KELLAMS: This is Ozarks at Large. I’m Kyle Kellams. Every semester, the University of Arkansas Honors College offers students an opportunity to enroll in a signature seminar led by an expert from the campus.
Next spring, there will be courses examining Nelson Hackett’s flight from being enslaved in Fayetteville, a deep dive into supply chain and society, as well as a seminar titled Crafting the Cold War. That one will be led by John Blakinger, endowed associate professor of contemporary art and Director of the Art History Program at the University of Arkansas.
The Cold War can conjure images of the space race, the Red Scare, Leave It to Beaver, and abstract art. John Blakinger says the spring seminar will scrutinize the roles art, politics, and society had in influencing each other.
BLAKINGER: I’m trying to get at the broad role of the visual arts, but also craft practices, design practices, architecture, pop culture at large, and the role that the arts played during the Cold War period.
KELLAMS: Did arts influence politics or politics influence arts?
BLAKINGER: Honestly, it’s a complex symbiotic relationship. The direction of influence is going both directions.
Certainly, politics influenced the arts. The arts had political functions explicit and also implicit during the Cold War period. I think the best example of this is abstract expressionism. This is painting associated with figures like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, very innovative, even radical in its time. And yet this type of artistic production also was useful. It had social, cultural functions as a representation of personal expression, which in turn was useful in promoting political ideologies.
There are well-documented revisionist accounts that trace how this type of painting was employed strategically as a form of soft power propaganda during the Cold War. So in that sense, there’s a use for the arts in an ideological, political function. But then, in subsequent decades, the arts take on more transgressive, subversive political functions that oppose establishment politics in different ways.
KELLAMS: It’s interesting. I think a lot of people would say, “Oh yes, I think of Pollock or de Kooning or Andy Warhol of that time, but I tend to think of them separately.” They happen to be on parallel lines but not intersecting lines.
BLAKINGER: Right. I think that’s often how we think of the past. We see art history as somehow separate. It exists in our art history textbook. We see that kind of linear trajectory, one thing after another.
I’m really interested in situating works of art and artists and art movements and creative practices more broadly in their context, in really rich ways. This means tracing a wide variety of social, cultural, political ideas, beliefs, and uses into the role of the arts. Not seeing art as completely separate, autonomous from the world, but really an actor in the world. That’s my approach. And that’s what this course will explore.
KELLAMS: Is that easier to do after the fact, when you have much more information at hand?
BLAKINGER: Yes, absolutely. That’s the role of the art historian: to situate artistic practices and see them in their context, to see the range of uses and functions they had. It’s hard to see in our own time. Even today, it’s hard to pin down and make sense of something as it is happening. So yes, it’s a practice of historical retrospect that allows us to recreate some of those narratives.
KELLAMS: What does it take to get that examination going? Do you have to go back to Life magazine?
BLAKINGER: Yes. For me as an art historian, it always involves primary sources. And yes, going back to something like Life magazine. One of the first art historical projects I ever did as an undergraduate was an honors thesis on Andy Warhol, in which I traced the sources he used in his paintings to advertisements and picture essays in Life magazine.
I was paging every issue of Life magazine from 1962 to 1964 in my dorm room, searching for those sources and making that connection to how Warhol was manipulating those images, the narratives he was reading, and what Life represented for paintings that were about the dark underbelly of American culture — his famous Death in America series.
So for me, it’s always about going back to the sources. That’s something I want to do with students. I want to go to special collections, go to Crystal Bridges, look at things firsthand, look at a wide range of materials so we can build the history together in the classroom.
KELLAMS: I’m thinking that Pollock, de Kooning — these are artists who I didn’t think of as being part of the mainstream culture in maybe the late ’60s, early ’70s. But then I think if Life Magazine or Look magazine is doing something on them, it was being delivered to homes all over the world.
BLAKINGER: Yes. Life magazine has an outsized influence in the reception of American art in this period. They absolutely cover Pollock. There’s a very famous spread that says “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living American painter?” And they ask the question but also present it as the answer to their own question.
That happens through the ’50s and ’60s, a fixation on presenting advanced and new American art. There’s an audience for it. This is the era of suburbanization, rising middle class. There’s a fascination with art and a new shift of focus on arts in the United States. And there’s an audience that really wants to know what is happening and to understand it.
KELLAMS: Of course, if you think about the Cold War, you think of imminent doom, the rise of nuclear warheads, the space race. Does that influence art?
