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Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2006 by Nancy J. Troy, Geoffrey Batchen, Amelia Jones, Pamela M. Lee, Romy Golan, Robert Storr, Jodi Hauptman, Dario Gamboni
The book is thus profoundly contradictory to the insights of poststructuralism in several important ways. First, it evokes poststructuralism repeatedly while continuing to narrate the history of art through a succession of authors and sidelining the epochal social and cultural shifts in the post-World War II period. (2) Second, the authors convey a general methodological suspicion of the subjective, accompanied by an erasure of the specificity of bodies and desires (including, most specifically, their own), while writing in a highly authoritative manner, stating opinions as fact. This hectoring tone obscures the role of their own bodies and desires in the construction of this particular history, the conditioning effect of their own positions and investments vis-a-vis the particular objects and narratives they choose to highlight and those they choose to downplay or marginalize. (3) Third, relating, in turn, to this erasure is the authors' collective denial of the politics of their own hegemonic practice as art historians.
It is perfectly simple (through the lens of the very psychoanalytic and Marxian critical models these authors often themselves deploy) to see why they are motivated to produce this kind of authoritative tome: after all, the market value of ideas is itself part of the cultural capital artists, philosophers, and critical theorists have long been interested in interrogating. The paradox here is that they are compelled to describe and privilege the very kind of critique they themselves must ignore in order to maintain their own authority. To acknowledge their own investment, in, say, art that is "structurally" (read formally) innovative over art that is explicitly political in its "content" (4) (Jackson Pollock over Andre Fougeron; Jasper Johns over Edward Kienholz, who is dismissed by Bois with the section subtitle "Kienholz tries too hard," p. 418; Eva Hesse over Hannah Wilke) would be to acknowledge both the interestedness of their choices (the way in which they are deeply invested in the choices they make on the bodily/conceptual/personal-cum-professional level) and the hegemonic force of the discourse they collectively represent through such strategic choices and the correlative repressions and marginalizations required to shore them up as "natural."
For lack of a better term, this hegemony marked in such definitive--one might even say final--form by the publication of this book might be called Octoberism: Krauss cofounded October in 1976, Foster and Buchloh were her students and subsequently editors and contributors to the journal, and Bois is a colleague who has also published extensively in October. The revolutionary claim of the aspirations of the journal's founders is, of course, signaled by its name, which refers to Sergei Eisenstein's film about the October Revolution.
