Totem Road Trips (1999)

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Clement Greenberg Never Made a Road Trip: Underground Highways and American Poplore as Allegories of Art

for Angel who just got in from the coast

Many go to Venice for the biennial. Some stay at home. Others do road trips. A few travel in their minds. How did I spend my summer vacation? I took a road trip through the sixties. Route 66 and Highway 61 revisited. Here is my report.

Now for Holly from Miami, F.L.A., who hitchhiked her way across the U.S.A., the New York underground was the place to be. Many followed suit. They left their hamlets and suburbs to travel in search of an ideal localized in places that might have been called the Factory or Max’s Kansas City. Getting there was the thing.

For artists in N.Y.C., and elsewhere in the States, the call of the road was the start of an other underground adventure. Their destination was less secure, because the lure of the road was now also an adventure of art—or an allegory of it. What beckoned in the distance, though, might only be where others of their generation had started from. They passed each other on different sides of the white line, Holly, Little Joe ... on one side, artists on the other, travelling in different directions.

One of those artists elsewhere retraced his original trip in reverse from the LA art scene to home in heartland Oklahoma City. Edward Ruscha’s 1962 publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations starkly documents the Route 66 highway journey through mundane photographs of the stations of the title. Dave Hickey has written of his discovery of the book that it “nailed something that, for my generation, needed to be nailed: the Pop-Minimalist vision of the road. Jack Kerouac had nailed the ecstatic, beatnik Road. Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady were, at that moment, nailing the acid-hippie Road, and now Ruscha had nailed the road through realms of absence—that exquisite, iterative progress through the domain of names and places, through vacant landscapes of windblown, ephemeral language.”

The road trip, or, rather, its evocation, is a matter of language, as Hickey suggests. Each generation will nail it in its own way. Given that “nothing changes from generation to generation except the thing seen and that makes a composition,” as Gertrude Stein has explained, and furthermore, as she adds elsewhere, since “it is strictly American to conceive a space that is filled with moving,” we can expect that the American fixation on the road to change its representations from, say, the beat fifties to the Pop sixties. Of course, the historical changes occurring at the side of the road will enter into those compositional changes. The highway and roadside were the site of dramatic changes during this period. (cf. Kerouac and Pop artists.) During the 1960s it was the artists, and not the period’s novelists, that gave us the image of the road trip—first Pop-Minimalist in composition and then Post-minimalist-conceptualist. Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations and his other publications are transitional: Pop-Minimalist, they were also proto-conceptual. [Easy Rider]

Totem Road Trips

The beats had made the road a defining generational rite of passage. The publication of Kerouac set off a rucksack revolution in the mid 1950s. But On the Road chronicled Kerouac’s late 1940s cross-country kicks when that countryside was still more Walker Evans than Edward Ruscha.

When Warhol made a cross-country trip in October 1963 to attend his second exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles of his Elvis and Liz paintings, the country had changed, partly due to the interstate freeway system that had begun construction in the mid 1950s. One of those Warhol travelled with was the poet and underground actor Taylor Mead who had been put on the road by Kerouac’s book, cross-country hitchhiking from one coastal beat scene to the other in the mid 1950s. But now travelling was different. Warhol made the trip laid out flat on a mattress, Dracula-like, in the back of a station wagon, only to rise with interest the further west they drove where “the more Pop everything looked on the highways. Suddenly we all felt like insiders because even though Pop was everywhere—that was the thing about it, most people still took it for granted, whereas we were dazzled by it—to us, it was the new Art. Once you ‘got’ Pop, you could never see America the same again. The moment you label something, you take a step—I mean you can never go back to seeing it unlabelled.”

Warhol’s own art, surprisingly, reflects little of this. His milieu is not the highway, or, rather, the highway side: witness his crash paintings depicting American road death. But being one of the first to have “gotten” Pop, he saw that the new attitude was only a change of perception. The re-framing of the perception by the application of a label was a Duchampian strategy. Here it is equally applied to a cultural artifact: the landscape. (Warhol would visit Duchamp’s first American retrospective in Pasadena on this trip.) Naming something “Pop” creates an image by applying a label. But in the 1960s this ready representable landscape was already an image, a picture with its label often already incorporated within.

Ruscha’s captions in Twentysix Gasoline Stations are almost redundant, for instance, “Union, Needles, California,” to his photograph of a Union 76 gas station. Image after image, station repeats station. Does it matter that the name of the chains change, given that each locale probably has much the same variety? Or are they all interchangeable, and as happens, we make a selection according to brand name when getting gas? What their relationship does is to displace to a book form not so much the function of a specialized guidebook (which will be appropriated by other artists) but that of a map. [not just a photo-album of snapshots] Yet it is a map of a special sort that pictures its journey. Linking place name to image establishes a linguistic function (and allows us to make an analysis) to the book. When we speak we select words and combine theme into sentences. In linguistic terms, we could say that each image in Twentysix Gasoline Stations is a metaphor or paradigm (belonging to the vertical axis of selection) and each caption is a metonym or syntagm (belonging to horizontal axis of substitution or combination)... but more than a sentence ... Roman Jakobson has written that “the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” If an allegory is an extended metaphor, then the book’s projection of the metaphoric into the metonymic chain makes it an allegory of the trip. The book’s “iterative progress through the domain of names and places” reproduces the trip. “Reading” reproduces making and making mimics driving. Place names combine to map the journey [the syntagmatic chain] whereas the photographs marking the places have been selected for particular reasons we do not know, but could be others. (In that the book mimics commodity production and serial consumption, it is also an allegory of our inscription within commodity production experienced through travelling.)

It follows in the line of Robert Frank’s The Americans.

The ready-made Pop landscape did not appear out of nowhere. It was prepared, both by technological change and artistic perception. [new category of experience — neither city nor country

signage mediates commodities to consumers through the vehicle]

Rapid post-war development, advances in advertising, new patterns of leisure transformed

During his road trips of 1955-56 out of which The Americans was produced, Robert Frank caught a moment of these new patterns that enmeshed common Americans ... . Published in a U.S. edition in 1959, The Americans may not have put as many on the road as Kerouac did, but they now had Leicas or Nikons in hand. ... lasting effect... Frank has been blamed for...

b&w to Technicolor

ironical vision ... unAmerican

but Kerouac saw it as a tragic vision, american ... , a roadside poem seen through Swiss eyes

[urban - A.E.]

language and images

juke-box

iterative

his Swiss eyes - tragic vision

Nabokov

Slightly earlier, another foreign traveller

Not everyone approved. Truman Capote saw Kerouac’s prose spree [evocations which mimicked...] as just so much typing. Ten years later, the critic, Michael Fried, read the minimalist sculptor Tony Smith’s description of his night-time drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike as proof of the fault of minimalism’s theatricality. The stay-at-home Fried objected to Smith’s JD joyriding. Art has limits and convention—the onrush of headlights has no place in studio practice.