The Art of Invisibility

By Michael R. Burch

The Connoisseur, 1962 by Norman Rockwell

Fact is, as they say, stranger than fiction.

When, where, why and how did Poetry — the capital “P” sort — lose its readership?

There are many theories, but as we are about to discover, together, theories regarding the arts must be studied with great skepticism. All too often, one discovers, one is being told that the earth is flat, that tomatoes are poisonous while cardboard is palatable, and so on.

My personal thinking, which I will decline to call a theory in order to avoid undue skepticism, is that poets stopped giving readers what they loved most about poetry: i.e., something  understandable that moved them in some way, whether to sadness, melancholy, a wince, a sob, a wetting of the eyes, a chuckle or a giggle, whatever. But to something.

Emily Dickinson knew real poetry by her physical reaction to it. Ditto here. I also know when I have read real poetry because I never entirely forget it, as with my favorite songs. Real poetry for me is both moving and memorable.

Thus my simple (or simplistic) non-theory is that poetry must be moving in some way, and memorable, or it’s not Poetry.

But why did so many poets stop writing poetry that was moving and memorable, or even making the attempt?

I believe the answer can be found in a small book of art criticism. Now, before you flee shrieking in terror at the thought of anything as dreadfully boring as art criticism, let me quickly mention that this little book is the funniest thing I have ever read. So please hang in with me, and I promise not to bore or boor you to death!

The book in question is The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe and his rib-splitting observations about modern art have direct parallels to modern poetry...

Wolfe’s book begins with a discovery he made “on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974,” while reading Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19 of the New York Times. I find the section and page numbers fascinating, because I happened to read the book on 2-19-2010, which just happened to be my birthday. I pay attention to such synchronicities, believing them to be meaningful without knowing why. The Universe providing subtle hints, perhaps? In any case, my interest was immediately piqued.

What caught Wolfe’s interest that fateful morning? Hilton Kramer, the Time’s dean of the arts, had opined that “Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial — the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

This was an “eureka” moment for Wolfe, as the fog of a lifetime lifted and he finally understood with stunning clarity that he couldn’t see a painting without having a Theory to help him understand it!

How could he have been so blind?

This is also true for modern poetry: how can we possibly understand Vorticist or Projectivist poems without first understanding the vastly-more-difficult-than-relativity theories that would have explained them to us, had we only possessed the elevated IQ’s required to grok the underlying theories, not to mention multiple advanced degrees?

Since poetry is an art, from this point forward, when I employ the term “art” I will mean both visual art and poetry. And nearly everything Wolfe says about modern visual art has a corollary in modern poetry.

Wolfe’s epiphany was that in Modernist Art “seeing is not believing” but “believing is seeing.”

Such believing is, however, not at all easy. Only if you are gifted with an exceptionally high IQ and a plethora of advanced degrees, can you hope to understand Modern Art. And then only doubtfully.

Before one can properly see or hope to even dimly understand a work of Modernist Art, one must profoundly grok the explanatory Theories. And such Theories are incredibly difficult to understand because they are, ultimately, nonsense.

How difficult? Well, two major poets of Modernism, T.S. Eliot and John Ashbery, confessed that they sometimes didn’t understand their own poems. And that, according to Modern Art Theory, means they didn’t grasp the Holy Grail by which they operated. It’s sort of like hearing that Moses didn’t really understand the Ten Commandments and was just winging it.

This sort of dependence on nonsensical Theories, is, I believe, the “when, why, where and how” of Poetry’s demise. Just as painters abandoned Realism, which did not require theories to be understood, for Art they could not understand themselves, even so poets abandoned poetry that could be understood in its own right, for poems that could only be understood via Theories that made no sense, leaving them confused about what they were saying.

For example, these intimately related Modernist Poetry commandments:

“No ideas but in things!”

“Fear abstractions!”

“Avoid didacticism like the Plague!”

The main idea here is that nothing should be said directly, or clearly. Everything must be said in a roundabout way, using concrete imagery and couching meaning in metaphors.

But if this were true, we would have to junk:

Great swathes of Homer, Virgil and Dante.

The great soliloquies of Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, et al.

The many sonnets of Shakespeare in which he stated his thoughts directly. 

The great soliloquies of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Great didactic poems like Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Lie.”

The direct statement poems of A.E. Housman.

Housman is a great example of the nonsensicalness of “no ideas but in things” since he wrote magnificent poems that entirely lacked imagery and metaphors. Houseman often said what he meant, point-blank. For example:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

No imagery. No metaphors. Just point-blank perfection.

As Wolfe explains so hilariously in his little book, nonsensical Art Theory followed nonsensical Theory, as if the Theorists were competing to see who could make the least sense.

First, the Theorists removed any hint of story or representation from their works of Art. No one should know anything external to a painting, from the painting. There must be no recognizable image: neither human, nor from nature. Cubists selected cubes because they said nothing to anyone. What can one say or think about cubes, after all? The art critic Louis Vauxcelles coined the term Cubism as a putdown, but according to Wolfe, “the Theory starts here.”

