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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
Let me conclude by opening two (unrelated) questions: that of anachronism and that of nonsynchronism. Hans Belting argued in The End of the History of Art that once art history became self-consciously anachronistic--the moment when Franz Wickoff decided to look at Roman art through the lens of Impressionism, Alois Riegl at late Roman art through Expressionism, and Henri Focillon at the Middle Ages through Cubism--art history, having entered a new episteme, parted from art criticism. What we are looking at then--somewhat ironically, in view of the profound distaste of our four authors for the concept of origins--is art history taken full circle back to the discipline's very beginning: to the moment when Giorgio Vasari, who was explicitly a critic, took on himself the task of writing the first master narrative (and one geared, I would say, no more blatantly than this toward canon formation). The fold of art criticism onto art history is inevitable when writing the history of something one has been a direct and constant live protagonist in, as our four authors have been. Yet it is important to note that we are dealing with an unprecedented fact in which three writers (this is not the case of Bois) who began their careers as art critics have assumed here the nonnormative job of writing art history. The principle of anachronism, the writing of art history from the standpoint of the present, is now absolute, offering us the identification of art history with art criticism.
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In the end, dismissing, ridiculing, or ignoring successful artists when they do not comply with avant-garde formulas will not do. We read here that Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were sadly "misled" by theosophy, Beuys figures as a pathological liar, Anselm Kiefer is the author of the photograph series Occupations without one painting to his credit, Matthew Barney is a crypto-Wagnerian producer of Gesamtkunstwerke, and Documenta 5 is the triumph of conceptualism, eliding its curator's favorite section on "Individual Mythologies." For the final irony is this: in this survey, the artists, the works, and the readers are asked to maintain--indeed, to live under, on a constant basis--a panoptic regime of unrelenting vigilance. Our four authors sit at round tables--the once and future beloved format--where the same cast is gathered, as in a Proustian supper at the Verdurins, on the premises of October and now Artforum, to bemoan the evils of a culture industry dubbed into the integrated spectacle compounded by present-day globalization. In the meantime countless men and women continue to live differently, nonsynchronously (in reference to Ernst Bloch's famous essay in which the author attempts to understand, on the eve of Hitler's takeover, the unstoppable rise of fascism)--in what Bloch calls the "here and now." We will do well to remember, however, that even in his most Brechtian pieces, Benjamin remained perturbed by the experiential void left behind by the disappearance of aura and ritual. As did, if less poignantly, Adorno. And yet what we are given here instead is an art history carried out without the patience, or the time, to reflect historically by authors who, while they have retrieved Benjamin for art history, have retrieved him, and his fellow travelers, minus the dialectic.
