The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization
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The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Jasper Bernes

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The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization

Jasper Bernes

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About This Book

A novel account of the relationship between postindustrial capitalism and postmodern culture, this book looks at American poetry and art of the last fifty years in light of the massive changes in people's working lives. Over the last few decades, we have seen the shift from an economy based on the production of goods to one based on the provision of services, the entry of large numbers of women into the workforce, and the emergence of new digital technologies that have transformed the way people work. The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization argues that art and literature not only reflected the transformation of the workplace but anticipated and may have contributed to it as well, providing some of the terms through which resistance to labor was expressed. As firms continue to tout creativity and to reorganize in response to this resistance, they increasingly rely on models of labor that derive from values and ideas found in the experimental poetry and conceptual art of decades past.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781503602601
1
Lyric and the Service Sector
Frank O’Hara at Work
Every story about the 1960s and its aftermath must begin, one way or another, in the 1950s. This is certainly true of any account we might give of Frank O’Hara’s quintessential 1960s volume, Lunch Poems. Published in 1964, the book had been planned as early as 1959, when City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti met O’Hara through Allen Ginsberg and asked him to collect the poems he had been writing on his lunch breaks from curatorial work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Later that year, O’Hara sent a postcard to Ferlinghetti promising that “lunch is on the stove,” the beginning of five years of correspondence about the book, which would eventually include thirty-seven poems, some written as early as 1953 and others as late as 1964, dated and published in chronological order.1 For a study of labor and poetry in the postwar period, the book is unavoidable, composed as it is of poems encircled by the workday. O’Hara was careful to highlight this lunch-hour setting in the blurb that he wrote for the back cover, a textual frame—a prose poem, really—that depicts the lunch-hour poet “strolling through the splintered glare of a Manhattan noon” and “paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines or ruminations.”2 Number nineteen in City Lights’s Pocket Poet series, the five-by-four book fits easily into a coat pocket, ready to be carried discretely to and from work. The poems in it are written, we are meant to imagine, by a worker on a lunch break for a worker on a lunch break, providing sustenance, as the conceit implies, for both parties. More than a mere frame for the composition of the poems, however, the lunch-hour setting is also continuously called forth and rendered vivid as poetic occasion by O’Hara’s use of deictics and proper names, which take great pains to locate and date this lunchtime situation of utterance. The poems are written during lunch but also about lunch. The transformation of moment of composition into poetic occasion is, of course, a distinguishing mark of the lyric mode, and part of what the poem-blurb does is call to mind the lyric occasion and then mock it and himself slightly, describing its results as “computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth.”3
The carefulness of O’Hara’s framing undoubtedly explains why his recent foray into popular cultural visibility, as leitmotif within season 2 of the acclaimed period drama Mad Men, begins in a bar during the lunch hour. Don Draper, creative director at a Madison Avenue advertising firm and the show’s protagonist, first encounters O’Hara’s poetry as the reading choice of the person on the bar stool next to him. The season takes place in 1962, before the publication of Lunch Poems, so the book featured is Meditations in an Emergency, published in 1957. Draper remarks without invitation that reading “makes you feel better about sitting at a bar at lunch, like you’re getting something done.”4 His neighbor, wearing the corduroy coat and thick glasses that mark him as a member of the 1960s demimonde, responds condescendingly, “Yeah, it’s all about getting things done.” When Draper shakes off the implied insult and asks if the book is any good, the corduroyed O’Hara reader, having already sized Draper up, replies: “I don’t think you’ll like it.” The title of the book resonates with the melodramatic trajectory of Draper’s life; he has just been told that his blood pressure is high and that his predilection for working and drinking too hard will eventually kill him. The lunch-hour encounter therefore underscores the difference between the carefree, bohemian O’Hara reader and the stiff Draper, haunted by his traumatic past.
