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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
A textbook aimed at the general under graduate and first-year graduate school reader, Art since 1900 is the popularizing as well as proselytizing product of that longterm enterprise. As such, it is in part a useful but in still larger measure a deeply problematic entity. Its four authors are given equal billing, but judging by the number of times Krauss's name or writings are cited in the two volumes and by her professional relations with the others--Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh were her students, and Yve-Alain Bois has been her protege and collaborator on other projects--Krauss is the presiding mind. That said, the two volumes open with four unsigned methodological essays (whose authorship is not identified until the round table at the end of volume 2) that represent some of the differences among them: psychoanalysis is introduced by Foster; the social history of art by Buchloh; formalism and structuralism by Bois; and poststructuralism and deconstruction by Krauss. Along with the books' other pedagogical apparatus--detailed chapter headings, chronologies, and text capsules on major themes, movements, schools of thought, and thinkers--these essays provide an easy way into a maze of art and ideas, though as with all things made "easy," the questions begged by these summaries and the contradictions between their never less than authoritative-sounding but frequently incompatible assertions are numerous and important.
This is most obvious in the blatantly doctrinaire section on social histories. There, for example, it is written:
If we accept that some forms of cultural production can assume the role of agency ... [then the social history of art] would inevitably be left with only a few heroic figures in whom such a correlation between class-consciousness, agency and revolutionary alliance could actually be ascertained. These examples would include Gustave Courbet and Honore Daumier in the nineteenth century, Kathe Kollwitz and John Heartfield in the first half of the twentieth century and artists such as Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke and Allan Sekula in the second half of the twentieth century. (vol. 1, p. 26; vol. 2, p. 26)
The implied parity between Rosler, Haacke, and Sekula in our day with Courbet and Daumier in theirs is not a generally agreed-upon fact, but how is the unsuspecting student to whom this idea is suggested to know? Moreover, how could anyone sensitive to postmodern or, for that matter, modern skepticism toward aesthetic and social determinism or toward the great man (or woman) theory of history not think twice about the use of words like "inevitably" and "a few heroic figures"?
I take this example to represent many similar pronouncements throughout these books: bald and unself-critical assertions of the importance of art and ideas that constitute nothing more or less than the construction of a new canon, a new master narrative, and, indeed, a new orthodoxy at just the moment when, one had hoped, art history had finally freed itself from the undertow of the old formalist "mainstream" hypothesized by Krauss's mentor, Greenberg. The canon proposed by Art since 1900 looks very much like the old one, with some strategic adjustments. As father figures, Marcel Duchamp has been raised and Pablo Picasso lowered, just as painting is downgraded and collage and photography are upgraded. This is not altogether a bad thing. Finally Dada, the Russian avant-garde, non-Bretonian surrealism and their post-1945 issue get their due, though Francis Picabia, Duchamp's Dada comrade-in-impudence and arguably the first-generation modernist most influential on post-1960s painting in Europe (notably, that of Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter) is held at arm's length. Overall, the requisite demotions and critiques demanded by such recalibrations are performed with a vengeance. Thus, we are repeatedly told when major artists rebelled against painting--Joan Miro in the 1920s, Richter in the 1960s--but the fact that they remained painters and that the medium has continued to provide artists with rich aesthetic and critical options are all too conveniently skirted.
