[david carrier] rosalind krauss and american philo

Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism

Shirley Kaneda, Smooth Abrasion, 2000, 76"x 64" oil, pencil on canvvas. Courtesy of Feigen Contemporary, NYC.

Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Crit icism

From Formalism to Beyond Postmodernism

David Carrier

D) Westport, Connecticut London PRAEGER

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carrier, David, 1944-Rosalind Krauss and American philosophical art criticism : from formalism to beyond

postmodernism / David Carrier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-275-97520-7 (alk. paper) 1. Krauss, Rosalind E.—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Art criticism—United

States—History—20th century. 3. Art Philoshpy. I. Title N7483.K7 C37 2002 701r .18—dc21 2002066344

British Library of Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright © 2002 by David Carrier

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002066344 ISBN: 0-275-97520-7

First published in 2002

Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com

Printed in the United States of America

@r The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).

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This book is for Alexander Nehamas

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In evaluating a perspective, we must always ask, 'To whose life does it contribute?7' There is absolutely no reason to think that a perspective that is good for one type of person will also be good for another—not to speak of "all others/7

Alexander Nehamas

The struggle of the spirit is just as brutal as the battle of men. Rimbaud

Contents

Preface

Introduction:

Chapter 1.

Chapter 2.

Chapter 3.

Chapter 4.

Chapter 5.

Afterword:

Index

The Rise of Philosophical Art Criticism

In the Beginning Was Formalism

The Structuralist Adventure

The Historicist, Antiessentialist Definition of Art

Resentment and Its Discontents

The Deconstruction of Structuralism

The Fate of Philosophical Art Criticism

xi

1

17

33

55

71

87

111

123

Preface

This book tells the story of Rosalind Krauss's intellectual career. This preface is where I briefly explain my background, telling how and why I came to write this account. Trained as a philosopher, in 1980 I started writing art criticism. The inspired writing of Joseph Masheck, then editor of Artforum, initially led me to focus on abstract painting. Thanks to supportive editors at Artforum, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artlnternational, The Burlington Magazine, Modern Painters, Kunst Chronik, and Tema Celeste, I have published a great deal of art criticism in the past twenty years.

As a critic, I was especially concerned to write about what I saw. But I often wondered how to wrrite a history of art from this period, which is not easy to understand. Like every American critic, I read Rosalind Krauss's publications and her journal October. And I reviewed a number of her books.1 It took me a long time to see that a study of her career was the best way to describe the development of American artwriting in the era after Abstract Expressionism. Krauss is a famous critic, but no one yet has evaluated her achievement. Writing as an analytic philosopher, my aim is to tell her story, showing how she deals in very challenging ways with philosophical concerns. Krauss's books are readily accessible, and so I am not concerned with summarizing them. My aim, rather, is to present and debate her contribution to the philosophical study of visual art.

XII Preface

Copyright restrictions permit me to quote only three hundred words from each of her books, and so often I paraphrase.

The 1996 Bielefeld author conference devoted to Arthur Danto helped me understand how the concerns of analytic philosophers and art critics intersect. Thanks to Julia Perkins and Brian C. Fay, I published the proceedings in History and Theory.2 When I was visiting lecturer at Princeton University in 1998, Alexander Nehamas and I discussed perspectivism, a subject central to my analysis of Krauss's writings. Nothing I write will meet his standards, but I learned from his fanatical lucidity. In an interview with me he said:3

I do believe the features that characterize oneself and one's life are similar to the features of literary works. The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing—style, connectedness, grace, elegance—and also, we must not forget, sometimes getting it right. Of course I'm an aesthete, I'm an unabashed aesthete. My main difficulty with the late twentieth century in America is that we neither respect nor admire enough what we used to call "aesthetic values." Is that bad?

I wondered how his account was consistent with the much discussed claim that postmodernism makes aesthetic values passe. The beginning of the Introduction uses his ideas and at the end of the Afterword I offer a tentative answer to his question.

Paul Barolsky, James Elkins, Shirley Kaneda, Catherine Lee, George J. Leonard, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Mangold, Saul Ostrow, Robert Ryman, Gary and Loekie Schwartz, Sean Scully, Timothy J. Standring, Garner Tullis, and Barbara Westman have discussed art and artwriting with me. Kaneda provided my fontispiece. And I thank Bill Berkson, Peggy and Richard Kuhns, Robert Pincus-Witten, and the late Mark Roskill for reading drafts of this manuscript, Stephen Bann gave suggestions about Rene Girard; Mark Cheetham discussed Kant with me and found a bibliography of writings by and about Krauss; Whitney Davis described the reception of his controversial essay discussed in chapter 1; many years ago, Albert Elsen showed me the Rodins at Stanford, opening the back door to the gates of hell; Otto Karl Werkmeister 's Icons of the Left (1999) gave me the epigraph from Rimbaud; and William Tucker made an unpublished lecture available to me. I report bits and pieces of remembered conversations with Clement Greenberg. Arthur Danto gave the key to the discussion of Greimas, and when in the early 1980s we toured Northern Italy together, his response to a street festival

Preface xiii

in Verona was one inspiration for the present Afterword.4 Danto's more recent characterization of my writing helped suggest how to present this account.5 All my publications should be dedicated to my wife, Marianne Novy, for she has helped me to argue and write more effectively.

The Afterword supplements my "Memory & Oblivion in Contemporary American Art: The Lesson of Artforum/' given at the 29th International Conference on the History of Art, Amsterdam, 1996, and published in the proceedings of that conference. I borrow from my lecture on connoisseur ship given at Princeton University; in four Swedish Universities; at the National Academy of Art, Hangzhou; and as 1999 Harvey Buchanan Lecturer in Art History and the Humanities, at the Cleveland Museum of Art. And I thank Laurie Schneider, editor of Source, for publishing two essays on Andy Warhol which contain ideas developed in different ways here.

This book, written in spring 1999, was withheld after Krauss's medical emergency. When I circulated the manuscript, after her condition stabilized, I learned how controversial she is. One publisher felt that I was much too critical, whereas several otherwise sympathetic readers of my work were surprised that I thought her writings deserving of close study. One editor who rejected this book told me that she would publish it were she not a friend of several of the critics I discuss. I thank Roger Conover, Jonathan Gilmore, and two anonymous readers for Greenwood Press for helpful comments, which I have used.6

Any reader of biographies knows the difficulty of writing about near contemporaries. In her autobiography, Muriel Spark, complaining about published accounts of her life, writes:7

The disturbing thing about false and erroneous statements is that well-meaning scholars tend to repeat each other. Lies are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect Truth by itself is neutral and has its own dear beauty.

Many artworld people know a great deal about Krauss's life, and so she is sure to be the subject of an intellectual biography. Much could be revealed by describing her alliances, friendships, and enemies; however, this study of her ideas is based almost entirely upon her publications. In an earlier book, I critically discussed Charles Baudelaire's art criticism.8 Here, similarly, I write about Krauss's publications. I am not interested in gossip about her. I have never

. . . .

XIV Preface

met Krauss, though I once heard her lecture, and long ago she generously responded to a minor query. For me, she is a marvelous original writer, always inventive, and never dull. I respectfully argue with her because she makes exciting claims worth debating.

April 2001

NOTES

1. See my reviews of Passages in Modern Sculpture, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 36, 4 (1978): 510-512; The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Burlington Magazine (November 1985): 817; The Picasso Papers, Art Journal 57,4 (winter 1998): 102-105.

2. History and Theory Theme Issue 37 (1998). 3. "Talking with Alexander Nehamas," Bomb no. 65 (Fall 1998):

38.1 quote from the full original interview. 4. See my "Baudelaire, Pater and the Origins of Modernism," in

Comparative Criticism: An Annual Journal, ed. E. S. Shaffer, 17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 109-121.

5. "Symposium: On David Carrier's Artwriting," Journal of Aesthetic Education 32, 4 (winter 1998): 27-59, including my "Reply to James Elkins, Arthur C. Danto, and Richard Kuhns," 51-59.

6. Jonathan Gilmore, The Life of a Style: Beginnings and Endings in the Narrative History of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), contributing significantly to the discussion, challenges my analysis.

7. Muriel Spark, Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), p 11.

8. David Carrier, High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism (University Park: Perm State Press, 1996).

INTRODUCTION

The Rise of Philosophical Art Criticism

We are engaged in a collective enterprise whose results can't always be easily traced. Some kind of marketplace of arguments and ideas may generate developments of value that wouldn't have been produced just by the greatest thinkers working individually and responding to each other.

Thomas Nagel

Visual art often is accompanied by words. Art critics evaluate contemporary art, and historians reconstruct the meaning of work from earlier t imes. The words accompanying modern i s t and postmodernist art have special importance, for much of this work is identifiable as art only because it is accompanied by theorizing. Clement Greenberg is the most important American art critic. In the 1940s, almost alone, he influentially championed Jackson Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists. Properly understood, he argued these painters developed the tradition of French modernism, which in turn works out the essential concerns of the old masters. In the 1960s, when the importance of Greenberg's view of the 1940s was generally accepted, his analysis of newer art was rejected by most younger critics. There was a well-developed market in contemporary art, and so someone had to replace him.

2 Rosalind Krauss

In the 1960s, Rosalind Epstein Krauss was but one of many critics who, after starting as a follower of Greenberg, went her own way. From the late 1990s perspective, she is, without visible rival, the most influential American critic of her era. How, Alexander Nehamas asks,1

[C]an one achieve the perfect unity and freedom that are primarily possessed by perfect literary characters?

One way of achieving this perhaps impossible goal might be to write a great number of very good books that exhibit great apparent inconsistencies among them but that can be seen to be deeply continuous with one another when they are read carefully and well.

This is what Krauss has done. Her development has four stages: (1) her early formalist essays from the 1960s and her book on David Smith, Terminal Iron Works, published when she was close to Greenberg; (2) the antiformalist narrative history of modernist sculpture developed in the 1970s in Passages in Modern Sculpture; (3) the structuralist antinarrative theorizing presented in the 1980s in The Originality of the Avant-Garde; and (4) the poststructuralist accounts of her recent studies of the semiology of cubism and the 'informal' in modernism and postmodernism. I want to write what Nehamas describes as

a book about these books that shows how they fit together, how a single figure emerges through them, how even the most damaging contradictions may have been necessary for that figure or character or author or person . . . to emerge fully from them.2

Krauss has moved an enormous distance in thirty years. The story of her career can, with pardonable exaggeration, be taken for the history of American criticism in this period. After Greenberg, no one has had as much influence on American art critics as Krauss. Her style of argument (though not always her taste) has been immensely important. Many art critics and, more recently, some art historians are heavily indebted to her ways of thinking. With her collaborators at October, the journal she cofounded, Krauss defined the dominant style of present-day academic art writing. With only three thousand subscribers, this publication has had great influence. Art historians who now so readily evoke the names of Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan owe something to October.

Introduction 3

I reconstruct Krauss's career, explaining the transitions in her thought, and evaluating her arguments. Krauss has written interestingly about David Smith, surrealism, and a host of modern and postmodern artists working in a variety of media. Like most strong interpretations, hers are highly controversial. I do not evaluate her tastes in contemporary art—this is a study of her theorizing. She appears to be a formidable personality. That is to the good, for in the artworld virtue is not its own reward. Krauss is a philosophical art critic. When immediately accessible art critics such as Frank O'Hara review an exhibition, their writing contains no abstract reasoning. By contrast, philosophical art critics do serious theorizing. A philosophical art critic is both historiographer and aesthetician—the critic's account of what art is often determines how art's history is narrated. This story about the rise of Krauss and philosophical art criticism is a story about the American artworld. In Europe, Greenberg and his successors are much less important.

Greenberg's analysis of Abstract Expressionism was inspired, in part, by philosophical argumentation. Pollock's "illusion of indeterminate but somehow definitely shallow depth . . . reminds me of what Picasso and Braque arrived at thirty odd years before, with the facet-planes of their Analytical Cubism."3 Analytic Cubism was important, and if Pollock's art was similar in this way, it also was important. People ignorant of Greenberg's theory could not see this similarity. When, by contrast, O'Hara writes of Number I,4 "this is the classical period of Pollock, classical in all its comprehensive, masterful, and pristine use of his own passions, classical in its cool, ultimate beauty.. . Pollock is the Ingres, and de Kooning the Delacroix, of Action Painting. Their greatness is equal but antithetical," his eloquent description is straightforward. O'Hara, as much of an intellectual as Greenberg, was a different sort of critic.

Philosophical art critics are special sorts of art writers. Vasari and Hegel are philosophical art critics, as are Erwin Panofsky (and some of his German precursors and contemporaries); so too are John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Clement Greenberg, Ernst Gombrich, Michael Fried, and Arthur Danto. But such indisputably great art writers as Diderot and Baudelaire are not philosophical art critics—nor are most journalists publishing in Artforum or the Burlington Magazine. It is possible to write highly distinguished art criticism without being a philosophical art critic.

Some philosophical art critics place philosophical concerns center stage. Hegel is of course centrally concerned with such theorizing.

4 Rosalind Krauss

But Vasari and Greenberg are only marginally concerned with philosophical problems. A philosophical art critic need not be an art historian. Judged by present-day standards, Ruskin and Fry barely qualify as art historians. Nor need a philosophical art critic be a distinguished philosopher. Pater and Greenberg borrow from philosophy in frankly eclectic ways. Few great philosophers of art are philosophical art critics. Kant, for all of his influence on philosophical art critics, is too far removed from art history to be a philosophical art critic; the same is true of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and John Dewey. A philosophical art critic must both be an art critic and be involved with philosophical concerns. Philosophical art critics thus inevitably are odd in-between figures. Their strictly philosophical interests often puzzle art historians; their concern with art's history is likely to pass by philosophers.

Along with her only true present-day American rival, Danto, Krauss offers a cha l lenging account of theoret ical and historiographic problems of contemporary art. Because Danto is a philosopher well known among aestheticians and historiographers, his theorizing has been much discussed.5 Krauss's vocabulary is less accessible to most American philosophers, and so her achievement as philosopher of art history has attracted less recognition. This book aims to change that situation.

Philosophical art critics often are criticized for being cavalier about facts.6 They are more likely to make errors than narrow specialists. Hegel and Pater got historical details wrong, but their theories remain interesting. Philosophical art critics need to be evaluated by appropriate standards. But that should not be taken as a license for suspending normal scholarly concerns with truth. Krauss apologizes for introducing Serra's art via discussion of Giacometti: "Giacometti's work has neither any real interest nor any relevance to his own."7 That statement gains authority because it appears in a commissioned essay. But in fact Serra has said:8

Philip Glass and I . . . would go to La Coupole every night. At two in the morning, Giacometti would usually come in. . . . We were very young, and for us, he epitomized the image of the working sculptor. The fact that he reduced sculpture to a plaster kernel as a catalyst for his understanding of the world was as interesting as anything going on at that time.

Yet Krauss's interpretation of Serra remains of great interest.

Introduction 5

A major philosophical art critic summarizes the cultural history of an era. Krauss is the first major female philosophical art critic. Not conspicuously identified with feminism in her publications, Krauss is of the first generation when academic women played a major role. When she recently writes, "art made by women needs no special pleading," she takes as given this achievement.9 Historians who want to understand feminism in art history will look closely at her books. So will scholars who want to know why "postmodernism" became so important in the 1980s. What will interest them, I predict, are less Krauss's errors and confusions than her amazing ingenuity. Presenting a highly selective history of American art criticism since Greenberg, I aim to bridge the gap between aestheticians and working art critics, writers who usually are very far apart. Krauss herself has mostly formulated her claims in the vocabularies of the French structuralist and poststructuralist writers. Her argument gains much in accessibility if presented in the lucid language of analytic philosophy. Krauss is a great subject for the analytic philosopher, for she says much of interest worth arguing about.

Krauss's development is dialectical. What motivates transitions at each point is the felt recognition of the inadequacy of her earlier way of thinking. Rejecting formalism, she constructed the developmental history of Passages—an alternative to Greenberg's history. Then in The Originality she rejects narrative histories, replacing them with the atemporal structures displayed in Greimas's structuralist diagrams. Finally, in her recent publications she abandons the claim to show the historical structure of modernism and postmodernism. The Originality supposes that there is one determinate way of translating the temporal development of visual art into a structure. Krauss now recognizes that there are diverse ways of telling her story. What marks the transition, at each stage of her career, is a new way of narrating the history of art. Her formalist writings employ Greenberg's Hegelian historiography. They treat modernism as making explicit the nature of art that was implicit in the old masters. In Passages she finds an alternative way of describing the development of modernist sculpture. Then in The Originality, the third stage, Krauss rejects nar-rat ives al together in favor of a s t ructural is t account of postmodernism. Finally, in her poststructuralist discussions of cubism and surrealist photography she acknowledges and overcomes the problems inherent in a structural account of art's history.

Krauss's abandonment of narratives is associated with American interest in French-style structuralism; her turn to semiotic analysis

6 Rosalind Krauss

and the "informal" is her deconstruction of structuralism.10 Krauss's development is the product of her active engagements as an art critic. Only after the fact can we reconstruct her development in my terms. Too many Americans who read French theorists applied their ideas in mechanical ways. What gives authenticity to Krauss's development is her active working through of the problems of art criticism and art history. She uses, and does not merely appropriate, continental theorizing. My account of Krauss's development differs, I would expect, from her own view of this self-fashioning. Krauss has worked hard to move away from a developmental way of thinking about art's history, and this book sets her writing in a developmental structure. But just as her career reflects concern to give the most convincing account of art, so I attempt to provide the best possible analysis of her position. As I do not know her personally, when I explain why she changes her mind, or describe her goals, I refer only to what can be deduced from her publications. "My" Krauss, thus, is Krauss-the-author. It would be tedious to continually qualify my assertions, saying "probably Krauss believed" or "most likely Krauss wanted." My reconstruction of her ways of thinking pretends to be more confident than it can honestly be.

For a long time I wanted to write a book combining the sweeping boldness of Fredric Jameson's histories with the conceptual clarity provided by analytic philosophy. I wanted to write something like Danto's book Jean-Paul Sartre, but with a subject from my world—the artworld. It took me a long time to see that my subject was Krauss. In his sympathetic review of The Optical Unconscious, Danto argues that11

Krauss7 way to the optical unconscious is through a sort of free association, writing down what is suggested to her by what she has written down, moving from Ruskin to Fried to Conrad to Jameson to Mondrian to . . . to. . . . So the book is inherently allusive and, one might say, adjunctive, rather than logical and narrational.

I disagree. Krauss's seemingly free associations are governed by a strange but logical argument which I spell out. In this book I suspend judgment about the comparative merit of Danto's and Krauss's view of philosophical art history. In the Afterword I explain why it is too early to judge the ultimate merits of her claims.

Krauss can be silly, determinedly mean spirited, and wrong headed. But she is consistently original. Only scholars who don't

Introduction 7

take risks always succeed. She deserves her fame, for without her our artworld would be a far different, quite less interesting place. Her failures and limitations, as much as her successes, are revealing. Unlike Jameson, whose Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism is a proper treatise, Krauss appears an unsystematic thinker. She has a disconcerting habit of borrowing fragments of theories, without regard for questions of internal consistency. Unlike their colleagues who study literature, art critics tend to be bricoleurs. Neither Diderot, Baudelaire, nor Pater or Roger Fry are original philosophers—they borrow and adapt ideas. In art history, as in other domains of intellectual life (and in art itself), the greatest recognition and professional esteem go to those capable of deep originality. To become an academic art historian, a student must learn the skills of professors. Of the graduate students who become professors, only a small minority makes significant innovations. To show skilled mastery of the established methodologies and to extend these familiar approaches to new materials are significant achievements. But at the highest levels, much more is expected. Admiration for deep innovation reflects the demands of the intellectual marketplace. A discipline unable to achieve serious innovation would not attract good students or adequate support. Demand for innovation is a natural expectation of a culture where changes in everyday life come quickly.

