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

ArtForum, Nov, 1996 by Charles Harrison

"Trauma discourse" is one of the two major preoccupations of Foster's "avant-garde at the end of the century." The second is "the ethnographic turn in contemporary art and criticism." Assembled under the banner of the "Artist as Ethnographer," we encounter the various interests of cultural studies at the cutting edge: anthropology "prized as the science of alterity"; culture itself defined as an ever-expanding field of reference; the "contextual" and the "interdisciplinary" accorded priority over the formal and the medium-specific; and self-criticism conceived as leading not (like the Greenbergian exercise of taste) to a sharper discrimination of the intensional properties of the art object, but rather (like the Rortyan practice of democracy) to a more liberal orientation of the viewpoint of the observer.

Ironically, it's just this liberal concept of self-criticism that limits the scope of Foster's book. For what it lacks is any sense of the resistance objects conceivable as artistic might present to its own viewpoint and framing powers. In the world it surveys, art world and academy merge imperceptibly but indissolubly into a single agency, so that no distinction can any longer be made between a work and its art-historical encapsulation, between intensional character and cultural symptomaticness, between production and ethnography. In consequence the book is fraught with the contradiction that any left-leaning art criticism or art history must sustain if it allows works of art no properties independent of the discourses that represent them: whatever its emancipatory pretensions, the effect of its articulation of these discourses is to suggest that one cannot know a work of art without being in the know. And as Foster's text demonstrates, being in the know is arduous work, largely to be done in bookstores and libraries. He acknowledges as much: "the horizontal expansion of art has placed an enormous burden on artists and viewers alike: as one moves from project to project, one must learn the discursive breadth as well as the historical depth of many different representations - like an anthropologist who enters a new culture with each new exhibition." What this book sorely needs is a convincing explanation of why anyone might want to take on this burden in the first place - anyone, that is, who does not already have a stake in the academy to defend or to advance. As an honest enterprise in support of avant-gardism, The Return of the Real is surely a work with its heart in the right place. But it needs to be remembered how small the world is in which the examples it draws on are the ones that come to mind.

Charles Harrison is professor of history and theory of art at the Open University, England. He is currently at work on two books: Modernism (Tate Gallery, London) and Art in Theory 1820 to 1900 (Blackwell), both to be published in 1997.