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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
PAMELA M. LEE is associate professor of late modernist art at Stanford University [Department of Art and Art History, Nathan Cummings Art Building, Stanford, Calif. 94305].
Review by Romy Golan
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This volume is essentially a digest of what we have been reading for almost thirty years in the pages of October. Although it is marketed as a textbook, it is hardly the stuff for neophytes. It will be most useful as a compendium handbook of the writings of the four authors for those in the modern/contemporary field, and perhaps most illuminating to art historians specializing in earlier fields. Over the years, these four writers have produced some of the most intellectually ambitious, exciting, and provocative work in our discipline. They have put art history on a par with the most advanced theoretical discourses originating in neighboring fields. An example that illustrates the shift: in 1983, a large international conference was organized by the Centre National des Lettres, Paris, on the theme of Walter Benjamin in Paris. Forty-five scholars were convened on different panels, including a panel on aesthetics and politics, and not a single one came from the field of art history. This lamentable situation would be harder to conceive today, and we owe this--as is made patently clear in countless passages of this book--in large part to past and present work of the authors of this survey.
Meanwhile, what we are given is an account where everything is refurbished, retrofitted, to make it sound more avant-garde than it ever was, and where, as a result, everything is, as the saying goes, forever young. "The avant-garde doesn't give up," scribbled Asger Jorn in large letters
across a nineteenth-century painting he hijacked in the early 1960s, during his years as a member of the Situationist International in Paris. This 1960s [neo-]avant-garde worldview is imposed on every entry in this book, whether the narrative is telescoped back to 1900 or forward to 2003. While Yve-Alain Bois hopes, halfheartedly, for a "liberatory effect" as he muses on what motivated the authors to write this book, a large dose of anxiety and paranoia is perceptible in their endeavor. Its hope is essentially pinned on making art relevant by proving that it is, more than anything, subversive. It is quite telling in this respect that Rosalind Krauss, Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh basically jump ship in this survey soon after the depressing aftermath of 1968, leaving the rest of the book in Hal Foster's care, except for highly targeted incursions by Krauss into latter-day instantiations of indexicality in various photographed and projected images and by Buchloh on the latest true believers in Institution Critique.
While our four authors gracefully thank their editor, the late Nikos Stangos, at the outset of the book for giving them the opportunity "to come together" for this project, it is well known that they have been collectively writing their master narrative for most of their adult lives--which is why they were commissioned to write this book in the first place. The perfect emblem of the joint project is the way in which the four introductions--in which we are offered a most spectacular display of their individual methodological preferences, and which are supposed to bring out, in Krauss's words, their internal frictions--bear no signatures, not even in the form of the initials used in the rest of this book. And no wonder, for, as is well known at least to us modernists, what we have been given here, and what is being consolidated to its ultimate phase, is not so much a new master narrative as a doxa, and as such we are supposed to have learned over the years exactly who's who among those four voices. Considering that October came about in the late 1970s, precisely at the moment when the concept of the grand narrative was being questioned and dismantled by Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, it is striking that the four authors pretend to be unaware that what they are doing here is precisely what they themselves initially set out to undo.
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