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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
Buchloh is the one who will not swerve, no more than Theodor Adorno himself, who, in 1964, published an essay entitled "Culture Industry Reconsidered," which reads, in spite of its title, almost word for word like his eponymous chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1947. For Buchloh, it is always the alienation effect over beauty. One is reminded of the scene from Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt where Fritz Lang, playing himself, responds to the query "Coming to Capri with us, Mr. Lang?" with these lines: "Each morning to earn my bread I go to the market where lies are sold ... and hopeful, I get in line with the other sellers." "What's that, Hollywood?" asks Michel Piccoli. Lang responds: "It's from a ballad by poor B.B." And to Piccoli's query, "Bertolt Brecht?" he can only respond with a melancholy "Yes," even as he is standing just next to the other, more famous B.B. (playing Piccoli's wife), Brigitte Bardot.
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Foster is left to pick up the many remaining pieces in this survey, consisting of gender and identity politics (feminism, gay/queer studies, postcolonial issues). He is left, that is, with all those instances of "others" and "otherness," which--since they do not pertain to the internal dissolution of identity at its core that has been wrought by Georges Bataille via everyone's favorite, the now-famous notion of the informe--remain of little or no interest to three out of four writers of this survey. And here one has to admit that what Foster does amounts to a tour de force of intellectual agility. As a result Foster, whose name appears first on the book cover's otherwise alphabetical list, is also the author most satisfied, in the second of the two round tables inserted in the narrative, with the book's overarching project. Thanks to an amazing knack, via a capacious reservoir of highly hypostatized psychoanalytic terms, for packaging everything into splendid pairs, Foster drops everything neatly into place. The pairings and binary historical scenarios are legion: Surrealism is either "predetermined" (Marx) or "overdetermined" (Freud); Bill Viola and Andreas Gursky are addicted to the "romantic sublime" as opposed to Douglas Gordon's, Stan Douglas's, and Janet Cardiff's "traumatic sublime"; "commerce" is the avant-garde's subversive take on hack artists' "commercialism"; the rise of fascism is emblematized by the confrontation of two mega-exhibitions (the Paris 1937 World's Fair and the Nazis' Degenerate Art).
It is instructive to look at the instances where, compelled by the survey format, our authors were forced to deal with issues they had steered away from before. Futurism, for example, required the joint efforts of Krauss and Buchloh, whose narrative gives way, under the year 1909, almost instantly to fascism (where they are more comfortable). Giorgio De Chirico is labeled a crypto-fascist even before he gets to paint his metaphysical canvases in Paris in 1912. Meanwhile, the bibliography is both inadequate and out of date. (This is true for everything touching Italy, already too far off the geographic map of this not very international survey, to the point that there are many misspellings of Italian words or titles, so that we have "Contributo a un nuove [sic] arte metafisico [sic]," and, in the entry on Neue Sachlichkeit, Buchloh's portemanteau subtitle "From manichino to machino [sic]".) Faced with the unpleasant prospect of having to look at paintings by Wassily Kandinsky during the years of his move to abstraction, Foster resorts to another sleight of hand, sliding the paintings under a text. Not On the Spiritual in Art, with its unwelcome religious flavor, but Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction and Empathy, one that fits Foster's binary worldview like a glove. A text, we are told, that in any case suits Die Brucke better than it does Kandinsky, so that the latter's paintings end up hijacked. Topics absolutely intractable, even for Foster's adroit hands, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Mexican muralists, have been outsourced in this survey to a fourth, virtually unnamed, author, a cryptic AD (Amy Dempsey).
