Art Since 1900
Richard Noble
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin HD Buchloch, Art Since 1900: modernish, antimoderisim, postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 2004, 704pp, 413 col, 220 b/w illus, hb, £45.00, 0 500 23818 9.
In his 1953 essay 'The Hedgehog and the Fox', Isaiah Berlin advanced the elegant thesis that intellectuals and artists tend to be of two types: hedgehogs, 'who relate everything to a single central vision' and foxes, whose 'thought is scattered and diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves'. Plato, Hegel and Marx were hedgehogs; Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Joyce were foxes. Art Since 1900, the new survey of 20th-century art by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, contains both tendencies. Its point of departure is the fox-like admission that there is no one single method for understanding the art historical past. The book begins with four essays, each outlining distinct and potentially contradictory methods of art historical inquiry: the psychoanalytic (written by Foster), the social history of art (Buchloh), formalism and structuralism (Bois), post-structuralism and deconstruction (Krauss), and the book then ends with a round table discussion of the current state of the visual arts. In between, there are 600-plus pages organised into ten chapters, each covering a decade in the history of 20th-century art in Europe and North America.
The historical narrative proceeds year by year, and it focuses as one would expect upon artistic and intellectual innovation. There is a heavy emphasis on the importance of the Avant Garde in the unfolding story of Modernism both as the creative motor driving the development of modernist visual art, and as a source of intellectual and political resistance to the allabsorbing, all-trivialising power of capitalist relations of production and their attendant cultural forms. One senses, particularly in the sections written by Buchloh, the uncompromisingly critical ghost of Theodor Adorno lurking in the background. The story the authors tell is complex, exhilarating and fiercely intelligent; but in the end there is a pervading, hedgehoglike sense that something hugely important has been lost and cannot be recovered. For these authors, the death of the modern has left a chaos of formal confusion, financially driven careerism and political apathy in its wake. The visual arts would appear to have lost their capacity to inspire any significant resistance to prevailing cultural and political norms.
The book is both handsome and intelligently designed from a reader's perspective. Analytical tables of contents provide a year-by-year breakdown of the subject matter. Readers concerned to read up on the fate of the Surrealists during the Second World War can very quickly find the relevant passages. The chapters are lavishly illustrated with photographs of iconic works, and throughout the text special explanatory boxes provide background information on important thinkers, personalities and concepts. Some of these will be very useful for students, for example the box on Michel Foucault comes in the chapter covering 1971, and so allows us to see the emergence of his ideas in an art historical rather than a philosophical context. Equally useful are the glossary of 'artspeak' terms at the back (no more excuses for confusing signifier and signified) and the bibliography, which is extensive, up-to-date and organised by subject area.
A book like this is bound to be controversial, if only because the sheer weight of scholarship on 20th-century art history is impossible to condense into a satisfactory and readable format. Added to this is the problem of how one goes about telling the story? The art historical canon is now hotly contested. The connoisseurial consensus has broken down in the face of theoretically informed criticisms advanced by those it had excluded. At the same time, a range of theoretical or methodological paradigms has been adopted within the discipline, such that few professional art historians can afford not to state at the outset which of the various theoretical frameworks conditioning art historical research forms the basis of their interpretations.
Art Since 1900 steers its way through this minefield of potential problems brilliantly. It faces the general methodological issue, as well as the authors' own reputations for uncompromisingly difficult theorising, right at the start. The four methodological introductions each offers detailed accounts of the genesis of these different approaches to understanding visual art, as well as some very useful explanation of the nature and limits of their application to its interpretation. Foster shows effectively how psychoanalysis emerged with Modernism in art and also how its influence in both the production and reception of visual art ebbs and flows over the century: strong during the Surrealist movement, weakening significantly in the 50s and 60s, and then returning strongly with feminist art production and criticism in the 70s and 80s. But more importantly, Foster demonstrates why psychoanalysis is useful for interpreting visual art in different historical circumstances. The Surrealists believed art could unlock the unconscious and in the process free its audience from the constraints of bourgeois reason. Feminists in the 70s, on the other hand, found critical potential in both Freud's and Lacan's accounts of the subject's sexual development and how this might condition visual experience, despite the evidently patriarchal bias of their theories. Foster suggests that the great insight of psychoanalysis is that the meaning of what we see lies less with its content than with the subjectivity of the viewer. Yet he is also careful to point out that it cannot explain everything about our visual experience, and still less can it make complete sense of the range of visual experiences comprising 20th-century art.
