"Kitsch" (1968): pop culture, fine art, and the line between them

For whatever reason, some books just stay with you. Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste by Gillo Dorfles is one of those books.

It's long out of print, but ten years ago I found a second copy, "profusely illustrated with more appalling pictures than you can shake a stick at," as the New York Times reviews with typical understatement. Newsweek puts it more succinctly: "This compendium of corn is guaranteed to contain something to offend everyone." The familiar figure playing the violin on its cover demanded I pay her one-dollar price at a book sale.

It replaces a copy I left behind in college thirty-five years ago. This was the book I would turn to on rainy days to pass the time between classes, and in upstate New York there was a lot of bad weather. Mr. Dorfles and a wide-ranging group of art critics rack their brains (and twist ours) trying to describe what makes kitsch so appallingly bad.

Some, like Herman Broch, are afraid they may pose more questions about bad art than they answer. But a ten-minute look inside at the kaleidoscope of images in Kitsch will open eyes to the avalanche of junk that makes up popular culture.

The titles in this collection of essays, photos, and illustrations, published in 1968, indicates, really, that bad taste knows no bounds. "Death," "Christian kitsch," "Tourism and nature," "Politics," and "Pornokitsch and morals" are just a few of the topics surveyed. The reader will also see more creative uses for the swastika of the Third Reich than one could imagine possible after 1945.

Also included is Clement Greenberg's essay "The Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published originally in 1939, tracing the rise of art in the service of totalitarian regimes. In this case, one photograph of Mussolini and Hitler at the Borghese gallery speaks volumes. The palpable disdain on their faces as they survey the half-nude reclining figure of Napoleon's sister on her couch makes it clear:Il Duce and Der Fuhrer will soon put an end to the decadence of the Little General's age of neo-classicism. Tomorrow the world.

Hitler & Mussolini, art critics

Kitsch -- "trash" or "cheap finery" in German -- has become a universal term for much of the things consumers see, admire, or desire. Mass production has made kitsch an unavoidable part of contemporary culture; it's so pervasive that most of us see elements ofkitsch everywhere, yet would have a difficult time separating the art from the artificial.

Let's face it, no one goes to Disney World expecting an adventure in high art, but now that Times Square in New York has been "imagineered" by Disney, who can say where the kitsch fantasy ends? Dorfles states thatkitsch "threatens to become the most pervasive style of our times." Considering the book was written forty years ago, the relentless, artificial tide has only increased.

The book was first published in Italy and many of the photographs and illustrations are from European sources. Yet the sentimental and commercial pull ofkitsch, with its tug at the heartstrings and purse-strings of millions, is universal. Anyone who thinks of The Lone Ranger or Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when listening to "The William Tell Overture" by Rossini has been influenced by kitsch.

While the line separating art from kitsch is exceedingly fine, one man's trash is still saved from being another man's treasure by context, or more rightly kitsch's complete lack of it. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa appears much less inscrutable on a plastic shower curtain. Mass production has made the irony of "authentic reproduction" available on a grand scale.

Some of the academic essays have not aged well, even if the gently tortured Italian-into-English translation has its own charm: "And obviously before long (and even now in fact) we will witness the anti-family kitsch, the kitsch of hippies and long-haired youths, the kitsch of addicts and beatniks," writes Dorfles -- foretelling Nirvana's cover version of Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" by a good 20 years.

Fascinating, funny, and full of hideously bad art, this book is a wonderland of the high-brow, the low-brow, and the no-brow of taste. In a pop-culture blender that makes no such distinctions, how else can you explain the success of American Idol?

"The Poem of Poems": Brion Gysin's disappearing act

This fair child of mine (roses and bitumen)
I make my old excuse:
He shall have the gift of song.
Praise deserves his beauty's use.
O, if thou couldst answer with studs of silver
this were to be new made!
What ease to our way
walled with silver, gold and beryl!

Excerpted from "The Poem of Poems"
Brion Gysin

While living in Paris at 9 Rue Git-Le-Coeur in the late 1950s, the artist and writer Brion Gysin accidentally sliced through some newspapers with a knife and became fascinated with the resulting jumble of text -- half of one sentence became the end of another, unrelated one. He began to experiment with this technique, slicing up newsprint, books, and other materials. He refered to these as "cut-ups," and when he demonstrated the process to William Burroughs, Burroughs asked if he could try it himself. "Go ahead, that's what it's for," Gysin replied.

Unwittingly, Gysin handed Burroughs a writing tool that he would use extensively in his career (The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, Nova Express and Exterminator). He achieved such infamy that Burroughs -- although he was careful to credit Gysin as often as possible -- became famous for the cut-up technique, while Gysin (whose multifaceted career as a musician, writer, painter, and calligrapher contines to defy categories) went on to write The Process (1971) and The Last Museum, an edited version of a much larger work about the fate of 9 Rue-Le-Coeur itself, published posthumously in 1986.

