideas finally may have less to do with the repression of sexual impulses (which explains neither the past discontents of our civilization nor the present ones), than with ambivalence. It is their capacity to reverse feelings that is the human problem and hope. What hope there is derives from Freud’s assumption that human nature is not so much a hierarchy of high-low, and good-bad, as his predecessors believed, but rather a jostling democracy of contending predispositions, deposited in every nature in roughly equal intensities. Where there is love, there is the lurking eventuality of hatred. Where there is ambition, there is the ironic desire for failure. Although he wishes not to know it, a sore loser may be sore mainly because he almost won and is reacting against his wish to lose."

"In the time of public philosophies and social religions, the great communities were positive. A positive community is characterized by the fact that it guarantees some kind of salvation to the individual by virtue of his membership and participation in that community. That sort of community seemed corrupt to the economic man, with his particular version of an ascetic ideal tested mainly by self-reliance and personal achievement. The positive community was displaced, in social theory, by the neutral market. Now, in the middle of the twentieth century, the market mechanism appears not so much corrupt as a fiction to psychological man, with his awareness of how decisions are made in the social system. In order to participate self-protectively in the manipulative and acquisitive game, psychological man builds his tight family island, living for the remainder of his time in negative communities. But these collections of little islands surrounded by therapeutic activities, without any pretense at a doctrine of salvation, are themselves infected by the negativity of the larger community and become manipulative arenas themselves, rather than oases of escape from the larger arena. The indefinite prolongation of psychoanalytic therapy is itself a form of membership in the negative community. Positive communities were, according to Freud, held together by guilt, they appear attractive only now, in distant retrospect, but the modern individual, faced with the necessity of merging his own life into communal effort, would have found them suffocating. Instead, the modern individual can only use the community as the necessary stage for his effort to enhance himself—if not always, or necessarily, to enrich himself."

"The higher dividends are essentially symbolic in nature. They are, in Freudian terms, the cultural equivalents of dividends which might be experienced more directly—if only a culture could stand the strain of immediate satisfactions. By setting a limit on the functional value of the higher dividends for most men, Freud declared that the religious question, in its inherited form, as a self-abnegation achieved with moral artistry, was no longer worth asking. This total rejection of the religious question gives even Marxism a pious look. By such a rejection psychoanalysis contributes to that symbolic impoverishment which is the only poverty a culture, as distinct from either a society or an individual, may suffer. ...Heretofore, the saving arrangements of Western culture have appeared as symbol systems communicating demands by stoning the sensual with deprivations, and were thus operated in a dynamically ambivalent mode. Our culture developed, as its general technique of salvation, assents to moral demands that treated the sensual part of the self as an enemy. From mastery over this enemy-self there developed some triumphant moral feeling; a character ideal was born. Every man was thus born twice, the second time as a creature aspiring to a moral artistry trained by deprivations. In sum, the classical character ideals were all personifications of a release from a multitude of desires. ...Not only our Western system but every system of integrative moral demand, the generative principle of culture, expressed itself in positive deprivations—in a character ideal that functioned to commit the individual to the group. Culture was thus the establishment and organization of restrictive motives. Men engaged in disciplines of interdiction. The dialectic of deprivation and remission from deprivation was in the service of those particular interdicts by which a culture constituted itself. ... The dialectic of perfection, based on a deprivational mode, is being succeeded by a dialectic of fulfillment, based on the appetitive mode."

"Since no firm social standards for treatment have yet been erected, some grave ambiguities persist regarding the question of just who should be treated. There may be a kindness that is neurotic, if it develops out of unconscious compulsions, and a cruelty that is normal, if it is freely and consciously determined upon. So far as sainthood is determined by unconscious and uncontrolled motives, it is neurotic; so far as sinning, as usually understood, is determined by conscious and rational choice, it is normal. One difficulty with the criteria of rationality and consciousness is that Eichmann, for instance, might well be considered quite without need of treatment. He knew what he was doing; indeed, he wanted to be a great success in his career. Freud was honest enough to discover that there was no inherent relation between normality and the norm, such as had been established, in the age of political and religious man, through the mediating myth that there were natural laws. The analytic attitude has discovered no natural harmony of goals, no hierarchy of value inscribed upon the universe."

