Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950-1965 Page: 20
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This type of thought which places man over and against nature, the other and even the
thing (for using things dispositively as interchangeable instruments of assault is different
from recognizing and cherishing diverse powers within them) takes its impetus from an
unrelenting belief in the total satisfaction of objectifying consciousness, and its unique
ability to create the happiest of all worlds. Meditative thinking on the other hand reasserts
man's autochthony (Bodenstindigkeit-rootedness).7 As has already been stated, man
has for some time now taken his consciousness from a special myth of objectivity. Thus,
for Heidegger, it is really not the most dramatic forms of manifestation of that sort of
thinking which are threatening. Rather it is the long term forgetting of the ground out of
which this type of thinking arose that constitutes the hidden threat. This type of thinking
has given over too much to technology and its devices-we tend to view them as
justification for and definition of our existence. Yet we fail to notice this. What Heidegger
asks for is a new attitude towards these devices: -to use them properly (it would be utter
foolishness to deny their special reality) but at the same time to cultivate an attitude of
releasement toward things (Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen)8-to leave them
alone"... as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent on something
higher."9-and to be open to the mystery-to the meaning hidden in technology (to
become aware of the myth which is its ground).
Is there then any reason to believe that what we have seen in art during the past twenty-
five years moves at all in the direction which Heidegger has indicated? Amongst other
things some of the more significant features of Abstract Expressionism are the following:
lack of the presence of an illusionistically depicted objected or no object at all, lack of
the presence of an illusionistic space, wide-open painterliness, utilization of new
methods of application of materials to surface, e.g., Pollock's drip process-a dynamic
gestural process of heroic proportions which involved an out-pouring of the personal
psyche frequently executed in a manner of automaticity, or, at least comparative
spontaneity in which directions to be taken are arrived at during the act of painting itself.
These features contributed to the apprehension of the works as bold, irrational and
spontaneous syntheses of emotion, spirit and physicality. Subsequently they were also
understood to possess formal, linear and coloristic power even though informal in
process and demonstrative of a rather unbridled vitality.
Out of this development, and at a somewhat later stage in a partial reaction to it, two
distinct directions arose. The first of these includes some of those developments which
have been called: junk culture, assemblage, combine, Beat, Pop or Pre-Pop. The second
has recently gone under the title Post Painterly Abstraction or Modernist Art.
Allen Ginsberg, one of the better known and more influential of the Beat poets, is closely
associated in his early development, in terms of both method and motive, with the20
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Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco , 1950-65 [Brochure] (Text)
Brochure from the exhibition, "Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco 1950–65," November 20–December 29, 1974, held at the Dallas Museum of Art.
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Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Poets of the Cities: New York and San Francisco, 1950-1965, book, 1974; [New York]. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth176526/m1/24/?rotate=270: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Museum of Art.