The October Century

Buchioh strikes a more moralizing note. He is in favor of Berlin Dada because it's left-wing; Constructivism because it demystifies art; Fluxus and Nouveau Realisme because they subvert late capitalism; Conceptual art because it criticizes museums and collectors; Viennese Actionism because it strikes a blow against repressive tolerance. He is against Neue Sachlichkeit painting and Neo-Expressionism because they reflect right-wing nostalgia. He is against Joseph Beuys because Beuys is too theatrical and romantic. He is for photography when it attacks the fetishism of the art object, but against it when it celebrates industrial production. He is for the mass media before World War II but against them after the war. He is deeply conflicted about Gerhard Richter. Buchioh's dense and repetitive prose is so clotted with philosophical concepts that the art sometimes becomes invisible. The average undergraduate may well find his chapters unintelligible. On the other hand, if you are willing to roll up your sleeves and make the effort to understand him, he usually has something interesting to say.

Foster contributes almost 40 of the book's minichapters, more than Krauss and almost twice as many as either Bois or Buchloh. Accordingly, his name comes first in the list of authors. He writes about Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism and postmodernism--the subjects of his earlier books and essays. He also writes about fin de siecle Vienna, Paul Gauguin, Wilhelm Worringer, early abstract painting, Constructivism, the Bauhaus, machine-age art in America, Henry Moore, the Nazi attack on "degenerate" art, Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier, the Situationist International, Jasper Johns, Pop art, eccentric abstraction, performance art, the rise of the not-for-profit art space, feminist art and theory of the 1970s, queer art of the 1980s, postcolonialism, African-American art, abject art, digital photography, and the pervasive role of installations and documentation on the international art scene today. Time and again, Foster fulfills the book's pedagogical mission by boiling complex questions down to essentials. Surveying the evolution of "advanced art" from 1960 to 2000, for instance, he suggests that it can best be understood as a "sequence of investigations":

... first into the constituent elements of a traditional medium like painting, as in the self-critical modernist painting advocated by Clement Greenberg; then into the perceptual conditions of an art object defined in terms less of a given medium than of a given space, as in Minimalist art; then into the material basis of such artmaking and perceiving, as explored variously by Arte Povera, Process art, and Body art. Along the way, Conceptual art also shifted attention away from the specific conventions of painting and sculpture to the general questions of 'art as art' and 'art as an institution.' (17)

On the other hand, some of Foster's chapters have a muted, dutiful feeling. You get the feeling that he's picking up the slack for other authors who haven't completed their assignments.