Buchloh traces the social history of art to Marxism's attempts to explain cultural activity in terms of its role in the production of the ideological forms necessary to sustain capitalism. Buchloh's conception of the modern in art is broadly dialectical, or at least driven by opposition. On the one hand, he argues that the autonomy of the aesthetic, which he traces from Manet through Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg's defence of Abstract Expressionism, is integral to Modernism. This is because it has been instrumental in the construction of the bourgeois public sphere. The autonomous art object, severed from its role in religious or civic tradition, demands individual interpretation, and so constitutes one of the conditions for nurturing bourgeois individuality. Yet Buchloh points out that there was resistance to the 'cult of autonomy' all the way through the 20th Century. Russian Constructivism, Surrealism and Dada are all given as examples of avant-gardist attempts to integrate art with life; while John Heartfield's provisional and geopolitically specific 'anti-aesthetic', down to Martha Rosler's and Dan Graham's conceptually-based engagements with the political, all represent strategies of resistance to the predominant cultural/ideological forms. For Buchloh, it would appear that the genius and value of the modern lies in this art of resistance, but he is aware of the paradox this creates for an approach to art history that tends to see artistic practice as a reproduction of dominant ideological forms.
Bois and Krauss outline the influence of structuralism and post-structuralism on art historical method respectively. For Bois, the key figure for understanding the influence of structuralism in art history is Roland Barthes. Barthes' semiology, or 'science of forms', allowed the possibility of a critical analysis of art works which distinguished between, but did not necessarily separate, form and content. For Bois, the continued significance of a formalist approach to art history or art criticism depends on a distinction between two types of formalism. The first, which he associates with the superficial morphology of Clive Bell, Fry and the later Greenberg, is concerned primarily with form as shape or design. The second, which he associates with Barthes, and interestingly with Brecht, treats form as structural, which is to say it treats the form of the work as fully integrated with the content, and so part of the meaning. This becomes a key principle guiding Bois' contribution to the book. In a brilliant discussion of Picasso's Bull's Head, 1942, he shows why Picasso's metonymic use of a bicycle seat and bar to stand in for a bull's head is a 'structuralist activity' in Barthes' sense. The work 'not only performed a structural analysis of the figurative tradition in western art, but it also structurally engineered new objects'. (p37) The power of Bois' formalist approach is clearly evident in his discussions of individual works by Picasso, Matisse and Braque, but as he admits, as a critical method formalism presupposes the internal coherence of the work under analysis, and so tends to work best with single objects or limited series. From an historical standpoint, it leaves out too much relevant contextual information.
