Fucked Again, A Meditation on the 20th Century. Jean-Marie Jonré, oil on
canvas, 44" x 72", 2001.
Death Rattle 1900-1999
A Short Catalog of Recent Misdeeds
by Doc Cuddy
1.
From the 1914-1918 bloodbath, we moved straightforwardly into the new, improved 1939-1945
model. Dripping red, we emerged into the horror of a MAD world, a very cold peace based on
the theory of Mutual Assured
Destruction. For forty years we lived under the leaky umbrella of knowledge that
thirty minutes from any given moment we could achieve an all-time, final record number of
deaths. Namely, everybody.
Looking back, we begin to see that we responded in two ways: denial, and psychosis.
2.
Some of the denial was quite lovely. Think of the so-called Neo-classicists, the
Neo-romantics. Lush Strauss, craggy Stravinsky. Joyce’s graceful night flight to his
self-constructed prison of words. Fitzgerald’s bitter laments. Lawrence’s
metaphysical hedonism. Mann’s lonely self-denying attempt to make sense of it all.
Mies, even. So austere. So antiseptic.
3.
Some, though lauded, were trivial, superficial. Picasso’s gifted schoolboy
vivisections. Hemingway’s boy scout view of self and world.
4.
Others screamed psychotically until they were hoarse and could scream no more. Brecht.
Sinclair Lewis. Trumbo.
5.
We emerged from under the poisonous mushrooms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a four-decade
death-rattle.
6.
Music became a lifeless, skeletal golem. The yin-yang of Babbitt and Cage. Each at his
wit’s end. Each calculating like crazy. The worship of order, the adoration of
disorder.
7.
Canvas became a depthless mirror to show back to us our own abstract, expressionless death
masks, lovingly colored by the best of morticians. Down finally into the dark pit when
Rothko breathed his last.
8.
Mortally distracted, we fled to the movies and television while waiting for the bombs to
fall. Both media grabbed and held our attention, filled with pretty sights and sounds,
fairy tales to keep our thoughts off the newly, massively dead, and the dead to come.
9.
Chemically augmented, the young for a time screamed loudest, actually managing to stop a
war.
10.
Greed, the flip-side of fear, ruled the planet, and the devil take the hindmost, the
weakest, the poorest, the sickest, the hungriest. Reagans big and small strutted their
selfish stuff while artists got millions for flinging pottery at the sacred woven material
which had once known Caravaggio’s touch. Everybody stole from everybody and called it
Post-modern.
11.
Death, you who won the century 200 million to nothing, thy sting is here, is 20th
century art.
Now, not only are we still far, far from out of the nuclear woods, we’ve in
addition put ourselves, angry, petulant, spoiled children that we are, at war with the
planet itself. Which, though patient, finally brooks only so much misbehavior. Yes, we are
its children, but only a tiny percent of its many, many children. Whom to protect it will
sooner or later restore a balance which neither heeds nor cares about our tantrums.
END
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