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M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology
of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism
Edited by Susan Bee and Mira Schor. Duke University Press. 467 pages.
$22.95 (paper).
Economic Engagements with Art
Edited by Neil De Marchi and Crauford D.W. Goodwin Ph.D. ’58.
Duke University Press. 506 pages. $22.95 (paper).00. |
Is postmodernism spent? When does a “critical method” of
analysis that claims that meaning is derived from the varied contexts
in which something is perceived—or in which a message is conveyed
—grow tired, weighed down by familiarity, or, in pomo’s
case, by the relativism with which it often seems to regard just about
any subject it addresses?
In art, postmodernist questioning has challenged the notion
of authorship—who really creates a work, an individual artist,
or the cultural and other conditions from which it emerges? It has
taken on standards of quality, too, for in a perceptually, culturally
relativistic world, who is to say what is technically proficient or
thematically relevant? Postmodernists have also looked at how the
art market and cultural institutions choose, present, classify, and
document artworks in various forms, and how such handling determines
their meaning and value to the public at large.
Postmodernists regard the world with a knowingly ironic
wink that says: “Of course, we all know we’re all being
manipulated by the mass media, hoodwinked by media-savvy politicians,
and rendered passive by a confluence of forces that seems to reduce
all human experience to some sort of spectacle.” But this is
old news. After three or four decades, depending on how one measures
it, postmodernism might be showing its age, at least on the more superficial
level of style (in fashion, visual art, design, and architecture).
Meanwhile, perhaps one of postmodernism’s most notable effects,
at least among many art and design students today, is that it has
helped nurture a strong desire for authenticity—that is, for
a sense of some absolute aesthetic values or technical standards on
which to hang their professional-artists’ hats.
Against this backdrop, books, reviews, and essays are
now being published that are beginning to examine postmodernism with
a retrospective air. Some observers have suggested that we are living
in “post-postmodernist” times.” In any case, many art-makers
sense that we are passing through some sort of transitional phase
that might eventually give rise to another Big Idea or Movement or
Style that will give everybody something new to chew on.
In the meantime, the American critic Eleanor Heartney’s
fine, brief survey, Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press), provides
a concise summary of how we arrived at this point, at least in the
visual arts. From Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) sculpture,
to Cindy Sherman’s untitled Film Stills (1970s) and Sherrie Levine’s
appropriations (1981) of classic black-and-white images by the photographer
Walker Evans, and on to the body-related art of the Nineties, Heartney
traces the development of postmodernist ideas in the works of artists
that gave them visible form.
Heartney does a fine job of explaining how so many of
the era’s paintings, sculptures, and multi-media installation
works served to argue pomo’s sometimes obvious, but no less contentious,
critical themes. Among them: the idea that the forward-moving, narrative
flow of history, including art history, ended decades ago, ushering
in an age of the perpetual present, in which historical styles or
motifs are merely fodder for art-making “strategies” that
celebrate pastiche; or the idea that, in our consumer-culture, insatiable
desire for gratification through representations of what we idealize
(like youthful fashion images) or through acquiring commodity objects
(to shop till you drop, including for works of art) both motivates
and helps explain our behavior.
Over the years, Duke University Press has published an
estimable share of books in the fields of postmodernist art history,
art criticism, and “culture studies.” M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An
Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited
by Susan Bee and Mira Schor, is one of its latest. It gathers a selection
of essays and articles from M/E/A/N/I/N/G, an art journal that Bee
and Schor founded in New York in 1986 and published for ten years.
By the late 1970s, pioneering feminist artists had introduced
many of their central themes into fine art’s international discourse.
In the early 1980s, splashy neo-expressionism emerged in Germany and
Italy, and
in New York. It rejected minimalism and
conceptualism’s austerity, and it seized the art world’s
attention. A short while later, M/E/A/N/I/N/G first appeared, providing
an independent venue for artists who, writing for themselves, explored
postmodernist critical issues from a feminist viewpoint at a time
when the art scene was charged with high energy and fueled by unprecedented
commercial hype.
