The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century

ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Charles Harrison

"Displacement" gets a special value by reference to the Freudian concept of "deferred action." Foster's argument is that the traumatic effect of avant-garde activity is only fully registered in subsequent workings out. This is the burden of the first of his seven chapters, and it is reprised in the fifth, in a sustained and well-written analogy on Andy Warhol's early "Death in America" images. His avowed ambition is to see this Freudian revision established in principle "for modernist studies at the end of the century." His more specific aim, however, is to save the "neo-avant-garde" of the '50s and '60s from the condemnations of Peter Burger. In his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974; English translation 1984), Burger claimed that while the Dada, Surrealist, and Constructivist avant-gardes of the early twentieth century were engaged in motivated critiques of the institution of art, the activities of the postwar avant-gardes were merely so many forms of repetition serving to institutionalize the legacy of avant-gardism itself. For Foster, following Lacan, "Repetition is not reproduction." His counterclaim, then, is that the return of avant-gardism is not mere reenactment, but rather a traumatic form of critical enactment. Once established with regard to the neo-Dada art of the late '50s and '60s (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, Yves Klein, and Piero Manzoni), this claim provides a methodological base from which to carry the process of recuperation forward, through the "Crux of Minimalism," into the late '60s and early '70s (Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Marcel Broodthaers, and Michael Asher), and thence into the late '80s and early '90s (Sherrie Levine, Robert Gober, Louise Lawler, Silvia Kolbowski, Christopher Williams, and Andrea Fraser). For it is of course the "avant-garde at the end of the century" that Foster aims finally to legitimate.

Crudely paraphrased, his argument is that a progressive avant-garde dissolution of art's traditional media has made possible an intensifying engagement with "actual bodies" and "social sites" and thus an effective realization of those institutional critiques that were repressed in earlier phases of avant-gardism. Hence the "Return of the Real." It turns out that the realization in question - the deferred enactment, that is, of the supposedly failed institutional critique of the historical avant-garde - is "the contestation of formalist modernism." Unfortunately, the device of replacing modernist or Marxist concepts of historical self-criticism with Freudian concepts of repetition does not itself overcome the dangers of historicism. For all the self-consciously postmodernist critiques of modernist concepts of progress - customary calls for "different models of causality, temporality, and narrativity" - the teleological character of Foster's argument remains clear. Wherever his own narrative may be thought to start, and however "lateral" its movements, there's no mistaking either its trajectory or its destination. Put to sleep in the traumatic second decade of the twentieth century, the spirit of avant-gardism is reawakened to its critical task: the storming of "Modernist Painting." Where but in New York?

In proposing to correct Burger's dismissal of the neo-avant-garde, Foster implicitly accepts that definition of the historical avant-garde on which Burger's account is itself based: one in which it is the Duchampian readymade, rather than, say, Picasso's Cubism, that furnishes the "primary device." The status thus accorded the readymade marks a third foundational assumption. For the Clement Greenberg of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," culturally advanced work identified itself as such in intensional (qualitative) terms. It was through its very originality and unrepeatability that the work of art evaded conscription to the ends of capital. For Burger and for Foster, on the other hand, the critical power of the avant-garde is rather to be found in its rearranging of extensional (quantitative) categories, through processes of mimicry, of infiltration, and of replacement. Foster's critical faculties are not noticeably engaged by any qualitative difference between one comparable work and another, but he shuffles categories of work like cards in his rhetorical pack.

That Burger finally furnished a graspable model of the avant-garde to set against Greenberg's was always a prime reason for the academy's interest in his work. The arguments of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" rested on a distinction between high art and popular culture that was not simply radical but in fine ethical (in the sense that bad taste may be thought unethical). This smacked of elitism - particularly to those who found their own enthusiasm disparaged in the analysis. What was required was a concept of avant-gardism - better still, a present avant-garde - that could be reconciled with transgression of the class boundaries dividing the modern media.

By the later '50s there were plenty of places to look, including some European forms of neo-Dadaism and Pop art that predated - though did not outshine - the American varieties. Foster correctly identifies the Minimalism of the '60s as the crucial "site" of a "general return" of the (Duchampian) avant-garde. It nevertheless took a while finally to dissociate avant-gardism from the medium specificity of Modernist high art. Michael Fried fought a determined rearguard action in his "Art and Objecthood" of 1967 - an essay Foster discusses at length in his chapter on Minimalism. Even as late as April 1970, the editor of Artforum could still describe the "most exquisite triumph of the two-dimensional manner" - from Cubism, through Jackson Pollock, to Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella - as a narrative that students "run through . . . by rote."