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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
Because these authors haven't let go of an essentially modernist belief in the connection between the work ("structurally" interpreted) and the artist as an originary force of meaning and value, and because they fail to interrogate their own participation in the posing of value judgments and in the positioning of origins and authors, this book, while brilliant and innovative in its analyses and structural organization, baldly reveals the conservatism of Octoberism as a hegemonic discourse. Of course, for the mid-twentieth-century Marxist political theorist Antonio Gramsci the notion of hegemony is precisely a way of refining the understanding of how power functions by accommodating the central role of intellectual discourse as it purveys cultural values in order to sustain institutional and political modes of control. Correlatively, in Louis Althusser's terms, Octoberism could be said to be an extremely refined ideological state apparatus. (8) Can it be, then, that this book marks both the ultimate triumph as well as the reification (as hegemony)--and thus the recession into the past (through the generation of counterhegemonic narratives)--of Octoberism?
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One final point serves to suggest that it may. As they define their positions, the authors here, following the October line in general, convey themselves more or less as members of the left intelligentsia (albeit in four interestingly different ways), hewing to a generally avant-gardist conception of political critique. Yet right at the beginning, the book illustrates the now-famous 1974 image of Lynda Benglis holding a dildo in front of her greased naked body, staring defiantly through darkened sunglasses toward the viewer (p. 19). While a long caption describes the "rise of feminism in the sixties and seventies" and notes Benglis's mockery of "some Minimalist and Postminimalist artists [note the recurrence of Minimalism as an origin], as well as the increased marketing of contemporary art," it sidesteps several crucial facts: first, that the image was presented as part of a double-page spread advertisement in Artforum magazine, thus itself blatantly adopting the techniques and even economic structures of print marketing as well as pornography, and second, that this image prompted Krauss and several of her coeditors to resign from the board of the magazine and found October. (9)
What this elision exemplifies is precisely the erasure of politics, history, and any acknowledgment of the way in which these authors have participated in--indeed, constructed and maintained--their own extremely powerful hegemony, which itself has become a marketing tool that serves to make some careers and unmake or stymie others. One can only hope that the strategic veiling of this hegemony--its naturalization as the only way to "do" the history of modern and contemporary Euro-American art--is now coming to an end with the overt statement of its ideals in this book. It would not do, however, to throw out the Octoberist baby with the bathwater; there are brilliant insights in this work and, as with the work of Greenberg, it has been formative enough to debates and institutions that it must be considered seriously. But it is certainly high time to see it for what it is: Octoberism has enacted a successful revolution to overthrow the simplistically formalist, anti-intellectual strand of modern and contemporary art history dominant in art history programs and in art criticism up through the early 1980s. The endpoint of this "revolution" is signaled by the very publication of Art since 1900. And, of course, a successful revolution is no longer revolutionary but the very hegemonic force that itself must now be countered and overthrown.