Perhaps the most difficult methodological section is left to Krauss, whose intellectual biography tracks the art world's transition from the modern to the postmodern. Formerly a student of Greenberg, she has become one of the most distinguished advocates of the postmodern in visual art. Krauss identifies two very distinct theoretical innovations as crucial in the transition to the postmodern. One is the post-structuralist denial of the autonomy of systems (linguistic, aesthetic or political) associated with Foucault; the other is Jacques Derrida's even more radical deconstruction of structuralist linguistics. She traces the influence of Foucault's argument that all articulated or discursive systems of knowledge should be understood as disciplinary, that is, in terms of the power relations they seek to instantiate, through Broodthaers' Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, 1972. Broodthaers made art out of the very structures used for framing art: the museum, the vitrine, the explanatory panel. In doing so he calls attention to the putative neutrality of such devices, and beyond that to the way the administrative practices/rituals of museums confer legitimacy and meaning upon art works. As Krauss says, 'the whole practice of what came to be known as "institutional critique" derives from such a practice'. Krauss's account of Derrida's work is necessarily condensed and inevitably opaque, but her tracing of his ideas through the work of artists like Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler and Barbara Kruger clearly illustrates the significance of his writing for visual art. She notes the particular importance of the reversal of the relation between reality and its representations derived from Derrida's thought. Artists like Sherman and Kruger came to see the 'real' as proceeding out of our representations. Sherman's photo works reveal a self that can only be understood through the mediation of pop culture; whereas Kruger explores woman's relation to the symbolic field of speech and meaning in terms of the way patriarchy represents her as a 'bearer' rather than a 'maker' of meaning. Krauss concludes with the contentious observation that the aesthetic field is currently structured around two absences. The first is the absence of reality, as it disappears behind 'the mirage-like screen of the media'. The second is the absence of any explicit recognition of the power relations behind the presuppositions of the language and the institutions that frame our experience of visual art.
Art Since 1900 is an impressive achievement of scholarship; it condenses a vast and complex subject into a readable book that does more than simply survey the field. The authors offer an interpretation of Modernism and its ultimate collapse, but they want this interpretation to emerge from a plurality of methodological perspectives, and so to achieve a kind of unity in difference. There is, it must be said, something slightly odd about this, even though it is difficult to see how it could be done otherwise. The language of the text consistently acknowledges the possibility of other interpretations, but at the same time one has the feeling that each author, with the possible exception of Foster, is deeply committed to their own. In any event, it is important to the authors' own sense of the significance of their subject that they don't easily accede to the pluralism that prevails in the current discourse around visual art. In their story, the essence of Modernism is its consistently renewed opposition to the received opinions and practices of the day. Part of what they lament about its passing is the gradual erosion of any connection between artistic or critical activity and resistance to the idiocies and injustices that dominate our public culture. We have exchanged the intellectual and political ambitions of the Avant Garde for the relativistic soup of pluralism.
This rather gloomy conclusion is reiterated in the round table discussion concerning the 'predicament of contemporary art' at the end. Despite their important contributions to the critical interpretation of contemporary art and artists, the authors (again with the notable exception of Foster) find the contemporary scene pretty unpromising. Buchloh is scathing about it: 'the very construct of an oppositional sphere of artists and intellectuals appears to have been eliminated; certainly this is true in the realm of cultural production. That production is now homogenised as an economic field of investment and speculation in its own right. The antinomy between artists and intellectuals on the one hand and capitalist production on the other has been annihilated or has disappeared by attrition.' An example is Matthew Barney, whom he describes as 'a small time Richard Wagner who mythifies the catastrophic conditions of existence under late capitalism'. Certainly this latter assessment is hard to resist, but surely the former is too bleak. The death of the Avant Garde poses a challenge to artists and critics alike to find new ways of making their practice relevant and compelling beyond the latest trend generating interest in the art world. What has disappeared is not so much the possibility of art as resistance, but rather any common consensus amongst artists or critics about what they are supposed to be resisting. As these authors have shown, the Avant Garde is dead because its theoretical sources, notably Marxism and formalism, have ceased to galvanise artistic and critical production. It therefore hardly seems fair to accuse contemporary artists of selling out the ideals they had no part in killing off.
Art Since 1900 will be of immense benefit to anyone wanting to understand 20th-century visual art. Yet at the same time it underlines the gulf between art history as a discipline and contemporary art criticism. Each of its authors has written brilliantly about contemporary artists, yet their assessment of the current condition falls into the historicist fallacy that the present is somehow a betrayal of the past. It is hard to see how their forensic analysis of the death of the modern can be faulted, but it is also difficult to see what it can tell us about the present.
Originally published in September 2005 / No 289, p38-39.
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