Essays in the journal, which Bee and Schor published twice
a year, and roundtable discussions involving female and male artists,
poets, and critics, addressed such topics as how contemporary art
represented gender or how conventional art history had largely excluded
women artists from its canon. M/E/A/N/I/N/G touched upon subjects
that glossy art magazines generally ignored during the boom years
of the 1980s art market, such as everyday working conditions for artists
who were not rock-star famous, or how artists who were mothers managed
child-rearing and professional careers.
Articles in M/E/A/N/I/N/G dared to examine from a feminist
perspective the idea of “visual pleasure”—whose pleasure,
and on what terms? They also looked at the persona of the “bad
girl,” who, contrary to American society’s moralizing stereotype,
just might have been a self-aware, self-assured, capable woman who
knew what she wanted—security, self-esteem, a satisfying job,
power, and sex—
and did not hesitate to go about getting it.
Some of the language in this anthology is dated; such
inelegant phrases as “patriarchy’s strategies of ideological
and institutional repression” or “the erotically disenfranchised
postmenopausal woman” might make more poetically inclined readers
wince. But they might also make them angry, for so many of the unfair,
condescending attitudes toward women in general and toward female
artists in particular that prevailed in society and in the cultural
world decades ago persist today.
Consider, for example, the typically small quantities
of works by women artists that routinely turn up in major museum exhibitions
like the Whitney Biennial in New York. Or the fact that revisionist
art historians still find themselves having to play catch-up with
outdated textbooks that diminish or ignore the accomplishments of
such figures as the black American painter Norman Lewis (1909-1979)
or the painter Joan Mitchell (1926-1992). Both were significant New
York School abstractionists who deserve to be known to more than an
informed, art-world elite.
M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology is a valuable document whose
arguments and messages still reverberate in urgent ways. Overall,
the book makes the point that postmodernism never completely subsumed
feminist critical theory. Indeed, over time, as structuralism begat
poststructuralism and the intellectual gymnastics of deconstruction,
postmodernism’s critical reach expanded to embrace not only literature,
cinema, and the visual and design arts, but also the methods and subject
matter of history and science. Academicians in these latter fields
are still wrestling with pomo’s impact today, as it challenges
the factuality of their research findings and their disciplines’
authority.
Just how far postmodernist critical thinking has stretched
in the visual arts was demonstrated in the exhibition “Painting
at the Edge of the World” at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis
earlier this year. As the show’s organizer, Douglas Fogle, observes
in the catalogue that he edited, which accompanied that presentation
of thirty artists’ works, today the practice of painting “is
no longer solely bound by such traditional categories as figuration,
abstraction, portraiture, and landscape, or even by the conventional
definition of the medium as paint on canvas.”
In the book Painting at the Edge of the World, numerous
artists and critics, in a similarly broad manner, consider what painting—the
concept, the process, the finished object—in our times can be.
Their conclusion: A painting, which is normally an image supported
by a surface (say, in oil paint on canvas), can certainly take such
a form, but that it can take many other novel forms as well.
For a long time, photography has influenced what image-makers
do; more recently, so has the expressive power of visual, digital
media. But Fogle’s exhibition suggested, and his book echoes
the idea, that, as he writes, “[P]ainting’s traditional
function as a window on the world has been circumvented, or rather
someone has left the window open and a number of things have crawled
in.”
Among the evidence of this change in the show and the
book: works ranging from the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica’s
three-dimensional paintings-as-sculpture to the Scottish artist Jim
Lambie’s site-specific installations. Oiticica, who died in 1980,
took paintings off the wall and broke them up into multiple planes
in space; often he hung their component parts from the ceiling and
placed mirrors on the floor beneath them. Lambie has “action-painted”
against a gallery’s wall, using a shaggy bunch of carrots as
a brush, and created geometric patterns with colored-vinyl tape on
the floor of another.
