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The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and Avant-Gardism. - book reviews
Art Bulletin, The, Dec, 1996 by Lisa Saltzman
As Cubism and modern art were lampooned and parodied in the pages of the popular press, the theme of humor emerges in Weiss's account. In turn, it is out of this critical culture of humor that Duchamp emerges, an artist whose work comes, for Weiss, to instantiate the "second truth" of modernism. Borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin, Weiss presents parody, both as it was practiced and as it was perceived, as "a sub-history of the avant-garde" (p. 109). Casting aside recent philosophical and linguistic models for interpreting Duchamp, and admittedly "streamlining Duchamp" (p. 110), Weiss suggests that humor is the rubric we should use to understand Duchamp and his cultural context. Focusing on the terms blague and mystification, whose cultural and intellectual history he carefully traces, Weiss contends that these terms, these aesthetic and philosophical principles, at once emerge from the popular domain and "exemplify the paradox of extroversion and introversion, or accessibility and hermeticism, which governs the prewar dynamic of popular culture" (p. 110). As such, Duchamp and his deadpan work serve to narrate the story that becomes Weiss's account of the avant-garde. Moreover, if Duchamp is the artist who embodies Weiss's "second truth" - that "hoax, as a claim, an act and a condition suffuses the experience of modern art" (p. 163) - then Cocteau's Parade is the work which fully instantiates that experience. Parade allows Weiss's study to come full circle, to Picasso and his immersion in the cultural milieu of Paris.
The seamlessness of Weiss's historical narrative is owed in large part not only to his persuasive use of material evidence, but also to the particular manner of its implementation. In his account, Cubism opens out onto popular culture, but very rarely into the broader sociohistorical sphere, leaving Cubism immune from the ideological contamination of history or politics. Cubism remains self-reflexive, but that self-reflexivity now includes popular culture. Further, more often than not, Weiss's argument remains embedded in his notes. It is there that he takes on those who might challenge his interpretation, allowing the text proper to read as if operating above the seemingly profane terrain of scholarly dispute. For example, it is only in an endnote that Weiss contends with the anticontextual, structuralist, or semiotic readings of Cubism that have so shaped its study in recent years, although his note is admittedly quite adept at anticipating charges of "reflectionist" readings and countering Krauss's assertion of a strictly semiotic reading of newspaper fragments. It is in an endnote as well that Weiss contends with, and proposes in some sense to resolve, the seemingly irreconcilable positions of David Cottington and Christine Poggi,(5) stating that Picasso's collage is neither an embodiment of a Mallarmean aestheticism untainted by the baseness of the popular materials he employed, nor a programmatic critique of such modernist autonomy and hermeticism. When Weiss does incorporate present art-historical disagreement into the body of his text, as he does, for example, with the opposing readings of Cocteau's Parade, juxtaposing Melissa McQuillan and her allies with Kenneth Silver and his,(6) such inclusion is made in the service of supporting his interpretation as historical truth. As Weiss writes, "Parade was born from a spirit of collaboration and rapport, but it lived according to a rupture of purpose and design which marks its true character as a parable of the avant-garde" (pp. 174-75; emphasis added).
