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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 look at the coverage of the various "arts" (disciplines, media, or techniques) and their hierarchies confirms these observations. The photography included is artistic photographie d'auteur, detached from the industrial or "documentary" uses of the medium that provide the current history of photography with such innovative issues. The absence of architecture is usual in English-language art history, (2) but with the exception of three Mexican murals (reproduced as if they were canvases) introducing Diego Rivera's intervention in the United States, one has to wait until the 1970s to find in these pages artists creating "site-specific" works, despite the considerable heritage of the first half of the century in this domain. In this account, monuments exist neither in the form of statues a la Antoine Bourdelle nor as the "invisible" or anti-monuments with which Alfred Hrdlicka, Jochen Gerz, or Rachel Whiteread have revived the genre. Design is limited to a few "utopian" projects doomed by the wrong turn taken by history, and the hierarchical distinction marginalizing the "applied arts" seems to have survived all transgressions, not straying
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beyond the stage where the multiple copies of Auguste Rodin's sculptures could be said to point "to the type of art industry--with its traffic in replicas--that characterizes the decorative, rather than the fine, arts" (p. 216).
In short, what Art since 1900 offers up as twentieth-century art is a canonical view of modernism, augmented with a dose of "anti-modernism" and with compatible aspects of postmodernism. Granted, any history implies a selection. The nature and the content of this one are deeply grounded in what Hal Foster defines as the authors' "double status as modernist art historians and contemporary art critics" (p. 679). This odd phrase may mean that they consider themselves to be historians of modernism and critics of contemporary art, but the fact is that they act as modernist critics throughout. Granted again, there is no absolute distinction between art criticism and art history, and the latter always involves an element of judgment, but these historians practice it with a rare absence of doubt. A remark such as "still today, after its great inflation and equally great deflation, it is difficult to see this sculpture clearly" (p. 270)--made about the works of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth--is exceptional. More pervasive is the attitude that Benjamin Buchloh, discussing Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, defines as the "traditional German task to give grades to history" (p. 326). This makes for exciting and sometimes entertaining reading, as when Edward Kienholz is pulled to pieces for creating "one-liners pounded into the beholder's head with a skull-crashing baseball bat" (p. 420). The underlying criteria, though, remain too implicit for the judgments not to smack of arbitrariness: Why should Robert Motherwell be damned for giving in to the "signature style" (p. 352) while Cy Twombly, for instance, is not even confronted with the possibility of such an interpretation?
