Page 25 - Studio International - November 1967

mark them as benign and pacific. In contrast, ascendant Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those
and emergent epochs are frequently naïve, dogmatic, impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one
crusading, and are stained by injustice, cruelty and re- of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight;
pression. Just the same, in more psychological terms, Joad . . . all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone
reverts once again to a view of decadence as malaise. Even while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be
though he thinks that form without content, or a failure more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.
to maintain a level in a realized form are only occasional To such a tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on
accompaniments, not definitions of decadence, his over- the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in
all viewpoint is disapproving. For him, the ultimate evil it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by,
of decadence is that it leads to a hermeticism in which the what is real in our life fines itself down.' Compare this
objects or events experienced are dispensed with, in with the statement 'There doesn't seem to be any tomor-
favour of an idea of experience. The truly decadent in- row. Every time I wake up, no matter in what position,
dividual, according to Joad, is one who drops the subject it's always been today,' by the singer Bob Dylan. For
in a fit of misguided resourcefulness, and narcissistically both speakers, the one a cultural mandarin, the other a
huddles over his dream of objects and sensations. He sharp-tongued young Folk-Rock' singer, the future
demurs to project himself into the world of real things, dissolves into an attempt to hold on to the immediate,
and therefore atrophies his experience, entrapping him- and to draw from that fiction which is the fixity of the
self in his own convictionless, unsubstantiated fancy. present moment a maximum distillation of significance.
Perhaps there is some little thrust in this. In the work of It is the decadent attitude par excellence, oscillating
Walter Pater, one of the great progenitors of modern between its desire to precipitate some happiness or poetry
decadence, there is a celebrated passage in which he impossibly more rarified than is ever to be found in life,
exalts the preciousness of individual impressions as 'the and the perception that life itself can be seen as an endless
impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind stream of poetry. Certainly it is in his attitude towards
keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world. pleasure, that the child-adult, the Decadent, inevitably

Facing page
James Rosenquist
Director 1964
oil on canvas
90 x 62 in.
Leo Castelli, New York
Right
Andy Warhol
Green disaster
silkscreen on canvas
Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris