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Out of context: Reply #7
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- janne760
Who among those of us assigned to teach the survey of art history has not struggled with the very concept of the comprehensive overview? In many colleges and universities, a foundational survey nevertheless remains the bread and butter of the art history program, the centerpiece of a disciplinary practice that Henri Zerner described two dozen years ago as "an uninspired professional routine feeding a busy academic machine." (1) The survey text has been the indispensable corollary to this deeply entrenched yet problematic curricular offering. According to Mitchell Schwarzer in 1995, "The survey text is art history at its most grandiose, promising to reveal the complex truths of humanity through art. It is also," he continued, "art history at its most political, reducing cultural and individual differences to questionable hierarchies and generalities." (2) When, five years earlier, Bradford Collins had addressed the challenge posed by the survey text, he, like Schwarzer, was writing about books that seek to present works of art in relation to the vast sweep of world history, and he noted, "The writing of a completely acceptable overview of art's history, impossible under any circumstance, has been rendered even more absurd by the growing pluralism within our field, which is why I think it may be time to rethink the entire introductory enterprise." (3) The solution that Collins proposed, "a collection of separate, lengthy and in-depth analyses of major monuments, a book that would leave the issues of continuity to the individual instructor," introduces the possibility of an intellectually rigorous alternative to the dominant evolutionary paradigm, one that could be adapted to the most general of surveys or to a particular field within the history of art. "I can imagine, too," Collins wrote, "that such a book might include essays that offer competing points of view on a given work or monument.... Perhaps what we need in this area, given the methodological diversity within our field, is a range of quite different options." (4) Some years later, Mark Miller Graham argued for a radical deconstruction of the traditional survey, which he condemned for its ties to "the authority of the panoptic gaze and the privileged perspective." (5) First on his list of remedies is this advice: "Stop using the present generation of survey textbooks.... Those who teach the course must get hold of its agenda." Graham's list continues with calls to "stop fetishizing completeness"; "eject the canon and thematize the content"; "embody and engender the discipline of art history"; and, finally, "teach the conflicts ... the actual debate and disagreement that constitute the scholarly process." (6)
The authors of Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism have produced a survey text that responds surprisingly closely to many (but not all) of these prescriptions, establishing an ambitious new paradigm that solves some of the most egregious problems of the survey genre by challenging the reader to become actively engaged with the critical debates that are highlighted in the book. (Although the publication is available in a single volume, it can also be purchased as two separate volumes, the first of which deals with the period to 1944, while the second begins with 1945. My remarks here are prompted by volume 1, though many would be applicable to volume 2 as well.) That an actively engaged reader is being called forth becomes immediately apparent in the instructions--"How to use this book"--with which the book opens (pp. 10-11). Here, two text pages are reproduced with additional graphic signs pointing out features of the layout and organization that are intended to help the reader "follow the development of art through the twentieth century and up to the present day." As this wording would suggest, the presentation appears rigorously chronological, insofar as the material is organized into individual entries, each approximately five pages in length and keyed to a given year. The chronological organization is further articulated by the grouping of entries into decades, although a countermanding arbitrary quality emerges from the fact that some years have multiple entries while others are omitted altogether. In fact, as the "Preface: A Reader's Guide" (pp. 12-13) makes clear, chronology is just one of the book's organizing principles; its numerous cross-references encourage the reader to construct alternative paths to destabilize the sense of an unfolding narrative, establishing links across time to reveal the histories of, for example, national schools, particular media, stylistic developments, or thematic concerns. Many cross-references call attention to the authors' introductory discussions of the theoretical methods that inform the entries, and these too, like the entries, are stand-alone essays by individual authors (pp. 14-48): "Psychoanalysis in Modernism and as Method," by Hal Foster; "The Social History of Art: Models and Concepts," by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh; "Formalism and Structuralism," by Yve-Alain Bois; and "Poststructuralism and Deconstruction," by Rosalind Krauss. Not only does this framework encourage the reader to focus on conceptual issues raised by, or in relation to, salient objects and events in the history of art, it also allows the authors to provide numerous compelling demonstrations of how theory and method can be applied in practice to structure interpretation.
Especially unusual in the survey context--where anonymity and objectivity have been the normative ideal--is the fact that all four authorial identities remain fairly distinct throughout the volume. (Peculiarly, however, the individual introductory essays are not signed, although the author of each is identified in the round-table discussion published at the end of volume 2, p. 671.) Moreover, the authors acknowledge and even embrace their methodological differences: "In this book," they write, "these tensions are not masked by an unbroken story unified by a single voice; rather they are dramatized by the four authors, each of whom has a different allegiance to these methods" (p. 13). In addition to the methodological essays, the two round-table discussions that appear at the ends of volumes 1 and 2 provide another--less focused and, correspondingly, less successful--format for the authors to highlight their differences as they reflect on what they have written, what they have left out of the account, and the connections they might have failed to identify in the process.
