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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
An excellent case in point is Krauss's treatment of Pablo Picasso's collage Cubism (pp. 112-17), a topic that she describes as "a battleground in which various parts of the foregoing discussion are pitted against one another" (p. 114). Setting out the terms of the debate with reference not only to the visual arts but also to the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Stephane Mallarme (whose reactions to the newspaper as a locus of popular culture were diametrically opposed), Krauss first links Picasso's development of collage to the embrace of mass media by Apollinaire. But she immediately complicates this connection to Picasso's contemporary and friend. Introducing a semiological reading of the representational operations performed by collage, Krauss demonstrates that Picasso's deployment of the medium is, paradoxically, even more closely aligned with Mallarme's Symbolist poetry, in which the linguistic sign is treated as it is in Picasso's pasted papers, that is, "as wildly 'polysemic,' or productive of multiple--and often opposed--meanings" (p. 114). Krauss then turns to a brief but pointed discussion of several significant interpretative positions that scholars have staked out during the past quarter century with respect to Picasso's papiers colles, mentioning in particular Thomas Crow's account of how "high" and "low" sources of cultural expression circulated through the work of Picasso as well as that of many other avant-garde artists. This sets the stage for her consideration of "those commentators who see [the artist's] reasons for exploiting this material as primarily political" (p. 116), notably, Patricia Leighten, with whom Krauss has for years carried on a heated debate about the interpretative merits of Leighten's social and biographical contextualism versus Krauss's formalist explorations of meaning, which privilege detailed visual analysis of characteristics that are strictly internal to the work of art. This methodological controversy structures Krauss's discussion of collage in the entry for 1912, and it reemerges in the entry for 1919 (pp. 160-65), where she takes up the debate surrounding Picasso's neoclassical turn of the late 1910s. Once again, Krauss identifies "a radical division" between "two camps of scholars [that] brings us face to face with the issue of historical method. The contextual explanation sets itself against the theory of the internally determined growth of the creative individual, each position feeling the other is blind to certain facts."
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It comes as no surprise that Krauss is far from neutral in her presentation of these issues, but it is precisely in the directed nature of her commentary that its pedagogical value lies. For in pointing out that interpretation is always intentional, Krauss and her authorial colleagues force crucial issues of method and theory into the foreground, positioning them at the center of art historical practice, even on the introductory level of the survey text. "There is," she cautions, "a naive belief that historical explanations are simply a record of the facts that the historian extracts from the archive. But facts need to be organized, analyzed, weighted, interrogated; and to do this all historians (consciously or not) have recourse to an underlying model that gives shape to the facts."
