Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

The authors enshrine themselves repeatedly in this survey, but they do so remarkably unself-critically, considering that their methodology is, supposedly, most sensitive to issues of discourse and ideology. The birth of October, for instance, is nested a bit too modestly in one of the book's little text boxes (under the year 1975) as one among a handful of other journals, including Screen, Macula, Interfunktionen, that emerged at the moment of the theoretical turn of the 1970s, short-lived publications to which fate has been less kind than it has been to October. Similarly, Buchloh's essay in the exhibition catalog for Europe in the Seventies at the Chicago Art Institute in 1977, the piece that put him on the American map as the great bard of institutional critique, or his scathing attack against Joseph Beuys in Artforum at the time of the latter's archauratic exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1980 never get mentioned as such in this book. Meanwhile, conversely, it is Douglas Crimp's exhibition Pictures that comes to stand for 1977, David Joselit and Elisabeth Sussman's Endgame for 1986, Metro Pictures as the gallery of the 1980s, and, perhaps most tendentious among selected feats that get our writers to inscribe themselves and their friends in the narrative, Martin Jay's book Doiwncast Eyes that comes to stand as the main event for 1993 (sharing that year, admittedly, in an a/b/c format with Rachel Whiteread's House and Elisabeth Sussman's Whitney Biennial). This creates a greenhouse effect that is only compounded by the way in which--duplicating the increasingly airtight atmosphere of October--the "further readings" given at the end of each entry point us to yet more October-related material (including an unpublished student dissertation on Marcel Broodthaers completed just a few months earlier in 2003). The yearly format of this book (although it skips a few), inspired by Denis Hollier's 1993 anthology of French literature, is effective and charismatic. But while it allowed Hollier to dismantle the normative narrative of a discipline that was traditionally structured around concepts of authorship and literary oeuvre, in our field it retains the old and all too well-known flavor of a Hegelian teleology.

Krauss, whose work has been driven in equal doses by insight, hunger for new theory, and deep, irrepressible irritation with her colleagues, most successfully places her arguments within alternative art histories and counternarratives. Having abandoned, sensibly, in view of the modicum of decorum required by a would-be popular survey, the ad hominem attacks that have animated many of her most important essays, Krauss delivers, without too much spilled blood, the most difficult and condensed and yet, as always, brilliant readings, echoes of a body of work that has irrevocably altered the horizon of the art historical landscape. Bois appears both closest to traditional art history (involving biography and single-image analysis, especially in his entries for the earlier part of the century) and the one most open to a possible reformulation of some parts of the narrative given us in this book. It is also Bois who is most ready to reflect on the frictions between the theoretical tools being foregrounded here and those left out--say, between structuralism and existentialism.