The October Century

A similar antipathy to the biographical and the subjective seems to lie behind the strange treatment of Robert Rauschenberg. His early works, such as Automobile Tire Print of 1953, pass muster, because they utilize "the indexical imprint ... as a weapon against the expressive mark." (27) Seventy pages later, in a text box about Leo Steinberg's concept of the "flatbed picture plane," Krauss cites Steinberg's lyrical analysis of Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings of the 1960s. (28) But neither the silkscreen paintings nor their revolutionary precursors, Rauschenberg's combines of the late 1950s, are reproduced or discussed in Art Since 1900. The problem, apparently, is that Rauschenberg's work is too subjective, too rooted in his own tastes and associations. (29) In contrast, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg's chief artistic interlocutor of these years, is praised for his use of "conventional, depersonalized" elements," and his work is discussed (and reproduced) at length. (30)

The "social history" of art in the chapters written by Buchloh is almost as problematic as the omissions of his co-authors. Discussing work made from 1900 through 1960, he judges artists by the degree of their adherence to the "antiaesthetic" of Dadaism and Constructivism, which "replaces originality with technical reproduction ... destroys a work's aura and the contemplative mode of aesthetic experience and replaces these with communicative action." (31) The "alogism," "shock" and "rupture" of avant-garde art are valuable because they accelerate the demise of bourgeois subjectivity. In contrast, Buchloh condemns the Neue Sachlichkeit painters as "cynical and melancholic" spokesmen for the "oligarchic bourgeoisie" and "rabid petite bourgeoisie" of the Weimar republic. After 1925, the goal of political effectiveness triumphs over the quest for a new formal language: now the task of the avant-garde is "to provide mass audiences with images of didactic information and politicization." (32) Elsewhere in the book, Foster acknowledges the argument, advanced by the Russian scholar Boris Groys, that the Constructivist ideal of a politicized avantgarde leads straight to the elevation of Stalin as, in Foster's words, "the epitome of the Constructivist engineer of culture," but he rejects Groys's argument as "reductive, indeed antimodernist." (33)

Buchloh's criteria of political correctness change after 1950. The new enemy is "postwar consumer culture"--in other words, the long economic boom that made the European and American proletariat into members of the middle class, writing finis to the dream of socialist revolution. By 1950, we are to believe, the worker has been brainwashed to see himself primarily as a consumer, held in thrall by the "spectacle" of mass entertainment and advertising. (34) Suddenly, the old bourgeois culture doesn't look so bad to Buchloh. He refers nostalgically to "the enlightenment culture of the bourgeois public sphere that has to be defended against the onrush of the forces of the culture industry." (35) Now that subjectivity is under siege, it has become a good thing. Diane Arbus, for instance, is praised for her "complex understanding of the fragility of the processes of subject formation, and the tragic consequences of their continuing destruction." (36)