Archives of modern art

October

Volumn , Issue 99, 2002, Pages 81-95

  Foster, Hal ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61249222286     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/016228702317274648     Document Type: Review

References (34)

1. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper Books, 1976), p. 129. Unlike Foucault, however, I want to put these archives into historical motion; my emphasis will be on the shifts between them.
2. I borrow the first term from Michael Fried (see note 4) and the second from Susan Buck-Morss in her Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).
3. Charles Baudelaire, "The Salon of 1846," in Jonathan Mayne, ed., The Mirror of Art: Critical Studies of Charles Baudelaire (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 83.
4. See Michael Fried, "Painting Memories: On the Containment of the Past in Baudelaire and Manet," Critical Inquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984), pp. 510-42;
5. also his Manet's Modernism, or the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). I am indebted to "Painting Memories" throughout the next few paragraphs.
6. Might some of the mnemonics that Frances Yates traced from antiquity to the Renaissance in her classic The Art of Memory (1966) be continued in the modern museum?
7. Fried, "Painting Memories," pp. 526-30.
8. Baudelaire, 1865 letter to Manet, in Correspondance, 2 vols. (Paris, 1973), vol. 2: p. 497. In some respects Jeff Wall returns to this crux in Manet, and claims it as the dynamic of his own pictorial practice.
9. On this Oedipal structure in nineteenth-century French painting see Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire: From David to Delacroix (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
10. and Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists in Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
11. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), p. 177.
12. Marcel Proust, À l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 2 vols. (Paris), vol. 2: pp. 62-63. This brief reflection on the museum comes in the midst of a long meditation on departures and arrivals, on de-contextualizations and re-contextualizations and their effects on habit and memory. "In this respect as in every other," Proust writes, "our age is infected with a mania for showing things only in the environment that belongs to them, thereby suppressing the essential thing, the act of mind which isolated them from that environment."
13. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), p. 110.
14. On memory crises see Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993).
15. The late work of Alois Riegl-the Riegl of "The Cult of Monuments" (1903), say-might serve as well here.
16. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), p. 229. This is not only the Hegelian sentiment that art is "a thing of the past" and that art history is belated by definition. What is at issue here is the redemptive logic inscribed in the dialectic of reification and reanimation (more on this below).
17. Martin Warnke, "On Heinrich Wölfflin," Representations 27 (summer 1989), p. 176.
18. Nineteen hundred fifteen is the year that Duchamp finds his "readymade" term in New York, a model of art that mocks style-discourse, especially its encoding of singular subjectivity and original work; the year that Malevich exhibits his early Suprematist paintings and Tatlin his early Constructivist reliefs two initial attempts to overthrow style-discourse altogether, especially its encoding of bourgeois forms of production and reception; and the year that Picasso reverts to drawing à la Ingres, that is, to a kind of postmodern pastiche avant la lettre that complicates any historicist narrative of styles (far more so than the nineteenth-century eclecticism that worried Wölfflin). Yet if Wölfflinian formalism could not address avant-garde art, some of its legatees felt that it might be adapted to "modernist paintings first French, then American. For example, Greenberg and Fried extracted a "dialectic of modernism" from such painting that is expressly Wölfflinian. It was driven by the same dynamic of palling in perception and problem-solving in form that Wölfflin saw at work in his history of styles, and it too was pledged to the reanimation of art and vision against reification-against the reification of "kitsch (for Greenberg) and "theatricality" (for Fried), that is to say, of mechanical reproduction and commodity culture. Again, all in the service of formal unity and historical continuity. (On the "dialectic of modernism" see Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella [Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, 1965], reprinted in Art and Objecthood [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998].)
19. Of course we face neither the world war nor the fascist threat that Wölfflin and Warburg faced, but there are some parallels to the crisis of nearly a century ago: a far deeper challenge to the Eurocentric tradition, an equally dramatic transformation of the technological bases of society, a greater extension of capitalist Empire, and so forth-certainly enough to provoke a renewed anxiety about the memory-structure of artistic practices and historical discourses today. This anxiety is effectively treated-not merely acted out-in two recent interventions in art-historical methodology: The Judgment of Paris by Hubert Damisch, which traces a "judgment" specific to art history, and The Intelligence of Art by Thomas Crow, which registers an "intelligence" specific to art; see The Judgment of Paris, trans. John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
20. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 19.
21. This formulation speaks to a Hegelian preoccupation of the discipline: how great art can be both "a thing of the past" and available to contemporary consciousness. On this point see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), especially the introduction.
22. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 255.
23. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 81.
24. Warburg bridges our second and third archival relations; and, to deepen the third one I have associated here with Benjamin and Panofsky, a pairing of Kracauer and Warburg, who complement each other uncannily on the relation between the photographic and the mnemonic, should be developed-but Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has already done so, brilliantly, in "Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive," October 88 (spring 1999), pp. 117-45.
25. Benajamin, Illuminations, p. 257.
26. On this relation see Denis Hollier, "On Paper," in Cynthia Davidson, ed., Anymore (New York: Any Foundation, 2001).
27. Also see Rosalind Krauss, "Postmodernism's Museum without Walls," in Reesa Greenberg et al., Thinking about Exhibitions (New York: Routledge, 1996). The "museum without walls" is the unfortunate translation of le musée imaginaire.
28. For a contemporaneous critique of the notion see Georges Duthuit, Le musée inimaginable (Paris: Libraire José Corti, 1956).
29. Yet this too is implicit in the "Art Work" essay, though most commentators overlook it. "At the time of its origin a medieval picture of the Madonna could not yet be said to be 'authentic,'" Benjamin writes in a footnote. "It became 'authentic' only during the succeeding centuries and perhaps most strikingly so during the last one" (Illuminations, p. 243).
30. André Malraux, The Voices of Silence, trans. Stuart Gilbert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). "All that remains of Aeschylus is his genius. It is the same with figures that in reproduction lose both their significance as objects and their function (religious or other); we see them only as works of art and they bring home to us only their maker's talent. We might almost call them not 'works' but 'moments' of art. Yet diverse as they are, all these objects. speak for the same endeavor; it is as though an unseen presence, the spirit of art, were urging all on the same quest, from miniature to picture, from fresco to stained-glass window, and then, at certain moments, it abruptly indicated a new line of advance, parallel or abruptly divergent. Thus it is that, thanks to the rather specious unity imposed by photographic reproduction on a multiplicity of objects, ranging from the statue to the bas-relief, from bas-reliefs to seal-impressions, and from these to the plaques of the nomads, a 'Babylonian style' seems to emerge as a real unity, not a mere classification-as something resembling, rather, the life-style of a great creator. Nothing conveys more vividly and compellingly the notion of a destiny shaping human ends than do the great styles, whose evolutions and transformations seem like long scars that Fate has left, in passing, on the face of the earth" (p. 112).
31. Michel Foucault, "Fantasia on the Library" (1967), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 92-93.
32. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), p. 186.
33. The most trenchant account of this dialectic remains Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1979).
34. On the "mediation" of modern architecture, see Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).