To see how good Krauss is, look at some of her would-be competitors. In the 1960s and 1970s, various histories of twentieth-century sculpture reflected the concerns of contemporary artists. Krauss's Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) deserves comparison with such rivals as William Tucker's Early Modern Sculpture (1974) and Jack Burnham's Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968). Tucker, a distinguished sculptor, writes with great sensitivity. Perhaps it was possible already in 1974 to sense that he would turn back historically in his sculpture, moving from his earlier abstractions to art rooted in the tradition of Rodin, Degas, and the other early modernist masters described in his book.12 Tucker is more visually sensitive than Krauss, but Early Modern Sculpture was irrelevant to the leading new developments of the 1970s—installations, earth works, and minimalism. Unlike Krauss, Tucker builds no bridge between early modernism and the present. Burnham certainly is concerned with the present; and he, like Krauss, was reading the structuralist literature. Why then did Beyond Modern Sculpture have so much less impact than Passages? Burnham, a muddled thinker, championed the wrong new art. He was fascinated by dreary mechanical sculpture that used

8 Rosalind Krauss

electronic apparatus and blinking lights—what he calls Robot and Cyborg Art. As Robert Mangold has recently noted, such work was in fashion: "There was a silliness in a lot of Pop Art and Kinetic Art of this time—art that moved, blinked, made sounds, was gaglike. I was not interested in any of that stuff."13 Neither, it turned out, was the artworld at large.14

When a critical paradigm is exhausted, there are conflicts among new competing methodologies. "By the end of the sixties it was clear that formalist abstraction had been challenged by a new set of formal and moral values."15 After Greenberg's taste and theorizing were rejected, what interpretative approach would replace his? Robert Pincus-Witten, one of the best critics of the day and a gifted original writer, offers a very subtle account of this moment. "Greenberg . . . really mattered because he pointed to shifts in style and these recognitions had the effect of even further intensifying such dislocations."16

What might reasonably have been expected was that Greenberg's successor would also develop such a stylistic analysis. But that expectation turned out to be mistaken. What in retrospect appears limited about Pincus-Witten's own art criticism is its very closeness to Greenberg's. Pincus-Witten disagreed with Greenberg's taste, but like him wanted to identify the new period style. Post minimalism (1977), a collection of essays mostly published in the most important American journal of the era, Artforum, offers well-informed accounts of many of the best-known New York artists accompanied by a p l aus ib l e h i s to r ica l p l an . What P incus -Wi t t en calls "Postminimalism" stands to minimalism roughly as, for Greenberg, the 1960s "Post-Painterly Abstraction" of Louis, Noland, and Olitski stands to Abstract Expressionism.

By comparison with Pincus-Witten's essays, Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" is an extremely abstract account whose relevance to working art critics is elusive. In its original published form, Jameson's essay mentions "Andy Warhol and Pop art, but also the more recent Photorealism" just in passing.17 In the longer version appearing in 1984, Jameson discusses Warhol's Diamond Dust Shoes, contrasting them to Vincent Van Gogh's A Pair of Boots as described by Martin Heidegger, as speaking of "a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense."18 Pincus-Witten's "postminimalism" invoked a very Greenbergian ideal of artistic continuity. Postmodernism, as presented by Jameson (and Krauss), involves a break with the past. Jameson had only a slight interest in art history. Why then was his way of thinking about history more in-

Introduction 9

fluential than Pincus-Witten's? In the 1980s, there was a felt need to believe that the most serious new art broke radically with tradition. In his recent essay on Brice Marden 's late 1960s-early 1970s paintings, Pincus-Witten observes that "Marden 's work is spared the dicey shelf life that devaluates most contemporary art, be it rooted in the techniques of advertising (as is now commonly the case), or one that inevitably engages matters of entertainment."19 Our artworld has a short attention span.

Krauss's most serious rival philosophical art critic was Michael Fried. Compared with his elaborate accounts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, her historical studies are merely adventurous. Set against his intently admiring commentary on the artists he encountered when he was young—Anthony Caro, Frank Stella, Kenneth Noland, and Larry Poons—Krauss's appreciations of Serra and the other figures she wrote about early on are slight. However much Fried's professional sense of philosophical issues may owe to his friendship with Stanley Cavell, it makes her intellectual culture seem a m a t e u r i s h . A n d yet, Kraus s , no t Fr ied , b e c a m e the post-Greenbergian critic. Fried at his best is a formidable critic:20

At his strongest... Warhol has a painterly competence, a sure instinct for vulgarity . . . and a feeling for what is truly human and pathetic in one of the exemplary myths (Marilyn Monroe) of our time that I for one find moving; but I am not at all sure that even the best of Warhol's work can much outlast the journalism on which it is forced to depend.

When his taste is challenged deeply, Fried makes surprising observations. But who today reading his awestruck commentaries on Caro, Olitski, and Noland can avoid Schadenfreude? These figures, who rode so high, have fallen so far that they wait to be revived, like forgotten nineteenth-century Salon painters.

Unlike his mentor Greenberg, Fried did not discover a single artist who stood the test of time.21

Noland's ambition to make major art out of color has compelled him to discover structures on which that ambition can rely—structures in which the shape of the support is acknowledged lucidly and explicitly enough to compel conviction.

Who today believes that? Fried thought that the best new art was developing out of tradition. He said that Olitski, Noland, and Stella were taking up the concerns of Abstract Expressionism. Krauss

10 Rosalind Krauss

started out as a Greenbergian formalist, but parted from him when she came to believe that the most challenging new art broke radically with tradition. Krauss embraced postmodernism, and that way of thinking, and not Fried's preoccupation with maintaining tradition, which now dominates almost all artworld thinking. Fried's theorizing is complex and often obscure.22 He elaborately distinguished the artists he admired from minimalists such as Carl Andre and pop artists such as Warhol, and he worked hard to explain his differences with Greenberg's theory of modernism. But their differences were only of academic interest when the visual culture has moved on.

A great deal of Greenberg's authority comes from his prophetic judgments. But a critic is not valued just for his taste. Diderot passionately admired Greuze, but had only a premonition of the greatness of David; Baudelaire wrote his best essay, "The Painter of Modern Life," about Constantin Guys, not his friend Manet. Ruskin praised Turner when that painter was already old and famous; and Roger Fry championed Cezanne only after that artist's death. And, at a much lower level, in the 1980s I supported painters and sculptors who have disappeared. So too did Fried and Krauss—where today are Michael Bolus or John Mason, whom they praised highly?23

All art critics have their philosophical moments. In his Salons, Diderot now and then turns to philosophy, Baudelaire sketches a theory of beauty, and Roger Fry develops a formalist theory of visual art. Mostly their writings can be understood without appeal to elaborate theorizing. You don't need to be a Kant-scholar to understand Fry's accounts of Caravaggio and Cezanne. With Greenberg, this division between journalistic art writing and philosophical art criticism is effectively externalized in the division between his few position statements and the body of his criticism. Theorizing essays such as "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" and "Abstract, Representational, and So Forth" have only occasional reference to individual artists.24

Greenberg admired the Abstract Expressionists, it is often claimed, because they fit into his theory of modernism. Late in life, he rejected this view; and tended in conversation to downplay the importance of his philosophical theorizing. "So I contradict myself," he told me when I tried to pin him down, "so what?" He did not believe that his tastes were determined by his theory of modernism. Because Danto has written very extensively about philosophical art criticism, the division in his writing between art criticism and theory is striking. Often his reviews cite philosophical anecdotes, as when he de-

Introduction 11

scribes Alex Katz's cutouts with reference to a theory of perception that describes the difference between seeing flat shapes "painted to look like barns" and a visually indistinguishable real barn.25 But as he has indicated, his philosophical arguments have only a somewhat distant relationship to his practice. He believes that ours is a posthistorical period, an era when everything is possible. And so he tends to like a great variety of art. What he likes, and how he describes art, in no way follow from his theorizing.

In Krauss's era, many writers wanted to make art criticism an academic subject. Journalistic art critics tell what they experience. Philosophical art critics are bookish academics. Krauss describes "Olitski's struggle to divest his art of drawing and yet to maintain the flexibility of the surface through the identification of different colors with that surface, became the object of his painting. . . . Michael Fried has discussed the successive phases of this struggle."26

She begins using Greenberg's theory of modernism, and closes with reference to Fried. She gives an elaborate analysis of what might appear relatively straightforward abstract paintings. Recently, in describing this period, she has noted that "it was a big struggle to say something about Olitski's work that wouldn't just be a repetition of what Michael (Fried) had said about it."27 A great deal of 1960s art looked simple but was said to be complex. Pop, minimalism, and conceptual art—art that existed as art only in relation to philosophizing—was a natural subject for philosophical art criticism. Art history became an academic subject around the turn of the twentieth century. Would it be possible to also bring art criticism into the university? An art critic has an eye and a literary style. Universities might teach such skills—creative writing is taught in many English departments. The philosophical art critics of Krauss's generation, who mostly were.academics, wanted to elevate their writing above journalism. They sought to make criticism as philosophically serious as art history had been in its German origins. A gifted writer might aspire to write criticism. Philosophical art criticism involves mastering technical ways of thinking. Professional art historians teach students to analyze objects collected in museums. When contemporary art is sold by art dealers to collectors and also to museums, philosophical art critics hoped to play a similar role.

Sometimes Krauss and her fellow philosophical art critics flirt with the claim that their theories have validity because they appear at the same time as the art being interpreted. "Although Rodin had no contact with Husserl's philosophy, as far as we know, his sculp-

12 Rosalind Krauss

tures manifest a notion of the self which that philosophy had begun to explore."28 Does the simultaneous development of cubism and Saussure's linguistic theory explain why Krauss's semiotic analysis is especially relevant to cubist paintings?29 If an artist reads contemporary theorists, then simultaneity has explanatory value. But because Rodin did not know Husserl or Picasso and Braque read Saussure, simultaneity proves nothing.30 Krauss might make a weaker claim: Husserl is relevant to Rodin, and Saussure to the cubists because theorist and artist share a period style. This belief deserves to be questioned. When in the 1980s Danto became a famous critic, the artists I knew were mostly reading such continental philosophers as Deleuze and Foucault. Few painters took an interest in Danto's Analytic Philosophy of History or his Analytic Philosophy of Action. Mere temporal and geographic proximity does not mean that a well-known theorist influences artists.

Some Renaissance art has exceedingly complicated iconography—usually such artists had humanist advisors. And so today31

an iconographer trying to reconstruct the lost argument of a Renaissance painting . . . must learn more about Renaissance arguments than the painter needed to know; and this is not, as has been claimed, a self-contradiction, but the plain outcome of the undeniable fact that we no longer enjoy the advantages of Renaissance conversation. We must make up for it through reading and inference.

But could art from the critic's own era be understood only using highly complex theorizing? Most contemporary artists are not intellectuals. Maybe the art of Marcel Duchamp, Agnes Martin, or Cindy Sherman is complex when described by philosophical art critics only because such writers are too bookish.

Interpretation invokes describing art in terms known not to the artist—need this be paradoxical? The Beatles could not read music, but only a musicologist can explain why they were innovative composers. Analogously, the reconstruction of a native speaker's grammar might invoke theoretical distinctions he knew not. And so it is not paradoxical that the linguist might understand that practice in terms unknown to that speaker. The linguist makes predictions about what sentences are grammatical. A native speaker knows correct speech, but not why it is correct. Theorists explain the speaker's competence. But here another analogy with different implications is also worth considering. Hockey players need not study physics. En-

Introduction 13

visage two ways of describing hockey: a scientific account and an in-tui t ive analysis appea l ing to the p laye r s ' in tent ions . A commonsense account appears in the sports reporting. A scientific account, explaining the game in the vocabulary of physics, is difficult to imagine. Given the obvious plausibility of the commonsense description, such an account seems superfluous. Analogously, it may be hard to conceive of a description of an artwork that, not in a vocabulary comprehensible to the artist, would offer a genuinely revealing explanation of that work. And so perhaps philosophical art criticism is problematic.

The body of this book, an exposition of Krauss's development, answers these questions. In the Afterword I say more about the relationship of philosophical art criticism to philosophy.

NOTES

1. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 195.

2. Ibid. p. 195. 3. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961),

p. 218. 4. Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: George

Braziller, 1975), p. 30. 5. History and Theory, Theme Issue 37 (1998) devoted to Danto. 6. See, for example, the review of The Picasso Papers by Marilyn

McCully, New York Review of Books 46, 6 (April 8,1999): 18-24. 7. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and

Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 262. 8. Quoted in Barbaralee Diamonstein, Inside the Art World: Con

versations with Barbaralee Diamonstein (New York: Rizzoli, 1994), p. 227.

9. Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 50.

10. Yve-Alain Bois has explained his problems with the word "poststructuralism" in his Painting as Model (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), p. 260 n. 7. See also Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, Volume 1, The Rising Sign, 1945-1966 and Volume 2, The Sign Sets, 1967-Present, trans. Deborah Glassman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

11. Arthur C. Danto, Review, The Optical Unconscious, Artforum 31 (summer 1993): 98.

14 Rosalind Krauss

12. See my "William Tucker at Storm King Art Center," Arts (December 1988): 88; and his unpublished Fuller Lecture, "The Hero and the Housemaid."

13. See my "Robert Mangold, Gray window wall, (1964)," Burlington Magazine, 1125,138 (December 1996): 828.

14. When Burnham reviewed Passages (New Art Examiner 5, 10 [July 1978]: 4-5), he, in turn, found Krauss's analysis all too traditional.

15. Robert Pincus-Witten, Postminimalism (New York: Out of London Press, 1977), p. 14.

16. Robert Pincus-Witten, Entries (Maximalism) (New York: Out of London Press, 1983), p. 11.

17. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Cidture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 111.

18. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 9.

19. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Rogue Equations," in Brice Marden: Classic Paintings (New York: C&M Arts, 1999).

20. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 288.

21. Ibid., p. 139. 22. Fried's revelatory art history writing is another story. See my

reviews: Absorption and Theatricality, Art Monthly (September 1981): 35-36; Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47,4 (1989): 398; Courbet's Realism, History and Theory, 30,3 (1991): 368-381; Manet's Modernism, Art Bulletin 79, 2 (June 1997): 334-337.

23. Michael Bolus is the subject of an essay in Fried, Art and Objecthood, pp. 193-196; John Mason is discussed in Krauss's "John Mason and Post-Modernist Sculpture: New Experiences, New Words," Art in America 67, 3 (May-June 1979): 120-127.

24. Art and Culture gives a misleading picture of his concerns. In Greenburg's collected writings, nearly all essays are exercises in applied criticism.

25. Arthur C. Danto, Encounters & Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990), p. 31.

26. "Jules Olitski," in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings (Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Flayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968), n.p.

Introduction 15

27. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000), p. 223. Her interviews vividly describe the struggles among Greenberg's successors.

28. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 28, italics added,

29. Rosalind E. Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992), pp. 299-300.

30. Umberto Eco, Serendipities: Language & Lunacy, trans. William Weaver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 50.

If... somebody asked whether my writings have been influenced by Dewey or Merleru-Ponty, the ... problem would be to establish, first, whether there are detectable literal or conceptual analogies between my work and theirs and, second, whether I had the physical possibility of reading the books of these authors.

31. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in The Renaissance (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 15.

CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning Was Formalism

The most important consideration when it comes to investing in art is a long-term outlook. You need to ask questions. Which artists are the innovators? Which artists influenced their peers? Which artists produce work that is visually seductive with intellectually challenging content?

Richard Polsky, Art Market Guide

A major philosophical art critic changes how his contemporaries look at visual art. To understand such an artwriter, we need to know why his arguments are found persuasive. Art criticism is a mixture of observation and fantasy. Art externalizes "a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror."1 The same is true of successful artwriting.

Clement Greenberg's highly personal synthesis of formalism and T.S. Eliot's view of culture and Marxist historiography persuaded his contemporaries of the greatness of the Abstract Expressionists. Greenberg's achievement has been much discussed, and so needs to be summarized only briefly.2 In the 1930s, many American artists made protest art. The Abstract Expressionists only became great when they turned away from politics. Greenberg argued that in the capitalism of his day, art's development was relatively isolated from changes in the larger society. All that advanced artists could expect by way of support was patrons—Abstract Expressionism marked

18 Rosalind Krauss

the triumph of art for art's sake. Greenberg argued that the best new painting canceled and preserved the accomplishments of early modernism. Art advanced in a country where political revolution was not a serious option. A Marxist critic might have been expected to identify revolutionary art, but Greenberg, following the politically conservative Eliot, argued that radically original painting built upon, without breaking with, tradition.

Greenberg thus links art, politics, and morality. He implies that a good connoisseur should be able to see Pollock's excellence and offers a theory linking Abstract Expressionism to tradition. Some critics dismiss Greenberg entirely. He was, Dave Hickey writes,3

an art critic from the postwar era whose practice and preferences were totally discredited and defunct by the time I entered the art world in 1967. Academic critics [have been]... laying siege to Greenberg's gutted and abandoned citadel for the past thirty years.

Peter Schjeldahl takes a similar viewr:4

The American art criticism, usually termed "formalist/' that flourished in the '60s was of a piece with the time's American art, part of a rhetorical onslaught, a generational power play, determined by historic openings. But the criticism often argued one thing while the art, more authentically, argued another.

Krauss also rejected Greenberg, but she takes his claims more seriously.

As a Marxist, Greenberg distinguishes between the popular literary and visual art and demanding advanced modernist culture, which is unpopular. Popular art forms, parasitic upon the elite culture, borrow7 from difficult art to make undemanding work. In some future classless society, the masses may have the leisure needed to appreciate fine art. But for now, there is large gap between the audiences for popular and high art. Greenberg's accounts of the relationship between art and money, of philosophical art criticism, and of the link between art and morality contain tensions resolved by critics of the next generation. He sought to balance the concerns of connoisseurs and philosophical art critics. Many 1960s critics thought that only esoteric theorizing could provide a proper guide to contemporary art. Greenberg separated popular and serious art. With the development of pop art and interest in political protest art, almost everyone felt the need for a more flexible account of the rela-

In the Beginning Was Formalism 19

tion between mass culture and contemporary art. Pop art borrowed from popular culture, taking images from comic strips into high art, establishing a two-way relationship between kitsch and museum painting.

Many recent critics of Greenberg, philosophers especially, write as if he had developed a purely intellectual argument whose premises might be critiqued. In fact, he offered a critical practice well adapted to his artworld. His way of thinking both reflected and transformed the situation of art. And so when the culture changed, his theorizing became obsolete. In the 1960s, the Abstract Expressionists became successful and much admired, and so the role of Greenberg's criticism was critically examined. Identifying these painters as heir to the old master tradition, he helped create a market for their art. Like many young would-be revolutionaries, Greenberg and his artists turned into members of the establishment. His Marxism had unexpected consequences—such is the cunning of history. Greenberg's formalism was based upon a Marxist historiography that the critics of Krauss's generation challenged. Greenberg claimed that the Abstract Expressionists grew out of modernist tradition; Krauss and her colleagues argued that the best contemporary artists broke with tradition.

"What is the good of criticism?" Baudelaire's famous question always arises in that peculiar marketplace of ideas that constitutes the artworld. What functions are served by commentary on contemporary art? When a great deal of art is made, consumers need guides to identify aesthetically valuable work. In a market economy, aesthetic value quickly translates into economic value. People buying a microwave read Consumer Reports, which evaluates appliances in straightforward empirical ways, citing comparative prices, efficiency, and safety and repair records. Evaluation of paintings and sculptures also calls for experts. Traditional critics were connoisseurs. Gifted with an eye, good at detecting forgeries, experts in Ming dynasty scrolls, baroque drawings, or Abstract Expressionist paintings guide novice collectors. So long as an artistic tradition is essentially stable, connoisseurs provide good guidance. But when new, untraditional criteria of evaluation are demanded, philosophic art critics are required. Only someone with a theory can explain why Duchamp's ready mades, Rauschenberg's 1950s monochromes, or the American conceptual art and earth art of the 1960s are art, or how such exotic-looking artifacts should be judged.

20 Rosalind Krauss

To understand why Rosalind Krauss's arguments were highly successful, we need to describe her culture and artworld. A philosopher's arguments can perhaps be reconstructed ahistorically, as exercises in pure reason, but a philosophical art critic's claims must be evaluated in historical and political context.

In a market economy, in China as much as in Europe and America, aesthetic value is inevitably equated with exchange value. Once a painting is thought very good, it becomes expensive. When Greenberg argued that Pollock was a great painter, he established the economic value of Pollocks. A generation earlier, Alfred Stieglitz said that Georgia O'Keefe and other artists he favored were major figures. In rejecting that claim and supporting the Abstract Expressionists, Greenberg linked radical artistic originality with economic value. A skilled capitalist entrepreneur, the successful painter knows how to innovate. In the 1960s, Krauss notes, "the consolidation of the stylistic hegemony of the New York School converted a provincial Bohemia into a Boomtown, a centre of self-confident aesthetic energy on which there was lavished money, glamour, attention."5 In this process, she adds, art criticism played a major role.

The relationship between art and money is difficult to describe tactfully. Too often writers who moralize offer reductive accounts. European art has almost always been associated with capitalist entrepreneurs.6 Giotto and Titian, as much as Picasso and Matisse, were good at making money. Duchamp offers a matter of fact observation: "Fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other. It's his job to do certain things, but the businessman does certain things also."7 But in our American artworld, it is hard to hold to this viewpoint. Duchamp lived cheaply, generously supported by his patrons, and occasionally sold art. In the 1960s, when New York became a boomtown, such a lifestyle was difficult to sustain.

Consider two extreme views of the relationship between art criticism and the sales of art. According to the reductive account, economic value is defined by art critics. There may be no intrinsic quality difference between the famous paintings of Morris Louis and those of a somewhat similar facile decorative artist, Paul Jenkins, whom no one any longer takes seriously. Louis's works are very valuable, and Jenkins's are not, because Louis attracted prestigious champions and Jenkins did not. Art critics determine what art is valuable. According to the purist account, there is no relation be-


tween economic value and art criticism. We can see the best art. Jasper Johns is highly valued because he is one of the great artists of his generation—and not because Leo Steinberg and other important writers championed his art. He attracted such champions because his art was good.

