I have been reading Harold Rosenberg's "The American Action Painters" (1952). This essay manifests a moment that I take for granted. It's a moment distinguished by a uniquely American contemporary foray into modernism. I have found a couple of gems from this essay that speak to me:"What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event."
Here Rosenberg might be providing an entry into the idea of the creative act. Notice that I use the word "act" here, a term/idea that is common in 2011 but may have its provenance with Rosenberg. (This startles me. Wow.) This brings to mind the active state that Greene and others ascribe to the doing of philosophy. It is dynamic, engaging, active, something fully realized.
"It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension."
I'm drawn to this because of the use of tension. In my acting training at the Experimental Theatre Wing at New York City in the mid 1980s, I was mentored by wonderful teachers who applied a physical approach to acting. Many of them spoke of the wonder of tension and its usefulness to an actor. My prior training had been disparaging of tension. The training would focus on being relaxed so as to be open to what a scene partner may be imparting. But at ETW, they recognized the forcefulness, the theatricality, the heightened sensibility that tension afforded an actor. It is the filled stillness that I recounted in my dissertation of Greene's Monday evening classes. Could this essay be where tension was finally lauded?
"A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist."
Could this be the lived life?
Greene notes this essay in Teacher as Stranger (1973). The reference occurs within a chapter that highlights the new art forms of abstractions and happenings in the 1960s. Greene suggests that the spirit of these new art forms forced viewers to take on new perspectives of how they viewed art and the world around them and that the same spirit should be applied to education--students and teachers should also take on new perspectives.
But the essay also provides the gems that I found above as well as a lot of writing about consciousness and the conscious action that the new art had embodied. I can't help but to think that this essay was the tipping point of the break from the post-War/the man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit/Levittown sensibility that had been emblematic of the era.
It also sparks for me a sensation that I experienced in coming to understand these kinds of tipping points in the development of unique American art forms. It was years ago in Philadelphia at a booking conference for youth performances. The Lincoln center Institute had been invited to facilitate the conferences' professional development on the day prior to the conference. I was put in a group that was assigned to study Paul Taylor's "Aureole."
But with the Lincoln Center Institute and my colleagues I cam to understand the significance of what "Aureole" was all about. What I passed off as balletic was actually ballet off-hinged. The dancers weren't traditionally turned out from the hips--their legs were perpendicular to the floor and their hips. The pastoral nature was pure movement of joy--not the tempered balletic sensibility of Tudor and others.
I came to understand that "Aureole" was a turning point in dance. What was "meh" in my uninformed viewing had been sensational in its debut. While I'm still not a fan of the dance, I truly admire what is happening within it.
These are tremendous moments. And these were occurring when Greene was, in my estimation, developing her philosophy, her voice.
