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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
This is not to say that the methods discussed by Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh serve as so many ideological contrivances. (As Bois avers to his colleagues in "The Predicament of Contemporary Art," "none of us is married to a particular method," p. 671.) In both the introduction to Art since 1900 and in the concluding round table on contemporary art, the authors insist on their shifting allegiances to these approaches. Foster identifies the relative "waxing and waning" of a method's usefulness (in his case, psychoanalysis) in addressing the "fate of these different methods in postwar art and criticism" (p. 671). It is in this light that I stress Krauss's section on poststructuralism. It implicitly frames the entries on the art from 1968 to the present not just as a matter of methodological interest but also relative to how contemporary artists engage the political and critical stakes underwriting that earlier moment. (Krauss herself will offer in the conclusion, "I don't know if I can maintain my earlier commitment to this methodological option," p. 674.) An insert on "The Spectacularization of Art," after all, does not assign its Debordian mandate to the art of the 1960s, the moment of the Spectacle's theorization, but to 1998, when the "inflation of design and display in many aspects of consumerist life" signaled the "point where media-communications-and-entertanment-conglomerates are the dominant ideological institutions in Western society" (p. 656).
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To unpack the pedagogical implications of this claim, we need to acknowledge that recent art is seldom granted such systematic treatment in survey texts: Art since 1900 runs its course up to 2003. For reasons of both editorial expedience and expertise, conventional art history surveys tend to stop somewhere in the mid-1980s, with the additions of "postmodernism" (usually represented by Cindy Sherman) tacked on for the respective volume's most current editions. Such surveys likewise group contemporary practices along thematic lines, in the process generalizing the specific historical and formal considerations of the artists under question. The advantage of the year-by-year approach undertaken in Art since 1900 is to sidestep these implicit curatorial judgment calls insofar as its structure invites both diachronic as well as synchronic reflection. To be sure, this makes for a heterogeneous mix. Among the artists discussed from the last decade, one encounters Yinka Shonibare, Tacita Dean, Andreas Gursky, Rona Pondick, Ellen Gallagher, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Stan Douglas, and Liam Gillick, hardly all fellow travelers.
If with a glancing perspective, the sheer word count devoted to these diverse practices might appear a thoroughgoing affirmation of contemporary art. No doubt all of the authors of Art since 1900 self-identify as both art historians and critics, each writing extensively about current practices in addition to their more historical work. Where this sits relative to both the teaching and study of contemporary art in the university--"contemporary art history," to indulge a useful catachresis--is a different story altogether. Indeed, the round table on contemporary art frames the conditions of current practice largely through the terms of what Bois calls a "dire diagnostic" (p. 673). As Buchloh argues, "the postwar situation can be described as a negative teleology; a steady dismantling of the autonomous practices, spaces and spheres of culture, and a perpetual intensification of assimilation and homogenization, to the point today where we witness what Debord called 'the integrated spectacle' " (p. 673). While hardly optimistic about the prospects of contemporary art, Foster will repeatedly question the "finality" of Buchloh's prognostications, which, in drawing impetus from both Theodor Adorno and Debord, Foster challenges as both reductive and defeatist. The authors acknowledge a number of recent practices (Allan Sekula, Thomas Hirschhorn), but I found this exchange especially constructive on pedagogical grounds: it illustrates the necessity of critical, even heated, debate among sympathetic but methodologically distinct interlocutors.
