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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
Far more problematic are the lapses made when the authors venture into areas where none of them has previously attempted any in-depth study: Latin American art, African American art, and Asian art. After requisite references to "difference" and "otherness" and a gloss of the basic principles of postcolonial critique, they slip into all the usual Eurocentric traps, betraying a profound lack of curiosity about modernisms made by artists and art worlds actually "other" than or "different" from the mainstream that runs through their historical montage. Following a recapitulation of the standard account of Mexican muralism--and by this time, how grateful should we be that modernist historians in this country have finally examined the movement on something like its own terms?--Krauss and company entirely miss aesthetic features that should be of the greatest interest to them: principally, David Siqueiros's involvement with filmic composition as a result of his contacts with Sergei Eisenstein (whose film commemorating the revolution gave October its name) and his use of photomontage based on collaboration with Josep Renau, the Catalan counterpart of John Heartfield. Both are key to understanding the signal importance of the very Siqueiros painting they reproduce, Portrait of the Bourgeoisie (1939-40). When it comes to the second half of the twentieth century, they cast a glance at Brazilian and Venezuelan neoconstructivism, the former having been heavily influenced by the elsewhere disparaged Max Bill, and briefly touch on work in that vein by Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. Yet the scantest of attention is paid to Clark's and Oiticica's pioneering environments and performance works. Are the authors discomforted by Clark's exercises in sensual self-awareness or Oiticica's truly carnivalesque (with no help from Mikhail Bakhtin) forays into the Rio slums? The belated inclusion of these artists in the canon thus performs a simultaneous exclusion of their most radical achievements, in violation of the canon's rules. Meanwhile, Gertrude Goldschmidt (known as Gego), the equal to these artists in innovative spatial abstraction, is left out. On Latin American art of the last twenty years, there is nothing.
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As for Asia, the sole tendency given consideration is Gutai--no post-1960 Japanese Pop or Conceptualism, no Mono-ha, Japan's equivalent to process and minimal art--and Gutai is thrown into the same chronologically determined chapter, "1955," as the Latin American geometric artists, with one of Hans Namuth's pictures of Jackson Pollock in action as the re-Americanizing lead image. Of Asian artists working in the West, Yayoi Kusama makes the grade, but the equally important On Kawara does not, and there is no way of knowing why. Other neglected avant-gardes from outside the North American-European axis include the whole of Russian Sots Art and of Moscow conceptualism, most inexcusably, Ilya Kabakov and Andrei Monastyrsky. This imbalance means that the Soviet avant-garde is effectively treated as the Golden Age of Russian modernism, with a capsule description of Socialist Realism in the hands of Isaac Brodsky and Aleksandr Deineka, but the complex response by Russian artists after 1970 to the avant-garde's initial dominance through collaboration with the revolutionary state and its eventual suppression by that state is consigned "to the dustbin of history." These omissions alone render the books not only culturally and politically suspect but also instantly obsolete as a resource for anyone interested in where art is going or has recently been.
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