In 1975, as the Son of Sam murders haunted New York’s consciousness, the city was struck by a blackout. There had been serious power-outs before but in 1977 it resulted in widespread looting, arson and urban chaos.
This was also a decade of exploration and decadence, even in the wake of the seismic 1960s. In the art world, artists began moving away from traditional media and incorporating the changing city – its architecture and economics – into their work.
It's no surprise that Rachel Kushner, a long-time cultural-journal editor, writing regularly about contemporary art, would find this world an ideal place to set her second novel, The Flamethrowers.
The central, unnamed, female protagonist – occasionally nicknamed “Reno” – leaves art college, sells her motorcycle (an object that is signifier for part of the plot) and moves to New York. Her passion is for creating land art. Another character, Ronnie, wants to photograph every person in the world. The actuality of making this kind of art happen works on the level of real, and metaphorical.
“Yes, much of the emphasis in 1970s’ art was on these very ephemeral gestures,” says Kushner on the phone from her Los Angeles home. “The 1970s were all about the dematerialisation of the art object. Making paintings had become a defunct activity; it was corny and answered to the needs of the marketplace. Artists were supposed to make something that was impossible to sell.”
While New York’s art scene was railing against previous modes of creating work, the city’s economic and labour status quo was also shifting. It was a decade, Kushner believes, that signalled the death of the industrial and manufacturing age in the US.
The Twin Towers, so emblematic of wealth, were built on the southern tip of Manhattan in 1972. “That area used to be full of warehouses but it was flattened. It was a manufacturing area replaced by buildings for finance.
“Lots of artists working in NYC in the 1970s were rummaging in the detritus of that, finding things on the street that had been part of it, and it seeped into their work. And, of course, people who buy art are often people who have made money in the stock market.”
Bohemian, beatnik parents
Art and commerce duel in the story and reinforce a sense of doubling throughout. While American bohemians fought for their art, Italy was experiencing its own social unrest during the "Years of Lead". By introducing Reno to a man named Sandro, Kushner shifts the story to Italy in the same decade. They have a shared love of motorbikes and eventually visit Italy, where Sandro's family owns a motorbike dynasty.
Kushner lived in Italy as a teenager, and rode Italian motorcycles, of which she has a life-long love. "Growing up, my father owned a 1955 Vincent Black Shadow – a very iconic British bike – and it planted a seed in my head. We'd go to vintage rallies at weekends but I was forbidden from riding a motorcycle, and certainly from owning one. As soon I was old enough, I bought a Moto Guzzi and kept it a secret for a year, even though I lived in the same city as my parents. One day my mother called my house and my roommate told her I was 'working on my bike'. She said: 'Your father is going to be furious with you. I'm putting him on the phone right now. He came on the phone and asked excitedly: 'So - what did you get?!'"
Kushner's parents were both scientists, but came from the "bohemian, beatnik" generation. Her father was interested in poetry and her mother was a Latin major. She has said that her parents "expected" her to be a writer. "We lived in a converted bus in a hippy town called Eugene Oregon, where Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) was the predominant cultural figure demonstrating how to be an artist.
“My parents didn’t have any more practical expectations of what they wanted their children to be than that. They valued literature, from Joyce to American poetry.”
In school, she read widely and wanted to be a poet but, when it came to college, she majored in political science, discounting fiction writing as something that could be a job. Her interests – politics, art, motorbikes, science – are broad, and Kushner discovered (conversely) that the novel could encompass these different parts of herself.
Given many of the novel's themes (and its title, from a part of the book that concerns the first World War), Kushner has been called a political writer. Her debut, Telex from Cuba, is partly set in the early Castro years and the Cuban revolution.
“I don’t think novels should be political,” she says, “in that they should have a message or an agenda . . . because it’s just not art. I think of art as being much more open-ended and less reducible to ideas, whereas politics is about having an ideological bearing in history. I’m more interested in the panorama of life, and what shapes people, than in small, domestic nuances between husbands and wives. It’s about the larger factors that make people who they are in a moment: history, circumstance, race and class.”
Rachel Kushner and Elizabeth Day are in conversation at Kilkenny Arts Festival tomorrow; kilkennyarts.ie
