After the FallCharles Harrison

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss.Yve-AlainBois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh./\rtsince 1900: Modernism,Antimodernism,Postmodernism. London: Thames andHudson, 2004. 704 pp., 413 color ills.,224 b/w. $9i .

This is not an easy publication to categorize.In its single-volume, hardbound format ithas the physical aspect of a glossy coffee-table book aimed at the retail market, wherethe affiliation that comes automaticallyto mind is with the type of bland ency-clopaedic survey that used to emerge fromFrench publishing houses like Larousse. Thepurchaser who may thus seem to be presup-posed is someone possessed by a dream ofenlightenment, who might be attracted toArt since 1900 by the admirable clarity of itsdesign and by the quantity and quality of itsillustrations, and who is likely to require lit-tle more of the accompanying prose thanthat it be comprehensible and informativealong relatively well-rehearsed lines.

But for anyone who approaches Art since1900 with expectations of this order, a ran-dom sample of the text is liable to proveseriously troubling, if not wholly discourag-ing. For that text consists of a succession ofmore-or-less self-contained papers in anuningratiating academic style: four introduc-tory essays setting out the authors' favored"theoretical methods of framing the art ofthe twentieth and twenty-first centuries"(14) and 107 chapters of roughly equallength, arranged according to a detailedchronology. To these are added two "round-tables" or quasi-conversational symposia,one for the conclusion o{ each half, and aglossary of terms that are not so much tech-nical as topical with respect to a highlysophisticated kind of cultural analysis. It maybe that the lay consumer of art books can bepersuaded that she needs to understand theconcept of desublimation, for instance, butshe may still struggle to grasp just what itmeans to say that it is "identified as a sociallyand historically determining factor of cul-tural decline caused by mass-cultural forma-tions" (683).

It has to be acknowledged that theapparent marketing strategy and publicity

for Art since 1900 render the book highlyvulnerable to hostile characterization of itsexpository style. Benjamin Buchloh's contri-butions present a number of particularlyjuicy targets. But the authors might respondwith some justice that in aiming to treat thehistory of modern art with due seriousnessone necessarily risks confirming the preju-dices of intellectual conservatives andPhilistines. They may not be too concerned—may even feel a kind of satisfaction—ifArt since 1900 disappoints those would-beenthusiasts who come to the publicationhoping for a more confident consumptionof the established canon of modern art. It isclear enough from the care that has beentaken in the selection and tracing of illustra-tions that something quite else is intendedthan a reinforcement of the canon. And theauthors can justifiably claim that so far asconcerns the checkable information thebook provides, the level of scholarship andof attention to detail is far in excess of whatmight be expected of the typical ency-clopaedic monograph. (To be picky: JacobEpstein's original Rock Drill is not "long-lost,"but was dismantled by the artist [266]; therug in Richard Hamilton's Just what is it. . . . 'is derived not from a Pollock drip paintingbut from a photo of crowds on a beach,while the ceiling is not "the face of Mars"but Earth seen from an early high-altituderocket [390]; Seth Siegelaub's exhibition ofworks by Robert Barry, Douglas Huebler,Joseph Kosuth, and Lawrence Weiner wasstaged in January 1969, not 1968 [5^27];and it was Florence rather than Rome thatconventionally stood for the values of disegnoin contrast with Venetian colore [650]. Butsupposing that straightforward errors canproperly be distinguished from grounds fordisagreement, this is a very small harvest oferrors to reap from so large a book.)

In fairness to the authors' endeavor, itcould be said that the representative imageof Art since 19OO is not really provided by itshardback version but rather by its alternativetwo-volume format in paperback, which ispresumably aimed not just at the high streetbut at the student market and the set-booklist. And unlike the browsers in the retailbookstores, those who approach this workfrom within the academic world will mostlyhave some idea of what to expect and ofhow it might be put to use. Besides theauthors' association as editors of the journal

October, each has a substantial record of indi-vidual publication in twentieth-century arthistory and criticism, and all hold seniorposts in substantial university departmentsof art and art history in or within reach ofNew York. On the authority of the jacketcopy they are "arguably the four mostimportant and influential art historians ofour time." (The presumed condition ofallowing this claim indeed to be arguableis that it is the art of the twentieth centuryalone that is at issue.) Their aim is no lessthan to consolidate the extensive criticalenterprise of replacing modernism's historyof modern art—an enterprise that com-menced at the close of the 1960s, impelledin part by the art of that decade and in partby the newly available resources of princi-pally European critical theory