Frank Stella explained this new form of Art as “what you see is what you see.” Which meant not getting anything except the underlying Theory, which was nonsense.

Most people were not interested in just seeing cubes — pointless, informationless cubes — and opted out at this point (pardon the pun).

Something very similar happened in Modernist Poetry. All too often the poets had no idea what they were saying, much less readers who had no grasp of the underlying Theories and wouldn’t have cared if they did. Modern Poetry movements came and went with their loopy Theories: Imagism begat Vorticism, which begat Projectivism, but no one understood the poems, no one cared about the poems, and pretty soon no one read the poems except other Theorists.

A big part of the Modernist game plan was running down one’s predecessors. Ezra Pound, not quite as popular as Shakespeare and Keats, dismissed traditional poetry with a wave of his imperious hand, but Charles Olson called Pound and his protégée T.S. Eliot “inferior predecessors.” And yet who can name a poem written by Olson, much less recite a single line he penned?

Modernism began with a bang in the early 1900s, when most of the poems could be understood, but it went out with a whimper. Has anyone really understood Pound’s cantos, “The Waste Land” or Finnegans Wake, or did it just make dilettantes seem “intellectual” and “with it” to feign admiration? “The Waste Land” is a poem that can’t be read aloud because it’s written in so many different languages, including (if I remember correctly) English, French, German, Italian, Latin and freakin’ Sanskrit. Probably more. How many linguists can pull that reading off, much less common Janes and Joes?

Harold Bloom called John Ashbery and A.R. Ammons “major poets” but then left them out of his anthology of the best English poems. Ashbery admitted forsaking his love of Robert Frost’s poetry on the advice of his mentors, the dispensers of Theories.

There are possible hints of discord here and there, even among the elitists.

Modern Art was chic, but it wasn’t understood, it wasn’t loved, and it most certainly wasn’t purchased. Ditto for poetry, which now lacked the capital “P.”

Artists and poets were chic, they were “smart,” they were “with it,” but they were only communicating with and impressing themselves. Or, in many cases, not really communicating and only pretending to be impressed.

Poets competed fiercely to be published by the “name” journals, but who was reading them except for other poets and a few dilettantes here and there? And in order to be published by hoity-toity journals, poets had to forget about writing timeless poetry. Rather, they were required to appease the great god Avante-Garde by sacrificing themselves. Poets became slaves to the latest New Style. Forget about keeping up with the Miltons, Wordsworths and Frosts. One had to keep up with the Godlike Eclecticism of the Ammonses and Ashberys.

It all became a bit incestuous, like French-kissing one’s sister. Or, in some cases, an orgasmless orgy.

Since no one was buying the product, the competition became largely of the “who do you know” and “which editors can you get in good with” variety. Sort of like flashing your siblings to get the orgy started.

It became all-important to stand out, to be “original,” and, better yet, to be eccentric.

The weirder, the better.

Andy Warhol. Tiny Tim. Gertrude Stein.

Anything to attract attention, to be noticed, to stand out.

Wolfe calls this peacock-like prancing and pirouetting for attention the Boho Dance and the Art Mating Ritual.

However, as Wolfe noted, the public was not invited and would have had no interest if it was. And while artists and poets love to denounce the public for not appreciating what they do, Wolfe thought otherwise:

“The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”

The terms that come to mind are “incestuous” and “inbred.”

It’s not that Modern Art was not a success, but that it was a success with 400 peacock-like Theorists and dilettantes while completely ignoring the millions and billions. And the 400’s disdain for the public was apparent:

“Any work of Art that can be understood is the project of a journalist,” said Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifesto.

Bad, true. But about to get worse. Much worse.

As the author of The Science of Fear observed, members of small, close-knit groups will begin to compete with each other to be the “most correct” and “purest” in their “thinking,” which ultimately means the most extreme. This is why we see the Nazis going from segregating Jews, to trying to deport them, to enslaving, torturing and using them in ghoulish experiments, to the ghastly “final solution.”

Thus, the closely-knit Art Theorists didn’t stop at removing all story and all representation from their work. That was not the end, but just the beginning. They were after purity, purity, purity and more Purity. And the Theorists were certain that the very possibility of civilization was at stake. It was 50 “beleaguered artists” against the millions and billions.

It was time for Flatness, the salvation of the world!

The idea of Flatness was that it wasn’t enough to remove all story and representation from works of Art. The true Artist had to remove texture as well, so that his/her paintings were as close to perfectly flat as possible. Thick oil paints were out. From now on paints would have to be thinned to the nth degree. The perfect Work of Art would have no height (and no depth, in more ways than one).

Watery stripes were now the height of Art.

But no more than a micron high, of course.

And of course the public wasn’t buying it.

Was there any chance of persuading the Theorists that Flatness was not the height of Art?

