Art Since 1900: Modernism, AntiModernism, Postmodernism

by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Blois and Benjamin HD Bloch
Thames and Hudson, London, 2005
704pp., illus. 224 b/w, 413 col. Paper, £45.00
ISBN: 0500238189.

Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg

andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com

Art Since 1900 is a survey of the ideas and particular approach to art history of its authors——Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. These art theorists have showcased their ideas in October, the art journal founded in the U.S. in 1976. Art Since 1900 is an overview and a continuation of the October project. This means that the essays, discussions, and discrete entries on particular subjects that comprise the book focus on the art of Europe and the U.S. and are preoccupied with critical theory and conceive of art as "texts" to be analysed and problems to be solved. Duchamp, of course, is the towering figure in this view of art. To paraphrase Levi-Strauss, these authors believe that 'art is good to think'. In 'thinking art' the authors invoke the grand narratives of psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics, modernism and postmodernism.

Unlike many, I have no quarrel with this theoretical focus. The authors are instrumental figures in the development of this way of looking at art; their work is extremely influential, and I doubt that anyone could seriously claim that it is not worth engaging with. My view is that this is one highly influential approach to the study of how visual meaning is constructed and that as much can be gained from rejecting aspects——or indeed, all——of this approach as accepting it.

My expectation was that this survey would introduce the undergraduate and the more serious general reader to this way of engaging with visual art. In some respects this expectation is met. The organisation of the material is a triumph. Some 107 essays are arranged chronologically from 1900 to 2003, each is well illustrated and supplemented by detailed time lines and side boxes on ancillary topics. Four theoretical essays on psychoanalysis, the social history of art, structuralism and formalism and post-structuralism and deconstruction are placed at the beginning of the volume and lay the theoretical foundations for what follows. Easy to follow symbols throughout the text refer the reader to related essays and entries so that non-chronological readings are possible. The reader can follow a traditional art historical reading or break off at any point to follow a series of linked ideas that cut across time. This organisation of the material encourages multiple readings of subjects with illuminating results. It is a way of reading that is familiar to us because this is how the internet creates relationships between ideas——by the use of hyperlinks——but it takes a high degree of skill to emulate so effortlessly this way of linking ideas in print and with a subject as complicated as this.

The problems I perceive with this work are twofold. One is the inability of the authors to communicate their ideas in plain English. I see nothing intrinsic in the subject matter that precludes this. The book, however, is full of sentences like these:

"Matisse resisted Rodin's metonymic fragmentation, and in some ways his sculpture represents the opposite approach."

The essays are full of jargon, such as "hierarchical canonicity" and "hegemonic media apparatus" and contain much of the vocabulary of Derrida and other theorists. Some of this jargon can be understood if the introductory essays are read first. But this precludes the kind of creative readings of the book made possible by the constant references to related ideas. A firm grasp of most of the complex theories the authors subscribe to is necessary before most of the essays can be read, and this is only very partly provided for in the introductory essays. In addition, I simply cannot see why much of this jargon is used. It seems possible to explain many of the authors' ideas without recourse to it, and those passages that I found unable to translate into jargon-free English were ones I suspected made little sense to begin with.

While the essays suffer from this use of jargon and barely comprehensible sentences, the text boxes within them on various related topics are written in much clearer prose and offer many illuminating insights.

The second problem is that while the authors are enthusiastic proponents of the use of theories, such as Marxism, post-modernism and psychoanalysis "to place criticism on a more rigorous intellectual footing," they have, in practice, ignored most of the (often quite devastating) critiques of these theories launched from within the social sciences. Some of the passages where the authors draw particularly heavily on concepts from semiotics and deconstruction import the concept of visual meaning as forms of linguistic or literary meanings with the result that the construction of visual meaning is treated as though it is strikingly akin to the construction of linguistic or literary meanings. This, in turn, means that the works of art under examination lose much of their specificity and a whole, huge dimension of what defines them is under-analysed. One cannot help wondering if the authors' disinterest in painting after 1960 is not connected to this. This way of analysing art marries much better with art that is pre-occupied with ideas and far less so with art which is insistently visual.

This kind of engagement with visual art can be understood as a response to Duchamp's question: 'what is art?' and his attempt to dissolve it. It turns art criticism into an intellectual exercise, requiring it to justify itself, question itself, and look at the conditions of its own making and display. Many of its strengths and limitations can be seen in this volume, and this raises the question: What other approaches to art might there be at this point in time? The book is a summation of the October project that will speak most clearly to those already familiar with the work published in that journal but, at the same time, it invites the reader to stand back from that project and assess its significance and imagine what lies beyond.