In shaping the character of Art since1900, two factors in particular seem tohave been decisive. The first of these is theauthors' common occupation of a certaintheoretical ground—a ground identifiablewith the editorial tendency of October andmapped out in their various separate publi-cations. Among the points of reference bywhich the book's view of twentieth-centuryart is most clearly oriented are RolandBarthes's critique of Enlightenment. WalterBenjamin's account of the work of art in theage of mechanical reproducibility, TheodorAdorno and Max Horkheimer on the cultureindustry, Guy Debord on the society of thespectacle, and Peter Bürger on the theory ofthe avant-garde. If there is a single artist whois seen to loom over the art of the century,it is Marcel Duchamp, the resurgence ofwhose reputation was a major factor in theNew York art world of the 1960s, and whoon this account could virtually do no wrong.As is customary in such enterprises, ClementGreenberg serves for the most part as thedominant representative of a supersededcritical order.

A crude outline of the resulting historymay be sketched out along the followinglines. At the beginning of the twentiethcentury, figurative art is destabilized—and"deskilled"—by the effects of photographyThe practical alternatives that open upare those of mechanical reproduction, ofabstract art, and of the readymade. With thebenefit of hindsight each of these may beseen as a mode of resistance to the "cultureof the spectacle"—i.e., to the public imagery

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of capital. They are pursued in various waysby avant-garde factions seeking to bring artclose to "the praxis of life." Maintenanceof such resistance becomes a condition of"radicahty" (i.e., of critical virtue) in art ingeneral. Abstract art can develop only so farbefore it establishes its "paradigms" in thegrid and the monochrome and is driventoward serial production. It otherwise repre-sents a retreat from the "proletarian publicsphere" into "the values specific to themedium" of painting, and a submission tothe demand for spectacle. After the SecondWorld War. the hegemony of bourgeois cul-tural values becomes increasingly associatedon the one hand with the modernist conceptof the autonomy of the aesthetic, and on theother with the development of a rapaciousculture industry. In the face of the "con-sumerist recycling" associated with the soc-iety of the spectacle, a "neo-avant-garde"aims to restore broken connections withthe original avant-garde and to restore somepossibihty of "reclamation of pasts." Thelegacy of the readymade and the pervasive-ness of the photographic image serve toundermine conservative notions of origin-ality. The tendency of radical practice isincreasingly directed against the fixed cate-gories of painting and sculpture, toward theanti-aesthetic and the site-specific, and, inthe wake of the Conceptual art movement,toward modes of "institutional critique."(As Duchamp's supposed heirs. MarcelBroodthaers, Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren,and Michael Asher dominate the 1970s.)As the institution of art is revealed as a "net-work of discourses," that network itselfcomes to be envisaged as the "site" withinwhich the critical work of art is to be located.

This account is summary to the point oftravesty, of course, and no more is claimedfor it here than that it represents the kind ofafterimage that Art since 1900 might leave inthe mind of a responsive student reader. Itmay be acknowledged that not one of theindividual authors' contributions could bealtogether assimilated to that account with-out some substantial remainder—whichacknowledgement introduces the secondfactor serving to characterize the composi-tion of i4rt since 1900. This is the divisionof labor and allocation of topics decidedamong the authors. Anyone who hasengaged in a collaborative project of compa-rable scope will appreciate that much of the

most difficult and creative work is donebefore any text is actually written, in theconversational process of matching thediverse and complex material of the subjectagainst the imagined structure of the work,and both against the interests and competen-cies of the contributors. The system these

ThametaHudion

authors have employed to articulate theperiod is to divide the book into decadesand each decade into a number of signifi-cant years. The year then serves as the effec-tive title of a chapter, with a subhead in themanner of a news bulletin advertising itshighlights. The resulting text is pepperedwith index points serving to direct thereader to possible thematic connectionsand convergences in other chapters, so thattopical pathways can be followed through-out the book.

Responsibility for the several chapters iscredited in an unemphatic style and manner,implying that the marking of individualauthorship has been accorded a relativelylow priority But for all the shared theoreti-cal presumptions of the authors, the readeris likely to notice telling variations in thesheer readability of the prose. In the event,Foster is the major contributor, with anintroductory essay on "Psychoanalysis inmodernism and as method," followed bythirty-six separate chapters, the majority ofthese devoted to the period since 19^0. Incoverage of the years since 1980, his is verymuch the dominant voice, and it is to hiscredit that some significant uncertainties areallowed to show through his concluding

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contributions. Krauss's introduction on"Poststructuralism and deconstruction" is

I

followed by twenty-six chapters with oneshared, the subjects pretty evenly distribtitedover the period. She also carries much theheaviest responsibility for the occasional in-text boxes that serve as stuTimary glosses onauthors arid issues. Bois'sintroduction is on"Formalism and struc-turalism,'' and he is theauthor of twenty-twochapters, though he makes no contributionafter the year 1967. Buchloh is responsiblefor twenty chapters with one shared, thegreater part of these devoted to the 1920sand the 1960s. His introduction is on "Thesocial history of art." (Worthy but pedestrianchapters on the Mexican muralists and theHarlem Renaissance are credited to AnnDempsey)

The allocation of responsibility for theintroductions offers some guide to the dis-tribution of year-topics among the authors,so that specific applications and extensionsof the four different methods of framing areto some extent braided together as the largernarrative unfolds. Foster emerges as theworkhorse of the book and perhaps as itsconscience, Kjauss as its most intellecttiallyenergetic voice, Buchloh as its most deter-

historicalmined ideologue. (That the summary art-

narrative sketched out above ismore readily identified with Buchloh's con-tributions than with the other authors' isperhaps due to the relatively bold-charactereffect of his analyses.) Bois's contributions—his later ones in particular—are marked bya disengagement from the critical edifice ofmodernisin that his French origin no doubtexplains, (it is hard to imagine an Americancritic suggesting that François Morelletanticipated Frank Stella in deducing hispictorial structure from an "arbitrary gener-ative elenient" [^ió].) This disengagementon Bois's part serves to highlight just howmuch of a shadow the Anglo-American formof that critical edifice casts over the work ofthe other three—and how hard it is for themto deploy the crucial concept of medium ina manner untainted by modernist notionsof autonomy. Indeed, it could be said thatit is this difficulty above all that stalks theiraccount of the period since the 1970s.One of the book's more dramatic momentsoccurs in the concluding symposium when

Krauss declares that if she as a critic has anyresponsibility now, it is "to dissociate myselffrom this attack on the medium, and tospeak for its importance, which is to say forthe continuance of modernism," by whichshe means "returning the work to a consid-eration of the rules" (674).Though Fosterresponds at this point with some apparentalarm, the conclusion to his own contribu-tion on the year 1992 strikes a not dissimi-lar note. "Granted, a strict focus on its ownintrinsic problems can lead to an art that isinvoluted and detached, but a strict focuson extrinsic debates can lead art to forgetits own repertoire of forms, its own mem-ory of meanings—to relinquish the criticalpossibilities of its own semi-autonomoussites" (629).

Predictably, the chronological structureadopted by the authors works better at somepoints than at others. Not all years get achapter, while some get more than one. Theyear 1959 gets four. Some chapters clearlybenefit from the close focus on a historicallyspecific issue. Bois is particularly good onAuguste Rodin and Henri Matisse in 1900,and on Matisse again in 1910. Krauss writescompellingly on Duchamp in 1918 and onDonald Judd and Robert Morris in 1965.On the other hand, she is also the principaloffender in those cases where space devotedto argument with academic peers over theinterpretation of specific bodies of workmight usefully have been traded for somemore basic accounting for the emergence ofa given tendency. Thus, much of her discus-sion of collage (in 1912) is devoted to therehearsal of an old battle with PatriciaLeighten, while the latter part of her accountof Jackson Pollock's allover drip paintings(in 1949) is largely taken up by an engage-ment with the work of T. J. Clark. In othercases, submission to the need for coverageleads to degeneration into lists only tenu-ously justified by connection to the year inquestion. Having drawn a couple of shortstraws, Foster labors through accounts ofvideo and performance art indexed to 1973and 1974 respectively, the former seriouslydeficient in its failure to acknowledge thepioneering work of Gerry Schum, whichhas still to register on the consciousness ofNew York, though Schum has been deadnow for over thirty years.

