art since 1900 review

Art Since 1900: Modernism,Antimodernism,PostmodernismHal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois,Benjamin Buchloh

Twentieth-century art history is a field conspicuously lackingin general surveys: attempts to construct any kind ofoverview soon break up into episodes that tell the rise andfall of individual movements, Post-Impressionism giving wayto Fauvism and so forth. Although each of these appears vividand distinct, the prevailing narrative logic has been that ofthe fragment, leaving interrelations between movements andtheir embeddedness in underlying historical processesobscure. The goal of Art since 1900 is to counterfragmentation, though not by reducing everything to atotalizing account. It mobilizes no fewer than fourart-historical approaches, each with the potential to bind thefragments in its own domain: Formalism, with itsattentiveness to the specific organization of the work of art;the social history of art, with its capacity for aligningaesthetic and social experience; psychoanalysis, in itssensitivity to the links between the psychic and the social;and Post-Structuralism, in its inquiry into the place of thehuman subject within signifying systems.Entries committed to the Formalist framework are byYve-Alain Bois, whose Formalism should not be confusedwith that of Clement Greenberg, for whom Modernismadvanced through the purification of its aesthetic means.Bois Formalism is closer to that of his teacher RolandBarthes, whose seminar Bois joined when Barthes wasturning from the high Structuralism of Critique et Vrit andSur Racine to the Post-Structuralism of S/Z and Sade,Fourier, Loyola (both from 1971). Although Barthes attentionto the structural principles organizing the text remained thecore of his method, his focus shifted to the place of thehuman subject in relation to textual systems. Two ideas wereessential: that no text was the original emanation of anauthor/god controlling its meanings from on high; and thatthe reader should not be defined as a sovereign subject, sincereaders were only the sum of the various discourses theybrought to the text.Bois debt to Barthes is clear in his brilliant entries onMatisse, which seek to understand the artists radicalcommitment to the logic of the all-over: a pictorial field nolonger split between figure and ground, a surface whoseevery square centimetre was as taut as the skin of a drum.

About this review

Published on 13/06/05By Norman Bryson

Back to the main site

Frieze Magazine | Archive | Art Since 1900: Modernism, Ant... http://www.frieze.com/issue/print_back/art_since_1900_mode...

1 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

Viewing is an aesthetic experience of visual jouissance orblinding, intense sensations that cannot be fullyapprehended or taken in, and which remain radicallydispersed and decentralized.What is at stake in both Barthes and Bois is the overturningof the classical subject of representation as masterful andcontrolling. Here Bois thinking goes back beyond Barthes tothe Modernist avant-garde, whose project was thedismantling of bourgeois conceptions of subjectivity. Aconstruction differed from a composition in that itsorganization derived from the nature and dimensions of thematerials used, not from decisions taken independently. Yetalongside the Bois of Formalism there is an alter ego, equallyfascinated by the informe, the ruination of form. And at firstit seems hard to understand why a critic drawn to suchobviously Structuralist art should also be a devotee ofGeorges Bataille.Again, there may be a debt to Barthes, whose interest injouissance led from Jean Racine and Honor de Balzac to thelinguistic madness of Sade, Fourier and Loyola. But Boisfocus on the informe may stem from his understanding ofModernism as overturning the illusions holding together thebourgeois citizenego. Access to the experience of pure,aesthetic form had been a traditional component ofbourgeois identity, but to suspicious Modernists form wasperhaps the ultimate bourgeois delusion. Bois devotes a spanof essays to art that undermined and degraded received ideasof formal coherence: Alberto Giacomettis Surrealistsculpture, Lucio Fontanas unashamed delvings into kitschand glitz, Piero Manzonis culture of junk and merda, andGutai, the Japanese response to Pollock that radicalized theaction in action painting. Bois identifies the informe as oneof the major tropes of Modernism, alongside the all-over, thegrid, the monochrome, the ready-made. He might haveextended its scope to include artists such as Cindy Sherman,Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley. Disappointingly, Bois lastentry is for 1967. I would give a lot to know his view of artover the past four decades.Benjamin Buchlohs entries develop the framework of thesocial history of art, where the central problem of Modernismlies in the tense relation of the avant-garde to the emergentforms of mass culture after World War I. This emphasismight recall the work of Peter Brger; but where Brgerargued that the avant-gardist goal was to release art from theaesthetic domain and to make art and life merge, Buchlohsees a quite different process: for him the old, individualisticbourgeoisie which had continuously supported advanced artwas now losing ground to forces based on collective or massorganization on political and cultural levels. It was theattitude of each avant-garde movement to the mass culturalsphere that would define its course and ultimately seal itsfate.It is probably true even today that the conventional view ofart after 1945 is that it marks a new beginning, signalled bythe cultural shift from Europe to the United States, a liberal


