Content provided in partnership with
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 politics of this hegemony, a hegemony already identified in other reviews of this book, (5) consist of a methodological formula involving varying components of the four methods outlined at the beginning of the book (psychoanalysis, social art history--arguably the least successfully integrated--structuralism/formalism, and poststructuralism), and, more insidiously, a self-serving strategy of citation, institutional placement, and historical narration that excises and marginalizes all voices that do not accord with their worldview. Interestingly, the index lacks the names of the four authors, one imagines because it would reveal the extent to which their work involves an internal circuit of self-citation, in which each of the four cites her/himself and the others. The reference lists at the end of each chronological entry and at the end of the book as a whole make the narrowness of their scholarship, which indeed revolves around a relatively closed circuit of scholars and artists, crystal clear: approximately 30 to 40 percent of the citations are from October or by authors associated with the journal. The number and range of major scholars writing in English who are not connected with October nor invested in its worldview whose work is ignored are astounding. A related problem is the book's lack of footnotes; while to some extent this problem is endemic to the survey format, because of the unusual sophistication of the arguments here and their often implicit and unacknowledged reliance on other complex debates, the book often synthesizes the work of others deemed outside the October canon, who, as a result, are not given full credit.
- More Articles of Interest
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your...
- Impressionism: Paint and Politics
- Many countries now have a mobile penetration rate above 100%, report says
- House of the Year: this craftsman-inspired home is factory-built--proving...
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
The book supports a broader hegemonic structure, which has incontrovertible effects in the job market as well as the art market. It is no accident that the scholars linked to October and/or who have studied with these four authors have a stronghold on most of the major jobs in modern and contemporary art history in the United States. Beyond these obvious politics I want to focus here on the ideological effects of their disregard for the most profound insights of poststructuralism, those relating to subject- and meaning-formation. The book addresses work by a range of artists outside the traditional canonical narratives of modernism and postmodernism, from the women photographers of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe (in a vibrant and informative section, 1930a, by Buchloh) to artists of the Harlem Renaissance (1943) and the Mexican muralists (1933). However, the fact that the latter two sections of the book are written by an additional author, "AD," who is not given full credit or clearly identified, indicates the way in which such movements and works are viewed as "marginal" by the primary authors. (6)
This kind of conceptual exclusion or marginalization is telling and endemic of the book as a whole. Many of the insights of post-World War II philosophers and cultural theorists such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan regarding subjectivity and authorship are evoked at various points in the book. Specifically, there is some discussion of the way in which identity is performed rather than innate; the chiasmic structures through which subjects and objects interrelate to determine meaning and value; the ultimate unknowability of meaning and identity; the absence at the "core" of all subjects and the correlative failure of all attempts to secure meaning and value once and for all; and the effect that our perception of a subject's identity has on our interpretation of her or his work. Unfortunately, however, these insights do not affect the book's basic structure and the modernist beliefs and methods that continue to underlie it: the book remains more or less rooted in the teleological unfolding of formal (or "structural") development around author names rather than concepts or problems relating to the infinitely complex social, intellectual, and political history of the period; despite contemporary criticism of the practice, the authors state artists' words as fact and present their subjective evaluations of artists' works as final.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Business
- Academy of Marketing Science Review
- Accounting Historians Journal, The
- Accounting History
- AgExporter
- Agricultural Research
- Agricultural and Resource Economics Review
- Air Force Comptroller
- Air Safety Week
- Airline Industry Information
- American Demographics
- American Journal of Potato Research
- Architectural Review, The
- Asian Economic News
- Entrepreneur