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 last absence, of regional responses to modernity--of an analysis of the specificity of, for example, Australian, Thai, Nigerian, or Peruvian modernism--is a particularly unfortunate one, eliminating as it does the enabling confusion of cultural difference from this book's master narrative. Although inconsequential, even a mess, in the terms established by this book, the art of an Australian painter from the 1940s like Sidney Nolan can be shown to embody visual contradictions that speak to, exacerbate into visibility, modernism's peculiarly uneven development across the globe. (2) Much could be learned of benefit to the present from the negotiations of center and periphery found in such art. But to gain that benefit one would have to develop a historical model attuned to such negotiations. Art since 1900 turns out not to be that model. A child of October magazine, and therefore of the marriage of institutional critique and postmodern theory that so enlivened the 1980s, Art since 1900 presents a view of art and its history that now, twenty years on, fits equally comfortably within the marketplace and the art history programs of Ivy League universities, where indeed all its authors reside. Apart from some minor shuffling of the modernist canon, this book's preferences and exclusions, and, in particular, its methods of art historical inquiry form an entirely congenial alliance with ruling-class values and interests. In the final round-table in Art since 1900, Buchloh worries that "the very construct of an oppositional sphere of artists and intellectuals appears to have been eliminated .... the antimony between artists and intellectuals on the one hand and capitalist production on the other has been annihilated or has disappeared by attrition" (p. 676). This book, while certainly the best of its kind, is also a primary example of what Buchloh describes. As a contribution to a larger project of social and political change, it is an utter failure. Where, then, does it leave the practice of art history? We seem to be at a moment that sees itself as being after postmodernism but has yet to attract the burden of a proper name or the motivation of an empowering and incisive politics. As the conservatism of Art since 1900 demonstrates, the invention of such a politics, and with it a "historicity" appropriate for the times in which we live, remains the most pressing task that faces the next generation of art historians.
- More Articles of Interest
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your...
- Impressionism: Paint and Politics
- Many countries now have a mobile penetration rate above 100%, report says
- House of the Year: this craftsman-inspired home is factory-built--proving...
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
GEOFFREY BATCHEN is professor of the history of photography and contemporary art at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York [Art History, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016-4309].
Notes
1. Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss, "Visual Culture Questionnaire," October, no. 77 (Summer 1996): 5.
2. For more on Nolan and Australia's regional modernism, see Ian Burn, "Sidney Nolan: Landscape and Modern Life," in Dialogue: Writings in Art History (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 67-85, 221.
