Another amazing essay from Lindley Williams Hubbell! Reprinted, again, through the good graces of Makoto Ozaki from the CD-ROM Collected Works.

Happenings

There is no progress in the arts. No one has ever written a better poem than the Iliad. But there is, and must be, constant change. No good artist has ever created anything in the idiom of the previous generation. Art changes because the world changes, and art cannot exist apart from the world. And because the world has changed more in the past hundred years than it had changed in the previous five thousand years it is inevitable that the arts should change just as much. Think for a minute what the world was like only one hundred years ago: there were no automobiles and people rode in horse-drawn carriages, there were no airplanes, no telephone, no phonograph, no movies, no radio, no television. As far as techniques of communication and travel were concerned, life in 1869 was much closer to life in ancient Egypt than to life in 1969, when men have landed on the moon. It is curious that in a period of such overwhelming change there are people who expect the arts to remain the same.
Let us look at what has been happening in the visual arts during this time of change. If you compare an ancient Egyptian painting―say one of the murals in the tomb of Nakht at Thebes which were painted in the 15th century B.C.―with a portrait or a still life by Cezanne, you will find that in spite of the great difference in technique they are essentially the same thing: they are both pictures of something, and there has been an intention to reproduce, within the limits of artistic tact, the actual appearance of that thing. But now, if you drop into the Okazaki Bijutsukan at almost any time you will find the walls covered with paintings which are not pictures of anything that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. They are simply paintings, having their own existence as works of art, completely independent of any other content. If man in the past century has gone from the horse and buggy to the lunar rocket, the arts have travelled just as far.
This revolution in the visual arts in the twentieth century may be divided into two periods: the first might be called the disappearance of the subject, and the second might be called the disappearance of the object. The subject began to disappear from painting about 1910, with the Cubists in France and the Futurists in Italy. The Cubists disintegrated forms, reduced them to their planes, and reassembled them as pure formal design. The Futurists, instead of painting “an arrested moment” painted a series of moments seen simultaneously. However, in both of these schools of painters, the subject matter was still there, even if it was no longer visible. It was Malevich who, in 1913, took the final step of abandoning subject matter altogether and painting pure geometric forms. This kind of painting is usually called “non-objective” to distinguish it from the other kind which is called “abstract” because it is an abstraction of something. This art of pure geometric form, which reached its apotheosis in the art of Mondrian, has taken as its credo a passage from Plato’s Philebus: “When I say beauty of form, I am trying to express, not what most people would understand by the words, such as the beauty of animals or of paintings, but I mean the straight line and the circle and the plane and solid figures formed from these by turning-lathes and rulers and patterns of angles. For I assert that the beauty of these is not relative, like that of other things, but they are always absolutely beautiful by nature,” and Cezanne’s famous dictum: “Everything in nature is derived from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder.” Finally in 1914, Marcel Duchamp, the most penetrating artistic intelligence since Leonardo da Vinci, exhibited a bottle-drying rack (a familiar sight in French cafés) as a work of art, signing his name to it.
All of this happened before World War I. It was not until after World War II that the next step was taken. Until then the artist, however complete his rejection of subject matter, either intellectual or emotional, still exhibited an object. But now even that was to disappear. For we are now in the age of Happenings. Until this century the artist always made something. Then, following the example of Duchamp, the artist chose something. But today the artist does something. The purpose of this has been well expressed by John Perreault: “The artists . . . are less and less involved in turning out precious objects. What they are offering to their audience is an art experience rather than material artifacts that create that experience. Once the ends have been achieved the means wither away.”
Now although Happenings originated among painters and although they are usually presented in art museums and are a part of the art world, it must be obvious to anybody that a Happening could just as well be the creation of a poet or a composer. In short, the boundaries between the arts seem to be disappearing. This was shown vividly when, a few years ago, John Cage, the most distinguished American composer of his generation, gave a “concert” at Kyoto Kaikan. Much of the performance was pure “Happening.” Cage has indeed given recognition to this fact by his rhetorical question, “Where do we go from here?” which he answers, “To theatre.” For Happenings are, in fact, a sort of abstract theatre. But, to whatever category they belong, they are the latest major movement in the ever-changing world of the arts.
We must never forget, however, that if the great artists of the past cannot be imitated, neither can they be superseded. Homer and Mozart and Rembrandt . . . these are still the mountains from which we must quarry for our lesser structures.