"On the other hand, he (Freud) hoped that somehow, despite the near equality of our warring emotions, reason would cleverly manage to reassert itself, despite its congenital weakness—not in the high and mighty way preached by Plato and his Christian successors but in a modest, even sly manner that would alternately dazzle and lull the more powerful emotions into submission. This way actually demands, it seems, the kind of character ideal we have called the “therapeutic” in order to contrast it with the more rigid character ideal produced by the moral demand systems preceding modernity. In the age of psychologizing, clarity about oneself supersedes devotion to an ideal as the model of right conduct."

"[T]his transitional civilization is becoming one vast suburbia"

"Reason cannot save us, nothing can; but reason can mitigate the cruelty of living."

"Surely the romantic and now permanent revolution against the ancient regime of reason is against a regime largely invented by the revolutionaries themselves."

"Depth psychology has demolished the optimistic faith of democrats in the rationality of a free citizenry, by discovering that the average citizen (in or out of a crowd) is not rational. But this is no reason to despair. There remains what is for Freud perhaps the highest rationality: knowledge of the irrational, a knowledge which may be used […] to arrive at rational decisions essential to democracy."

"In the slow accretion of self-images that is the mortar between periods in the history of our civilization, a third character ideal emerged, in part from the failure of the previous two [political man and religious man]: economic man, one who would cultivate rationally his very own garden, meanwhile solacing himself with the assumption that by thus attending to his own lower needs a general satisfaction of the higher needs would occur. A moral revolution was the result: what had been lower in the established hierarchy of human interests was asserted to be higher."

"Freud was overimpressed, it now appears, with the monolithic repressiveness of culture, and unable to perceive that our own culture might become highly permissive in the sphere of private sexual morals—the better to enforce its public repressions. The combination of a repressive political order with a permissive moral order is not unheard of in human history."

"The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility. …The grimness is relieved by the levity of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives."

"[To Freud], [t]he ascetic was limited, and often broken, in his organizational usefulness by a naïve dedication to principle."

"Symbolic impoverishment ceases to be a problem precisely because the rich have found functional equivalents for a system of compelling moral demands, in analysis and art, which may be said to be a mode of self-reverence. the alternative to questionable renewals of religion, taking the form of excessive moral demands, by which this culture has been regularly carried away in the past. Educated as they are, the rich have no need of religious renewals. In classical cultures, an ascended class had to justify itself before those below in the social structure. But the culture revolution of our time has eliminated this need for class - as well as self-justification. Nevertheless, those below still seek to emulate the ascendant social class, without being convinced of its superiority. And just as the rich have lost their idea of superiority, so have the poor lost their idea of religion. Poverty is no longer holy; the poor, insofar as. they are educated in the new doctrine, have no motive for projecting onto society a new set of strict moral demands that might infuse society with the kind of impetus needed to end symbolic poverty."

"[The United States and the post-Stalinist Soviet Union,] [b]oth issue from the assumption that wealth is a superior and adequate substitute for symbolic impoverishment. Both American and Soviet cultures are essentially variants of the same belief in wealth as the functional equivalent of a high civilization. In both cultures, the controlling symbolism has been stripped down to a belief in the efficacy of wealth. Quantity has become quality. The answer to all questions of “what for?” is “more.” ... Out of this redefinition, Western culture is changing already into a symbol system unprecedented in its plasticity and absorptive capacity. Nothing much can oppose it really, and it welcomes all criticism, for, in a sense, it stands for nothing."

"The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props."

"Only cultureless societies can exist without presiding presences. No presence can preside when all are subject to abandonments quick as their adoptions. Our passionate truths are so provisional, they move so quickly with the electrified times, that none can prepare us to receive them deeply into ourselves, as character."

": "Thoroughly Modern Steichen", senior curatorial assistant of "Edward Steichen in the 1920s and 1930s: A Recent Acquisition" exhibition, Carrie Springer, Interview, Hannah Ghorashi, 12/5/13."