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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
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the decision to represent the career of Norman Lewis, an early gestural abstractionist and the only African American artist to attend the 1950 Studio 35 panel convened to define Abstract Expressionism, by a figurative painting tells us a great deal about the cultural insularity of the writers. That decision is exacerbated by locating that image and seven lines of text devoted to Lewis in a ghettoizing chapter on black artists rather than in the chapter on Abstract Expressionism, where he belongs. It makes one wonder whether they have ever really read--as opposed to read about--Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The sections consecrated to contemporary artists from the African diaspora are marginally better, but token concessions to modern art's actual diversity, awkwardly coupled with high-minded rhetoric about the attempts of others to redress inequalities, mean that as a textbook Art since 1900 is in many respects more deceptive than previous, frankly biased surveys.
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Theoretical anomalies attract suspicion as well. How is it that the authors have neatly fused Robert Morris's "Antiform" with Georges Bataille's "Informe" to create a tidy new formalist classification leading inexorably, not to say schematically, from Surrealism to Pollock to postmodernists like Mike Kelley when the thrust of both concepts was to break down boundaries and pollute purities? (It should be mentioned that in his own theoretical essays, Kelley vigorously disputes the sanitized October-brand readings of Bataille.) In particular, how is it that Bataille's Sadean economics of desire, defilement, and waste have been cleansed of his actual sadism, chauvinist eroticism, cultist authoritarianism, and deeply, perversely ritualistic religiosity? Are these not the essential qualities of Viennese Actionism, which, astonishingly enough, is handled with only passing reference to Bataille, though his is the best, most congruently twisted paradigm available? And in the matter of unacknowledged taboos, how is it that the "queering" of American art history as regards figures such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns by scholars such as Jonathan Katz, Kenneth Silver, and Jonathan Weinberg is passed over in silence? "Queer aesthetics" are written into the story told in these volumes only at the point when AIDS begins to affect art practice directly, and only Douglas Crimp, a regular October contributor, is credited on the theoretical side.
Obvious as well as consequential exclusions, lapses, evasions, and favoritisms of this kind abound, as do sequences of mechanistic analysis that transform correlations into causes, reduce manifold meanings to pat formulas, and turn vital dialectics of modern art to phases of progress and regress in a manner that should warm the heart of born-again positivists as much as it troubles anyone who has sought to widen, retexture, and imaginatively warp art historical discourse. Perhaps it is the nature of textbooks to do this. Certainly it is the method of those who seek intellectual hegemony. On that score, one wonders how it is that the October "revolutionaries" of 1976 have become figures of authority so well entrenched within their positions, or why their carefully hedged, dogma-heavy version of twentieth-century art serves the needs of so many sectors of institutional American culture at its most conservative moment since the 1950s. The answers are complex, and this is not the space to address them, but the question is posed by the appearance of Art since 1900 and will not go away if it becomes a standard reference. For now, suffice it to say that this reader would rather explore the expanded field of art making and art history the authors of this new orthodoxy helped open up, but from which they have long since retreated, rather than join them in their claustrophobic redoubt. Citadels are both symbols of power and monuments to insecurity. Once built they need constant shoring up and, since they become conspicuous targets, frequent defense. Those tasks inevitably fall to their creators. It is to be hoped that the illusions such power creates will not lure an army of fresh recruits to that essentially conservative endeavor.
