Content provided in partnership with
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
This shift from work to frame allows the authors to demonstrate the messiness of history. First, we see that the factors driving cultural production exist both in and around the artwork, both within and outside of the artist: from contemporary aesthetic and political debates to personal relationships and private ambitions, from market conditions to notions of value--and so much more. Second, the book demonstrates that works of art are living things that play an active role in the unfolding of history and that this role shifts over time. Third, Art since 1900 foregrounds the publicness of the work of art. The book, again and again, examines reception, illuminating the object's public life or revealing its debut as a public event. I should note that the authors' conception of the public role of art objects extends beyond exhibitions to performances (Francis Picabia's Relache), manifestos ("The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism"), publications (Surrealist journals), important figures and their accomplishments (Sergei Diaghilev, Gertrude Stein), the reception of works and how reception changes over time (Lucio Fontana), political activism (feminism, AIDS).
It is through exhibitions and related events that the authors are able to show that the production and consumption of art is a dynamic, contentious, and changing process involving diverse players and institutions with varied interests and concerns. That multiplicity, that attention to process, is, of course, a crucial lesson for students. Sitting in the darkness of the lecture hall, staring up at images on the screen (like the prisoners in Plato's cave), students are hostage to the "masterpieces" that flicker by. This book promotes an alternative to the canonization and finality that make projected and displayed objects seem embalmed.
If the exhibition in Art since 1900 is a nexus of competing interests, attitudes, and publics, it also is the locus of the authors' ever-increasing pessimism. The book may in fact be read as an act of mourning. If history, as presented here, has any logic at all--any pattern we can count on--it is the persistent compromise of the radical: at its most extreme, "from revolutionary and emancipatory to regressive and politically reactionary" (p. 30). The exhibition follows a similar path: introduced in one chapter as the stage of revolutionary efforts, in another it becomes the site and force of institutionalization. See, for example, the discussion of existentialism:
But if the tragedy of the war had produced this realism of the human subject thrown into the full certainty of "existence" ... the years that followed were to turn existentialist aesthetics ... into farce. As the postwar forties became the Cold War fifties ... existentialism became a product of the culture industry ... promot[ing] almost any kind of realism, as was the case with the exhibition "New Images of Man," which the Museum of Modern Art mounted in 1959. (p. 421)
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History