A Collage of Indignation : Max Kozloff

Krishnendu Basu

1124138

Thesis statement - "There is also nothing like such a crisis to cause some of us to rethink the

nature of our role as men involved or concerned with creativity."

Paragraph 1:

Topic sentence - "To write of art and politics in the United States in 1967 is surely to court

futility in context of provocation."

Supporting sentence - "It is the predicament of trying to resolve divergent obligations-

intellectual and moral-which public life in this country is always prying further apart, with

stupefying results."

Predicament.

Paragraph Two:

Topic sentence - "We are in a time when the public that is aware of art assimilates all avant-

grade hypotheses into an apparatus of mild titillation."

Supporting sentence - "It is frightful to consider how insistently the present circumstances

make a mockery of so much of current art's Dadaist presumption to operate within the "gap"

between art and life."

Gap.

Paragraph Three:

Topic sentence - "To the argument that the processes of visual art are metaphorical and ritually

self-contained, whereas individual or collective "action" must be pragmatic and literal, I reply

that we are probably guilty of a failure of imagination."

Supporting sentence - "There is a level on which actions cannot focus or connect without the

inner, intangible guidance of a vision."

Intangible guidance.

Paragraph Four:

Topic sentence - "What makes this condition so paradoxical is that both sides back away from

limitless anxiety, as if from a menace that can be so little controlled that it must be ignored."

Supporting sentences - "There is, as it were, an impoverishment of the heart. The freedom from

anxiety is but the other side of a deeper loss of freedom."

Impoverishment.

Paragraph Five:

Topic sentence - "Such are roughly the prevailing conditions under which we have seen the

conclusion of a remarkable week of manifestations against the war, entitled overall, "The Angry

Arts"(although surely, as many have pointed out, it would be more accurate to say, "angry

artists")."

Supporting sentence - "The distinction between an actual antiwar iconography, and works that

only "stood for" the individual's personal attitude was sometimes waived or muddled, but the

public sympathy for the programs (which were often mobbed) was unequivocal."

Iconography.

Paragraph Six:

Topic sentence - "Not since the WPA thirties has there been any tradition of political activism in

American art."

Supporting sentence - "Leaving aside the motley illustrations of the Neo-Impressionists in the

anarchist press of their time, one thinks of the manifestations of the Surrealists as the only

fierce outcry prior to the depression of a committed group of artists against the status quo-in

work, significantly enough, that was restricted to the nonpictorial."

Manifestations.

Paragraph Seven:

Topic sentence - "I say discordantly because this aesthetic wailing wall, thus convocation of

clichés and cretinisms, which was the 'Collage of Indignation", was alienated and homeless in

style, as it was embattled in content."

Supporting sentence - "Frequently one saw a viciousness that was determined to match what it

was ostensibly exposing."

Viciousness.

Paragraph Eight:

Topic sentence - "The problem was not just that artists who had stripped themselves of

everything but sincerity were still clothed in borrowed rags."

Supporting sentence - "The problem, rather, was in a failure of a quality of mind, or artistic

imagination, which had not solved the rhetorical goal to which the common effort had been

legitimately directed."

Rhetoric goal.

Paragraph Nine:

Topic sentence - "Now I wonder if I have not also been sharing in his illness, or perhaps have

been totally uncomprehending, when I impose, at least in part, aesthetic criteria upon a

phenomenon which may be only nominally art."

Supporting sentence - "If, in their passion and peculiar bravery they can chuck aside all artistic

motivation, a critic can perhaps forgo his own professional scruples."

Artistic motivation.

Paragraph Ten:

Topic sentence - "Looked at from any further perspective, such as that of effecting a spiritual or

material change, the situation becomes very dubious indeed."

Supporting sentence - "By contrast, the indirection and ambivalence of ambitious art

(Rosenquist's chrome-plated barbed wire is an example) is socially formulated because it

is "distanced" by its creator."

Ambitious art.

Paragraph Eleven:

Topic sentence - "It could have been that the absentees (they tend to represent the more

affluent, abstract, better-known practitioners in their field) almost foresaw the subordinate

theme of immolation that ran through "The Angry Arts" and declined to participate, almost out

of a sense of self-preservation."

Supporting sentence - "And it was from this feat of desperate imagination, even though the

thought threatened innumerable artists, that the week of anger produced some of its most

lasting effects."

Desperate imagination.

Paragraph Twelve:

Topic sentence - "No one can measure the impact of such a phenomenon as 'The Angry Arts'."

Supporting sentence - "It dimly perceives how mush art cuts away repressions and stereotypes

in its impulse, not toward power (which governments can at least understand) but toward

psychic freedom.

Repressions and stereotypes.