“No, in an age of avant-gardism the only possible strategy to counter a new style which you detest is to leapfrog it.”

Thus, brushstrokes had to go. “Too painterly.”

Or better yet, create Art criticizing brushstrokes, being very careful to let viewers know the True Artist did not Himself/Herself employ brushstrokes, but subscribed to the reigning Flatness dogma. Hence, a perfectly flat, one-dimensional parody of brushstrokes!

Because the True Artist was not allowed to employ any practices of the past, no matter how effective, the only possible response to a squirrely Art theory was something newer and even squirrelier!

At this point the True Artist, who was also the True Theorist, had gotten rid of story, representation, understandability, common sense, the third dimension, most of the paint, and brushstrokes. Was this the end of the reductions? Nay, it was just the beginning!

An intense competition ensued to remove everything else that might possibly be removed. Colors were replaced by different shades of Restaurant Exhaust-Fan Duct Lint Gray that could not be accused of “sentimentality.” Curves and soft edges (too “emotional”) were replaced by hard linear geometries. And there must be nothing inviting (gasp!) that might cause viewers to loiter (double gasp!) over a work of Art. Why? Because all True Artists knew that Real Art should be “fast.” That it should be taken in with a single quick glance, then immediately forgotten, its work complete. Thus the True Artists began competing to be the “fastest.”

And thus, not a series of faint, watery, heightless stripes, but a single perfectly flat lint-gray stripe or paradoxical brushstroke. Or, better yet, a blank canvas. Or, best of all, a frame with nothing in it!

Nay, better yet, no frame, just faint heightless emotionless lint-gray nonrepresentational lines drawn directly on art gallery walls!

“FASTER AND FASTER ART THEORY FLEW NOW, IN EVER-TIGHTER AND MORE DAZZLING TURNS.”

Wolfe compared what transpired next to the French Revolution devouring its architects. Clement Greenberg, an architect of Modern Art Theory, protested that the Minimalists lived only for “the far-out as an end in itself.” Harold Rosenberg called the Minimalists a “DMZ vanguard,” a buffer between the real Avant-Garde and the masses. What was the response?

“Off with their heads!”

The original Theorists were devoured like “breadsticks.” Like Robespierre and Danton.

“Viva la Revolution!”

Were the Minimalists done? Not at all. Their Glorious Revolution continued apace, indeed picked up the pace. They proceeded to get rid of walls and galleries. How? By creating works of Earth Art in remote deserts and dry lake beds, where no one would see them and purchasing them would be impossible.

But a rather obvious problem remained: such works of Art could still (gulp!) be seen, however implausibly.

How utterly medieval, how terribly retrograde!

Thus works of Art were created with evaporating water and invisible ink. A notable albeit-almost-entirely-unnoted Modern Masterpiece consisted of weighted garbage bags filled with rotting calabash that were flung into the ocean.

But even so, there remained the vexing problem of visibility, however temporary and unlikely to be achieved. Luckily the Theorists remained undeterred and came up with the obvious solution: Conceptual Art.

Works of Art should not be (the festering horror!) created, but only imagined!

But no, that was still too much, since something visual had been imagined. By now it was completely obvious that the True Artist must go to the real source of the problem, and eliminate the Artistic Ego that might otherwise have imagined something visual.

It was the Artist that needed to be replaced, with nothing!

The problem was, finally, solved.

The final solution was that all the problems posed by Art could be eliminated by eliminating the Artist, who was now completely invisible due to self-imposed nonexistence.

The public happily agreed that it had all been much ado about nothing, and immediately went back to spending billions of dollars on songs, movies, and other forms of entertainment.

Did the True Artists succeed? Yes, wildly beyond their wildest imaginings, because not only did no one bother to loiter over their Masterpieces, but no one was able to view them in the first place, since they had become entirely invisible along with their creators!

And just as the True Artist became deeply suspicious of brushstrokes and canvases, the True Poet became deeply suspicious of words and the paper they were written on. Much less anyone loitering over them! Ammons wrote a poem on a strip of calculator tape in which he complained about the difficulties of writing poems on calculator tape. No one read it, of course, but wasn’t that the ultimate object of the True Poet?

In order to achieve the goal of Perfect Invisibility, the True Poet of Modernism removed, literally, everything, including the kitchen sink: meter, rhyme, form, understandability, the colorings of sentiment and other honest human emotions, praise, nostalgia, adjectives, adverbs, exclamation marks, etc. The list is endless.

For the True Poet of Modernism the ultimate end was inevitable: 

“The perfect poem is silence.”

And the public, unsurprisingly, agreed.

Michael R. Burch is the editor of The HyperTexts, on-line at www.thehypertexts.com, where he has published hundreds of poets over the past three decades. His poetry has been translated into fourteen languages, taught in high schools and colleges around the globe, incorporated into three plays and two operas, and set to music by seventeen composers. A five-time Pushcart nominee, his poems, translations and essays have appeared in hundreds of literary journals.