Surveying the Century: Art Since 1900

Feature Reviews Surveying the Century: Art Since 1900 gillian whiteley AND PETER MUIR Art Since 1900: Modernism,Antimodernism, Postmodernism hal foster, rosalind krauss, yve-alainbois,benjaminhdbuchloh Thames and Hudson 2004 d45.00 $85.00 704 pp. 413 col/224 mono illus isbn 0-500-238-189 A rt Since 1900 is audacious in its objectives, in its scale and in the transparent way that particular theoretical perspectives frame the data. Add to this the joint authorship of four of the most influential critical voices on art discourse of recent decades – Foster, Krauss, Bois and Buchloh – plus a range of unusual features, and we have a publication which must be commended as an essential reference work for all students, teachers and scholars and a rewarding, if demanding, read for anyone with a well-informed but general interest in twentieth-century art. However, any new book that claims to be ‘the most comprehensive critical history of art in the twentieth and early twenty-first century ever published’ and ‘a landmark history of modern art’ is inviting the disappointment of sections of its readership. Surveys of this kind are inevitably selective. Paradoxically, this book’s authorship is both its strength and weakness. The four critical voices are differentiated by their individual methodological approaches – psychoanalytical, socio-historical, formalist/structuralist, poststructuralist/deconstructionist – as helpfully set out in the four introductory essays. Overall, though, the study is inflected with the authors’ joint history of involvement with the American critical journal, October, and, despite efforts to shift the agenda, the publication is fundamentally grounded within a Western, and predominantly USoriented, art paradigm. The book is structured around decades, with yearly entries by named authors that focus on key events and artworks. Each short essay is supplemented by inserted textboxes of related information on cultural or theoretical issues plus brief lists of further reading. There are excellent contributions on material rarely incorporated 6 The Art Book into surveys of this kind, for example, the Harlem Renaissance, Neoconcretists and Kinetic artists in the 1950s and 1960s. The format facilitates looking up things that ‘happen’ in a specific year. This is a major asset but it also tends to dictate the reader’s navigation of the material and, depending on one’s research interests and orientation, produces both surprises and, inevitably, omissions. Oddly, Yves Klein’s important Le Vide, staged in 1957, gets a mere mention in the 1960 essay; 1965 highlights the critical debates around sculpture and objects by centring on Judd’s writings and American Minimalism, but fails to acknowledge the transatlantic discourse exemplified by the New Generation exhibition of work by British sculptors in London; the year 2000 is unmarked. Aspects of British modernism are given scant attention – Herbert Read’s considerable influence on modernist production and criticism is virtually ignored. Paradoxically, given the authorship, the empirical emphasis on ‘events’ embodied in the book’s structure does not help a reader whose approach is premised on ideas. Also, the yearly format does not necessarily facilitate an exploration of the intermittent, ongoing or sustained impact of artworks, criticism, journals (October and Artforum aside), institutions, collections and galleries. The authors claim that the book is organised to enable the reader to construct his/her own story – but, in practice, this is difficult. For example, the construction of national identity through culture is a major area of scholarly research and pedagogy but the indexing system (and the supposedly ‘innovative’ cross-referencing system) does not make this easy, particularly if compared with the sophisticated cross-referencing systems now offered by online databases and information banks. That said, some of these issues are addressed in another useful feature of the book – the two ‘roundtable discussions’ that enable the authors to assess art at ‘mid-century’ and currently. The second is subtitled ‘the predicament of contemporary art’, referencing the problematic nature of such evaluation, which is reflected in the rather insubstantial treatment given to the volume 12 issue 4 november 2005 r bpl/aah 1980s and 1990s. The division of the century ratifies the obvious cultural impact of the Second World War. This neat division – speaking from a ‘centred’ place – remains a largely unchallenged convention which requires review if we are to take a more considered (and global) perspective on art. Surely, for example, the collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s and its ramifications for global culture must now be acknowledged as providing a new ‘watershed’ for appraising previous, subsequent and contemporary histories? In a reference book of this kind, the supplementary resources are equally important and, here, an extremely useful glossary and general bibliography are included. Whilst the latter is excellent on some topics, on others it is useful but rather perfunctory. The short list of art websites is, again, helpful – but only as a starting point. On the other hand, despite accusations from various critics that the book does not favour the ‘visual’, it is certainly lavishly illustrated throughout. The isolation and examination of ‘art’ as a separate cultural practice is fraught with problems so the very idea of Art Since 1900 was ambitious. There are innovative features, but it sits firmly within a tradition of critical histories and surveys of twentieth-century art based on particular analytical approaches to selected material. Despite the aspiration to be a postmodern object which facilitates the reader as a ‘bricoleur’ who constructs multiple narratives, it offers a ‘story’ as much as its predecessors and antecedents. Inevitably, a feature of surveys of this kind is that – in time – they become primary sources, studied for what they reveal about the historical moment of their writing as much as for what they say about art. However, a very real strength of Art Since 1900 is that it encompasses so much material that it will be a long time before it makes the transition from being a vital and relevant reference source to becoming an artefact that is studied for its reflection of the state of art-historical discourse in the late twentieth century. gillian whiteley Loughborough University School of Art and Design Feature Reviews T he authors of Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism present a history of the modernist project within a structure that contains both a received chronological narrative of the ‘isms’ of the twentieth century and a more permeable account of artistic production that functions within a kind of grid system; a network that enables the consideration of a number of documents, or objects, or perhaps ‘symptoms’ of the history under consideration. This second and more open narrative confronts – through the analysis of those ‘incidents’ – the central and recurring debates on the nature of ‘culture’, ‘autonomy’ and ‘realism’ that characterise the period under review. As a consequence, the book is both temporal and temporally distorted; both chronological and anamorphic in its structure. This complex combined approach is highly successful in that it affords to the student reader (its primary audience) an important structural understanding about the received modernist trajectory, whilst also containing a thematically driven account of the art and historical issues at stake. Hence, the book succeeds in finding some coherence in the fragmentary and complex modernist trajectory. This substantial and comprehensive work finds its model in Denis Hollier’s (ed.) A New History of French Literature (1989), and directs particular attention to the theorising of art’s institutional frameworks, as well as the debates around identity and class that the authors quite rightly claim have shaped and constructed cultural practices and the work of art. Of particular significance is the ‘introduction to the introductions’, where the authors elucidate the above concerns and methods of approach through a consideration of four different art historical (social-theoretical) methodologies – instruments of analysis that, according to the writers, can be detected at work within the historical fabric of artistic practice since 1900. This lucid introduction to methodologies is designed to provide readers with some understanding of the ‘conceptual tools’ used in the construction of the text, which they might adopt and use for their own further study. Each approach is augmented by a very useful group of further readings. This section of the book focuses specifically on the interpretative potential of: psychoanalysis (Chapter 1: Foster), the social history of art (Chapter 2: Buchloh), Formalism and Structuralism (Chapter: 3 Bois), and Post-structuralism and Deconstruction (Chapter 4: Krauss). These approaches to art history and theory are refracted in the main text, where their presence gradually and steadily shifts the reader’s attention away from the intrinsic qualities of a particular artwork (so profoundly associated with modernist formalism and approaches to art interpretation that concentrate on medium, style and biography) to the societal context in which art appears. This history, this social project, is revealed in the competing aesthetic and cultural systems of the period under review: their debates, their texts, their images and their art objects. The four approaches also mark the authors’ own intellectual engagement with the critical theory that has been their hallmark since the founding of the New York-based art journal OCTOBER (the founding editors being Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson: 1976, Foster, Bois and Buchloh are also members of the current editorial board). The overall result of these considerations is an extensive, well written and engaging inquiry into the function and meaning of modern art, contained within 107 short essays chronologically arranged and linked by cross-referencing. These limited (instrumental) case studies attempt to blend theory with an engagement with the works of art in question (a user’s guide to the book is provided at the beginning). These cases provide an historical overview and are concerned with how the reader might begin to interpret the multiple and various forms of visual representation that are the theoretical objects of the book. The text provides a year-by-year approach to the modernist project in which each essay focuses on a particular art historical event or issue, such as the production of an emblematic artwork, the publication of a significant manifesto, or the implications of a significant exhibition, that helps to characterise the art and critical theory of the period. The major aesthetic landmarks – perhaps one could say the ‘monuments’ of modernism and postmodernism – are considered in an amount of detail appropriate for the undergraduate student. This discussion includes a series of antimoder- Richard Prince’Untitled’ (four women looking in the same direction) (detail) 1977--9. r Richard Prince, courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York. nist and postmodernist reactions that project various possible alternative understandings of artistic practice. In this way the cases are used to examine institutional and individual responses to art functioning under different types of aesthetic and ‘political’ regimes (what might be termed the conditions of reception operative in different decades); this in turn allows textured analysis of theoretical issues operative during the periods under consideration. As well as acting as standalone introductions to individual art historical events or sites, the mini-essays also act to give empirical colour to a discussion of wider aesthetic forms and their interaction within disciplinary fields. One might suggest that a major advantage of this approach is that it allows for the development of art theory based on observations of local-level institutional and interpersonal interaction found in individual art historical sites. The narratives and rhetoric developed in the book are established self-consciously within the received convention of dividing the twentieth century into two halves separated by the Second World War. This produces, in essence, a two-volume format within a single continuous text (one should note however, that a two volume ‘students’ edition’ is planned for the future). The text reflects its authors’ well known historical positions and intellectual concerns whilst also attempting to fulfil its primary pedagogical purpose of presenting a review of the artistic production, the associated theoretical literature and new writing in an accessible and engaging format that is suitable as both a reference for undergraduates and a pedagogical tool for teachers of art history and visual theory. peter muir The Open University volume 12 issue 4 november 2005 r bpl/aah The Art Book 7