The reductive account attributes to critics the power to determine aesthetic and so economic value; the purist analysis asserts that critics have no influence on judgments of economic value. Neither account is entirely satisfactory. Looking at art of earlier eras, when art criticism played a lesser role, we feel comfortable making judgments of comparative quality. Raphael is generally superior to Peruguino; Nicolas Poussin is usually better than Sebastien Bourdon. But when we get to the present, it is easy to be more skeptical about the critical consensus. If judgments about art involve esoteric theorizing, confident claims about aesthetic value seem problematic. Once we recognize how much pressure the market in contemporary art produces, it is to natural to be skeptical about critics' claims. In the art market, there is grade inflation.

Richard Wollheim, whose experience of old master art is very rich, speaks of "the genius of de Kooning and Rothko," admires Hans Hofmann and David Smith, and praises Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Fairfield Porter, Louise Bourgeois, and Wayne Thiebold. But on the whole, he is skeptical about the claims of American critics.8

I do not believe that history will treat New York as the Venice, or the Paris, or the Florence, of the second half of the twentieth century. . . . The scene is too overcrowded with figures who tried to get into the history without contributing to the art.

Eighteenth-century Florence had painters who were admired then but who no longer attract attention. New York also will suffer this fate.

Those of us involved with the New York artworld may be surprised at Wollheim's judgments. But we too know how difficult it is to be confident in evaluating near contemporaries. When we get to Krauss's generation, there is almost no painter or sculptor, photographer or installation artist whose reputation is entirely secure. Like antique dealers and used car salespeople, art dealers sell objects whose value is determined by consensus about their rarity and resale value. But unlike antiques or automobiles, artworks are accompa-

22 Rosalind Krauss

nied by theorizing. Contemporary art is collected in depth by American museums. Midcareer artists have museum exhibitions, and famous senior figures receive numerous full-scale retrospectives. Many collectors and museums support a large market in contemporary art. But the art audience is not, on the whole, sophisticated. Everyone at a Pi t tsburgh Pirates game knows the rules of baseball—and most spectators evaluate the players, comparing them with their precursors. Few people ask, "Why are there three bases?" or "How many swings does that man at home plate get?" At the movies or pop concerts, similarly, almost everyone has informed opinions. Popular culture is highly accessible. You don't need to study academic film theory to judge Hollywood movies. In the museum, by contrast, despite the efforts of art educators, most spectators have surprisingly little knowledge of what they are seeing.9

Traditional art mostly was made for an elite. Modernist mass culture makes possible political protest art, which seeks to analyze critically the ruling elite. Moralists believed that good art might make the viewer a better person. Marxist philosophical art critics agreed, and gave this idea a novel twist—art should call attention to social injustices. In 1976 the editors of October wrote:10

We have named this journal in celebration of that moment in our century when revolutionary practice, theoretical inquiry and artistic innovation were joined in a manner exemplary and unicjue. For the artists of that time and place, literature, painting, architecture, film required and generated their own Octobers.

The Russian avant-garde artists who supported the 1917 October revolution were destroyed by Stalin. In 1917, as also in the 1960s and 1970s, the connection between revolutionary art and politics was relatively loose. Like some Americans of Krauss's era, the Russian artists of 1917 wanted to make politically effective art. But work done in Paris, and not Russian avant-garde, was the most significant artistically revolutionary art.11 October identifies its political interests with its title. October's "October" is the Eisenstein movie, not the Bolshevik revolution. But because that movie depicts the Bolshevik revolution, this distinction is a little subtle. In 1987, the editors claimed:12

We have no desire to perpetuate the mythology of the revolution. Rather we wished to claim that the unfinished, analytic project of


constructivism . . . was required for a consideration of the aesthetic practices of our own time.

It is not constructivism, but cubism, semiotics, and surrealism that have been Krauss's central concerns in recent years. On the cover of October appear the words: "Art /Theory/Cri t ic ism/Pol i t ics ."

Throughout Krauss's career, analyzing critically links between art and money, and art and morality, has been impor tan t . Like Greenberg, she—while hesitating for the most part to publicly adopt partisan positions—has supported left-wing ways of thinking. "It is Eisenstein's most basic assumption," she has written, " t h a t . . . all art . . . is fundamentally ideological."13

Krauss argues that although "for certain works of modern a r t . . . esthetic content is tied to the function of the community . . . they are about the act of delectation and possession and nothing more," in early Abstract Expression; in the work of Rauschenberg and Johns, there was "an at tempt to renounce this function."14 Rauschenberg, she observes, employs quite banal things and images. The artwork might thus "challenge its fate of being absorbed as a commodity only." This political way of thinking is exemplified in the format of October.15

October will be plain of aspect, its illustrations determined by considerations of textual quality These decisions follow from a fundamental choice as to the primacy of text and the writer's freedom of discourse.

As Thomas Crow, who publishes in October, has observed,16

what is lost in that approach is the opportunity for the text and visual reproduction to function on anything like equal terms. . . . in the absence of the assertive, large-scale illustration provided by a magazine like Artforum, it can be too easy to speak of the visual without speaking to it.

Color illustrations are expensive, and so art journals using them are dependent on advertisers. Artforum occasionally has hostile reviews, but an overly critical journal would lose its commercial supporters. October's format allows the journal to present more intellectual debate than Artforum. Like its political opposite, Hilton Kramer 's The New Criterion, which has no illustrations, October can afford to wi thdraw from the commercial artworld.17 Because Rauschenberg was, as Krauss says, "entirely original," it should not

24 Rosalind Krauss

be unexpected that his art and Johns's—and not the work of their less original contemporaries—became extremely valuable. The art market, like other capitalist markets, rewards inventiveness. In the 1970s, it was possible to expect that art in some future socialist society would escape comodification. Today that expectation looks much less promising.

Revolutions sometimes inspire political art. Imagine a French aristocrat who in 1785 sees Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii.™ That narrative of a historically distant Roman conflict between public duty and family loyalty becomes by 1789 a picture about the present. Informed by the painting, that man comes to care more about the interests of France than his family. Never before having seen how dramatic such conflicts are, or how they might be resolved, he becomes a different person. His view of duty changed, he acts differently. At least, this is what believers in political art would like to imagine. Even so, a variety of responses to David's art are imaginable. David's The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (1789) shows the brooding father below the body of his son—another lesson in virtue. A man might identify with Brutus and learn to serve the state, whatever the cost to his family. But someone might look rather to the group of women at the right mourning the brother who died. This viewer might then draw a rather different lesson—he might see the picture as showing the problems of masculine morality and the wicked absurdity of political judgments that take too little account of the intrinsic value of individuals.

How plausible is the belief that politically critical art might improve the viewer? "Recent art history," Whitney Davis writes, "holds that subjects—human individuals with personal, ethnic, and other identities, well-defined social roles, and at least partial consciousness of specific orientations toward the world of objects and other subjects—are constructed in relation to works of art."19 This view may be plausible, he allows, when, for example, early experience of homoerotic images "contribute to the formation of a homo-erotic subject." But the belief that adults are changed in any serious way by "attending a Salon, reading an illustrated magazine or going to a museum" is implausible. Maybe children who grow seeing gay or leftist images are less likely to be homophobic conservatives than they would be otherwise, but that adults change because they see a picture is highly unlikely. Once our character is formed, massive changes in erotic preferences or political ideals require correspond-


ingly dramatic causes. The Buddha, a very sheltered child, changed because he saw aging and death. But in our culture homosexuality is discussed on television. No one could remain very sheltered, even if they wished. Few visitors to the recent Whitney Biennales object to the political art on display there.20 Even if they did, would momentary exposure to such art change their political beliefs?

Most Americans think it important that children not grow up with homophobic, racist, or sexist books, movies, or television shows. We believe that nasty images of gay people, minorities, or women deform children's ways of thinking. And we believe that no one, neither children nor adult authority figures, who makes homophobic, racist, or sexist remarks should be unchallenged. When people are permitted to speak publicly in racist ways, then the mistaken impression is given that such ways of thinking are acceptable. In practice, of course, this ideal is very far from being always achieved. But that it is a norm is significant, for that influences how people speak and think in private. Racists, sexists, and other bigots are generally felt to be abnormal, if not (when they hold extreme view's) "crazy." The culture people grow up with affects their moral views. The art they see when adults mostly does not.

Championing Richard Serra, Douglas Crimp argues that21

it is not in the interests of the institutions of art and the forces they serve to produce knowledge of radical practices even for their specialized audience.... Such practices attempted to reveal the material conditions of the work of art, its mode of production, and reception, the institutional supports of its circulation, the power relations represented by these institutions.

Published in a catalog of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, these claims are self-contradictory. If it is not in the interest of museums to promote such awareness, then why do they show7 Serra? When viewing Serra's Tilted Arc, Crimp claims, we learn that "insofar as our society is fundamentally constructed upon the principle of egotism, the needs of each individual coming into conflict with those of all other individuals, Serra's work does nothing other than present us with the truth of our social condition."22 Few New Yorkers are unaware of the importance of egoism or, what Crimp does not take up, how city life depends also on cooperation.23 Everyone knows that contemporary works by famous artists are expensive commodities and that the very rich rule our museums. The prob-

26 Rosalind Krauss

lems inherent in Crimp's role as radical critic are apparent in the acknowledgments to his excellent book On the Museum's Ruins. Fie thanks the "many museums, art schools, and universities" where he lectured, and the National Gallery, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Getty Grant Program for support. Crimp, an important critic, deserves this recognition. Of course this does not satisfy him. Why indeed should he be satisfied when often even relatively privileged gay people are often badly treated? Crimp's well-deserved success puts him in an impossible position. He seeks to be a radical critic of the museum, but the function of his writing is to promote Serra.

Attempting to preserve Tilted Arc, Richard Serra appealed to legal reasoning.24 His government, he argued, has an obligation to respect his rights. As Crow, Serra's supporter, observes, "the trap that he created for himself was that, had his suit been successful, Tilted Arc would have become a permanent monument to the virtues of the American judicial system— its survival would have entailed an implicit contradiction of his intellectual premises."25 Crimp and Crow observe how the hearings against Tilted Arc were manipulated by Serra's enemies, but they don't deal with the obvious fact that this sculpture was unpopular. Like almost all serious contemporary visual art, Serra's is esoteric. The conservative view that Crow presents, that Tilted Arc is "the product of an entrenched, self-interested minority culture brutally indifferent to the needs of the average individual," is essentially true. Setting down a large expensive sculpture, not commissioned in open competition, defending it in prose the public finds incomprehensible, was to ask for trouble. You only need read Krauss's public statement in support of Serra to realize how little of a populist she is:26

The kind of vector Tilted Arc explores is that of vision, more specifically what it means for vision to be invested with a purpose.. .. this sculpture is constantly mapping a kind of projectile of the gaze that starts at one end of Federal Plaza and, like the embodiment of the concept of visual perspective, maps the path across the plaza that spectator will take.

As Crow notes, she speaks as if to a seminar. It is too late when in her last sentence, Krauss says, magnificently, "In the beauty of its doing this, Tilted Arc establishes itself as a great work of art." And yet, Krauss's account could be used in a populist way. Unlike some pub-


lie figurative sculpture, which only those knowledgeable about iconography can understand, Serra's essentially democratic work is accessible to anyone with eyes to see. Had Tilted Arc's defenders better explained the work, it might have become popular.

Compared with the activist critics of October, Krauss has a nuanced view of the possibilities of political art.27

While the artist might be creating a Utopian alternative to, or compensation for, a certain nightmare induced by industrialization or comodification, he is at the very same time projecting an imaginary space which, if it is shaped somehow by the structural features of that same nightmare, works to produce the possibility for its receiver fictively to occupy the territory of what will be a next, more advanced level of capital.

This argument too is questionable. Is the good critical artist ahead of his time? Serra, the surrealist photographers, and most of the other figures Krauss has championed are very much of their time.

When in the late 1960s Krauss was publishing in Artforum, formalism remained very powerful. Michael Fried wrote commentaries on Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella. Krauss discussed David Smith, Robert Motherwell, and Jackson Pollock's drawings. "My knowledge of modernist painting and sculpture," she wrote in 1971, "was developed largely through the critical essays of, and discussions with, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried I am deeply grateful to . . . Greenberg, wrho . . . as a friend, helped the present work come into being."28 Soon enough she would speak differently, but in her early criticism, Greenberg was very influential.29

[Morris] Louis embedded the release of color within a surface that was mural-like, that was oriented to the wall in terms of its continuity and its resistance to being bounded. . . . The rhythmic momentum of mural-art or wall-decoration naturally resists centralization and the relationships between perimeter and centre that constitute the easel picture.

She uses Greenberg's concept of "all-over" or decentralized composition. In Le Corbusier 's cubist paintings, she argued, "pictorial space is that which cannot be entered or circulated through; it is irremediably space viewed from a distance, and is therefore eternally resigned to frontality."30

. . .

28 Rosalind Krauss

Terminal Iron Works begins discussing recent attacks on formalism. Soon Krauss too would be among those critics. In the 1960s, the color field painters were identified by Greenberg as the natural heirs to the Abstract Expressionists. Krauss also supported them:31

Because Pollock's line never registers objects which one imagines one could touch but rather creates a space available only to vision, Pollock was the first to usher the viewer into what has been called an optical space.

[Jules] Olitski's art makes it possible to see how different the kind of opticality achieved by Pollock was from that achieved by Newman. The color cannot inform or make sensible the literal place of the picture. This is precisely what color in Olitski's art can, and does, do.

In Smith's sculpture, similarly, "the surface makes the work visually accessible, while defeating the desire for possession by touch."32 But already in Terminal Iron Works different concerns emerge—surrealism and totems. Looking back, Terminal Iron Works appears an uneasy synthesis. Krauss's experience at Artforum "with John Coplans and Robert Pincus-Witten" then dramatically changed her interests.33

Jasper Johns's mid-1970s paintings, Krauss wrote, "convey an extraordinary sense of the autonomy of the visual. The autonomy of the voice is the ironist's last source of value."34 Greenberg did not much admire Johns, but here Krauss remains under the spell of modernist ways of thinking. In a 1968 catalog essay, Fried spoke of "the difficulty of conceiving of a space to which eyesight gives access but which somehow denies even the possibility of literal penetration of it by the beholder,"35 Fie alludes to Heinrich Wolfflin's distinction between linear sixteenth-century art, where what we see depicted is what we can also imagine touching, and baroque painterly representation that "has its roots only in the eye and appeals only to the eye . . . just as the child ceases to take hold of things in order to 'grasp ' them, so mankind has ceased to test the picture for its tactile values. A more developed art has learned to surrender itself to mere appearance."3 6 Wolfflin distinguished two forms of representation; Krauss and Fried identify different ways in which painters open up abstract illusionistic space. Krauss makes distinctions of detail between her claims and those of Greenberg and Fried, while accepting the basic formalist framework.

Krauss's break with Greenberg involved a very public dispute about the David Smith estate. It is no accident that they argued about


economic issues, for critics of Krauss's generation had become very suspicious of Greenberg's role in the art market. Judging just by the published information, the issues were more complex than either side indicated.37 Because there is a tendency to reject Greenberg's claims out of hand, this point is worth spelling out. Smith left some sculptures with only primer. When Greenberg had that paint removed, it was possible to understand his action in two ways. Greenberg removed paint that Smith applied. But insofar as the primer supplied no guide to the final intended color, that paint was not an essential to Smith's artwork. (So far as I know, Greenberg did not remove final paint applied by the sculptor.38) Greenberg claimed that "the question of color in Smith's art . . . remains a vexed one. I don't think he has ever used applied color with real success."39 And Krauss wrote, "Smith was willing to conceded that the color he applied to the surfaces of his earlier work was largely arbitrary and almost never really successful."40

Might the unfinished works painted only with primer have been destroyed? When Smith's became valuable, this was unlikely. Krauss writes, "I feel that there are no justifiable grounds for altering the work of an artist after his . . . death."41 But this is not exactly the situation. Smith did not choose the color of these sculptures. Krauss needed a pretext to rebel against a mentor whose era was passed. Looking back, it would have been more honest to separate herself from him over some matter of principle (of which there were plenty)—and not over this point of detail. But when personal relationships fail, people generally behave in irrational ways. This argument about David Smith became the basis for settling long simmering disputes. In a review, Krauss made Greenberg the target: "Caro seems to me an example of an artist who has been rather badly derailed by paying close attention to the terminology used by admiring critics to forward his work."42 Greenberg's positivism, she says, is not the best way to understand Caro's achievement. In her next book, she developed an alternative to Greenberg's theorizing.

NOTES

1. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 208.

2. See my Artwriting (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987); and Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary

30 Rosalind Krauss

Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

3. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles, CA: Art Issues Press, 1997), p. 111.

4. Columns & Catalogues (Great Barrington, MA: Figures, 1994), p. 237.

5. "Eva Hesse," in Eva Hesse: Sculpture (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1979), n.p.

6. On the history of the art market, see Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).

7. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 16.

8. Richard Wollheim, "Danto's Gallery of Indiscernables," in Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 37.

9. See my "Teaching the New Art History," in The History of Art Education: Proceedings from the Second Perm State Conference, eds. P. Ambury, D. Soucy, M.A. Stankiewicz, B. Wilson, and M. Wilson (Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 1991), pp. 65-92.

10. The editors, "about OCTOBER," October 1 (1976): 3. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, a founding editor, discussed this occasion in his Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 361 n. 22. See Stephen Bann's review (October: The First Decade and Brian Wallis, ed., Hans Haacke, Word & Image 4, 3-4 [July-December 1988]: 746-748) and Noel Carroll, "Illusions of Postmodernism," Raritan 7, 2 (fall 1987): 143-155.

11. See my "Art Criticism and the Death of Marxism," Leonardo, 30, 3 (1997): 241-245.

12. Annette Michelson, Douglas Crimp, and Joan Copjec, "Introduction," October: The First Decade, 1976-1986 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), ix.

13. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 9.

14. "Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image," Artforum (December 1974): 38.

15. "About OCTOBER," October 1 (1976): 5. 16. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Ha

ven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 88.


17. Even a small circulation publication requires patrons. The summer 1996 October acknowledges "generous support" from Marian Goodman (Gerhard Richter's American dealer), Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Serra, and Leo Castelli, artists (and dealers of artists) championed by October.

18. See Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and my "Was David a Revolutionary before the Revolution?: Recent Political Readings of Oath of the Horatii and The Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons/' forthcoming in an anthology on David edited by Dorothy Johnson.

19. Whitney Davis, "The Subject in the Scene of Representation," Art Bulletin 71, 4 (December 1994): 570.

20. See my "New York. Whitney Biennial," Burlington Magazine (June 1995): 409-410.

21. In Rosalind E. Krauss, in Richard Serra/Sculpture, ed. Laura Rosenstock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), p. 42.

22. Ibid., p. 53. 23. An earlier version of this argument appears in my "Art Criti

cism and Its Beguiling Fictions," Artlnternational, 9 (winter 1989): 36-41.

24. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, ed. Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

25. Crow, Modern Art, pp. 149-150. 26. "(Statement)," The Destruction of Tilted Arc, p. 82. 27. "The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum," October

54 (fall 1990): 11. 28. Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of Da

vid Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), vii. 29. "Introduction," Morris Louis, exhibition catalog (Auckland:

1971), n.p. 30. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Leger, Le Corbusier, and Purism,"

Artforum (April 1972): 52. 31. "Jules Olitski," in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings (Institute for

Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1968), n.p.

32. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 89. 33. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, vi. 34. "Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony," October 2 (summer

1976): 98.

32 Rosalind Krauss

35. Three American Painters (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1965), p. 21.

36. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, n.d), p. 21.

37. See my Principles of Art History Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1991), pp. 24-25.

38. Some of Smith's sculptures were left outside in winter—a photograph in Terminal Iron Works shows snow piled on Cube Totem. If the painted sculptures also were set out of doors, that would suggest that their paint was relatively unimportant to Smith.

39. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 192.

40. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 170. In a footnote she quotes Smith: "I've only made two sculptures in tune properly between color and shape."

41. Letters, Joseph W. Henderson, with reply, Art in America (March-April 1978): 136.

42. "How Paradigmatic Is Anthony Caro," Art in America (September-October 1975): 83.

CHAPTER 2

The Structuralist Adventure

The semiotic square usually imposed an initial structure on a narrative . . . anything could be put in the four corners of the square without any verification whatsoever Within the semiotic square, the empirical world and the referent could be kept at bay.