There is considerable unevenness in theprovision of expansive material on individ-

ual movements and artists, but this is nottroubling in itself It can be argued on thepositive side that the structure of the bookensures some critical resistance to that era-sure of significant difference to which art-historical categorization conduces. There arenevertheless some cases where a determina-tion to "rescue" artists and groupings fromtheir supposed marginalization by mod-ernist criticism and art history (amountingin some cases to no more than their absencefrom American exhibition and publication)results in the extrusion of a kind of indi-gestible radical lump. Much of this is downto Buchloh, for whom marginalization, like"deskilling," seems to lead inexorably to"radicality" He does a particularly earnestjob in reforming the often whimsical andmessy anarchy that was Fluxus. The troublewith the art-historical equivalent of explain-ing jokes is that it tends to require of one'sinterlocutors that they inhabit a world with-out bathos. If we once come to suspectthat there is nothing the author might nottreat with comparable gravity, the natureof his engagement with his subject mustinevitably be rendered questionable. In anart world heavily populated by snake-oilsalespersons, one looks for reassurance thatone's guide has the wit both to resist and towork the con.

The issue that is unavoidably raised atthis point—as it must be in the assessmentof any significant work of critical art history—is the nature of the mutual implicationbetween authorial preferences and judge-ments on the one hand, and the developingtheoretical narrative on the other. Theaccount that drives Art since 1900 fits whereit touches, of course, as did the modernistnarrative that it has largely supplanted. Butlike that narrative, it depends for its coher-ence and its consistency on the adjustmentof descriptions and on the effective cancella-tion of exceptions. For Greenberg the ten-dency of major painting under modernismwas toward the elimination of modeling.To the objection that Salvador Dalí paintedroundly modeled figures, the response wasthat Dal! is not to be counted as a majorartist. In the revisionist account detailed inArt since 1900, Pablo Picasso's work of the1920s is an anomaly, as is virtually theentire career of Pierre Bonnard. BCrauss'schapter on 1919 accordingly recycles thecondemnation of Picasso's post-Cubist work

as pastiche that is elaborated in her bookThe Picasso Papers, while Bonnard is virtuallyignored, scoring half a column of text andone small picture (this in a book that findsspace for illustration of eight works byBroodthaers). Mark Rothko's paintings comerelatively late in the supposed developmentof abstract art and might thus be thought topose problems for the idea that the grid andthe monochrome represent unavoidabletermini. They are briefly assimilated to theaccount, however, by being classified as seri-al production. While Foster does a compe-tent job on the English material that catchesthe authors' attention, neither Walter Sickertnor Roger Hilton is mentioned at all.Duchamp's Etant donnés—which is surelynothing if not congenial to the institutionin which it is housed—becomes "a newlywrought paradigm," a "total and devastatingcritique of how the aesthetic itself operatesand is legitimized" (497), and is creditedwith providing the energizing precedent forsubsequent institutional critique. Althoughthe critical apparatus the book establishesseems entirely to warrant the welcome dis-robing of Edward Kienholz, Matthew Barney,and Bill Viola, no objection is raised to whatmight be thought the thoroughly spectacularexhibition-gambits of Buren. Haacke, andBroodthaers (allowing that these last havebeen subject to a high degree of posthu-mous management). Buchloh's account ofConceptual art rests upon a naïve politicalanalysis, and it is partial to the point of false-hood. Elements of the movement that criti-cally confronted the collapse of modernismin ways not submissive to that account areboth disparaged and misrepresented. (Assomeone associated with the work of Art& Language I should declare an interest atthis point. It could only be damaging tothe integrity of the authors' critical theorywere it to be claimed that that theory justi-fies ignorance or falsification of the workin question.)

The clearly partisan character of thewriting is not in itself what is problematic;nor is it that preference, theory, and narra-tive are subject to a fair amount of mutualadjustment. How else is modern art historyto proceed without boring everyone todeath? But unless readers are to take Art since1900 as a truly comprehensive survey, thequestions they are bound to ask are just howthe subject material gets singled out in the

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first place, how far the art-historical narra-tive is responsive to properties in the art ofthe period that might be noticed indepen-dently of the theory, and how far the theoryactually constitutes the very critical virtues itclaims to discern. It might be diought thatArt since 1900 is no more vulnerable in thisrespect than any other art-historical survey.But the problem with an art—or a conceptof art—that has no independent being apartfrom the "network of discourses" is that itcan have no effective resistance to that net-work. At worst it is client to the accountthat would represent it. It has traditionallybeen precisely in its bearing upon the limitsof language—of what is describable andsayable—that art has done its most invalu-able imaginative work. And this has hadsomething to do with its being made, andnot just thought up. In the words of NiklasLuhmann, "Only the overcoming of difficul-ties makes a work significant. Hoc opus, hielabor est." ' And the difficulties are nothing ifthey are not at some point practical.

