1. David Hollinger, "The Knower and the Artificer," American Quarterly 39 (1987): 37.

2. Daniel Joseph Singal, "Towards a Definition of American Modernism," American Quarterly 39 (1987): 8.

3. In The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), Singal studies a small group of American intellectuals and writers from the South who made the transition from Victorian to modernist culture. Other historians, however, counter Singal's view of modernism as relativizing and skeptical; they find the basis of modernist philosophies in the belief that the operations of the universe are known and that this knowledge can be applied to social behavior. Brief expositions of modernism as a cultural system can be found in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, "The Name and Nature of Modernism," in Modernism, 1890-1930 , ed. Bradbury and McFarlane (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 20-49; and Bruce Robbins, "Modernism in History, Modernism in Power," in Modernism Reconsidered , ed. Robert Kiely (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 231-39.

4. Henri Lefebvre, "Modernity and Modernism," in Modernism and Modernity: The Vancouver Conference Papers , ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1983), 1-2.

5. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 37, 80.

6. The term "residual" refers to Raymond Williams's 1973 essay "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory," New Left Review 82 (November-December 1973): 3-16. Williams modified Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain continued cultural contests by postulating the existence of multiple worldviews in society. Residual cultures represented older ways of life that had not entirely died out but had lost legitimacy and power. Dominant and emergent cultures reflected the outlooks of those groups contending for power.

7. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso 1989), 38.

8. Journal entry, May 2, 1928, Mabel Alvarez papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

9. Arthur Millier, "Postsurrealism or Subjective Classicism: A Means to a Genuinely Contemporary Art," in Ferdinand Perret papers, Notebooks on California Artists, Lorser Feitelson file, roll 3856, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

10. Wolfgang Paalen, "The New Image," Dyn , no. 1 (April-May 1942): 7-8.

11. Ibid., 9.

12. Ibid., 13, 15.

13. Entry for December 10, 1918, Mabel Alvarez papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

14. Diary entry March 18 [1919?], Mabel Alvarez papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

15. Entry for June 8, 1919.

16. In 1916 Ezra Pound proposed a distinction between perceptual and cognitive art that influenced poets and critics of the interwar period. Writing on the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound argued that artists who focus on the act of perception operate as receivers of impressions, from which they derive meaning. Such artists accept the external world as the dominant reality and see the human being as a product of circumstances. The artist who focuses on cognitive process directs "a certain fluid force against circumstance, as conceiving instead of merely reflecting and observing." External reality was a jumble of meaningless events until an intelligent mind imposed order through the creation of images. See Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Directions, 1970; first published 1916), 89-90.

17. Journal entry, May 2, 1928, Mabel Alvarez papers (as in note 8).

18. Biographical data on Sabato Rodia (also known as Simon Rodia) are based on David Johnston, "Towering Indifference," Los Angeles Times , Calendar Section, August 14, 1984; Jules Langsner, "Simon of Watts," Arts and Architecture (July 1951); Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts , exh. cat. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1962); Calvin Trillin, ''I Know I Want to Do Something," New Yorker , May 29, 1965; "The Watts Towers," pamphlet published by the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts, ca. 1960; and Leon Whiteson, The Watts Towers of Los Angeles (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1989).

19. Quoted in Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts , 11.

20. Langsner, "Simon of Watts," 25.

21. William C. Seitz, The Art of Assemblage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 6.

22. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 72.

23. Ibid., 77-78.

24. See Jürgen Wissmann, "Collagen oder die Integration von Realität im Kunstwerk," in Immanente Ästhetik: Ästhetische Reflexion (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1966), 327-60, for the distinction between organic and constructed work in the development of modernism.

25. Ernesto De Martino, Mondo popolare e magia in Lucania (Rome: Matera, 1975), 39.

26. This summary is drawn from De Martino's Mondo popolare e magia in Lucania , particularly the first chapter, "Intorno a una storia del mondo popolare subalterno," and his La fine del mondo: Contributo all'analisi delle apocalissi culturali (Turin: Giulio Einauldi, 1977), 212-82.

27. Ibid., 136.

28. "Being," translated from the Italian word esserci , the word Italians use to translate the German philosophical term Dasein , often untranslated in English or translated as "Being-there)' Esserci refers to a being conscious of itself as a subject, whose most fundamental nature involves awareness that it has a relationship to Being. The quotations are from Ernesto De Martino, Il Mondo magico (Turin: Giulio Einauldi, 1948), 145.

29. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York: Airmont, 1963), 209.

30. Perry Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," New Left Review 144 (March-April 1984): 96-113.

31. Letter to Helen Lundeberg, December 11, 1947, Lorser Feitelson and Helen Lundeberg papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, rolls 1103-4.