Other elements that have crept into the conceptual and
physical space that paintings once literally framed include the artist
Takashi Murakami’s amusing blend of influences from pop art and
from Japanese manga and anime (comic books and animated cartoons),
and the sumptuous psychedelia of the British-born artist Chris Ofili’s
mixed-media tableaux. Ofili uses paint, glitter, magazine cutouts,
and elephant dung. His images refer to African art, hip-hop culture,
fashion, and 1970s “blaxploitation” films. From such works,
some viewers might surmise that we really are passing through a period
of late postmodernism or post-postmodernism, in which artists are
both theoretically and literally deconstructing the familiar forms
that artistic expression conventionally takes.
If so, then as Painting at the Edge of the World argues,
painting (or “painting”) can refer as much to the making
of tangible objects that represent the world—the real or the
imaginary—as it does to an outlook that is philosophical and,
well, “painterly.” Such is the sensibility of a person who
“paints” what he experiences even as he experiences it (that
is, someone who considers what he perceives as he perceives it in
terms of how it could be artistically represented). Think of a painter
or film-maker’s gesture as she crops a view with her fingers,
imitating a picture frame or a camera’s viewfinder. Or recall
the voyeuristic suburban teenager in the movie American Beauty who
videotaped hours and hours of his daily peregrinations. All the world’s
a stage, postmodernist image-makers tell us, and it is our job or
our recreation to capture the spectacle, to make the real irreal with
whatever media become available and in whichever forms we can fashion
from them.
Another Duke Press anthology, Economic Engagements with
Art, scrutinizes the market in which art it is bought and sold. Edited
by Neil De Marchi and Crauford D.W. Goodwin, its essays examine the
history of a field whose more recent roller-coaster rhythms have reflected
the money-obsessed spirit of our age. In one essay, Zarinés
Negrón, a 1999 Duke graduate in economics, looks back at the
European art market’s early history. She recalls the life and
work of the seventeenth-century Spanish painter and art theorist Francisco
Pacheco, who served as an overseer of religious painting during the
Inquisition. His writings described the practice of painting and advised
both suppliers and buyers of art—of artworks as products—about
what to look for.
Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke
and developer of a course for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies
program that examines some of these same issues as seen through the
Bloomsbury group, has researched the relationship between the history
of art and that of economic thought. His essay, “The Economics
of Art Through Art Critics’ Eyes,” looks at how the pioneering,
twentieth-century critics Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Kenneth Clark
understood and explained the conditions in which art is made and consumed.
Their concerns were primarily aesthetic. Still, their considerations
of the nature and functions of art inevitably took into account the
commerce that surrounded it. Goodwin writes: “These critics behaved
and approached their subject in some ways remarkably like... economists.”
Among their aesthetic beliefs, they held that the artist
was someone who answered an inner—or higher—calling, not
the dictates of market forces; that beauty could be regarded as more
important than comfort; and that art was something that served to
enhance or improve civilization. In short, art was something good—provided
it was good art.
Economic Engagements with Art also looks at the nineteenth-century
British artist and critic John Ruskin’s musings on similar themes,
at the international scope of the art market, and at luxury spending
and how “pictures” were priced in eighteenth-century England.
The book serves as a reminder that postmodernism’s sometimes
self-important-sounding critique of art as a commodity has long roots.
Artists, critics, buyers, and sellers have long recognized that artworks
are products whose values and meanings shift in relation to laws of
supply and demand, to the changing contexts in which they are experienced,
or simply to fashion’s perennial, passing fancy.
These books and others like them put some of the ideas
and subjects that historically helped shape postmodernism or that
its proponents have routinely investigated into a perspective that
could be helpful to university students. For anyone else who might
want to become familiar with a way of critical analysis that has been
pervasive and influential for a long time, they offer plenty of insight,
too. However postmodernism in the visual arts further evolves is anyone’s
guess. What is certain, though, is that its outlook and sensibility—ironic,
challenging to established powers, sensitive to language, and endlessly
intrigued by the forms and meanings to be found in the human-made,
visible environment—have indelibly marked our understanding of
the world and societies in which we live. —Edward M. Gomez
Gomez ’79 is the author of Roberto Cortázar,
a biography of the contemporary Mexican painter, which will be published
this summer by Landucci. |
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