The opposition between O’Hara and Draper is mostly a bluff, however, or perhaps a moment of dialectic. The show very much wants us to identify the two figures, later using a voice-over of Draper reading the poem “Mayakovsky” to suggest that O’Hara’s performative selfhood is a good match for Draper, whose entire identity is, as we learn, a construct.5 I would argue, however, that this psychodramatic terrain distracts us from the real affinities between Draper and O’Hara. Mad Men is a show about work. Given O’Hara’s insistent identification of poet and poem as islands within the workday, we might wonder what his labors share with Draper’s. Despite the bohemian disdain of Mad Men’s imagined reader, the energetic poems collected in O’Hara’s book are very much about “about getting things done” and thus might appeal to Draper. Many of his most famous compositions depict the poet hurrying through a list of tasks creative and banal; they hum with a frenetic intensity that is counterbalanced but not abnegated by their insistent sprezzatura. O’Hara’s lunch-hour frame makes it seem as if the compression, urgency, and swift pleasure taking of the poems derived directly from the time constraints of the workday.
Consider these two famous examples:
It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering
if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for Lunch
ah lunch! I think I am going crazy
what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up
At excitement-prone Kenneth Koch’s
I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems
for a new book by Grove Press
which they will probably not print6
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me.7
O’Hara’s lunch-hour pastorals are not so much opposed to the workday and its unfree time of getting things done as they are a space for an alternative kind of work—“working” on poems, the hurried accomplishment of shoeshines, gift buying, eating and drinking that fills his poems. Unlike many of his poetic contemporaries, who are infrequently treated to historicizing interpretation, O’Hara is often read as poet for an age of mass consumption, a writer of consumer odes and retail idylls, a lunch-hour flâneur in an urban landscape populated by commodities and celebrities. This follows a general scholarly tendency to approach questions of culture—especially in the late twentieth century—from the side of consumption, from the side of marketplace rather than workplace. But wherever there is consumption, there are specific acts of labor that mediate it. As an astute observer of the urban environment, O’Hara populates his poems with workers as well as with purchases: the service workers who shine his shoes, sell him liquor and books, and serve him lunch. My critical intervention therefore proposes that we see O’Hara as poet of service work as much as poet of consumption, reorienting ourselves to the presence of labor (his own and others’) within the poems. By the light of this reading, the relationship between this lunch-hour timespace and the world of work is both temporal and spatial; work is before and after the poem but also right across the lunch counter, and that is what gives his poems their directed intensity.
Advertising work is also, like these face-to-face services, fundamentally oriented toward consumption, part of the production of consumption. This is one reason why O’Hara’s poetry and Mad Men would seem poorly matched if Draper were an insurance executive (like Wallace Stevens) or a banker (like T. S. Eliot), and it is likewise hard to imagine the O’Hara reader instead holding a copy of Harmonium or Prufrock and Other Observations (and not just for reasons of anachronism). Advertising and poetry share a secret affinity, so much so that advertising is often held up as an example of what poetry becomes when rendered entirely mercenary. Ezra Pound, famously, in “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” exhorts his contemporaries to “consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.”8 His manifesto ran in one of the very first issues of Harriet Monroe’s Poetry; thirty-three years later, the magazine published an article by semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, “Poetry and Advertising,” that makes explicit Pound’s aesthetic hierarchy. Hayakawa defines advertising as the “poeticizing of consumer goods” and is quick to note that, at a technical level, advertising and poetry are largely identical in the way that they use language.9 The difference between the two obtains only at the level of intention. Implicitly drawing on Kant’s distinction between a “free art . . . agreeable on its own account” and a “mercenary art . . . that attracts us only through its effect (e.g., pay) so that people can be coerced into it,” Hayakawa defines literary poetry as “disinterested poetry” and advertising as “venal poetry.”10 In the age of advertising, he argues, venal poetry is omnipresent, “written by the highest paid writers in this country, organized into companies of poets, rhapsodists, sub-poets, and sub-rhapsodists.” As a result, modern literary poets are forced to distinguish themselves through an abandonment of the poetic altogether: “In a world so filled with the clamor of venal writing . . . all poetry has come to sound suspicious, so that disinterested poets are practically compelled not to sound poetic.”11
