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and the ‘resurrection of the flesh’ in a prohibitively puritanical and pleasure-numbing post-World War II America. ‘[W]e need an erotics of art’, she famously concluded in her 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’. Thek – who painted that phrase on one of his last canvases in 1987 – was Sontag’s modern art muse, constantly experimenting with avant-garde forms and processes that
structure, reworked and re-signified over the decades. This organic and diachronic dimension of art is what post-World War II American artists appreciated about Italy. Its complexity was more multifarious and allegorical (in Benjaminian terms) 49 than the self-assuring fantasy nurtured by the Section of transplanting a golden age retrieved from the
obvious in post-World War II American art. In the fine arts it is not the critics or the artists who are invested in the ideology of contemporaneity, but the museum managers. The “American contemporary,” which was partially discussed in parallel with the contemporaneity emerging in Moscow after Stalin's death (see Chapter 4 ), and was illustrated in the context of the 1948 renaming of the Boston ICA is one such example of a “contemporary” radicalism. The ICA's managers’ “successful attempts to detach ‘contemporary’ from ‘modern,’” as one commentator wrote
. 66 For a discussion of antipolitics in the context of Western Europe, see Suzanne Berger, “Politics and Antipolitics in Western Europe in the Seventies,” Daedalus 58, no. 1 (Winter, 1979): 27–50. For antipolitics in the context of post-World War II American “neo-avant-garde,” see chapter “Virus” in David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 67