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The October Century
Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Pepe Karmel
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, by Hal Foster, Rosalind Kranss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin HWD. Buchloh, New York, Thames and Hudson, 2005; 688 pages, $85.
Over the last 30 years, Rosalind Krauss has established herself as the era's most influential critic of modern art. This influence has been exercised not only through her own numerous publications, her lectures and her teaching, but also through the journal October, founded in 1976. Now, together with several colleagues from October--Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh--she has published a textbook, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. While the other three authors receive equal billing, the book represents a kind of summation of Krauss's remarkable scope as critic and chef d'ecole.
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To grasp the distinctive character of Art Since 1900, it is worth briefly retracing the evolution of Krauss's ideas. Her first book, published in 1971, was on the sculpture of David Smith, an artist championed by her mentor, Clement Greenberg. But Krauss located the originality of Smith's work in psychological and philosophical issues that had nothing to do with Greenbergian formalism, Krauss argued that, whereas traditional sculpture presented figures and objects as forms radiating out from a hidden "core," analogous to the hidden self of consciousness, Smith shifted to a contingent, additive mode of composition, challenging not just conventional esthetics but also the Cartesian idea of the mind-body relationship. (1) Krauss expanded on this premise in her 1977 book, Passages in Modern Sculpture, a selective history tracing the medium's evolution from Rodin to Minimalism. Here she argued that the achievement of Minimalism was "to relocate the origins of a sculpture's meaning to the outside, no longer modeling its structure on the privacy of psychological space but on the public, conventional nature of what might be called cultural space." (2) As Krauss explained, Minimalist artists were influenced in this direction by a variety of sources, from Ludwig Wittgenstein's attack on "private language" to the "objective," anti-psychological novels of Alain Robbe-Grlllet. (3)
Meanwhile, Krauss (together with Annette Michelson and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe) had started October. In its pages, Krauss and her colleagues reformulated the critical program of Minimalism in the language of French structuralism. There was an immediate affinity between the two, since in France structuralism represented a revolt against the existentialist idea of the self. Yve-Alain Bois was soon recruited to the October group, bringing with him a novel synthesis of structuralism and Greenbergian formalism. (4) With the advent of post-structuralism in the later 1970s, the attack on the idea of the self was rephrased in terms borrowed from Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Especially influential was Lacan's discussion of the "mirror-stage," which posits an incurable contradiction between the real incoherence of the self and the factitious unity it achieves when it perceives itself in the eyes of others. In the 1980s, Krauss discovered the writings of the dissident Surrealist Georges Bataille, and restated the subversion of the self in terms of "formlessness," "horizontality" and "base materialism." (5) Taking Lacan and Melanie Klein as points of departure, new recruits such as Hal Foster and Mignon Nixon used psychoanalytic theories about psychic fragmentation to explicate Surrealism and contemporary art. (6) Meanwhile, the academic leftism implicit in the journal's title, a reference to Sergei Eisenstein's film about the Russian Revolution, was bolstered by the contributions of the German scholar Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, who drew on the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Peter Btirger to argue that the idea of the independent self was a piece of bourgeois obfuscation, and that the role of true avant-garde art was to expose it. (7)
Over time, the leading writers associated with October assumed increasingly important academic positions. After many years teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center, Krauss moved to Columbia, while Bois, Foster and Buchloh found positions at Harvard, Princeton and Barnard, respectively. (8) They are no longer a band of rebels against the establishment. They are the establishment. Their writings now constitute a large part of the standard curriculum for graduate students studying the history of modern art. The publication of Art Since 1900 seems meant to extend their influence to undergraduate education as well. (9)
Art Since 1900 competes directly with existing textbooks by H.H. Arnason, Sam Hunter and other scholars. (10) Alternatively, teachers and students can turn to Modern Art: Practices and Debates by a group of British scholars associated with the Open University, four volumes that trace the history of modern art from Courbet to Gerhard Richter in essays exploring topics such as "Primitivism and the 'Modern,'" "Surrealism, Myth, and Psychoanalysis" and "The Politics of Representation." (11) Art Since 1900 sets out to combine the comprehensive historical narrative of a conventional textbook with the kind of critical analysis found in the Open University series.