Though some of O’Hara’s work does proceed according to the modernist disfiguration Hayakawa describes, rescuing the poetic through a resort to anti-poetry, he often takes a rather different path, following the lyric poem into its debasement as advertisement and trying to find moments of authentic poetry there nonetheless. While many of O’Hara’s poems may be said to participate in “the poeticizing of consumer goods,” they may mime the structures of the advertising world to run the Hayakawan process in reverse, finding in the language of consumer goods traces of a reified poetry that they can reconstitute.12 The Hayakawan argument allows us to read a poem like “Having a Coke with You” not only as one of the great love poems of the twentieth century but also as, implicitly, a very fine advertisement for Coca-Cola (just as the frame poem on the back cover is a very fine advertisement for Olivetti). Like advertisement, the poem functions through an associational logic, usually comparative but sometimes metonymic, that imbues the referenced commodity with all sorts of desirable qualities. “Having a Coke with You,” O’Hara begins,
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt.13
Certainly the poem is less about Coca-Cola as commodity than it is about the singular experience the cola facilitates. This makes the poem closest not to the advertisements of the 1960s but rather to the so-called postmodern advertisements that began to appear in the 1980s, whose development O’Hara seems to prefigure (and perhaps even contributes to, indirectly).14
Paradigmatic here are Wieden+Kennedy’s memorable Nike advertisements, which eschewed all reference to particular qualities of the shoes and instead imbued them with various aspirational meanings, breaking with even the most “radical” advertising strategies of the 1960s and 1970s. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank advanced an important argument about how the touted “creative revolution” of 1960s advertising depended on an alliance between the 1960s counterculture and dissident fringes within the corporate world.15 Agencies such as Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB) broke with the established practice of distinguishing commodities according to what Rosser Reeves (advertising guru of the period) called Unique Selling Propositions, plying the consumer with qualitative claims that differentiated their product from those of their competitors. Instead, advertisements by DDB and its fellow travelers made fun of the grandiose claims of their competitors, turning to minimal and understated declarations. These so-called revolutionary ads still made reference to particular features of the products they were selling, however. The famous “Think small” advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle emphasized, through its use of white space, the car’s departure from the giant sedans of the time and the bloviating ad copy that sold them. But this modesty was associated with particular values: gas mileage, sturdiness, a distinctive look. Read as advertisement, O’Hara’s poem makes only one mention of the product. The Coke enters only as part of the grammatical subject of the first few lines, separated from the poem proper by the title, but quickly displaced by the welter of comparative predicates it spawns, predicates that have nothing to do with the propositional qualities of Coca-Cola itself but pertain rather to the singular experience that the drink enables. Compare this to the advertisement that introduced the famous “Just Do It” slogan, still in existence almost thirty years later. It begins with an establishing shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, then an image of the elderly running-community icon Walt Stack jogging across it, who we learn, through intertitles and voice-over, is eighty years old and “keeps his teeth from rattling in the cold” by leaving them at home.16 We find out that it’s an advertisement from Nike only in the final shot, when the tagline appears. Other advertisements, such as the famous pair-up between Michael Jordan and Spike Lee, might highlight the shoes only to point out how little they have to do with true athletic (or human) achievement, with Lee asking Jordan repeatedly and ridiculously, the wide-angle lens exaggerating the physical difference between Lee’s nerdy ungainliness and Jordan’s muscled poise, “Is it the shoes? Is it the shoes?”17
The postmodern advertisements of Wieden+Kennedy and their imitators introduce a commodity-without-qualities, a commodity whose power to segment markets and differentiate itself from competitors is not a design feature but a rhetorical—or dare I say, poetic—one. They do this by following their antecedents in the 1960s and parodying the comparative structure of advertisement—as in the Lee/Jordan ad—but unlike those early ads they do not reintroduce comparison; comparisons are impossible, so the logic of the ads would imply, in light of the unique values that individuals bring to the items on display. Nikeism is a kind of Nietzscheanism for the rabble.
Drawing on the resources of the ode and the lyric poem ...

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