This latter dialogical strategy will be familiar to readers of October, the influential journal of avant-garde art and culture of which all four authors of Art since 1900 are editors. During the thirty years since it was founded, October has become a powerful nexus of theoretically sophisticated (though, some would argue, also narrowly conceived) discourse whose impact on the practice of art history has been profound. Given the high level of the journal's intellectual ambition, it is somewhat surprising that its editors would choose to take on the writing of a survey text in which they might have risked compromising discursive rigor in an effort to assure broad comprehensibility. But contrary to what one would expect from a survey, Art since 1900 is an intellectually demanding enterprise that new initiates to art history will probably find somewhat daunting as well as exciting. (Although most of the glossary entries at the end of the book are informative and should prove helpful, some are unnecessarily confusing, while at least one comes across as just plain incomprehensible--see the explication of "desublimation," pp. 662-63.) Virtually all of the yearly entries make sophisticated arguments that go well beyond the recitation of historical facts to present complex interpretations of works of art, a number of which have previously surfaced in more fully fleshed-out form in the authors' contributions to October and other scholarly publications.
An excellent case in point is Krauss's treatment of Pablo Picasso's collage Cubism (pp. 112-17), a topic that she describes as "a battleground in which various parts of the foregoing discussion are pitted against one another" (p. 114). Setting out the terms of the debate with reference not only to the visual arts but also to the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire and Stephane Mallarme (whose reactions to the newspaper as a locus of popular culture were diametrically opposed), Krauss first links Picasso's development of collage to the embrace of mass media by Apollinaire. But she immediately complicates this connection to Picasso's contemporary and friend. Introducing a semiological reading of the representational operations performed by collage, Krauss demonstrates that Picasso's deployment of the medium is, paradoxically, even more closely aligned with Mallarme's Symbolist poetry, in which the linguistic sign is treated as it is in Picasso's pasted papers, that is, "as wildly 'polysemic,' or productive of multiple--and often opposed--meanings" (p. 114). Krauss then turns to a brief but pointed discussion of several significant interpretative positions that scholars have staked out during the past quarter century with respect to Picasso's papiers colles, mentioning in particular Thomas Crow's account of how "high" and "low" sources of cultural expression circulated through the work of Picasso as well as that of many other avant-garde artists. This sets the stage for her consideration of "those commentators who see [the artist's] reasons for exploiting this material as primarily political" (p. 116), notably, Patricia Leighten, with whom Krauss has for years carried on a heated debate about the interpretative merits of Leighten's social and biographical contextualism versus Krauss's formalist explorations of meaning, which privilege detailed visual analysis of characteristics that are strictly internal to the work of art. This methodological controversy structures Krauss's discussion of collage in the entry for 1912, and it reemerges in the entry for 1919 (pp. 160-65), where she takes up the debate surrounding Picasso's neoclassical turn of the late 1910s. Once again, Krauss identifies "a radical division" between "two camps of scholars [that] brings us face to face with the issue of historical method. The contextual explanation sets itself against the theory of the internally determined growth of the creative individual, each position feeling the other is blind to certain facts."
It comes as no surprise that Krauss is far from neutral in her presentation of these issues, but it is precisely in the directed nature of her commentary that its pedagogical value lies. For in pointing out that interpretation is always intentional, Krauss and her authorial colleagues force crucial issues of method and theory into the foreground, positioning them at the center of art historical practice, even on the introductory level of the survey text. "There is," she cautions, "a naive belief that historical explanations are simply a record of the facts that the historian extracts from the archive. But facts need to be organized, analyzed, weighted, interrogated; and to do this all historians (consciously or not) have recourse to an underlying model that gives shape to the facts."
Krauss's caveat might have served as an epigraph for this book, in which the authors' value judgments as well as their theoretical predispositions are deliberately made apparent. (Typically for Krauss, the Picasso-Braque model of Cubism affiliated with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's private gallery trumps that of Salon Cubists Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger, whom she dismisses as doctrinaire.) Privileging the high-art media of painting and sculpture, to which photography is added in a manner that explores its cultural position and integrates its history with the larger art historical narrative "for the first time in any survey" (p. 12), the authors engage with architecture and design only fleetingly (most directly in the entry on 1923, devoted to the Bauhaus, pp. 185-89), the possibilities offered by feminist analysis seem to play second fiddle to Freudian psychoanalytic theory, while the controversial subject of visual culture studies is entirely ignored. The accepted canon of European and American modernism remains largely intact (essays on two outliers--the Mexican mural movement, pp. 255-59, and the Harlem Renaissance, pp. 302-7--are contributed by a mysterious fifth author identified only as AD), although two unfamiliar figures, Polish artists Wladyslaw Strzeminski and Katarzyna Kobro, are given prominence alongside El Lissitzky in Bois's nuanced discussion of how Russian Constructivism was received in Berlin and Eastern Europe during the 1920s (pp. 226-31).
But it would be disingenuous to judge Art since 1900 on the basis of the subjects it omits or those it includes; as the authors themselves point out, "Of course, with new orientations come new omissions" (p. 13). The book represents a welcome challenge to its users, who will need to assimilate the complexities of its discursive modes as they engage with the sophisticated model of a self-reflexive art history that the authors have set out. Instead of surveying art as a seamless succession of stylistic innovations whose historical embeddedness is often claimed but nevertheless remains insufficiently theorized, Foster, Krauss, Bois, and Buchloh invite us to debate a version of modern art's history that is internally divided, rich in historical contradiction, and ripe for intervention. It remains to be seen, however, if the authors' apparent success in rethinking the survey text and infusing it with intellectual ambition will place their book beyond the grasp of the introductory audience for which it was intended.
- I read this too.********
- but I must say fuck the Picasso-Braque model. What a bunch of whiny little bastards. Are you a man or a chicken? AH!********
- That is the question.********
- i am still reading it.janne76
- I read this too.