The October Century

For all his brilliance as a critic, Buchloh is hamstrung by the fact that his political and artistic ideals are only rarely in accordance. As he writes in his introduction:

If [the social history of art] were to align its aesthetic judgment with the condition of political solidarity and class alliance, it would inevitably be left with only a few heroic figures in whom such a correlation between class-consciousness, agency, and revolutionary alliance could actually be ascertained. These examples would include Gustave Courbet and Honore Daumier in the nineteenth century, Kathe Kollwitz and John Heartfield in the first half of the twentieth century, and artists such as Martha Rosler, Hans Haacke, and Allan Sekula in the second half of the twentieth century. (37)

Evidently, politics cannot be used as a yardstick of esthetic quality; in practice, however, Buchloh cannot resist the temptation to do this. The more fundamental problem here is that Buchloh and his co-authors have such a narrow and theoretical idea of social history that there is no way for real history, with its wealth of detail and its manifold links to art, to squeeze into their analyses. Picasso's relations to the social and political issues of his time, for instance, have been discussed by critics and historians including John Berger, Patricia Leighten, David Cottington, Jeffrey Weiss and Gertje Utley, but none of their ideas or discoveries is cited in Art Since 1900. (38)

Some exception should be made here for Foster. In many places, he follows October's party line. As the book proceeds, however, he seems to depart from it more and more often. Maybe this is because he wrote so many more chapters than the other authors: the experience of absorbing and analyzing such a wide variety of art seems to have shaken his faith in his theoretical assumptions. Particularly, in his chapters on art after 1970, you seem to see Foster growing and changing as a critic, getting more flexible and more thoughtful. (39)

So what's a teacher to do--assign Art Since 1900 or angrily reject it, like the critic for the Wall Street Journal who wrote: "I have a suggestion for the parents of high-school students: Find out whether the college that your child hopes to attend plans to assign 'Art Since 1900' in its art-history courses. If so, apply elsewhere." (40) The answer, of course, will depend partly on the teacher's tastes and politics. The intellectual intensity of Art Since 1900 should engage undergraduates (and other readers) who are prepared to be challenged rather than spoonfed. Its more conspicuous omissions will perhaps be rectified in the next edition, due out in about three years, and in the meantime the publisher, Thames and Hudson, is supplementing the textbook edition with a copy of a multimedia CD, Art 20: The Thames and Hudson Multimedia Dictionary of Modern Art, which includes reproductions of many of the missing works.

On the other hand, I wonder whether a big, ambitious textbook like Art Since 1900 isn't in fact a kind of dinosaur. The rise of copyright clearinghouses now makes it possible for teachers to offer students custom-designed selections of readings, photocopied and bound between paper covers. It's still useful to have a textbook that serves as the backbone of a course, tying everything together, but there's no need for the textbook to be the students' only resource. If I were teaching a course on 20th-century art, I would probably assign Hunter and Jacobus's Modern Art, which has a shorter, pithier text than Art Since 1900 and offers 877 illustrations compared to 637. To compensate for the lack of critical theory in Modern Art, I would put together a readings packet of essays by important critics, certainly including Krauss, Foster, Bois and Buchloh, but also covering writers such as Alfred Barr, Roland Barthes, Homi Bhaba, John Berger, Mel Bochner, Anna Chave, T.J. Clark, Thomas Crow, Carol Duncan, Michael Fried, Coco Fusco, Tamar Garb, Clement Greenberg, Eleanor Heartney, Fredric Jameson, Donald Judd, Allan Kaprow, Donald Kuspit, Lucy Lippard, Robert Morris, Cindy Nemser, Molly Nesbit, Linda Nochlin, Barbara Rose, Harold Rosenberg, Robert Rosenblum, Richard Shift, Kenneth Silver, Robert Smithson, Leo Steinberg, Kirk Varnedoe and Anne Wagner. The students would be exposed to a wider spectrum of opinion and they'd have more fun.