Femininmasculin. - book reviews

In another instance, at the Paris exhibition, Lynda Benglis's Parenthesis (1975) formed one part of a sea of penises arranged on a huge pedestal. Fabrice Hybert's 1995 Untitled, a swing with two stubs poking up from the seat, hung next to the pedestal like an off-shore island. The revolutionary role played by Benglis's work, at least within American art-world gender politics, was thus undermined by a tabletop display that might have been more appropriate to the Pleasure Chest than it was to the galleries of the Pompidou. As illustrated in the catalogue, however, the distinction of these specific items is restored.

The Pompidou catalogue contains the scattering of essays one has come to expect in such publications; its thirteen contributions range from considerations of individual artists (as might be expected, three on Marcel Duchamp, particularly in his Rrose Selavy mode, by Jean-Jacques Lebel, Juan Antonio Ramirez, and Michael Taylor; more surprising is Thierry de Duve writing on Luciano Fabro), to overviews, notably those of Marina Warner (on hair and sexuality) and Rosalind Krauss (who crossreads two magisterial texts, her own 1993 Optical Unconscious and Jacques Derrida's 1990 selections from the Louvre, Memoires d'aveugle . . .). Among the apparati at the end of the volume is a "Glossaire Oriente" printed on pink paper, which playfully deconstructs the language and imagery of sexuality in styles as varied as Ambrose Bierce - type epigrams and Andre Masson's "scientistic" definitions.

Another "virtual exhibition" can be found in The Masculine Masquerade, the catalogue for a 1995 exhibition at MIT's List Visual Arts Center. Not only does this book make full use of the possibilities of such a format - it incorporates a range of short essays and some well-reproduced images predicated on both the possibilities and the limitations of the specific occasion - it even contains what is in effect a separate installation, Glenn Ligon's A Feast of Scraps. These ten lavishly printed pages (printed as an essay, and not in the exhibition) resemble a faked-up scrapbook of images mixing scenes of African-American family life and scenes of homosexual desire and activity. Among the essays, Harry Brod's "Masculinity as Masquerade" presents an elegantly Hegelian mapping of the changing academic discourse of sex and gender. Brod traces the transformation of the latter term from a "role" determined by "nurture" to the concept of "performance or enactment" (p. 16). This is a significant contribution to theories of consciousness.

Both the MIT and Pompidou publications are stimulating, but the pleasure one takes in them is promiscuous, changing with the partner, from one writer to another. The rush to publish and the exigencies of academic life have conspired to create texts that adumbrate slices of a subject without offering the possibility of expanding or considering the question as it relates to the larger field of art. What results from this monographic treatment is the vitiation of the discipline; art history becomes another element of "sound-bite" culture, and just as that culture conducts its discourse through iteration and reiteration, so the brevity and compartmentalization of these approaches produce the illusion of rhetorical argument through repetition rather than development. One cause of this phenomenon might be the fact that many U.S. critics write predominantly for periodicals. Although many of these writers are now associated with the academy, the experience of turning out occasional pieces to be read frequently by distracted readers means that repetition becomes a substitute for thought. Any alliance between cultural theory and cultural history is weak in this country. Clement Greenberg, arguably the exemplary American critic, never advanced a cohesive theory of art and society or the position of modernism within this discourse; his formalist descriptions and quality judgments tended to paper over discontinuities or contradictions in theory. No doubt this problem has its roots in a puritanical opposition to the sensual.