2 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

democracy at the height of its powers equipped to defend theproject of Modernism against its totalitarian enemies. ForGreenberg and Alfred Barr, New York simply continued theupbeat story of Modernist progress, from Manet to Picasso toPollock, without a significant break. But Buchlohs entries onpostwar art concentrate on Europe, where the main fact oflife was the opposite condition: not the advance ofModernism but its liquidation, not the continuity of historybut its violent interruption. Buchloh sees the culture ofAustria and Germany as haunted by historical trauma andthe return of the repressed, and his brilliant essay on theViennese Actionists argues that the violence that Otto Muhl,Hermann Nitsch and Gnter Brus inflicted on the body canonly be explained in terms of a post-fascist condition. There-enactment of brutally extreme forms of human defilementbecame a necessary move for at least two reasons: first,because official culture repressed historical memory,something the Actionists combated by making trauma thecentre of their activity; second, because any artistic move thatdid not measure itself against the devastation would fall intodenial and aesthetic consolation. In West Germany there wasno way of resuming the Modernist project withoutinvestigating its fate. Lifting the memory ban becamecentral to Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and GerhardRichter, though in each case the move was fraught withdifficulty, since attempts to forge continuity between thepresent and the past, however critical, could be read asrehabilitating the mythologies of the nation state.Buchlohs entries on postwar Europe are surprising in that,given the scale of the destruction of cultural institutions,there are so many instances where art managed to reassertthe avant-garde project of emancipation. For Buchloh themost impressive development was Fluxus, with its potentcombination of participation, chance and the everyday.Similarly the pauperist aesthetic of arte povera avoided theall-out surrender to technological processes that seemed, onthe other side of the Atlantic, to engulf Pop and Minimalism.Buchlohs assessment of European Conceptual art is that ittoo found means to combat the forces of commodificationand the society of the spectacle by withdrawing the objectfrom the domain of art (though by staging this withdrawal asart and spectacle, it conceded almost as much as it gained).The concurrent rise of institutional critique succeeded inproblematizing the aesthetic domain, proposing that artsproblem was that it always obscured the real powersoperating behind the scenes of art. On the other hand, theaesthetic domain might still be worth defending (MarcelBroodthaers wanted to parody the museum, not to destroyit), as one of the last remnants of the bourgeois publicsphere.The potential of psychoanalysis as a framework forunderstanding Modernism is developed by Hal Foster, whocarefully avoids the traps that psychoanalytic method sets forthe unwary: in particular, the reduction of the work of art topsychobiography (Freud on Leonardo) or the illustration of


3 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

psychoanalytic ideas (Lacan on Holbeins Ambassadors).Instead, Foster treats psychoanalysis with a certain relativityand scepticism: the concept of the unconscious becomes afactor for the art historian, not because it is true but becauseat certain junctures belief in something like the unconsciousbecomes widespread. Psychoanalysis closest affinity is withthe art produced in its own milieu, high bourgeois centralEuropean culture of the declining years of the Empire. Withthe structures of public life no longer secure, bourgeoisculture turns inward while maximizing the dramas of psychiclife, and discovering in sexuality the secret core of thesubjects identity. There is no need to search, then, formoments of contact between Freud and, say, Egon Schiele,who reworked self-portraiture through double structures ofvoyeurism and exhibitionism, and a wish to mutilate and bemutilated the world of conflicted subjectivity onto whichFreuds case studies open. Later, as Freuds ideas becamedisseminated among the Surrealists, the pursuit ofirrationality through the lapsus, the rebus and the dream,through a syntax of condensation and displacement, adaptedbourgeois culture to its changed circumstances.It is remarkable that psychoanalysis maintained its status asresistant counter-culture for so long, yet that is exactly whatemerges in Fosters essays concerning art from the 1970s tothe 1990s. When feminist cultural theory first appeared inthe writings of Julia Kristeva, Hlne Cixous, Luce Irigarayand Laura Mulvey, and in the work of artists such as MaryKelly, Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, psychoanalysisre-emerged as a useful discipline that allowed the social andthe psychic to be considered at the same time. Theorientation differed from that of Surrealism: the interest ofthe unconscious was less its capacity to elude the forces ofnormalization than its ability to explain it, and to account forthe sheer tenacity of oppressive social structures (patriarchy,racism, homophobia). Fosters entries on Louise Bourgeoisand Yayoi Kusama, and the feminist inflections ofMinimalism found in Eva Hesse, Mona Hatoum and RachelWhiteread, indicate ways in which the category ofsubjectivity becomes crucial to artistic intervention. This isespecially the case for those whose subjectivity has beenerased or posited as less than full: Fosters account of the1990s includes Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Isaac Julienand ACT UP.The last framework in Art since 1900 is Post-Structuralism,whose resources are explored by Rosalind Krauss, thegalvanizer of the authorial team and its primus inter pares.The concepts she takes on board the arbitrariness of thelinguistic sign in Saussure, the problematic of authorship inBarthes, Walter Benjamins discussion of art in the age ofmechanical reproduction, the structure of the visual field inLacan are the shared intellectual currency of hergeneration. But her real engagement is with the figures whointerpreted Modernism for the American public: Alfred Barrand Clement Greenberg. At times Krauss enterprise seems astruggle with these founding fathers, a project of refutation