Francois Dosse

The key figure in the revolt against Greenberg was Leo Steinberg, for he provided the best argument against formalism and linked that argument to the best artists corning after Abstract Expressionism. His lecture "Other Criteria," Krauss rightly wrote in 1988, "announced the advent of 'post-modernism/" 1 Krauss is a follower of Steinberg—she often acknowledges his influence. Speaking of Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, Steinberg asserts, "the all-purpose picture plane underlying this post-Modernist painting has made the course of art once again non-linear and unpredictable."2 The relationship of artwork and spectator had changed. Greenberg said, "Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is . . . continuity, and unthinkable without it."3 Steinberg disagreed, and his way of thinking soon was generally accepted.

Greenberg argues that the history of modernist painting is inaugurated by Manet's preserving-anci-breaking-with old master tradi-

. . .

34 Rosalind Krauss

tion. Krauss says that the history of modernist sculpture beginning with Rodin involves a decisive break with tradition. What assertion of Greenberg is being denied by Krauss? If Krauss and Steinberg were right, then the artists championed by Greenberg were too traditional to be significant. Passages in Modern Sculpture argues that modernism began with Rodin. His sculptures fail to present a visual narrative. In failing "to relate . . . the outward appearance of the body to its inner structure," he "produced an art intensely hostile to rationalism."4 Rodin's figure groupings do not present narratives; his individual figures are not expressive.

Krauss's characterization of Rodin's achievement is essentially negative. Tim Clark has asserted, and Michael Fried has denied, "that the practices of modernism in the arts are fundamentally practices of negation."5 Does a marxist concern with negation give a just image of the achievements of modernism? Krauss's emphasis on negat iv i ty in modern i s t scu lp tu re s ignals her revolt agains t Greenberg. When, by contrast, Fried insisted that high modernist abstraction was not fundamentally concerned with negation, he remained closer to Greenberg. By not presenting a narrative and not showing the body 's structure, Krauss's Rodin negates what came earlier. Greenberg, by contrast, argues that Roclin both does something new and builds upon tradition:6

Rodin was the first sculptor who actually tried to catch up with painting,, dissolving stone forms into light and air in search of effects analogous to those of impressionist painting. He was a great artist, but he destroyed his tradition.

His art . . . was fulfilled in itself and in the revival of monolithic sculpture that it initiated.

Passages characterizes many very different sculptures in these negative terms.7

Duchamp's strategy has been to present a work {Fountain) which is irreducible under formal analysis, wrhich is detached from his own personal feelings.

Because of its actual disjunction from the body that lies behind it, the mask functions in . . . [Picasso Head of a Woman, 1931] as a denial of the classical principle which holds that the surface of a form is the external effect of an underlying cause.

The Structuralist Adventure 35

The idea that they were not fabricated by the artist but were made instead for some other use within society at large—constructing buildings—gives to those elements [Carl Andre, Lever, 1966] a natural opacity.

Johns's Target or Ale Cans, in negating the internality of the abstract-expressionist picture, simultaneously rejects the innerness of its space and the privacy of the self for which that space was a model.

Richard Serra's One-Ton Prop (House of Cards)... continues the protest . . . against sculpture as a metaphor for a body divided into inside and outside.

As Gombrich's The Story of Art describes paintings by Giotto, Masaccio, and Manet as illusionistic, so Krauss identifies these very different looking sculptures in the same way: like a Rodin, they are not meaningful because they are not representing the body.

A traditional sculpture is like a person. As a person's inner states are expressed outwardly by their body, so a sculpture displays an expressive surface. This analogy is easiest to grasp when sculpture depicts human bodies, but it also applies to abstract art. Krauss says that Mark di Suvero creates three-dimensional versions of Abstract Expressionist paintings. "A beam thrusts; a piece of iron follows a gesture; together they form a naturalistic and anthropomorphic image."8 Like Rodin's figurative sculpture, the video art of Bruce Nauman, the minimalism of Serra and Carl Andre, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson all turn away from outward expression of what is inward to concern with surfaces. Even in this radical negation, something is preserved. The subject of this art is the body and our experience of it. In Greenberg's theory of modernist painting, what is essential is how the medium is used, and not whether art is figurative or abstract. Similarly, for Krauss what matters is how these meanings are expressed. When we get to her near contemporaries, "the transformation of sculpture—from a static, idealized medium to a temporal and material one—that had begun with Rodin is fully achieved."9 Rodin's figures may look like Michelangelo's, and very unlike Smithson's Spiral jetty, but if Krauss's account can be accepted, these different looking artworks by Rodin and Smithson seem similar. Because she thus achieves narrative closure, identifying Smithson as finishing a project begun by Rodin, what could come next? Only her next book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, answers this question.

36 Rosalind Krauss

Krauss's modernist tradition in sculpture starts earlier than Steinberg's postmodernism. Where Steinberg finds a serious historical break in the 1960s, Krauss identifies continuity from Rodin through to the advanced art of the 1970s. Under one description, postmodernism starts in the 1960s; under another, it does not. Some artists Krauss discusses—Johns, Rauschenberg, Warhol—appear also in "Other Criteria." Steinberg focuses on painting and Krauss discusses sculpture, which defines some of their differences, but does not explain why they think about history differently. "Since sculpture itself offered few models," she argued, "the Minimalists looked sometimes to architecture, but more crucially to painting."10

If, as narratologists argue, narrative structures are literary artifacts, structures of texts and not the world, then writers can legitimately describe art's history differently. The Originality (1985) says that a group of sculptors working around 1968 to 1970 "had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist. In order to name this historical rupture. . . one must have recourse to another term. The one already in use in other areas of criticism is postmodernism. There seems no reason not to use it."11

She gives a different date for the break than Steinberg, describes the break differently, and associates it with different artists. Krauss calls Steinberg's 1963 essay "Rodin" a decisive influence, but his concerns are different. Steinberg's Rodin is a brilliantly innovative employer of tradition. "Rodin" neither discusses the modernist sculptors discussed in Passages, apart from a brief mention of Brancusi, nor links Rodin to the postmodernists of "Other Criteria."12

Perhaps Rodin's ultimate significance for our time is simply that he turned the direction of sculpture around. Nineteenth-century sculpture was... dedicated chiefly to conventional communal goals. Rodin restored to imvard experience what had been for at least a century a branch of public relations.

Steinberg's Rodin is quite different from Krauss's. In the most interesting modernist sculpture, Krauss argues,

meaning is "seen as arising from . . . a public, rather than a private space," as, in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, linguistic meanings are given not by internal experiences but publicly by behavior.13 Artists who "insisted on making work that would refuse the uniqueness, privacy, and inaccessibility of experience" employed Wittgenstein's argument against a private language. Meaning of art


is given in public ways in "what might be called cultural space." The sculptural language Krauss describes became the dominant language of the modern artworld. Modernist sculptures are meaningful because like sentences, they make statements, as when, for example, Richard Serra made House of Cards by balancing four 500-pound plates of lead against each another, in contact only at their upper corners. Language combines words into sentences, as the sculptor combines physical elements into the artwork, hence the subtitle of the last chapter of Passages—"a new syntax for sculpture." That the sculptures of Anthony Caro are constructed of assembled autonomous elements makes this comparison tempting.

This analogy between linguistic and sculptural meaning cannot go very far. Native speakers make and understand statements, but usually only sculptors make sculptures. To make her analogy plausible, Krauss would need to imagine a meaningful language that most people understand but cannot speak. The linguist and the scholar of modernist sculpture have different goals. Krauss explains the history of this art form from Rodin to Serra. A linguist, by contrast, can analyze the present uses of language without examining its history. Soon Krauss will take up this problem, translating diachronic analysis into atemporal terms to present the historical development of sculpture in a diagram. The history from Rodin to Smithson is the story of the development of artworks that do not express outwardly an inner structure, and so do not present a narrative. Her next major book, The Originality oftheAvant-Garde, presents a very different view of art's temporal development.

When an original thinker changes her ways of thinking dramatically, do her new arguments develop continuously out of the old ones, or does she need to break with her past? How, after rejecting the developmental narrative of Passages in Modern Sculpture, did Krauss turn to structuralist theorizing? Passages offers an alternative to Greenberg's account of modernism. Focused on sculpture, not painting, unlike Art and Culture her book does not use a formalist narrative; according to Passages, understanding the content of sculpture is essential. By the 1970s, it became apparent that any mere tampering with Greenberg's account was insufficiently radical to command attention. Leo Steinberg called for new criteria, for the best new art had broken with the past. Passages dealt sympathetically with Mel Bochner, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson, figures very different from David Smith, the sculptor associated closely by Greenberg with Abstract Expressionism. Giving a major place to

38 Rosalind Krauss

Smith, Krauss described him in postformalist terms. Fler Smith is different from Greenberg's. But although Passages presented a postformalist analysis, in retrospect that account seems close to Greenberg's. The next step came when Krauss developed a nonnarrative way of thinking about art history. "In sequence making," Philip Fisher notes, "we domesticate novelty. The choice to see the new fact, at least provisionally, as no more than a variant of development of a familiar range of facts without only certain differences is a profoundly conservative habit."14 Krauss breaks with this conservatism. When Frank Stella worked in series, she suggested in 197V5

the image no longer contains the terms of its past—understood as the terms of the problem to which it is seen to be a response. Rather, both the past and the problem are felt to reside outside it, and access to them can only be achieved by a long chain of explanation which characteristically takes the form of narrative.

Here, in ways that only became clear later, she anticipated structuralist ways of thinking.

In the 1960s there was much interest in structuralism among literary critics, and some tentative attempts to apply it to visual art. In 1966 Sheldon Nodelman drew attention to the writings of Claude Levi-Strauss, and to some earlier, untranslated German literature.16

Neither Levi-Strauss nor the other well-known figures associated with structuralism were centrally concerned with visual art. And so a major creative effort was required to identify ways of applying their ways of thinking to visual art. What would it mean to speak of a structure in modernist art? Levi-Strauss, primarily interested in cultures outside of history, did not discuss this issue.17 The Originality of the Avant-Garde developed a highly original way of applying structuralist theorizing to contemporary art. Krauss does not say much about premodern art. Like Art and Culture, her book, focused on contemporary art and its early modernist precedents, only hints at historical analysis.

Just as Krauss's first deeply individual creative work was provoked by her break with Greenbergian formalism, so the title essay of her second full book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, originated in a dispute with another senior figure, the Rodin scholar Albert Elsen. Both disputes concern art and commerce. In Passages, Krauss describes Gates of Hell without mentioning Elsen. Initially Rodin


made a traditional sculpture, but "in its final version the Gates of Hell resists all attempts to be read as a coherent narrative."18 In his review, Elsen objected to her attempt to "make Rodin a founding formalist and the Gates of Hell into a formalist exercise of 'opacity' and self-referral."19 Krauss sets Rodin into a history of modernist sculpture very different from Elsen's, and so, not surprisingly, he found her account of Rodin unsympathetic.20

The 1981 Rodin catalog for the National Gallery, Washington, by Elsen and other experts asks: Is Gates of Hell finished? Is the bronze in exhibition, cast in 1978, an original Rodin?21 Rodin had a plaster cast made in 1900, did not change the sculpture, and died in 1917. This work, very expensive to cast, was owned by the French government, which took possession after his death. Rodin often thought of his art as unfinished; in 1904, an inspector reported that Rodin expected to make further changes. Because the sculpture was paid for, but could not be set in its site, as originally planned, Rodin had no incentive to make changes. Gates of Hell does not look obviously unfinished, but it contains many individual sculptures such as The Thinker, which could be positioned differently. Elsen plausibly called Gates of Hell "completebut not finished."22 Copies of Rodins are a sensitive issue, for bad replicas were one cavise of the long posthumous eclipse of his reputation. Gates of Hell was cast only a decade after his death. During his lifetime, he supervised his more important castings, working with a trusted assistant. Many of his sculptures were intended to be copied. He gave to the French nation rights to reproduce his art, and decisions were made by committee about the permitted number of authentic casts. Usually there is an intimate relation between a person's intentions and their actions. Rodin did not permit assistants to conceive and execute a sculpture, acting in his name. Generally he left the making bronzes of his sculptures to assistants. Relinquishing rights of copying Gates of Hell, he had no explicit thoughts—that is, no intentions—about how many copies should be made.

Here, as in the argument about Greenberg's removal of primer from unfinished David Smiths, complex questions are generated by practical concerns. Were the unfinished Smiths or the posthumous cast of Gates of Hell not genuine, they would have no economic value. If the problematic Smiths are "only one per cent of the estate's holdings at the time of Smith's death," Krauss suggests, "one course of action would have been to withdraw that small body of work from the market."23 But the sculptures were very valuable, so that was unlikely to happen. Rodin left to the state a plaster version of an enor-

40 Rosalind Krauss

mous, important sculpture. Had he been forgotten, that cast would have been discarded. But when, after his reputation was long in eclipse, he again became famous, Gates of Hell was cast. When valuable paintings are damaged, museums feel pressure to made them presentable for exhibition.24 Similarly, whether Rodin thought Gates of Hell definitively finished, his cast permits making very complete-looking artworks.

Many 1960s artists sought to undermine or move outside the market system.25 Krauss's critique of Elsen builds upon that concern. Accepting, in effect, most of Elsen's legal and historical arguments, Krauss wants to open up discussion. "We do not care if the copyright papers are all in order; for what is at stake are the aesthetic rights of style based on a culture of originals."26 She uses this example to motivate discussion of authenticity and originality.27 Style, she elsewhere has said, is "a category born of idealism . . . a fundamentally nonhistorical way of thinking."28 She does not suggest that Gates of Hell be discarded. The Originality of the Avant-Garde moves beyond modernism. Part one, "Modernist Myths," is followed by part two, "Toward Postmodernism." Gates of Hell provides the staging point for questions taken up by Rodin's postmodernist successors. Krauss links Rodin to Walter Benjamin's much discussed essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, to grids in modernist painting, to Jane Austen's accounts of picturesque landscapes, and to Roland Barthes on realism and Sherrie Levine's playful undermining of traditional ideals of artistic originality.29 This virtuoso performance, which frequently changes focus, has little to say about Rodin. "The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but—more importantly—its hostility to narrative."30 Krauss describes a structuralist model for describing contemporary art. She found in Elsen's exhibition the pretext for moving her own argument forward. The result was brilliant, even if the means employed are oddly arbitrary.

Teachers of logic will recognize that Krauss 's Greimas structuralist diagrams derive from the "Square of Opposition."31 For example, the four statements:32

A All republics are ungrateful E No republics are ungrateful I Some republics are ungrateful O Some republics are not ungrateful


define the chart:

A E I O

The relations between propositions permits determining truth values of assertions.33 If E is true, A is false, and so on. As used by Greimas or literary critics such diagrams have at most a metaphorical significance. When, to quote Fredric Jameson's sympathetic commentary, Greimas seeks "to articulate any apparently static free-standing concept or term into that binary opposition which it structurally presupposes and which forms the very basis for its intelligibility," he would show the structures of the world.34 The "Square of Opposition" displays "the logical structure . . . which is obscured by the unwieldiness of ordinary language."35 But when Jameson writes36

Ancien Regime Energy Culture Bourgeoisie

then the bourgeoisie is not the opposite of the Ancien Regime, nor energy its contrary, the opposite of culture. From this juxtaposition of names, not propositions, there is no legitimate way to infer logical relationships. Jameson merely diagrams his interpretation of the French novel's development.

Similarly, when Krauss explains Giacometti's sculpture with the diagram

figure ground grid gestalt

she is only juxtaposing in one of many possible ways those four concepts. There are no logical relationships here, and so nothing can be inferred from the diagram, suggestive though it may be. With ingenuity, any four words can be set in such a diagram. Consider, for example, my Greimas diagram of modernism:

Formalism Antistructuralism (Greenberg) (Michael Fried) Antistructuralist Antiformalism Structuralist Antiformalism (Arthur Danto) (Krauss)

42 Rosalind Krauss

It "makes" some true statements: Krauss is opposed to Greenberg; Fried's ideas are different than Greenberg's; Danto is not a formalist. But it also suggests false claims—for example, that these are the only four possible views of modernism.3 7

Greimas diagrams translate temporal narratives into spatial relationships. In Jameson's account of Balzac's Ea Vieille Fille or Joseph Conrad 's Eord Jim, a story is interpreted. The Square of Opposit ion has explanatory power—from the truth value of one proposition, that of the others follows. Greimas's device does not. As Umberto Eco notes,38

when Greimas elaborates a system of oppositions of meaning in order to explain the narrative structures . . . he undoubtedly brings to light the oppositions which can be found in the text at the level of a certain working hypothesis; but nothing prevents another reader, using that text in a different way from singling out another key to reading and therefore of reducing it to different oppositional values.

Greimas diagrams uncover the structure of texts, or the world itself as it is represented in such texts, apart from appeal to authorial intention. The author has disappeared, replaced by an impersonal structure.

What attracted ar tworld readers to Krauss 's Greimas d iagrams was their pseudotechnicality. Structuralism aspired to be a science. Krauss thought that the vocabulary of art history could be translated into structuralist terms.39 Picasso's modern i sm and Heinrich Wolfflin's art history40

both convert diachrony into synchrony Both take successions of raw historical phenomena and transform them into formal systems—in fact, the same formal system. . . . Meaning does not arise from the positivity of a simple existent (color for example) but rather from a system of differences (color and not line), the meaning of any choice being equally (and simultaneously) a function of what is not chosen.

Picasso and Wolfflin at roughly the same time do for the practice and theory of the visual arts what Saussure does for language.

Krauss refers to the well-known categories of Wolfflin's Principles of Art History, which seem to be oppositional: l inear/painterly, plane/recession, closed and open form, multiplicity/unity, clearness and uncleamess. She thinks his history of the transition from the sixteenth- to the seventeenth-century modes of depiction is a


structuralist analysis. Wolfflin uses linguistic metaphors: "in the course of time, art manifests very various contents, but that does not determine the variation in its appearance: speech itself changes as well as grammar and syntax."41 Krauss believes that his "art history without names" is a semiotic account in which the "meaning (of Raphael's) The School of Athens as Classical style is possible only in relation to its not being Baroque."42

Wolfflin's Principles of Art History presents his categories as binary oppositions. But his fullest account of The School of Athens is a formal analysis setting the painting in historical context:43

Here, Raphael is obviously following in Michelangelo's footsteps

The group of the geometers is a solution to a formal problem which few have ever attempted—five figures directed towards a single point, clearly developed in space, pure in outline, and with the greatest variety in attitude.

Suppose Italy had been conquered by the Muslims in 1550, so there had been no baroque. Still this description of Raphael 's painting would make sense. It therefore is not true that Raphael 's classical style in defined only in relation to the baroque.44

Ernst Gombrich argues that Wolfflin's procedure is inherently flawed. Looking at two Madonnas,4 5

it is legitimate and illuminating to compare the Caravaggio with the Raphael, for, after all, Caravaggio knew Raphael's work... . But when we read the comparison the other way round and contrast the Raphael with the Caravaggio we are on more dangerous ground. We imply that Raphael, too, deliberately rejected the methods of Caravaggio. . . . He cannot have rejected what he never knew.

Insofar as the historian's goal is to describe Raphael 's art as he himself understood it, Gombrich is correct. Still it might be illuminating to anachronistically contrast the Raphael and Caravaggio paintings in Wolfflin's way. But doing that would not justify Krauss's claim that Wolfflin is implicitly developing a semiotic art history. Wolfflin believes we see painterly and linear paintings as illusionistic representat ions. Krauss th inks each element has mean ing only in structuralist, that is, in oppositional terms:46

. . . .

44 Rosalind Krauss

In Picasso's collage... a frequently employed sign for depth is the different sizes of the two f-shaped sound holes of a violin The inscription of these f's is not so much the mark by which we infer the presence of the violin in space as it is the writing of an absent spatiali-ty onto the surface of the image.

Her goals are thus quite different from Wolfflin's. There are two ways of presenting semiotic theories of visual art.

The editors of a recent wide-ranging anthology Visual Culture, which includes studies of old masters as well as accounts of popular culture, say that each of their authors "invokes a semiotic notion of representation . . . defining the work of art as a semiotic representation, that is as a system of signs"47 All visual representation is semiotic.48

On the narrower view, developed by Krauss, only some representations such as cubist pictures are semiotic. Because she motivates her account by contrasting cubist pictures with other more traditional figurative images, the general semiotic theory is inconsistent with her analysis. Her analysis of the various techniques of representation employed within a single picture does not depend on broader claims about the plausibility of semiotic theories of representation. Krauss is interested in "an art history that has accepted the degree to which signs and social structures exceed the grasp of the individual, an art history that is seeking to unders tand the forms of dependency between the artist and the systems of representation that function as his or her already elaborated context."49 The goal is to avoid appeal to intentions.

Without reference to French phi losophy, in his 1964 essay "The A r t w o r l d " Ar thu r Dan to deve loped a s t ruc tura l i s t analysis . Imagine that pa in t ings are character ized by qualit ies, G "is representa t ional" and F "is expressionist ." That w h a t he calls the style matr ix,

F G

+

characterizes all paintings. Every painting possesses, or does not possess, the quality of being F and G. And more qualities could be

. . . .