Perhaps it was a concern along theselines that led Foster to worry lest art "forgetits own repertoire of forms," and Kraussto speak at the very end of the book of"returning the work to a consideration ofthe rules." If so, these are welcome signs ofthe possibility of some continuing vitality inthe critical project that An since 1900 repre-sents. They are the more welcome given that,notwithstanding the impressive intellectualindustry to which the book bears witness,its possibly unavoidable tendency is to acad-emicize the very revisionist enterprise itseeks to consohdate. This tendency is inno way inconsistent either with the book'sthoroughgoing elaboration of a radicalthread in the art of the twentieth century orwith the critical project's own political self-image. It is manifest in the patrician disfavorwith which Art since 1900 treats anomaliesand counterinstances, in its virtually unre-lieved solemnity, in its rhetorical managementof the untidinesses of practice, and in itsoffering of a codification of the conditionsof virtue that is not just as inflexible as themodernist critical apparatus that it seeksto replace, but actually harder practically toengage with.

It has been a persistent motif in thecritique of Greenberg's modernism that itserved to hide the world in which art ismade. But one could at least learn how to

look behind the occluding surfaces. Art since1900 is a product of the generation ofthose who did so—described elsewhere byBuchloh as the "mid- 1960s generation thathad recognized the historical failure of themodernist concepts of autonomy and visualpleasure.""^ The world of discourse in whichhe and his colleagues accord art its being isa far from congenial place, however. It is onein which dissent is not easily accommodatedas potentially constructive criticism, but israther reduced to the status of pitiableheresy. In this respect Art since 1900 is sim-ply—if monumentally—symptomatic of thetime and place of its production. As theauthors themselves seem almost to con-clude, the moment in question is a momentof exhaustion—exhaustion on the one hand,we might say, of New York's hegemony overthe culture of art, on the other of the imagi-nation of socialism in the intellectual workof the American Left.

1. This is the conclusion to Niklas Luhmann's Aftas a Social System, trans. E. M. Knodt (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2000), 315.2. Benjannin Buchloh, "Hans Haacke: Memory andInstrumental Reason," in Neo-Avantgarde andCulture Industry (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press,2000), 212.

Charles Harrison has been associated with thepractice of Art & Language since 1971. He isauthor of English Art and Modernism 1900-1939;Essays on Art & Language: Modernism: ConceptualArt and Painting: and Painting the Difference: Sexand Spectator in Modern Art, and is coeditor of Artin Theory ¡648-1815, 18i5-1900, and 1900-2000. He is Professor of the History and Theoryof Art at the Open University in the U.K. anda contributor to the tv^o four-volume series.Modern Art: Practices and Debates and Art of theTwentieth Century.

Resembling,Dismembering,RememberingTim Barringer

David Gëtsy. Body Doubles: Sculpturein Britain. I877-/90S. New Haven:YaleUniversity Press, 2004. 248 pp., ii'O b/wills. $6 j .

Sue Malvern. /Modern Art, Britain, andthe Great War:Witnessing,Testiniony,and Remembrance. New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2004. 244 pp., 40 colorills., 108 b/w. $50.

The meeting'—ultimately a collision—of themale body and modernity in British art isthe essential subject of these two sumptuousbooks. Leaiing through the strangely glossypages of Sue Malvern's history of British artand the First World War after perusing DavidGetsy's more aptly hisciotis sttidy of lateVictorian sculpture, one can't avoid connect-ing the gilded and lissome youtli, so grace-fully captured in bronze after bronze, withthe damaged and dehumanized bodiessearingly represented by the War Artists of1914—18. The limbs of Frederic Leighton's

Athlete Struggling with a Python may be strainingin mortal combat, but the athlete's body andbeing remain whole. It may seem diat highmodernism's fragmentation of the bodyfound its fulfillment in the trenches, wherethe terrible harvest of mechanized warfareseemed to play out the disruptive visualdevices of'Cubism and Futurism on the fleshof infantrymen. Yet, faced with the carnageof Ypres and the Somme, British artists, asMalvern chronicles, returned to many of theacademic devices so recently and defiantlyrejected. Ejid history painting provide aputting-together-again of bodies and identi-ties, a Leightonian pageant stepping backfrom the abyss to a world of corporealwholeness', or a making of modernist iconsfor the collective memory?

Getsy provides an important contribu-tion to th¿ history of British sculpture,revising, if not altogetlier replacing, SusanBeattie's established account of The NewSculpture and arguing for the centrality of fig-urai sculpture in the development of mod-ern British art. ' The discerning reader will

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