BLAKINGER: Yes, absolutely. The fear of nuclear war is a subtext present in the period. In the ’50s, there are many artists using abstraction to think about the expanded universe that nuclear weapons and nuclear science revealed. But also, art in the ’60s is premised as being countercultural and anti-war. It’s art connected to activism, anti-war politics, the student movement. That’s another role for the arts in this period.
KELLAMS: In the literature letting students know about this Honors College signature seminar, it says, “Topics include the celebrated rise of abstract expressionism and the covert role of the CIA in promoting the new American painting as soft power propaganda.” That sounds wildly interesting.
BLAKINGER: It is. It’s a fascinating history. At the time, people did not exactly have a concept of what was happening. But revisionist accounts have identified the role of abstract expressionism as a form of propagandist cultural production.
There are two ways art historians analyze this. One is tracing the money — connections between institutions, key figures associated with the Museum of Modern Art, and the U.S. government: the State Department, the USIA, the U.S. Information Agency, and others. Understanding the role MoMA has in promoting work and receiving sponsorship from the government to do that, especially abroad and especially in locations bordering the USSR, in order to create a cultural bulwark against communism.
The other aspect is how these paintings, which don’t have obvious messages — many of them are abstraction — are useful because they appear open-ended. That makes them adaptable, reframable, and meaningful to new audiences.
KELLAMS: That’s interesting, because to my mind it seems counterintuitive that you’d use Pollock. That’s not Norman Rockwell or suburban America — the image we wanted to share.
BLAKINGER: Right. One way art historians understand this is by thinking about the politics of figuration and representation in the 1940s, and the break away from that as partly political. Figuration and representational painting were deeply associated with propaganda used by the Nazis, the National Socialists and the USSR. While it was a prevalent style and form in U.S. modernism, there was a shift toward abstraction after World War II as a clear contrast against figurative painting associated with totalitarianism. Ironically, the fact that it doesn’t appear to have a clear message makes it a more powerful message.
KELLAMS: And can this become cyclical, because young artists might be influenced by these artists?
BLAKINGER: Yes. Some of the line of influence is against the abstract expressionists. By the late ’50s, many artists are pushing back. Abstract expressionism was often framed as an existential crisis, a personal quest, with pathos on the canvas. Later artists were skeptical of that premise and motivated to contradict it. They still embraced experimentation and abstraction, but also pop culture and everyday life, things not normally considered works of art.
KELLAMS: Do you think by the end of this semester, students will be looking at contemporary art differently, too?
BLAKINGER: I hope so. You always want to bring in things happening now in an art history class, think through the present even as you’re doing history. We’ll definitely think about contemporary art, how artists are thinking about politics now, and the connections that might have to earlier decades.
KELLAMS: Another part of the Cold War was, at least here, the Red Scare — communists potentially around every corner. Will you touch on that as well?
BLAKINGER: Yes. It’s an interesting dynamic within the art world. Many artists had leftist leanings and associations, many critics as well. Many were card-carrying Marxists in the 1930s. There’s a shift that happens. Part of the politics of apolitical painting is a move away from Marxism and repression of prior orientations. Thinking about those hidden politics is interesting, as is the reemergence of radical leftist ideologies in the 1960s as an echo of the Red Scare.
We’ll also look at social movements: how art fits with feminism, queer artists, anti-war protests, the Civil Rights Movement. Art becomes politicized in a direct, intentional way that contrasts with the hidden agendas of the earlier period.
KELLAMS: This may be impossible to answer, but for people younger in the Cold War — maybe they didn’t know Pollock or de Kooning or Warhol, but they were watching The Jetsons, Mission Impossible, or Get Smart, shows influenced by the Cold War. Is it possible those programs helped develop a worldview that lasted into adulthood?
BLAKINGER: Absolutely. Culture always influences our politics, our worldview, how we navigate the world. It circumscribes what we think is possible.
KELLAM:S It provides representation — or non-representation.
BLAKINGER: The early Cold War period, the 1950s, is remembered as conformist, black and white — everyone with a ranch house, a television set, and Life magazine. It’s a fantasy narrative created at the time and made nostalgic later. It doesn’t describe the reality and is exclusionary to many other experiences.
We’ll think about that image of the Cold War, how pop culture like The Jetsons bolstered it, and how artists proposed alternatives in their work.
KELLAMS: Thank you so much for your time.
BLAKINGER: Thank you.
KELLAMS: John Blakinger is endowed associate professor of contemporary art and director of the Art History Program at the University of Arkansas. In the spring, he’ll lead the University of Arkansas Honors College signature seminar, Crafting the Cold War. Our conversation took place inside the Carver Center for Public Radio earlier this month.
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