4 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

and correction of their gross misrepresentation of modernart.Barr brought a de-fanged Modernism to New York, aschematic simplification with two principal lines: ageometric abstraction shorn of references toindustrialization and an organic line that, thoughbiomorphic, was severed from the carnality of the livingbody. Meanwhile Greenberg, creating a lineage running fromManet to Pollock, managed to exclude from the narrative anyreference to Dada or Surrealism: an avant-garde without theavant-garde, a Modernism without historical memory.Krauss exasperation with this travesty of Modernism is, in asense, what Art since 1900 is all about, and her contributionsfocus on correcting key distortions and impoverishments inBarrs and Greenbergs packaging of Modernism for domesticconsumption.One step was to restore Surrealism to its rightful place, anendeavour for Krauss that has included the collaborationwith Jane Livingstone on the exhibition of Surrealistphotography Lamour fou and with Bois on the informe. Butthe strategy of the exhibition is insufficient in itself, sinceSurrealisms understanding of the visual field as shot throughwith the energy of the drives cannot be fully accommodatedwithin the museums disinterested visual regime. Hence theimportance of Lacans account of perspective as radicallydecentred by the drives. Krauss concentrates on three worksthat disrupt the rationality of the viewing subject: theDemoiselles dAvignon (1907), where the violence andheightened sexuality of the figures overwhelm any claim onthe part of the viewer to visual detachment or control; MarcelDuchamps tant donnes (c.194666), where the spectatoris turned into a voyeur; and Pollocks drip paintings, worksGreenberg could claim as optical only by denying theirrhythmic bodily production.In Barr and Greenbergs consensus Modernism wascelebrated as an allegory of the values of liberal democracy.The btise was the suppressed fact that so much of theModernist enterprise problematized the status of art as theproduct of individual creativity. Barthes discussion of thedeath of the author reopened the question, making it possibleto grasp the extent to which the avant-garde had renouncedprecisely the kind of originality it was now supposed torepresent. Krauss concentrates first on Duchamps strategies:the ready-made, the index, chance operations and the playbetween the original and the copy. All of these challenged theauthor/god, which is why Duchamp had to be excluded fromthe postwar pantheon. In discussing Sherrie Levine, LouiseLawler and Sherman, Krauss shows Duchamps strategies ascontinuing, in different configurations, into the present.What brought the index, the ready-made and mechanicalreproduction into new alignment was photographystransformation of visual culture at the level of theory(Benjamin), artistic practice (appropriation) and art history(the shift from the original to the reproduction). But thishistory conveys too narrowly the scale of Modernisms


5 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

assault on art as the expression of a full, creative subject, andone begins to realize why Art since 1900 had to be teamwork.Barr and Greenbergs denial of the extent to which theavant-garde was defeated by the rise of mass society ispresumably Buchloh territory. But Krauss makes her owncontribution, in her account of the absorption of the museuminto the society of spectacle: the blockbuster shows of the1970s, the advent of installation art and the museumsDisneyfication as a branch of the leisure industry. It is asthough Krauss attack on New Yorks MoMA was overtakenby the rising tide of spectacle and desublimation; her tonehere is complex and elegiac, concluding with a contemporarydefence of medium-specificity that sounds like Greenbergcome again, in an internalization of the founding father shehad helped to polish off.Art since 1900 combines the best writing and the bestarguments of the October circle; however much one maydisagree with their point of view, the level of discussion issimply far more interesting than in any other guide to20th-century art. Still, the volume has its limits, not least inwhat it leaves out: plenty of Diego Rivera and David AlfaroSiqueiros but no Frida Kahlo, Man Ray but not ClaudeCahun, and so forth. Exclusions are unavoidable, but someare more like occlusions: why, for example, is everythingcentred on the West, as though there were only onemodernity? In the 20th-century Asia modernized too. Japandeveloped wholly original forms of the avant-garde, not onlyGutai (though its good that Bois included it) but the earlierMAVO movement, Butoh and the neo-avant-garde critique inMorimura and Dumb Type. Attending to the variousmodernities would help to relativize the picture offered hereand counter the tendency to inflate the local fortunes of oneavant-garde New York into an epic of world proportions.This is encouraged by the groups fondness for thinking interms of the grandest of grand narratives. Freud, Lacan,Theodor Adorno, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson: what theyshare is the sense of grasping the total social or psychicprocess, and this feeds a susceptibility to thinking inteleologies, with art either advancing or retreating in relationto a goal known in advance.At one point the team states its modest hope that Art since1900 offers a much more complex tableau than the oneserved up to us when we were students. It certainly does but its success could also be its problem. We have alreadyseen how quickly a fascinating analysis (T.J. Clark onManets Olympia) can harden under university pedagogy intoa formula, a doxa. Precisely because Art since 1900 is so wellconceived, even user-friendly with information boxes,timelines and useful cross-references it is likely to producea strong doxological effect. Will the next generation react asstrongly as this one has to its own precursors?

Norman Bryson

Norman Bryson is Professor of Art History at the Universityof California, San Diego, and Advisory Researcher at the Jan


6 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Frieze3-4 Hardwick Street, London EC1R 4RB, 020 7833 7270


7 of 7 5/5/15, 1:22 AM

art since 1900 review

Documents