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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 authoritativeness of the authors' manner of presenting their arguments, especially evident in the "Roundtables" (paralleling the round tables published in October)--which assume that the stated thoughts of these authors would necessarily be of ongoing, even perpetual interest to students of art history and other readers--also finds its way into the chronological essays of the book. This is especially obvious in those entries addressing topics in which the author has established her or his authority (Foster on Andy Warhol and his apparently undeniable "greatest period," p. 486), or on topics that the authors presumably felt the political necessity of including in the book but find intellectually anathema or uninteresting (Bois and Buchloh's offhand dismissals of Gutai, one of the few non-Euro-American movements even mentioned in the book, as "misreading" Pollock, implying that we all "know" what the correct reading of Pollock is, pp. 373, 464).
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This authoritative tone is brought weirdly to bear on feminism, queer theory and art, and postcolonial theory and antiracist art practices in ways that would be fascinating if they weren't so dangerous. Ultimately, most of the essays relating to these vast and crucial areas of post-World War II thought and creative practice are relegated to Foster, who does a laudable job of including many of the important voices and theories articulating the importance of a structural critique of meaning and identity formation. Regrettably, however, the more subtle insights offered by these are not addressed. The work of artists such as Yayoi Kusama (Krauss, p. 502) and Ana Mendieta (Foster, p. 572) are thus discussed briefly and with cursory reference to feminist concerns (although, given the gingerly way in which she approaches the work, one imagines how distasteful it must have been for Krauss to contemplate Kusama's obsession with phalli). More seriously, the effects of these artists' racial, national, and ethnic otherness on their conceptions of self, their work, and on others' interpretations of the latter are completely ignored, as if women's artwork in the 1960s and 1970s can only be about gender or, even worse, as if gender is separable from the experience and perception of racial and other identifications.
While Foster acknowledges on paper (p. 570) the crucial impact of feminism on art since 1960, he neglects to follow through on its most important theoretical contributions to cultural debates, particularly the point that it is impossible to make authoritative value judgments that aren't inherently suspect (an insight, it must be said, also common to poststructuralist philosophy). To my mind, feminism's contribution to contemporary art and discourse is less about the introduction of women into survey textbooks (done here relatively well) and more about this fundamental insight, which is also put forth in a different way by postcolonial, antiracist, and queer theorists and artists such as Frantz Fanon and Laura Aguilar, who are minimized or left out of this history.