+ ++ -- +- -


added. If some new painting comes to have the quality H, the chart reads:50

F G H

+ + +

+ +

+

4.

+

Every other painting in existence becomes non-H, and the entire community of paintings is enriched— It is this retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld that makes it possible to discuss Raphael and De Kooning together, or Lichtenstein and Michelangelo.

Danto had, he has explained recently, "a kind of political vision that all works of art were equal, in the sense that each artwork had the same number of stylistic qualities as any other." But the trouble with the style matrix, he came to think, is that it is essentially ahistorical. Juxtaposing works with radically different styles, it treats "all works of art as contemporaries, or as quite outside of time."51

Danto makes the same point as Gombrich. Structuralism cannot explain change. Can Krauss use a structuralist account to explain the history of postmodernism? Could ahistorical analysis explain the origin of new art forms? When an historian seeks to explain why at a certain moment the development of some new art form is significant, a timeless comparison of styles is irrelevant.52

Insofar as logic proceeds formally, presenting its rules without reference to the time, place or circumstances of their use, is it not the mode of analysis most inimical to understanding historical process?

What explains change is a narrative.53

(1) x is F at t-1

(2) H happens to x at t-2

(3) x is G at t-3

-- -

- -- -

. . .- - -

46 Rosalind Krauss

"(1), (2), and (3) simply has already the structure of a story. It has a beginning (1), a middle (2), and an end." Greimas diagrams diagram change, and so can be transformed into a narrative sentence like "(1), (2), and (3)." But the diagram cannot bypass the need for historical explanation. An historical process can be presented atemporally, but doing that is self-defeating if the aim is to explain change.

Were this the entire story, then Krauss's structuralist analysis would fail. But there is more to her argument.54

The expanded field of postmodernism occurs at a specific moment in the recent history of art. It is a historical event with a determinate structure— This is obviously a different approach to thinking about the history of form from that of historicist criticism's constructions of elaborate genealogical trees. It presupposes... the possibility of looking at historical process from the point of view of logical structure.

Krauss gives a structural analysis of postmodernist sculpture and explains why that structure developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The ahistorical part of her account is supplemented by historical analysis.

When Greenberg connected cubism to Abstract Expressionism, as when Passages linked Rodin to minimalism, these histories link together different artworks without much regard for artists' intentions. Such genealogies are like slide show narratives. Cubism is shown to lead to Pollock or Rodin to Richard Serra. What made such stories problematic is recognizing that it is possible to construct such a genealogy for any artist. Greenberg thought that Abstract Expressionism led on to Morris Louis. You might, rather, write a genealogy in which Picasso led to Picabia led to David Salle. Histories are not value neutral. If Salle is Pollock's heir, then his paintings also should be valuable. The same objection could be made to Krauss's prestructuralist theorizing. If Richard Serra is Rodin's successor, then his sculptures should also be valuable. That way of establishing artistic value is problematic.

Pollock's paintings look very different from cubist works, but in Greenberg's historical narrative they deal with essentially the same concerns. Rejecting that way of thinking, Krauss argued that postmodernism breaks with modernism. The Originality rejects the explanatory techniques of traditional art history. The belief in art as self-expression, which lies behind biographical explanations; the belief in the unique artwork; the belief that an artist develops in a continuous way: Krauss critiques these ideas. Postmodernism is es-


sentially unlike earlier art. The Greimas diagram, which shows the structures of postmodernism, must be supplemented by an historical account explaining why those structures developed at a particular temporal moment. Krauss's structuralist diagram differs, then, from Danto's style matrix. Because Danto believes that the history of art ended with Warhol, he can diagram all of the possibilities. Krauss does not believe that art's history has ended. Her Greimas diagram identifies the range of artworks possible at one time, but in the future, other forms of art are possible.55

Do Greimas diagrams avoid the arbitrariness of genealogies? Jameson thinks that the structures are not arbitrary.56

We never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—through the sedimented readings habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions.

As a reader brings to a text experience of other books, so we see visual art influenced by art we know already. That much is common sense. Jameson's more interesting claim is that he provides the best possible account of the meaning of a text. Analogously, Krauss claims that she provides the best possible structural analysis.

Behind Jameson's Kantian vocabulary is an appeal to psychoanalytic models. Freud presented unconscious thoughts—Jameson's and Krauss's goal is to identify the unconscious of a text or artwork as it really is. If the Greimas diagram only shows one person's associations to the artwork, then how significant could it be? Jameson's argument that his is the best of all possible interpretations will convince only those who accept his highly personal Marxist adaptation of Christian textual exegesis. A text cannot be scrutinized all at once, and so can be understood only by bringing outside knowledge to bear. The visual artwork is seen essentially all at once—totally accessible to the eye. Greenberg laid particular stress on this purely optical nature of modernism. And so, for Krauss to claim that we can understand what we view only by knowing what is visually repressed is surprising. An artist can repress a thought. What, by analogy, would it mean to speak of something visible as repressed?

Here we return to the role of intentions in the structuralist analysis. One often defended traditional view is that interpretation must

48 Rosalind Krauss

appeal to the artist 's intention. If we override his own view of his goals, failing to take his intentions seriously, then, so Richard Wollheim argues, our analysis will be arbitrary.57

In certain quarters, where the view is taken that criticism is at liberty to project on to a work of art whatever it wishes, or whatever it finds original or suggestive or provocative, and in this liberty lies the vitality of art, it is insufficiently appreciated that, in taking this view, critics, or friends of criticism, cut off the branch on which they sit. For the view in effect cancels the status of art and relegates art to the status of nature.

This is wrong.58 The artist intentionally makes an artifact, but often is not in the best position to describe the artwork.59 That a visual artifact was made intentionally does not imply that its maker can provide the best verbal description. A critic might legitimately describe the picture in terms unknown to the artist.

Krauss tends to be skeptical of appeals to intentions: "Since Pollock's statements can be shown to have been the result of a kind of ventriloquy practiced by his various m e n t o r s . . . . they give us no reliable sense of his own intentions."60 Danto says something similar about Warhol: "It is difficult to pretend that Warhol's intention was to clear the underbrush and make room for a finally adequate theory of art. In some ways it is perhaps inscrutable what his intentions ever were."61 Warhol intended to celebrate popular culture—but he did not think of himself as a philosopher of art. Greenberg also argues that appeal to intentions cannot explain art 's development:62

The paradox in the evolution of French painting from Courbet to Cezanne is howr it was brought to the verge of abstract in and by its very effort to transcribe visual experience with ever greater fidelity. The logic of the Impressionist readjustment... had to work itself out regardless of the volition of individuals.

In Greenberg's Hegelian narrative, the logic of art 's history worked itself out regardless of what individuals desired. Krauss rejects this historiography, but accepts Greenberg's view of the irrelevance of intentions.

Philosophical art critics, whether they write genealogies or construct structural diagrams, underplay the importance of intentions. H o w then can their interpretations be evaluated? The danger, as much for Krauss's structuralist analysis in The Originality as for her


historical narrative of Passages, is that the analysis be merely arbitrary. When interpretation appeals to intentions, the critic can get the artwork "right," his account matching what the artist intended. But once we place works of art in a genealogy, or set them in a structure, who is to say that other histories or structures are not possible? This worry about arbitrariness led Krauss to reject the historical analysis developed in Passages. To defend the structural account of The Originality she needed to present an ahistorical definition of art. This argument is the subject of the next chapter.

NOTES

1. "Editorial Note" (introducing Leo Steinberg, "The Philosophical Brothel") October 44 (spring 1988): 5. See also Rosalind E. Krauss, "Perpetual Inventory," October 88 (spring 1999): 89 n. 6. In an earlier account, I identify the dominant critics of the post-Greenberg generation as his followers (The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s [LIniversity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press:, 1994], p. 178). This Steinberg denied. "In your essay," he wrote, "I find the phrase 'Steinberg's followers.' As my trusty assistant—typing this letter as I dictate—blurted out: 'Who the hell are they?'"

2. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 91.

3. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 93.

4. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), pp. 24, 9.

5. Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark," in response to Clark's essay "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 65.

6. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 316; Greenberg, The Collected Essays, Volume 4, p. 58. The second quotation comes from the revised version of the essay.

7. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 80, 137, 250, 259, 269.

8. Ibid., p. 254, quoting Donald Judd.

50 Rosalind Krauss

9. Ibid., p. 283. 10. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Richard Serra: Sculpture Redrawn,"

Artforum (May 1972): 42. 11. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and

Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 287. 12. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 393. 13. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, pp. 262, 259, 270, 269. 14. Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art

in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 106.

15. "Problems of Criticism, X: Pictorial Space and the Question of Documentary," Artforum (November 1971): 69.

16. Sheldon Nodelman, "Structural Analysis in Art and Anthropology," in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (1966; reprint, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1970).

17. He was opposed to Sartre's Marxist historiography; see Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans, anonymous (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), ch. 9.

18. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p. 15. Her account of David Smith mentions Elsen's account; Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 29 n. 16.

19. Albert Elsen, "Clogged Passages" (Review of Passages), Artnews 74, 4 (April 1978): 140.

20. The title of an exhibition catalog by Elsen, The Partial Figure in Modern Sculpture: From Rodin to 1969 (Baltimore, MD: Museum of Art, 1969) points to his differences with Krauss. For him, much modern sculpture fragments the body; for her, that way of identifying modernist subjects begs the question. See Elsen's catalog essay, Pioneers of Modern Sculpture (London: Hayward Gallery, 1973.

21. I summarize Elsen's "Are the Gates Complete?" Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert E. Elsen (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1981), pp. 73-75.

22. That is the subtitle of chapter 8 of his The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).

23. Letters, Joseph W. Henderson, with reply, Art in America (March-April 1978): 136.

24. Rothko executed a major commission for Harvard University. Left in bright natural lighting, these paintings are no longer


exhibited, for their present colors provide little indication of the artist's intentions. See my "Restoration as Interpretation: A Philosopher's Viewpoint," in Altered States. Conservation, Analysis, and the Interpretation of Works of Art (Mount Holyoke, MA: Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1994), pp. 19-27.

25. Krauss notes that these questions about copies are raised already by old master art; see her "Originality as Repetition," October 37 (summer 1986): 35-40.

26. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 157. 27. Ibid., p. 181.Writing before Elsen's exhibition opened, she

described in the present tense seeing a movie about the making of Gates of Hell. That film was never made. She describes that mistake as "journalistically, an error" and suggests that imagining the film is a legitimate "part of the staging of The Gates as a theoretical entity at the beginning of a general inquiry on originality within the conceptual frame of modernism"

28. "A Conversation with Hans Haacke," October 30 (fall 1984): 47.

29. I discuss Benjamin's argument in my "Le opere d'arte false nell'era della riproduzione meccanica," Museu dei Musei, exhibition catalog (Florence: Littauer & Littauer, 1988), pp. 29-34.

30. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 158. 31. Arthur C. Danto pointed this out to me—I never have taught

logic. 32. Morris R. Cohen and Ernest Nagel, An Introduction to Eogic

and Scientific Method (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1934), p. 66.

33. Ibid., p. 52. 34. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Eanguage: A Critical Ac

count of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 164. See also Ronald Schleifer, "Introduction," A.-J. Greimas, Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method, trans. Daniele McDowell, Ronald Schleifer, and Alan Velie (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1983); and Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory, trans. Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

35. Cohen and Nagel, An Introduction to Eogic, p. 70. 36. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a So

cially Symbolic Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 167. 37. Consider another Greimas diagram:

52 Rosalind Krauss

male/middle aged male/young (David Carrier) (Brigston) female/young female/middle aged (Liz Carrier) (Marianne Novy)

This diagram of my family shows the alliances and conflicts of my wife Marianne, Liz our daughter, and Brigston, Liz's dog. If we had a cat, how different our family life would be!

38. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 83.

39. This account builds upon my "Art History," in Contemporary Critical Terms in Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: LJniversity of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 129-141.

40. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," Art in America (December 1980): 93.

41. Heinrich Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Eater Art, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, n.d.), p. 220.

42. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," 93. 43. Fleinrich Wolfflin, Classical Art: An Introduction to the Italian

Renaissance, trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London: Phaidon, 1952), p. 95.

44. In this section of Classical Art, Wolfflin does not refer to the baroque. He does, at the beginning of the book, place classical art in relation to the quattrocento, but not in such a way that classical painting is meaningful only in relation to what came before.

45. E.H. Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1966), p. 90. Gombrich argues that for Wolfflin the High Renaissance always is the hidden norm.

46. Krauss, "Re-Presenting Picasso," p. 94. 47. "Introduction," in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations,

ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), xviii.

48. This is the view of Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 72,2 (1991): 174-208. They refer to Pierce, but their view is quite different from that presented in his "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writings ofPeirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), ch. 7.

49. "Only Project" (Review of Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art), The New Republic, September 12 and 19,1988, p. 38.


50. "The Artworld," Journal of Philosophy 61, 19 (October 15, 1964): 583.

51. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 164.

52. Craig Owens, "Analysis Logical and Ideological," reprinted in his Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 278.

53. Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 236.

54. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 290. 55. Krauss's history is essentially discontinuous. Some art histo

rians focus on describing continuity. In Wolfflin's account, the Renaissance leads to the baroque; in Greenberg's history, old master painting leads to modernism. But it is also possible to find precedents for her concern with discontinuity. When the classical illusionistic art of antiquity is replaced by Christian pre-Roman-esque painting, Gombrich argues, art changes entirely.

56. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 9. 57. Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 7. 58. See my "Why Art History Has a History," Journal of Aesthet

ics and Art Criticism, 51,1 (1993): 299-312. 59. My Poussins Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology

(University Park: Penn State Press, 1993) argues for this claim. 60. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 322; Mark Roskill,

The Interpretation of Cubism (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press and London: Associated University Presses, 1985) gives a different account.

61. Arthur C. Danto, "Aesthetics of Andy Warhol," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 4, p. 4.

62. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 171.

CHAPTER 3

The Historicist, Antiessentialist Definition of Art

Interpretation is not an isolated act, but takes place within a Homeric battlefield, on which a list of interpretative options are either openly or implicitly in conflict. . . . [0]nly another, stronger interpretation can overthrow and practically refute an interpretation already in place.

Fredric Jameson

In the "Acknowledgments" to his Kant after Duchamp, Thierry de Duve tells how he proposed to Michel Foucault "that the time had come for artistic modernity to be looked at archaeologically, the way he (Foucault) had looked at the global episteme of the classical age."1 This is what Krauss did in her structuralist phase. De Duve's account of Duchamp reveals some of the philosophical problems of such an investigation. For de Duve, as for Krauss, Clement Greenberg's account of modernism is the natural starting point. "From Giotto to Courbet," Greenberg writes, "the painter's first task had been to hollow out an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface... . Modernism has rendered this stage shallower and shallower until now its backdrop has become the same as its curtain."2Giotto, Courbet, and Morris Louis made different looking objects, but they all were engaged in the same activity. Giotto made sacred images; Courbet produced resolutely materialist landscapes; Morris Louis painted abstractions. Only under Greenberg's

56 Rosalind Krauss

description is it true that they all are doing the same thing. To adopt this as the description of their activity, independent of their intentions, is an Hegelian procedure. Beneath its apparent changes, painting has an unchanging essence. Here we return to Steinberg's argument that postmodernism breaks with tradition. The shift in orientation, which he says defines the novelty of postmodernism, is also part of a continuous development. But focusing on continuity prevents understanding what happens.3

The new is made comfortable by being made familiar, since it is seen as having gradually evolved from the forms of the past. Historicism works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference.

Insisting on continuity is a conservative political impulse. Nominalists do not believe in real essences. "There really is no

such thing as Art. There are only artists."4 But Gombrich, critical as he is of Hegel, goes on to tell the story of art as the history of progress in naturalism. Like Greenberg, Gombrich believes that painters making very different looking works share a common goal. For Gombrich there is no abstract art.5

If this game [of Pollock] has a function in our society, it may be that it helps us to humanize the intricate and ugly shapes with which industrial civilization surrounds us. We even learn to see twisted wires or complex machinery as the product of human action.

We should treat all such histories, Gombrich's as much as Greenberg's, as fictions. Narrating the history of art, Greenberg and Gombrich tell a story gathering together objects of interest. The structures of these accounts come not from the nature of things, but from the art writers themselves. It is not a fact that Giotto, Courbet, and the modernists hollow out an illusionistic space. Nor is it a fact that Gombrich's painters all make illusionistic representations. Alternative accounts, as true to the facts, are possible. There are diverse ways of organizing such narratives because art historians describe nominal essences—not painting as it really is. Greenberg's and Gombrich's different stories need not come into conflict.

Once belief in the arbitrariness of such narratives became generally accepted, pleas for the importance of tradition were doomed. Frank Stella's well-developed genealogy for abstraction, as much as the analysis developed a little later by me and David Reed, came to

The Historicist, Antiessentialist Definition 57

seem old hat.6 Krauss identifies the Hegelian structure of Art and Culture.7

Profoundly historicist, Greenberg's method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux. . . . certain things, like art itself, or painting or sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal, transhistorical forms... the life of these forms is dependent upon constant renewal, not unlike that of the living organism.

Gombrich 's story of art makes similar assumpt ions . Painting changes radically over time but always remains painting, in the way that a person, first an infant in the mirror stage, then a young scholar, and finally a professor emerita, is the same person through all these changes.

Structuralists rejected belief in fixed essences lying unchanging behind the flux of appearances. Barthes describes8

the ship Argo . . . each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form. . . . Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.

And then he considers a second similar case, his work spaces in Paris and the country, which have "no common object, for nothing is ever carried back and forth," but possess the same structure. The Argo remains the same ship because it continues to serve the same function; Barthes's two studies have the same structure because the objects in them are arranged exactly the same ways.

Talk of essences is genera l ly rejected by the French figures—Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault—discussed in October. But Krauss's point can be made in neutral terms. Analytic philosophers call Barthes's example the raft of Theseus.9

Suppose it were decided . . . to erect a monument to Theseus and to put his ship upon the monument. Surely some people would say that the ship put together from discarded planks was the right one to raise up there. And dispute might break out about this matter between priests who favoured the working ship and antiquarians who preferred the reconstruction.

Krauss, the author of The Optical Unconscious, is the same person who when young was a formalist. Persons are living organisms. The

58 Rosalind Krauss

present Louvre is the same museum where the eighteenth-century Salons were held. The physical space has dramatically changed, but there is continuity in its development.

Painting changed dramatically from Giotto to Morris Louis, so does it make sense to assert (or deny) that such historically distant artists practice the same activity? Is Greenberg only saying that in his account the old master art of Giotto and Courbet leads to modernism? This solution to the ontological problem leaves out his most significant claim. Greenberg is not just claiming that in his historical narrative the art of Giotto can be connected with modernism. Were that the case, then he could allow that in another narrative, the history of painting might be different. Greenberg thinks painting has a real essence: modernism painting is the same art as Giotto practiced.

Krauss denies that. "Sculpture in the Expanded Field" argues that new sorts of artifacts do not share any essential qualities defining them as sculpture with the older art. But she, like Greenberg, is an essentialist; it is not possible, she implies, to offer legitimate alternatives to her narrative. Fried suggested an historicist view of art's essence:10

Rather than give up all thought of "essence" in connection with painting or sculpture . . . one might instead seek to historicize essence by producing a narrative of the shifting depths over time of the need for one or more basic conventions within a pictorial or sculptural tradition.

His account of art's essence differs from hers. When no appeal to precedent is possible, how then can we know

that these new kinds of things are sculptures? And what criteria should we use in evaluating them? To know what is art, and how to judge it, we must know the appropriate conventions. In film, Krauss says,11

a modernist sensibility pushes a medium to its limits, creating an image of itself in them. And in advance of this the limits are unknown. Indeed, the limits are given their contour in conjunction with the process by which the imagination turns round on itself in order to capture its—as well as the world's—own image.

Stanley Cavell bases discussion on too narrow a range of examples. Because he does not know Soviet film of the 1920s and Ameri-


can experimental cinema, Cavell cannot identify the nature of that medium.

Does sculpture have a real, or only a nominal essence? That is, is it a fact about the world that sculptures are a distinct sort of thing, or has Krauss merely identified one possible way of describing sculpture? Earlier we asked a related question. When the postmodernist asserts that the modernist tradition has ended, is he identifying a fact about history, or merely asserting that under one description we find such a break? This question about sculpture's essence of sculpture is internally connected with our query about the historical break. What defines a break in tradition is making new kinds of sculptures. These abstruse questions are more likely to concern writers in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism than critics working for Artforum. But here, as elsewhere when Krauss takes up philosophical positions, there is payoff for the working critic. Jack Burnham gives a very different view of the 1960s than does Krauss. Judging from the perspective of the 1990s, Krauss, not Burnham, made the right quality judgments. Richard Serra, Carl Andre, and Robert Smithson—and not the figures Burnham cites, that is, Robert Breer, James Seawright, and Alex Hay—are the sculptors of that era who matter. To identify the essence of art requires picking out the best art. At any time, many conventions defining art are possible. In the 1950s, some American critics bet on realism; others thought that French-style Abstract painting was the strongest new art. When in the early 1960s the moment of Abstract Expressionism passed, various successors were proposed. Clement Greenberg argued for what he called "Post Painterly Abstraction."12 In fact, pop art and minimalism proved to be the most significant new art. Only experience, and not a priori theorizing, can determine what defining conventions are most plausible.

