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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
The same is true of recent developments within art history itself, which is summoned almost exclusively when it deals with the art of the twentieth century--as if chronological divides were more unbridgeable than disciplinary ones--and mostly when it is written in, or at least translated into, English. It is a parochial "modernist" art history in which no inspiration seems to have been found in the work of, say, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Fried (on the nineteenth century), Joseph Koerner, or Victor Stoichita. The geography of art, renovated a quarter of a century ago by Enrico Castelnuovo and Carlo Ginzburg and recently introduced into English-language art history by John Onians and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, (11) is left unattended, although it could have helped avoid the implicit biases weighing down this book. Similarly, a look at the thriving studies of iconoclasm would not have allowed the interpretation of Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin as a harmless "pure provocation" (p. 197). And the new iconology of materials proposed by Monika Wagner (12) could have contributed to a realization of Krauss's wish to revive the notion of medium (p. 674).
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Many of these shortcomings and omissions can be explained in cultural geographic terms as a case of provincialisme du centre, of the kind that dominant positions invite. But there is also a question of generation--of "extended generation," as the younger Foster put it in an interview. (13) In its most extreme form, it leads to Buchloh's apocalyptic assessment of the last decades as a time of "perpetual intensification of assimilation and homogenization" (p. 673), which implies a tacit laus temporis acti. One hardly sees how a tableau informed by such a verdict, which Bois admits to sharing "to some extent," could "have some liberatory effect" (p. 679) on anyone. Foster, who resists Buchloh's Kulturpessimismus, also has the courage to admit that "in the last several years the two primary models [they]'ve used to articulate different aspects of postwar art have become dysfunctional" and that the methods advocated in the introductions "are hardly thriving" (p. 679).
Rather than "the definitive history of twentieth-century art" hailed in characteristic fashion by the Guardian, Art since 1900 thus appears to be a witness to a defining moment--for better and for worse--in the history of Western art and of Western (especially North American) thought about art. As is so often the case when ideas take a monumental form, it is ready for its passing moment, even as intimated within its pages. In a historiographic hyperbole referring to Heinrich Wolfflin and Alois Riegl, Bois writes that "the birth of art history as a discipline dates from the moment it was able to structure the vast amount of material it had neglected for purely ideological and aesthetic reasons" (p. 34). Transposed from Baroque art and the "art industry" of late antiquity to twentieth-century art, this is more than ever a pressing invitation.