In order to show Burroughs the extraordinary possibilities of juxtaposing text-on-text, while in Paris Gysin experimented with the cut-up technique on audio tape (heard here) as well as print. Describing this in an interview published in Terry Wilson's book Here to Go: Planet R-101, Gysin says:

I suggested to William that we use only the best, only the high-charged material: King James' translation of the "Song of Songs" of Solomon, Eliot's translation of "Anabasis" by St. John-Perse, Shakespeare's sugared "Sonnets" and a few lines from "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, about his mescaline experiences.

The result -- as can be expected from such diverse sources -- is at once mysterious and glorious, beautiful, and maybe the finest example of the cut-up process Gysin himself created. Unfortunately, it was never published in its entirety during his lifetime. An excerpt appeared in the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up collaboration The Third Mind (1978) and mistakenly credited to Burroughs -- once more undercutting Gysin's contribution.

The full text finally appeared in 2001. Jason Weiss' Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader helps to restore Brion Gysin's legacy, after so many of Gysin's works have become unavailable, hard-to-find, or have simply slipped out-of-print. There are excerpts from his first published novel in 1947, five chapters from The Process, a scene from Gysin's unpublished script forNaked Lunch.

There is a large selection of his cut-ups, as well as uncollected magazine pieces, scores and lyrics, and reproductions of his unique calligraphy. Full texts are included of his permutated poems, "I Am That I Am" and "Junk Is No Good Baby," as well as "The Poem of Poems."

In one interview Gysin put his multimedia career in perspective by saying the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said, somewhat ruefully. By the 1980s, he was a performer as well -- he'd written for Broadway in the '40s, but here he was onstage singing new lyrics he'd written and describing himself as "the world's oldest living rock star."

It's all the more ironic that Gysin's work remains largely undiscovered in this multimedia age his work helped create. His legacy, long overshadowed by others of more fame or infamy, remains elusive as ever.

Anna Quindlen: "Don't read these," a back-to-school memo on censorship

School is (or is about to be) back in session, which means the annual battle over books appropriate for school-age readers is about to heat up. Young or old, it's not easy reading banned books. There are traps for unsuspecting readers on every page: "inappropriate" language, "desensitizing" violence, "stimulating" stories. As Anna Quindlen comments, "And then there's Faulkner. Oy."

Quindlen wrote a witty column in 1994 in which she outlines a week's worth of reading censored books, and comes to a "wonderful end to a depressing week" -- she re-reads Bridge to Terabithia and finds it even better. Her final recommendation? Tell kids there are certain books not to be read, and then watch the reading scores soar. If only.

Monday: Begin Banned Books Week by reading Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, which parents in several school districts have tried to remove from required reading lists. Weep copiously at realistic tale of friendship and loss among children. ...

Discover that Terabithia caused such a stink in Oskaloosa, Kan., that the school board has required teachers to list each profanity in any book they assign and how many times the profanity is used. Page through book. Find a "damn" and write it down. Feel like a fool. "I hate to say it, but sometimes grown-ups are really stupid," says oldest child. ...

Tuesday: Read reams of material about the banning of In the Night Kitchen, fanciful account of dreams of little boy by Maurice Sendak. Boy falls out of clothes, is naked, has penis. Penis has been described as "desensitizing children to nudity" (Beloit, Wis.), "nudity for no purpose" (Norridge, Ill.) and "the foundation for future use of pornography" (Elk River, Minn.). In Missouri copies of book were distributed to kindergarten class after artist was commissioned to draw shorts on boy. ...

Wednesday: Contemplate bookshelves in office. Moby Dick encourages whale hunting, Anna Kareninaadultery, Shakespeare teen suicide, usury and the occult. Faulkner, oy. ... Realize cat with hat encourages children to make a mess while mother is out. Discover in American Library Association Banned Books Week literature that the Bible was challenged as "obscene and pornographic" at library in Fairbanks, Alaska. Fear for future of human race.

Library Association sends information on case in Wyoming challenging Judy Blume book Forever. Judy reigning Queen of banned books, maybe because writes books about teen-agers in which they talk and think like actual teen-agers as opposed to adult's idea of what teen-agers should be like. (How quickly we forget.) Parent complained Forever contains sex described graphically. Spells graphically "grafically."

Read that parent in Lambertville, N.J., objected to The Amazing Bone by William Steig, because animals use tobacco. Love Steig, love Bone, hate tobacco. Heart sinks. Reports of censorship at highest mark in last 10 years. Find myself counting uses of Lord's name in vain in Catcher. Read dictionary instead. ...

Consider entire K-12 curriculum of banned books, beginning with Night Kitchen ... Great stuff all. Foolproof pedagogical method: tell students they cannot, repeat, CANNOT, read these books. Too stimulating. Watch reading scores soar. Next stop, Faulkner. .. Decide oldest child is right. Reread Bridge to Terabithia. Even better the second time.