The test of time shows that Krauss made better critical judgments than Burnham. But that Krauss picked the best artists does not entirely resolve our philosophical questions. As we have seen, there is more than one way to describe novel art. It would be possible to describe Serra, Andre, and Smithson differently than Krauss does. Instead of treating them as breaking with the past, they might be seen as extending tradition. Krauss does not allow appeal to intentions, so asking how the artists saw themselves cannot solve this problem. When someone makes an error in identifying art, what kind of mistake have they made?13

60 Rosalind Krauss

The modernist painter seeks to discover not the irreducible essence of all painting but rather those conventions which, at a particular moment in the history of the art, are capable of establishing his work's nontrivial identity as painting leaves wide open . . . the question of what, should he prove successful, those conventions will turn out to be.

If nominalists be correct, errors in identifying the nature of art involve failure to recognize conventions. When there are competing accounts of those conventions, whose analysis should be accepted?

Descartes argued that thought is an act of spiritual substances. No mere mechanism is capable of thinking. His mistake was generalizing from too narrow a range of examples. In the seventeenth century, no one could have imagined our computers . Equally well, no contemporary of Rembrandt could have imagined Warhol's Brillo Box. But in one way, these two cases differ. That a computer could play chess was discovered only when it was possible to envisage how such an apparatus might be constructed. Alan Turing's classical essay "Comput ing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950) was inspired by his work building computers. But there existed in Rembrandt ' s time objects like Brillo Box.14

A pile of hemp of the sort Robert Morris exhibits now and again turned up in Antwerp in the seventeenth century when it could certainly have existed as a pile of hemp but almost certainly could not have existed as an artwork, simply because the concept of art had not then evolved in such a way as to be able to accommodate it as an instance.

Rembrandt could not have seen the pile of hemp as a work of art. In 1650, the artwork might have existed, but it was not yet visible.

In his essay "Ar t /Na tu re , " Andrew Forge presents a series of examples—the eighteenth-century reducing glasses making the English countryside look like a Claude landscape; a Pissarro-like tree seen from the top of a London bus; a Barnett Newmanesque stripe on a window curtain.15 Forge draws attention to the interplay between viewing art in the gallery and looking outside in the world. Someone who had never heard of these artists could still see a landscape, trees, or a curtain in these ways.16 The art of Pissarro and N e w m a n is not the source of novel forms of aesthetic experience. (Before their paintings existed, these experiences were perhaps harder to identify.) We can take an aesthetic atti tude toward any-


thing—when eighteenth-century aestheticians made this claim, they said nothing about the nature of art. They did not anticipate Duchamp's ready mades and Warhol's Brillo Box.

Neither Danto nor Krauss accept Forge's argument. Danto argues that Brillo Box and other similar objects made in the 1960s reveal the essence of art. Danto is not an historicist. Krauss, an historicist, argues that the nature of art has changed over time. Now objects such as Brillo Box can be artworks. What does it matter whether this recent discovery reveals what-art-always-has-been or, rather, only shows that the nature of art has changed? In any event, such things are artworks. Krauss draws attention to one important difference between herself and Danto.17 Thinking that the nature of art has changed, she explains why that change has occurred. By contrast, because Danto thinks of art's nature as essentially timeless, he is not concerned with providing such an account. Danto does not deny that it is possible to offer an historical explanation of why Warhol took up popular culture. Indeed, he discusses that issue. But as a philosopher of art history, Danto is concerned with the timeless nature of art. Here we get to a very controversial point: Danto's claim that the history of art has ended. Some critics associated with October have made similar-seeming claims. Douglas Crimp's influential essay "The End of Painting" (1981) responded critically to some fashionable painters of the 1970s. Unlike Danto, Crimp does not argue for a philosophical thesis. The protest art Crimp admires might continue to develop so long as there were injustices to call attention to. For Krauss too there is no reason that the essence of art might not continue to change in the future. She does not accept Danto's argument that art's history has ended.

If we abandon essentialism, how do we know what new kinds of things are sculptures? We need conventions, defined by the practice of the artworld, and articulated by critics. Krauss's analysis is akin to the institutional theory of art. Inspired by a misreading of Danto, some influential philosophers argued that art is defined by the artworld community.18 If there are no necessary and sufficient conditions defining art, George Dickie says, then19

A work of art . . . is (1) an artifact (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld).

62 Rosalind Krauss

When he adds, "this artworld consists of a bundle of systems No limit can be placed on the number of systems that can be brought under the generic conception of art Such additions might in time develop into full-blown systems," then he supports Krauss's way of thinking. So far as I know, Krauss did not respond to Dickie's analysis, which was not much discussed by art critics.20 If art has no essence, and the conventions defining art change with the times, what happens when someone claims that a novel object is an artwork? I lectured on Danto's theories at the National Academy of Art, Hangzhou, on a very humid summer evening. A student killed mosquitoes, put them on a paper, and asked, "Is this art?" I replied that many Western artists present similar examples, and that traditional Chinese art also uses chance procedures such as ink throwing. The next morning, I asked the students if an empty packing box could be an artwork. They thought that this was a good question. Chinese students grasped quickly the conventions of Western art.

Asserting that something is an artwork is interesting only when I can convince other people. But this merely displaces the problem. If one person can be wrong about what is art, then cannot a group be mistaken? One person may fail to obey convention, as when a forgetful American drives on the right in England. But everyone cannot fail to obey the convention, for the convention is defined by collective behavior. Suppose an artist says, "this is art" and makes that claim everyone else may find puzzling. In Royal Road Test (1967), Ed Ruscha threw a typewriter from a speeding car. His report, "it was too directly bound to its own anguish to be anything other than a cry of negation; carrying within itself the seeds of its own destruction," perhaps links this action to surrealist tradition.21 The kind of gesture was much repeated in the 1960s.

Greenberg writes:22

The 18th century saw the "sublime" as transcending the difference between the aesthetically good and the aesthetically bad. But this is precisely why the "sublime" become aesthetically, artistically banal. And this is why the new versions of the "sublime" offered by "novelty" art in its latest phase, to the extent that they do "transcend" aesthetic valuation, remain banal and trivial instead of simply unsuccessful, or minor.

He responds to Duchamp's ready mades, Smithson's earthworks, and 1960s and 1970s art. Because eighteenth-century aestheticians

. . . .

. . . .


had said that we can take an aesthetic attitude toward anything, here there is nothing new. This argument is not open to Krauss. She holds that new kinds of art require new kinds of criteria of judgment. Judged by the standards of Bernini, what can we make of Rodin? Judged by the standards that make Rodin great, Royal Road Test probably is bad art.

Here the argument threatens to become circular. To identify the proper standards of evaluation, we need to know what good art is, but we cannot identify good art until we establish standards. Political philosophers have considered relevantly similar problems. John Locke claimed that someone gains property rights in previously unowned objects by mixing his labor with them. As Robert Nozich notes,23

this gives rise to many questions. What are the boundaries of what labor is mixed with? If a private astronaut clears a place on Mars, has he mixed his labor with (so that he comes to own) the whole planet, the wrhole uninhabited universe, or just a particular plot?

If art has no essence, a sequence of enlargements of the extension of "art" could take us arbitrarily far away from our present concept of art. To parody Nozich's questions: Could anything whatsoever be art? Might everything be art?

Greenberg developed his account of aesthetic judgment under the spell of Kant.24 But his analysis deviates, in fundamental ways, from Kant's. When he agrees with Kant, Greenberg would derive support from him; when he disagrees, Greenberg claims that he understands taste better than Kant. But because Greenberg does not depend on the details of Kantian theorizing about mental activity, agreements with Kant give no reason to support his claims. Kant's texts are intricate, so a great deal of labor is needed to reconstruct his views.25 Even had Kant known the art of his day, that experience would hardly have prepared him to anticipate the dilemmas of our late-modernist museum-based culture. Kant's a priori argument is that objectivity in aesthetic judgments is possible. Greenberg's argument is empirical. Judgments of taste, he argues, are not based upon rules, but yet they possess objective validity. We judge art intuitively and spontaneously. That means that we must be prepared to be surprised. Because aesthetic judgments are intuitive, it is unnecessary and, to some degree impossible, to say much by way of justification. The claim "this is a great painting" cannot be supported by reason-

64 Rosalind Krauss

ing, for it is not a rule-bound judgment , but a response to an object seen here and now.26

It's no use asking why a work of art succeeds in spite of this and that fault, in spite of lacking this or that; or why it fails in spite of having this and that. There the brute fact of the esthetic judgment is, and there's no thinking or arguing around or past it.

We focus on aesthetic qualities of art, not upon its autobiographical, historical, or political significance. Aesthetic value has nothing to do with morality. To confuse the two, as marxists typically do, is to treat art as a means to an end. Art as art is an end in itself.27

We find, Greenberg says, significant consensus in the long run. Intuitive judgments converge, and this agreement justifies calling taste objective.28

My taste became objective—it will become objective—long after I die. Actually, if some of my judgments survive, and posterity goes back to the works of art I like and goes back to the works of art I don't like and agrees with me—and when I say posterity, I mean the people who try hardest.. . if they, let's say, in succeeding time agree with me, that will show my taste to have been objective.

Greenberg is not interested in mere empirical agreement. He claims that agreement in aesthetic judgments shows something about the nature of art. From sufficient long-term agreement, we infer that the artwork possesses the property of excellence. Following Greenberg, I wrote as if he, following a familiar t radi t ion, thought that long-term agreement defined taste. That claim is plausible. When we judge living artists, we cannot yet achieve objectivity; but the test of time might make detached judgments possible. But Greenberg makes eccentric judgments about old masters.29

I was brought up to think of Michelangelo as one of the greatest, if not the greatest sculptor in Post-Medieval Western tradition I looked, and I looked, and the more I looked, the less I liked Michelangelo as sculptor. . . . I think he was an infinitely better painter than he was a sculptor. So, there it is.

As for Rembrandt 's Night Watch—it "doesn' t come off." If consensus about such famous, historically distant figures has not yet been achieved, then when we get to contemporary art, there is no hope for

. . . .


agreement. Most people think Picasso's Guernica great, Greenberg says, but "I challenge anyone to look at that picture and see it as satisfactory." Perhaps Guernica is too close to the present to be judged objectively. But if Michelangelo's sculptures and Night Watch have been so badly misjudged, then long-term agreement does not amount to much.

In declaring that such recent figures as Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol are great artists, commercial interests are engaged. But when, denying that they are significant artists, Greenberg appeals to future consensus, he writes a promissory note which is impossible to cash. When critics agree with Greenberg, he fakes that agreement as evidence for objectivity of taste. When critics disagree with him, Greenberg concludes that he is right and they are wrong. Agreement proves nothing. He is committed to claiming, not just that there should be general agreement about tastes, described in a broad way, but that all of his often highly personal judgments are objective. Someone trying to be conciliatory might say that Rembrandt and Picasso are great artists, allowing that there is disagreement about individual paintings. But that is not Greenberg's position. Aesthetic judgments, he claims, are about individual artworks. "There is no question in my mind but that Goya's Third of May is better than anything Pollock could paint."30 He thinks that that judgment is as certain as his claim that Pollock is a great artist.

When Greenberg describes judging of art, I find his analysis convincing and valuable. Aesthetic judgments are intuitive, spontaneous, and unpredictable. Who, making the rounds of the galleries and museums, has not had the pleasurable experience of being surprised, or the unhappy experience of being unexpectedly disappointed? But what follows? Greenberg wants to argue that his intuitive judgments are not merely arbitrary. That desire is understandable. Passionately admiring a painting, how can I not expect everyone to agree with my judgment? In fact, often friends do not agree with me. Connoisseurs agree (within limits) about quality judgments. Poussin scholars have well-established ideas about how to evaluate his paintings. But when we judge new kinds of art forms, what standards are relevant? David Sylvester describes his initial response to Abstract Expressionism:31

When exposed to the first rate examples shown at the 1950 Venice Bi-ennale, I reacted in an utterly obtuse way, proudly exhibiting that

66 Rosalind Krauss

blindness in a patronising notice. . . . I was incapable because I was blinded by an old fashioned anti-Americanism.

After consensus is established, a critic may thus see the errors of his earlier judgments. But how is consensus established?

Krauss thinks her judgments correct, and that those who disagree with her are wrong. But of course her opponents think the same. A political analogy is helpful. When aristocrats were no longer treated differently than other citizens, when slaves were freed, women given the vote, and those once called "cripples" reclassified in more sympathetic ways, then old standards were abandoned. Moral revolutionaries such as John Stuart Mill in his The Subjection of Woman persuaded people that the existing standards were inconsistent. We have progressed by abolishing feudalism and slavery, Mill argues that patriarchy is, in morally relevant ways, similar, and so also should be abolished. A critic, analogously, aims to be persuasive.

Believing that art had an essence, Greenberg said he could intuit the value of original artworks. Greenberg saw that early Jasper Johns was minor and Jules Olitski great. Olitski's paintings looked very different from early modernist and old master work, but all art could be judged by the same standards. Olitski, Manet, and Giotto were pursuing the same goals, as different as their paintings appeared. His way of thinking allowed no legitimate room for disagreement. When in conversation I posed this problem, Greenberg told me that I, like Alfred Barr and everyone else who disagreed with him, was "blind as a bat." It is easy to see why people found Greenberg arrogantly annoying. He did not claim that he knew more than me because he was more experienced at judging art; he said that I was not looking very carefully. But I was, and still I disagreed with him

Greenberg believed that there were standards of taste, impossible to articulate in words,, but knowable intuitively. Because these standards are fixed, it was impossible to doubt judgments of taste. Once Krauss allows that critical standards change, who is to determine if her judgments are correct? Appeal to historical precedent cannot demonstrate that her standards are correct. Some aestheticians appeal to the test of time. As a coat is a good coat if it lasts, or a political system good if it survives conflicts, so an artwork is good if it survives the test of time.32 Mill dismissed such an argument for patriarchy. That patriarchy has survived the test of time only shows that a bad system may last. For the art critic, this test of time is useless. In a gallery I plan the review which in two months will be in print. The


consensus achieved in fifty years will depend in part on the cumulative effect of many published judgments like mine. Suppose that critics' claims have no other ground than the consensus. The reason that some thing is an artwork is that many people believe it to be an artwork. The grounds for excellence of art of our era are determined by convention. The art critic is a rhetorician, seeking to persuade many people that her view is correct. This view of art writing as a form of rhetoric has problems of its own. How does the critic persuade us? Greenberg argues that original-looking kinds of work can be classified according to wel l -ent renched s t anda rds . As an antiessentialist, Krauss cannot adopt this way of thinking.

Danto is an essentialist. Since the history of art has ended, the necessary and sufficient conditions for being an artwork can be given. But for him, this historiography does not determine how to critically judge particular artworks. The working critic must look at each kind of art on its own merits. Krauss is an antiessentialist. Not all things are possible—not any thing could be a sculpture. "The field provides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore, and for an organization of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium."3 3 But what are these limits? Rodin would have difficulty recognizing sculpture "in the expanded field " of Richard Long and Joel Shapiro, two 1960s and 1970s figures discussed by Krauss. The conventions defining sculpture could change again in equally dramatic ways. The art of 2050 could be as unlike our art as 1970s art is unlike seventeenth-century sculpture. Walter Benjamin claimed that34

art has no essence apart from the specific circumstances of its making. Thus mechanical reproduction has come to change, historically, the conditions of the work of art: to relocate the status of the original; to alter the conception of agency we attach to the idea of the author; to blur the boundaries of where the work begins and everything else ends; and so on.

Perhaps sociological analysis explains how the na ture of art changes. Danto 's argument, which leads to theorizing about the end of art history, is based upon Brillo Box, an artwork physically identical with the mere brillo box in the grocery. Warhol and the other pop artists intended3 5

68 Rosalind Krauss

to blur, if not to obliterate, the boundaries between high and low art, challenging, with commercial logos or panels from comic strips or advertisements from newspapers and magazines, distinctions assumed and reinforced by the institutions of the art world—the gallery, with especially its decor and the affected styles of its personnel; the collection; the carved and gilded frame; the romanticized myth of the artist.

Warhol's whole body of art might thus be associated with Danto's argument about the end of art's history.

The conventions determining what is art, and so also how art is to be judged, are determined by historical precedent. Greenberg provided the most important analysis for his era, Krauss's starting point; and so for the next era, the appropriate conventions are found by a negation of Greenberg's analysis. The Originality described the conventions of postmodernism. What remains unachieved is a justification of these conventions. That is the task of Krauss's next book, The Optical Unconscious.

NOTES

1. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. xiii.

2. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961), p. 136.

3. In Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 277.

4. E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London: Phaidon, 1995), p. 15.

5. E.FI. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), p. 267.

6. Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); my essay with David Reed was "Tradition, 'Eclecticism' and Community. Baroque Art and Abstract Painting," Arts (January 1991): 44-49.

7. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 1.

8. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 46.

9. David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 93.


10. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 33. He got this idea from Wittgenstein's writings,

11. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Dark Glasses and Bifocals, A Book Review," Artforum (May 1974): 61.

12. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 192-197.

13. Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark," Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 71.


15. Philosophy and the Arts: Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 6 1971-72 (London: Macmillan, 1973), ch. 13.

16. Forge's last example, men installing boxes that look like Judd's minimalist sculptures, is a little different. Such objects were not seen in city streets before the industrial revolution. This minor point does not undercut the general force of Forge's analysis.

17. See her "Post-History on Parade," New Republic, May 25, 1987, pp. 27-30.

18. The problems with this view are discussed by Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), first supplementary essay, pp. 157-66.

19. George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), pp. 34, 33.

20. See my reviews: George Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic in Journal of Philosophy, 62, 22 (1975): 823-825; George Dickie, Evaluating Art in Arts, (October 1990): 126.

21. In Lucy Lippard, Six Years . . . (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 22.

22. Clement Greenberg, Avant-garde Attitudes. New Art in the Sixties (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1969), p. 12.

23. Robert Nozich, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 174.

24. See Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

25. See, for example, John H. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

26. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 67.

70 Rosalind Krauss

27. This is not to say that aesthetic values take precedent over moral values. Greenberg says that human beings matter more than art.

28. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 109. 29. Ibid., pp. 112,91. 30. Ibid., p. 150. 31. David Sylvester, About Modern Art: Critical Essays 1948-96

(London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 20. 32. This argument is developed with great ingenuity in An

thony Savile, The Test of Time: An Essay in Philosophical Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). My critical review (Journal of Philosophy, 81, 4 (1984): 226-230) does not do justice to the intricacy of his argument.

33. Krauss, Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 288-289. 34. "Post-History on Parade" (Review of Arthur C. Danto, The

State of the Art; The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art), New Republic, May 25,1987, p. 28. A clear presentation of Benjamin's argument, as read by Krauss, appears in her "Alfred Stieglitz's 'Equivalents,'" Arts Magazine 54, 6 (February 1980): 134-137.

35. Arthur C. Danto, "Aesthetics of Andy Warhol," in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 4, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 43.

CHAPTER 4

Resentment and Its Discontents

It is the mark of fantasies that we return, obsessively and repetitively, to the same images and the same scenarios, over and over again. We do not for the most part live our fantasies out, and so they never evolve.

Arthur C. Danto

In rejecting Greenberg's historicist theory of art, Krauss did not leave formalism behind. On the contrary, the more she tries to separate herself from him, the closer she comes, in some ways, to his ways of thought. "Krauss's reinterpretation of the history of Modernism .. . in many respects... repeats the form of Greenberg's judgments, while trying to invert their meaning."1 Krauss's sense of selfhood involves absolute closeness to her allies and violent distancing from foes.2 Her extreme way of thinking is well suited to the art critic, who must distinguish the few major artists from their many contemporaries. An artwork is either major or it is worthless. This is an all-or-nothing way of thinking. When still a formalist, Krauss introduced her account of David Smith by criticizing various recent denunciations of formalism. "While this study was taking form, a rash of attacks on the critical procedures of formal analysis broke out."3 Soon she too rejected formalism. Through all the drastic changes in her theorizing, she has not changed her personal style. Recently introducing her account of Jasper Johns, Krauss talks about

72 Rosalind Krauss

her frustration with Robert Hughes ' s review: "I must have read it on an airplane since that 's the only occasion I ever had to see Time magazine. I remember my indignation."4 What art critic is not frustrated by disagreements with peers? But for Krauss, disagreement provides the natural starting point for her own positive discussion.

Forming alliances and struggling against enemies are common, almost universal practices. "Academic life is about learning and continuity as well as about controversy and dispute. These two ways of getting the business of knowledge production done intersect and interlock."5 I admire Krauss's capacity to use creatively what might otherwise seem an inevitable human limitation. Few important intellectuals are as economical. We may like to imagine that deeply innovative scholars and artists build upon the achievements of their precursors in unenv ious ways . Perhaps this hope is overoptimistic. Making art and writing criticism involves rivalry with one's master, and in this struggle, the weight of tradition is heavy. Harold Bloom's account of rivalry and poetry is famous, and Richard Wollheim and Norman Bryson have described rivalry in painting. But no one else has pressed these concerns so far in art criticism as Krauss. The Optical Unconscious psychologizes the structural analysis of The Originality of the Avant-Garde.

Art critics create values. Nietzsche's6

polarization of terms, one of which (the one that describes one's own position) is good, while the other (the one used for someone else's) is bad, and the role that this polarization into a system of binaries plays in the very constitution of a self—this ethical scheme is what Nietzsche's genealogies alerted us to. "Slave ethics/' he said, "begins by saying no to an 'outside,' an 'other,' a nonself, and that no is its creative act."

We make a sharp distinction between good art and bad art admired by uncritical viewers. Nietzsche describes Krauss's procedures:7

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of nature that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds. . . . This inversion of the value-positing eye—this need to direct one's view outward instead of back to oneself—is of the essence of ressentiment: in order to exist, slave morality always first needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all—its action is fundamentally reaction.

Resentment and Its Discontents 73

As Stephen Bann observes, "the culminating drama of the whole book (and in a sense, its precondition) is the attempt to settle scores with" (Greenberg).8 He complains that Krauss, making use of Rene Girard's ideas in The Optical Unconscious, refers to only one early book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. Girard is prolific, but because his concerns are rather different from Krauss's and he—so far as I know—does not discuss visual art, I am not sure what to make of this fact. Krauss is not concerned with the details of Girard's development, but with a way of thinking about rivalry which is relevant even to someone who, unlike Girard, does not focus on religion and anthropology.9 Here then, without exploring the nuances of Girard's claims, I analyze Krauss's ways of thinking.10

The Optical Unconscious cites Girard to explain the envious relationship of Warhol to Pollock.11 Warhol's Oxidation Paintings "leaving behind the sense of violence that Pollock's traces had carried . . . bury the erotics of aggressive rivalry that was potential in the original, the very erotics that had probably attracted Warhol in the first place."12 But the biography of Warhol by Bob Colacello, Krauss's source, does not say that.

"'It's a parody offackson Pollock,'" he told me. . . . Andy liked his work to have art-historical references, though if yon brought it up, he would pretend he didn't know what you were talking about." These Warhol paintings alluded to the practices of "the sexual fast crowd His specialty was sensing the times as they happened."13

Warhol's concern with Pollock seems marginal—he envied Matisse, Picasso, and the Queen of England because they were famous. Warhol rejected the "macho" style of Abstract Expressionism. He didn't have any special concern with Pollock's art.

Like Danto, who builds his aesthetic around Brillo Box, Krauss focuses on only one Warhol. (In Formless she cites a second Warhol, Dance Diagram, 1962, which also responds to the horizontally of Pollock's paintings.) The claim she makes about Warhol's view of Pollock depends only on Oxidation Paintings. Pollock's drip paintings, painted on the floor, were meant to be displayed on walls; and much commentary discusses Pollock's aggression and regression. A David Levine cartoon, playing on this tradition, shows Pollock pissing to make paintings.14 Rejecting such crude autobiographical interpretation, Krauss is interested in how, from a 1990s perspective, Pollock is involved in the informal, associated both with much re-

74 Rosalind Krauss

cent art and with surrealism. She thus connects Pollock to our present and draws attention to what Greenberg denied, that is, Pollock's link with surrealism.

But if Girard's account of mimetic rivalry has only very limited application to Warhol's relation to Pollock, Girard is extremely relevant to another figure in The Optical Unconscious, Krauss herself.15

We have been talking about critics, one of whom has just presented her views in an attention-grabbing article about art he detests.

"Spare me smart Jewish girls with their typewriters," he laments.

"Ha, ha, ha," I reply, sparkling with obedient complicity.

Who could not identify with Krauss in this stressful situation? Greenberg was aggressively nasty, and so the temptation for the younger critic to pay him back must have been irresistible. Greenberg admired Pollock; in also admiring that painter, Krauss was thus copying Greenberg. Krauss also admired Greenberg, and when she (like many of his admirers) had a falling out with him, it is unsurprising that she settled scores. She rejected him very much in his style. She too is arrogant, condescending, proud. Krauss has described herself as involved in "[shameful] complicity in Greenberg's misogynistic dismissal of those others who hadn't made it when the sides got chosen."161 see his misogyny, but in dismissing those artists or critics "who hadn't made it" Greenberg was only describing what happens in the artworld. Krauss too is dismissive of artists and critics.

Watching a film of Greenberg, she thinks: "His face is . . . flabby and slack, although time has pinched it sadistically and reddened it. . . . I am held by the arrogance of the mouth."17 The Optical Unconscious attempts to upstage his theory of modernism. Greenberg was the grand theorist of the previous generation, so it was impossible to develop a revisionist historiography without challenging him. Had Krauss remained deferential, she would have been minor. By imitating Greenberg, she became major but owed a great debt to her enemy. Greenberg was the critic of his day. How then could anyone involved with contemporary art not wrant to meet him? But because he tended, so everyone says (and this also was my experience), to be difficult and adversarial, inevitably he inspired resentful rejection. What then is strikingly original about Krauss, and so deserves praise, is her capacity to use her resentment creatively. He has de-


scribed the exactly moment when she broke with him. Giving a lecture at Harvard, summer 1970, about cubism, Krauss said18

I was working with a model... based on ideas from Greenberg's essay "Collage." . . . and I looked around and I saw this huge amount of space in the painting. It was a Friday, I remember, and 1 turned to the class and said, "everything I said to you in the last twenty minutes is a total lie, and we're going to start with this again on Monday.

In describing Greenberg's arrogance, Krauss did not take up his remark about their shared Jewishness, nor did she focus on his sexism. Michael Fried responded in a quite different ways to Greenberg, turning back to art history, a territory alien to Greenberg. Fried too broke with Greenberg—"for reasons I only partly understand, our relations gradually become impossible."19 That he chose not to distance himself from Greenberg is one reason Fried is a less important critic than Krauss. Nothing can grow beneath a great tree.

A totem, Freud explains, is "an animal (whether edible and harmless or dangerous and feared) and more rarely a plant or a natural phenomenon (such as rain or water), which stands in a peculiar relation to the whole clan."20 Rationally speaking, the communion bread and wine are just bread and wine, but in this "transfiguration of the commonplace" for the believer they become Christ's body and blood. Rationally speaking, a representational painting is just pigment on canvas; and a minimalist sculpture is just shaped metal. But in what Danto calls the transfiguration of the commonplace, "a work of art . . . has qualities to attend to which its untransfigured counterpart lacks. . . . We are dealing with an altogether different order of things."21

Philistines, who cannot respond to contemporary art, are fascinated by its cost. But is it really possible to disassociate our aesthetic interest in art from awareness of economics? A major artwork is a totem, just another physical thing, but also precious and so untouchable. Like totems, artworks are surrounded by prohibitions. They are set in special places; treated with awe or, on occasion, contempt; in wars or riots they often are plundered or destroyed. That totems are often otherwise banal or disgusting objects makes them a model for contemporary art, which often is concerned with negating-and-preserving aesthetic distance. The fetish, somewhat similarly, is "an object of irrational fascination, something whose power, desirability, or significance a person passionately overvalues, even thought that same person may well know intellectually that such feelings are unjustifiably excessive. "22 The fetishistic quality of art in present-day society marks

76 Rosalind Krauss

the survival of the totem's role in tribal culture, and links religious uses of the totem with art museums.23 Fetishes, linking sexual attractiveness and money, religion, and art, are tantalizing subjects for postmodern philosophical art critics. Girard discusses Freud's Totem and Taboo, arguing that24

because of their large-scale and sophisticated organization, modern Western societies have appeared largely immune to violence's law of retribution. In consequence, modern thinkers assume that this law is, and has always been, mere illusion.... the law of retribution itself is very real; it has its origins in the reality of human relationships.

Rationally speaking, Greenberg was just a man whose writings entitled him to respect, but his contemporaries treated him like a totem.25

A king of this sort lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a network of prohibitions and observances Far from adding to his comfort, these observances, by trammeling his every act, annihilate his freedom and often render the very life... a burden and sorrow to him.

Pollock, Greenberg claimed, was a great painter. In the 1940s, few other critics agreed; today almost everyone agrees. Greenberg's success gave him power. Freud describes the ambivalent feelings harbored toward totem figures: reverence but resentment, affection but also hatred. Greenberg was the sacrificial victim who had to be symbolically killed if art was to advance. After the totem is killed, "it then becomes necessary for . . . the survivors . . . to defend themselves against this evil enemy; they are relieved of pressure from within, but have only exchanged it for oppression from without. "26

As The Political Unconscious concludes with Krauss's description of being put down by one critic, so it begins with a similar scene, with a different narrative structure. "Little John Ruskin" was easy "to laugh at" because he "did not even know how to frame a coherent argument."27 Ruskin, not a formalist, may seem an odd figure to put down in opening discussion of Greenberg. Ruskin's religious views lead Krauss to Fried's early essays, and a silly story told by Fried. Krauss didn't know that Frank Stella thought Ted Williams the greatest living American because he could see the stitches on a fast pitch. Fried told her the story "by way, of course, of inducting me onto the team, Michael's team, Frank's team, Greenberg's team, major players in the '60s formulation of modernism."28 But Krauss has seen through the problems of this team with the aid of the

. . . .


Greimas diagrams. "By showing me the system whole, it showed me my own outsideness to it. But it also gave me a way of picturing what it had been like to be inside" when she was friends with Fried and Greenberg. We think of ourselves as seen by others, imagining how we appear in their eyes.29

My gaze finds its answer in the person I see, so that I can see its effect in her eyes. . . . I see and I can see that I am seen, so each time I see I also see myself being seen. Vision becomes a kind of cat's cradle of crossing line of sight, and Lacan thinks of the whole scene as a kind of trap.

But Krauss is not outside this system. Motivated by still intense resentment, she rejects Greenberg's ideas about purely optical art. When Proust 's Swann pretended to be indifferent to Odette, he still cared very much about his former lover. Were Krauss truly outside of Greenberg's world, she would be indifferent to him. In fact she continues to borrow from and learn from him.

Krauss has transferred her allegiance to another team, to that of Fredric Jameson, whose The Political Unconscious suggested her title, The Optical Unconscious. As he contends that the repressed political forces decisively influencing a text are not present in the text, so she claims that the influences on an artwork are not visible within it. Here she comes back to Ruskin, for Jameson's Marxist account of the levels of meaning is based upon scripture-exegesis. He finds the Greimas diagram so important because it shows the uniquely best interpretation. Krauss is not a Marxist, and so this line of argument is not open to her.

As Krauss's critics have noted, speaking of Greenberg as repressing surrealism does not strictlv follow psychoanalytic ways of think-ing.*>

Repression

Strictly speaking, an operation whereby the subject attempts to repeal, or to confine to the unconscious, representations (thoughts, images, memories) which are bound to an instinct. . . .

In a looser sense, the term "repression" is sometimes used by Freud in a way which approximates it to "defense."

78 Rosalind Krauss

Defense

Group of operations aimed at the reduction and elimination of any change liable to threaten the integrity and stability of the bio-psychological individual.

Greenberg disliked surrealism.31

The Surrealist image provides painting with new anecdotes to illustrate, just as current events supply new topics to the political cartoonist, but of itself it does not charge painting with a new subject matter. On the contrary, it has promoted the rehabilitation of academic art under a new literary disguise.

Marginalizing surrealism was his way of defending formalism. In treating Pollock as directly continuing the cubist tradition when it was visually obvious that Pollock's early 1940s paintings borrowed from surrealism, Greenberg defended his theorizing against an obvious threat. Taking account of the content of these Pollocks would have destroyed the formalist narrative. A person represses and has defenses. Formalism repressed the importance of surrealism. To say that a theory represses or has defenses is a backhanded way of describing a theorist. But insofar as formalism is a collective creation, with Greenberg building on the ideas of Roger Fry and other precursors, this way of talking is useful.

Immediately after describing her response to his remark about "smart Jewish girls with typewriters," Krauss jumps to the story of another Jewish woman who, though outwardly obedient to a difficult male mentor, also had a "desire for instruction." Eve Hesse, the favorite pupil of the famous teacher, Josef Albers, moved from painting to sculpture when she "bridled at Albers's limitations, his rules, his dicta." Hesse's sculptures are misunderstood, Krauss argues, when praised for moving Pollock's concern with the informal into a three-dimensional space. In fact "Hesse's process elaborates the space of painting with its modernist laws, only to sap it from its very center: yet one more avatar of the optical unconscious."32

Identifying with Hesse, Krauss uses Hesse's art to support her anti-Greenbergian reading of Pollock. Hesse is Krauss's Pollock, standing to her criticism as Pollock does to Greenberg's. That Hesse, like Pollock, died tragically young reinforces this analogy. What Greenberg repressed now has been made explicit. And yet, the logic of this identification is different than Krauss recognizes. She wants


to use Hesse to bring her, Krauss, closer to the authentic Pollock than Greenberg, his friend, could be. Krauss understands Pollock better than Greenberg did. And she better understands how Hesse used Pollock's achievement. Hesse was a great artist, but because she died at the beginning of her career, she cannot legitimately be compared with Pollock. In Passages in Modern Sculpture, Hesse has but a modest place. Hesse stands to Pollock as does Krauss to Greenberg: The implication of that analogy is that Krauss also is relatively minor. Coming after Greenberg, her achievement is parasitic upon his.

The reactive character of The Optical Unconscious raises questions about how to understand Krauss's claim that she reveals what Greenberg and the other champions of optical art—Ruskin and Fry—repressed. Krauss claims to make explicit what these three men left hidden. But Krauss, in turn, has left repressed some crucial aspects about her relationship with Greenberg. Perhaps this shows that any attempt to make conscious all that has been hidden is doomed. Art criticism has an unconscious, for something always remains unsaid. Krauss criticizes Greenberg, but leaves more to be said. When I, in turn, discuss Krauss, I also have blind spots that my critics can identify. In this self-perpetuating paranoid scenario, none of us escape missing something. But this is not the whole story. In fact, Krauss has recognized the limitations of the power of this identification with Hesse. In her more recent work, she has trumped Greenberg, discussing an artist inaccessible to him, not Pollock but a still greater figure, Picasso. Greenberg, she claims, not only was mistaken about Pollock, but he also got Picasso wrong.

On the cover of The Optical Unconscious is Raoul Ubac's Portrait in a Mirror, 1938. In an earlier book Krauss described this photograph:33

Her eyes, her forehead, part of her hair, obscured as though by shadow, are in fact corroded and dispersed through the very agency of reflection— This subject who sees is a subject who, in being simultaneously "seen," is entered as "picture" onto the mirror's surface.

The lesson is Lacanian. We may believe that mirrors merely reflect, permitting us to see ourselves as we really are, but that is mistaken. Seeing the woman, eyes obscured, unable to see herself, we know more about her appearance than she does. We see her, but she cannot look back at us. Someone might think this a photograph of Krauss, whose portrait appears on some of her books. Her book is in a diary format, but it is not Krauss's diary. She uses this literary technique

80 Rosalind Krauss

much as the surrealists used photography, as a way to break "down the difference between . . . author and reader . . . and thus between the inside and the outside of the text."34

When Krauss became famous enough to have followers, she in turn found herself on the other side of a Girardian dispute. This was predictable. Early on, a former friend wrote: "Krauss . . . quite forswore papa (Clement Greenberg), dished daddy. Are we yet to see the day that mama gets kissed off too? I expect so."35 Craig Owens had published in October but then in a critical review of The Originality published in Art in America, where he was a senior editor, he turned on Krauss.36 Her methodology is inconsistent, he claims, because it does not convincingly analyze the myths she claims to unmask. Failing to "acknowledge the work of those contemporary artists who have in fact engaged in a functional analysis of the institutional frame," Krauss refuses to allow that because two of her essays "were originally commissioned by a commercial gallery" and one by the Museum of Modern Art, she was influenced by these institutions. This may seem a strange complaint coming from a man who worked for a commercial publication. But compared with Krauss, who can, in collaboration with her coeditors, control what appears in October, Art in America editors, servants of the art market, have relatively little freedom.37 October has patrons—artists, galleries, and the MIT Press—and so can afford to be noncommercial. The familiar situation in which younger would-be radicals accuse their elders of selling out is the inevitable result of success of people who, defining themselves by struggle against the establishment, become part of that establishment.

Krauss's account of Warhol's relation to Pollock is obviously problematic. The Optical Unconscious gives a very accurate description of Krauss's role. Rationally speaking, it ought to be possible to both admire greatly Greenberg and to acknowledge that he had not told the entire story. Admiring Baudelaire and Fry is compatible with recognizing their limits. But when the great art writer is one's senior contemporary and former friend, then the situation is different. No one today responds so directly to Baudelaire or Fry, for no one knows them personally, but most senior artwriters still have personal feelings about Greenberg.

In the catalog for his 1998 Pollock retrospective, Kirk Varnedoe criticizes Krauss and Bois:38


making this artist the father of down-and-dirty "abjection" in contemporary art scants the lush prettiness and glamour that can characterize the poured paintings, and touts the antiorder aspects of scattering and expulsion in the drip method at the expense of equally salient intimations of controlled sensuality

In rewriting Greenberg's history, with Pollock leading to Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelly—and not, as with Greenberg's Pollock, to Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis—Krauss and Bois make Pollock relevant to the present. Krauss and Bois look at the past to write a history of the present. Their revisionist analysis is compatible with the historically oriented account of Varnedoe. Pollock's paintings can both be glamorous and involved with "antiorder."

Perhaps only now, when Greenberg's era is ended, can we see how strange was his role.39 When Greenberg praised Pollock highly, calling him "the most important new painter since Miro" (1947), "one of the major painters of our time" (1949), how odd those judgments must have seemed.40 What makes a fashionable brand of clothing or young actor desirable? What is desired is what "everyone"—that is, everyone in some group—desires. Objectively speaking, what distinguishes Leonardo de Caprio from other handsome young actors? But few of us remain objective in such a situation. It is hard to remember that once he was just another young pretty face. Groups, be they teenagers or art critics, are held together by shared desires. "Almost everyone thinks that Robert Ryman is a great painter," that is, everyone in the New York-based artworld, for philosophers of art hardly have any view of him and the larger public does not know his name. In the larger American culture, the artworld is a small place. Watching objects change in value before your eyes is instructive for the art critic, for his writing plays a role in such transfigurations. As the selfsame painting, once affordable by an associate professor, becomes very valuable, it comes to look more desirable, while art which loses all exchange value looks forlorn.

When Yve-Alain Bois says of Krauss, "her combative stance has constantly represented to me a rock to which I could return at moments when my strength was threatening to fail," he describes civil war, not intellectual debate.41 No doubt this is how debate in the artworld appears to him. Looking at a valuable painting I own, I understand something about how Pollock's art looked to Greenberg in the 1940s. Knowing that it is valuable, I am aware of how other people see it differently. People from outside the artworld, the postman

82 Rosalind Krauss

or the plumber, do not make these discriminations. That a few connoisseurs recognize this painting is enough to transform how I see it. Here we return to totemism. I know that a representation is just an inert object, and yet, when it "works" I cannot get out of my mind the sense that what it depicts is somehow real. When I see the eyes of the figure portrayed following me, when I am aroused by the erotic scene, and when I am moved by a Christian martyrdom, then I respond to images as if what they merely depict were real. Rationally speaking, Greenberg is just another writer—unusually smart and original, but fallible. But when he was very powerful, it was hard to see him in this rational way.

Mimetic rivalry is a central issue for the critic, but not the philosopher. Certainly there have been colorful personalities in our discipline, but they produce purely abstract argumentation. The philosophers' goal is abstract and impersonal. Rivalries enter into how and why philosophers argue, but not into the arguments themselves.42

Russell's theory of types or Goodman's new riddle of induction or Quine's concerns about the inscrutability of reference do not in any plausible ways reflect patterns of paternalist oppression, or the politics of phallologocentrism, however human all too human their sponsors. ... By the time even the most urgent of human concerns finds its way into philosophy, it has been transformed into terms philosophy knows how to deal with.

Philosophers think it possible to argue about even partisan political matters in impersonal ways. It is the art critic's aim is to convince others to see art in their way. Philosophers are concerned with reality, and critics with matters of appearance. The art critic must wrestle with precursors, and so, Krauss's argument implies, cannot be objective.

In the Afterword, I take up the implications of this contrast between philosophy and art criticism. But first, we need to sketch the fourth stage of Krauss's career.

NOTES

1. Stephen Bann, "Greenberg's Team" (review of The Optical Unconscious), Raritan 13, 4 (spring 1994): 159.


2. When Yve-Alain Bois, no doubt joking, says in an interview^, "Picasso is the fastest eye in the West, except for Rosalind. (Laughter)/' he identifies himself as her perfect ally. (Linda Nochlin talks with Yve-Alain Bois, "Matisse and Picasso: A Gentle Rivalry," Artforum [February 1999]: 115.)

3. Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 1.

4. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Split Decisions: Jasper Johns in Retrospective. Whole in Two," Artforum (September 1996): 78.

5. Mieke Bal, "Semiotic Elements in Academic Practices," Critical Inquiry 22 (spring 1996): 581.

6. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Theories of Art after Minimalism and Pop," in Dia Art Foundation: Discussions in Contemporary; Culture: Number One, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1987), p. 63.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 36-37.

8. Bann, "Greenberg's Team,"p. 149. 9. See, for example, Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foun

dation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987). Bann's account of visual art owes an important acknowledged debt to Girard, but because it is so different from Krauss's approach, comparisons are difficult. See Stephen Bann, The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1989); and my review, Critical Texts, 7, 2 (1990): 95-102.

10. The very sympathetic exposition by Paisley Livingston (Models of Desire: Rene Girard and the Psychology of Mimesis [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1992]) emphasizes the thin empirical evidence for his theorizing.

11. See Rene Girard, "The Founding Murder in the Philosophy of Nietzsche," in Violence and Truth: On the Work of Rene Girard, ed. Paul Dumouchel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 227-246.

12. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 277.

13. Bob Colacello, Holy Terror: Andy Warhol Close Up (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 342, 341.

14. Kirk Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1998), p. 55.

15. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 309.

84 Rosalind Krauss

16. Rosalind E. Krauss, "We Lost It at the Movies," Art Bulletin 76, 4 (December 1994): 579.

17. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, p. 243. 18. In Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 (New

York: Soho Press, 2000), p. 292. Krauss says that Greenberg's hawkish views about Vietnam played a role in their break.

19. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. xvii.

20. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo and Other Works: The Standard Edition, Volume XIII, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), p. 2.


22. William Pietz, "Fetish," in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), p. 197.

23. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 103, quotes Frazer to say "as distinguished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual, but always a set of objects."

24. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1972), p. 260.

25. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 44. 26. Ibid., p. 63. 27. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, p. 1. 28. Ibid., pp. 7, 20. 29. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing

(San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1996), p. 70. 30. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psy

cho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), pp. 390-391,103.

31. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume I, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O' Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1986), p. 230.

32. Krauss, Optical Unconscious, pp. 309, 313, 320. 33. Rosalind E. Krauss with Jane Livingston, VAmour fou: Pho

tography & Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 78. 34. Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1999), p. 15.


35. Robert Pincus-Witten, "Letters to the Editor," Arts 53, 3 (November 1980): 28.

36. Craig Owens, "Analysis Logical and Ideological," reprinted in his Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 270-271.

37. As Krauss has noted: "Younger writers, I think, are more vulnerable than I; they don't have a journal open to themselves to which to turn." ("' . . . And Then Turn Away?' An Essay on James Coleman," October 81 [summer 1997]: 32.)

38. Varnedoe, Jackson Pollock, p. 55. 39. See my review of Florence Rubenfeld, Clement Greenberg: A

Life in The Nation, June 29,1998, pp. 33-35. 40. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol

ume 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, ed. John O'Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 155, 286.

41. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. xxx.

42. Arthur C. Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. xiii.

CHAPTER 5

The Deconstruction of Structuralism

There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art's sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses which are for the most part extinct to-day. And among them we may suspect the presence of many magical purposes.

Sigmund Freud

The Originality of the Avant-Garde presented a postformalist art history. But as we have seen, there were problems with Krauss's claim that Greimas diagrams translate the historical development of art into a visual structure. Thus, in her recent writings the structuralist theory is replaced by two quite distinct interpretative approaches, without any attempt to synthesize them. She has a semiotic theory of cubism, and, with Yve-Alain Bois, she developed an account of "the formless." "For Bataille, informe was the category that would allow all categories to be unthought."1 Cubist pictures, structured like a language, are thus as far as possible from the informal, that is, what lacks structure by definition. These two essentially opposed approaches together provide a poststructuralist account of modernism.

The best way to understand Krauss's recent development is to look back to Michael Fried's influential conception of theatricality. "Art and Objecthood" (1967) argues that the most basic division within 1960s art is between that superior painting and sculpture that

88 Rosalind Krauss

defeats theatricality and the lesser art that embraces it. Fried's deeply obscure analysis has been much discussed. In Passages, Krauss says, "we should try to unpack the notion of theatricality. For it is too dense and too confusing."2 More recently, she has attempted an exposition in terms of Sausserian linguistics.3 Fried, whose own recent exposition is none too clear, rejects her analysis. Her real target, he argues, "is not Greenberg's or my writings on modernist painting and sculpture so much as modernism itself." This means, he correctly notes, that "she has as least as great . . . an investment in the global idea of modernist opticality as any critic or historian before her."4

An old master painting shows the world from one point of view.5

Nothing is hidden in a Poussin landscape. As it makes no sense to ask what happens to the characters in a novel after their story is told, therefore in that painting all that exists is what the artist shows. A depicted landscape thus differs from a real scene, for when I stand in the Roman campagna, I know that each step, left or right, forward or back, will reveal things at present still hidden. That my viewpoint contains implied horizons, potential views not yet visible, makes the world a world. Poussin merely shows his world. In composing the picture, the artist controls what we see. Moving to the side or standing back, we see the same depicted scene—the same people, trees and lake—in the same relative positions.

Pollock or Morris Louis, as much as a Poussin, control everything in a composition. Contrast the theatricality of Duchamp's ready mades and 1960s minimalism. How we see Fountain, an array of boxes by Donald Judd, or Carl Andre's metal plates on the floor, depends on our spatial relationship to these objects. The traditional artist aims to compose his work; rejecting that ideal, the minimalist leaves open to the viewer to determine how to relate the elements of a sculpture. Abandoning control to the viewer, a theatrical sculptor does less than a traditional artist. He thus offers a false freedom—his sculptures are more like ordinary objects than traditional artworks. Like theater, minimalism introduces a temporal dimension into our visual experience.

"Art and Objecthood" begins and ends with frank evocation of religious ideas. It starts with a quotation from Jonathan Edwards, speculating about how God might re-create the world at every moment and concludes by calling "attention to the utter pervasiveness—the virtual universality—of the sensibility or mode of being

The Deconstruction of Structuralism 89

that I have characterized as corrupted or perverted by theater. We are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness is grace."6

When Fried distinguishes art that achieves presentness from that literal work "corrupted or perverted by theater," he makes a theological distinction. God sees the world as it really is; we mere mortals see his world in perspective. Like God, the traditional artist creates a world. All that matters is manifest. Dismantling that tradition, the theatrical minimalist makes a mere arrangement of things, another object in the world.7

By making sculpture that would be perceived in terms of extended and interconnected surfaces, [David] Smith could force the viewer to recognize that the sculpture spread before him was unlike other objects. To force the work to appear entirely open and visible from a fixed point of view is to provoke the illusion that a sculptural object... can be known all at once.

If there is no God, then what remains of this quasi-theology? Fried's ideal presentness requires that everything can be made ex

plicit. Face to face with a Caro sculpture or Olitski painting, nothing of aesthetic interest remains hidden. As Krauss characterized this way of thinking in 1971 "modernist paintings have insisted on the singleness-of-aspect of painting itself, they have asked us to grasp the work of art with the kind of immediacy with which we experience our own inner states."8 Nothing stands between us and our pain, which thus is as totally accessible as a modernist painting. We have complete access all at once to the entire artwork, though not, of course, to the complete physical object; we see the painting's surface, but not its back. Krauss's rejection of Fried's way of thinking takes very seriously the link between theology and modernism. If there be no God, presence is impossible to achieve. Because it is impossible to make everything explicit, an artwork has an unconscious in the same way as a person. For Descartes, an idea in the mind is conscious. If we reject that way of thinking, then maybe Fried's ideal of presence is also impossible. Greenberg implied that modernist art achieves presence. Krauss thinks that formalism repressed the fact that some part of an artwork remains unconscious.

The stages of Krauss's argument as she moves away from belief in presence can be rationally reconstructed. Structuralism implies that an artwork cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to alternatives in the Greimas diagram. Fried imagines that an artwork

90 Rosalind Krauss

can be entirely present all at once. He fails to recognize that Caro, as much as the minimalists, cannot achieve all-at-onceness. To understand a Caro, it must be set in relation to the history of art. The choices made by Caro are understandable only by knowing what alternatives were possible. Greenberg's genealogies set the apparently self-sufficient modernist artwork in historical context, and Fried, notwithstanding his disagreements with Greenberg, does the same. Krauss rejects this procedure. As a structuralist, Krauss still was committed to an essentially visual way of thinking. The Greimas diagram translates the possibilities into pictorial form. Each individual artwork is effectively a fragment, meaningful only in relation to the system. So, for example, Robert Morris's Untitled (Mirrored Boxes), 1965, is not a landscape and not architecture—options defining the context of 1960s postmodern sculpture.9 That system is grasped visually. For the structuralist, nothing need be repressed— everything can be made visible.

Greenberg understands abstract painting as the product of an historical development in which the pictorial space was gradually flattened. Many champions of abstraction were dismayed when in the 1950s de Kooning and Pollock made figurative images, for it seemed as if the most advanced abstractionists had suddenly become reactionaries, like the politicians in the era of feminism who rejected the equal rights amendment. In ways she has not entirely made explicit, Krauss suggests a different way of thinking about this issue. Once we abandon Greenberg's teleological account of historical development in favor of the Greimas diagram, then abstraction is meaningful only in relation to what it negates, figurative art. Moralizing about the superiority of abstract painting is wrong headed. The Greimas diagram translated temporal development into spatial structure, undercutting the autonomy of the visual artwork. Jameson argues that we can properly understand what is in the text only by looking at the larger political context. Analogously, Krauss asserts that we understand Robert Morris's minimalist sculptures only by seeing their place in the Greimas diagram. Looking at the Greimas diagram, we grasp all at once the structure of art. For us, as for Fried looking at a Caro, presentness is grace. Rejecting Greenberg's optical way of thinking, Krauss moved beyond this theory. A hint of how to proceed was provided by the problems with the Greimas diagram that we have discussed. Pretending to be the logical structure of the range of possible artworks, in fact the diagram merely offers one interpretation of the evidence. The relevant struc-


ture cannot be laid out once and for all. We can deconstruct that structure in more than one fashion. There is no hard and fast line between relevant and irrelevant interpretative materials, for multiple structures are possible.

In his essay "Collage" (1959), Clement Greenberg argues that "collage was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century."10 Krauss agrees that cubist collage is extremely important, but her analysis is different. For Greenberg, printed materials in cubist pictures "declare as well as to deny the actual surface. If the actuality of the surface—its real, physical flatness— could be indicated explicitly enough in certain places, it would be distinguished and separated from everything else the surface contained." In this formal analysis, the words in the papier colle are irrelevant, for what matters is only that words make the flattened picture illusionistic. "The only place left for a three-dimensional illusion is in front of, upon, the surface." Greenberg describes these collages in Marxist language stripped of its original political sense:

the illusion of depth and relief became abstracted from specific three-dimensional entities and was rendered largely as the illusion of depth and relief as such: as a disembodied attribute and expropriated property detached from everything not itself.11

Greenberg thus connected Pollock's "trickles and spatters... with . . . Analytic Cubism." Only when understood formally can cubism appear the starting point for Abstract Expressionism. Abandoning structuralism, Krauss deconstructs this historical analysis. No longer are cubism and Pollock linked so intimately.12 The unified structuralist analysis offered in The Originality is given up. Once the Greimas diagram is abandoned, no longer can one history accommodate cubism and Abstract Expressionism.13 The discussion of cubism in Krauss's "The Motivation of the Sign" is further developed in The Picasso Papers; she offers an alternative interpretation of Pollock in The Optical Unconscious.14

Once historians of cubism considered the meaning of the word s in the papier colles, various interpretations were possible. Perhaps the words from newspapers signal Picasso's political sympathies; maybe they reveal his erotic concerns. Krauss claims that the papier colle should be understood semiotically. "One needs a model for how politics enters the work. It can't just enter the work by walking

92 Rosalind Krauss

in."15 In 1971, Krauss gave a formalist account of Picasso's cubist art.16

As a modernist artist, Picasso felt obliged to insist on the viewer's recognition that he was confronting an artificial object. Therefore a sense of the flat and opaque plane was made to qualify every other experience the painting might offer.

N o w she offers an antiformalist political reading. In Picasso's Violin, 1912, "the very flatness which banishes all three-dimensionality from the field of the image declares the total presence of the two-dimensional shape to vision."17 This phrase could almost come from Greenberg, but Krauss uses this observation to very different effect.

We read collage elements not just as visual forms, but as linguistic signs. Physical things are either present or not, for pictures have no way of representing absence. What is represented is presented as an illusion. How could a painter show what is not present? But a sign may refer to what is absent, as when cubist collage signaled the absence of depth "through summoning it as a meaning— a signified— that would be inscribed on the pictorial surface." The papier colle displays presence-and-absence. Violin refers to depth without letting us see illusionistic depth, as in a traditional painting.

If semiology refuses the copy notion of representation (the sign as a copy of a prior model or referent), it's because of a conviction that it is the signifying medium itself—language, the sign, verbal or iconic— that constructs the representation, constructing it simultaneously, of course, as meaningful.18

What matters is not the particular words used, for Picasso is not speaking. The fallacy of earlier Picasso commentary was to treat his art as essentially autobiographical.19 The Russian formalists offered a different approach. When a writer incorporates various voices, we read them as words of speakers without attributing them to the author. In Lolita, Humbert Humber t is not Vladimir Nabokov. The novel uses Humber t Humber t ' s voice, distanced from Nakobov's . Sometimes when I speak, I make an assertion; but on other occasions I utter words without myself asserting them. A visual artist, as much as a novelist, can engage in this playacting. Both the meaning of words and their visual appearance are relevant in cubism.20


Greenberg made a radical separation between high art and kitsch. Krauss rejects that opposition— her Picasso draws on popular culture of the newspaper by employing these materials in high art. This procedure was employed also in The Optical Unconscious. The various voices, which need not all be Krauss's, provide multiple perspectives on the narrative.21

I would write as though through the first-person account of many other characters, actual historical characters, whose narratives I would, by the mere fact of bringing them into the orbit of my own subjectively developed voice, suspend somewhere between history and fiction.

Krauss's semiotic analysis of Picasso's cubism, concerned with that very special case, does not extend even to contemporary paintings by Braque and Matisse.

Many contemporary art historians are attracted by semiotic theories of representation. Norman Bryson, for example, argues that there is no difference in kind between the abstractions of Pollock and figurative paintings.22 But there are obvious problems with what Bryson takes to be Krauss's position: ''all representation, including what Lessing would have regarded as lifelike, is grounded in the arbitrary"23 To understand realism, Bryson argues, is to ask how an image "creates the effect of lifelikeness—what has been called 'the effect of the real.'" Gombrich says that Constable's Wivenhoe Park resembles Wivenhoe Park because the painter intended to make a naturalistic representation. According to Bryson, Constable learned to manipulate the codes of convention. Gombrich argues that Wivenhoe Park looks like Wivenhoe Park because it does, to some degree, look like what it depicts. Bryson rejects that claim.

Bryson links the semiotic theory presented by Nelson Goodman and Roland Barthes to leftist politics.24 But Richard Wollheim, a socialist, rejects the semiotic theory; and Goodman had no sympathy with the left-wing views of early Barthes. If there be any connection between leftist politics and semiotic theories of representation, Wollheim and Goodman fail to see this. In insisting that the relation between representation and reality is arbitrary, the semiotic theory can be unders tood as a product of, and natura l ally of "late-capitalism." Barthes draws examples from advertising. But that it is arbitrary that chic clothes be seen as glamorous does not demonstrate that representation in visual art is purely conventional.

94 Rosalind Krauss

An honest leftist cannot take as given his or her political goals and then decide what theory of representation to accept, as if theorizing were then free of any constraint except to support the leftist's political sympathies. We must find a true view of representation, and then see what if any are the political consequences. But, as I hinted earlier, there is some question about whether Bryson correctly reconstructs Krauss's view of pictures. This argument against a general semiotic theory of pictures is not a critique of her account of cubism. Krauss's discussion of cubist semiotics has few immediate consequences, at least as she has presented it, for discussion of contemporary art. But the second part of her recent theorizing, the discussion of the formless, has implications for contemporary art.

What kind of aesthetic is possible for the formless—what kind of story can be told about the informal? In 1975, Andrew Forge wrote:25

Painting means nothing to me if it does not symbolize vision and the part vision plays in the definition of a stable body seen at a distance, a stable-self-image, and consequently a stable, freestanding view of the outside world.

What would it be to give up these beliefs? Uprightness, Krauss suggests, marks what26

separates the "beholder" from his object, the gap built into the human perceptual relation is what provides a space for all those varieties of vision which separate man from animals: contemplation, wonder, scientific inquiry, disinterestedness, aesthetic pleasure.

Here she is taking issue with a long philosophical tradition. In Mind and the World-Order, C.I. Lewis says,27

there are, in our cognitive experience, two elements: the immediate data, such as those of sense, which are presented or given to the mind, and a form, construction, or interpretation, which represents the activity of thought. Recognition of this fact is one of the oldest and most universal of philosophic insights.

As he notes, what is required is working out the relationship between the given and the mind's contribution.

W.V.O. Quine writes:28


Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects.... We cannot strip away the conceptual trappings sentence by sentence and leave a description of the objective world; but we can investigate the world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he could have of what goes on around him. Subtracting his cues from his world view, we get man's net contribution as the difference.

In the background here is Kant's general analysis of experience, which is one source of Formalism.

"When we are in the picture gallery," Roger Fry writes,29

we are employing our facilities in a manner so distinct from that in which we employed them on the way there, that it is no exaggeration to say we are doing a quite different thing. On the way there our conscious attention must frequently have been directed to spotting and catching the right bus, or detecting the upright flag of a distant taxi-cab, or, at least, avoiding collisions on the pavement or recognizing our friends.

Fry draws a sharp dividing line between aesthetic responses and everyday life.

When, by sharp contrast, Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenic is30

out for a walk... there is no such things as either man or nature, now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.

They do not recognize any distinction between aesthetic and "practical" experience. Insofar as language and so also thought itself involves making distinctions, separating what is here-now from what existed there-then, is this way of talking really coherent?

The radical suggestion of Formless is that Greenbergian formalism is not based upon a correct philosophical analysis of experience. Suppose Quine is wrong, and that Deleuze and Guattari are right. "The unconscious . . . is totally unaware of persons as such— from which it follows that part objects are not representations of parental figures: they are parts of desiring machines."31 Then a quite different analysis of experience would be required. Deleuze and Guattari bor-

96 Rosalind Krauss

row from Freud's follower, Melanie Klein.32 Deleuze is too far removed from American academic philosophy to have received much helpful commentary. And so what is most urgently required is making contact between philosophical tradition and the concerns of Formless. Philosophers do not think that early childhood development is relevant to epistemology. What counts, Quine suggests, is the ways in which adults perceive the world. Normal perception is by stable selves who view other such selves and objects. Klein describes a disturbed child she analyzed:

When, simultaneously with making phantasies, he took to playing. . . . Usually it came finally to fights between Indians, robbers or peasants on the one hand and soldiers on the other, whereupon the latter were always represented by himself and his troops.

And she tells his dream:

where there were no doors to be seen and no ground all around about it, and yet the windows were crowded with people. . . . It was a phantasy of the maternal and paternal bodies as well as the wish for the father At the end of this dream he is able to fly along, and with the help of the other people.. . he locks the giant into the moving train and flies away with the key.33

Is that experience relevant to understanding adult forms of knowing? Richard Wollheim is a Kleinian, and so his book on F.H. Bradley

draws an analogy between her ways of thinking and Bradley's:34

The task that confronts the infant is to escape from, or at least to modify, the depressive anxiety that attends the awareness . . . of his own destructive impulses... . In desperation he may try to split off the injured from the undamaged part of the object, the impulses that he dreads from those which he can control. . . . To achieve a permanent lessening of his anxiety, the infant must be seized with the desire to make reparation, to preserve or revive the loved and injured object. Is it not in strikingly similar terms that the Monist characterizes the task of metaphysics?

Philosophers were bewildered by this discussion. Suppose that early childhood states—as described by Klein, or by

Jacques Lacan, who is quoted by Bois and Krauss—did have a lasting effect. Maybe it is impossible to understand adult knowing without taking them into account. Then the mainline philosophical


tradition would seem overly narrow and extremely complacent. We could not base epistemology on analysis of organized, harmonious adults perceiving the world, but would need to look at childhood psychology and at abnormal or pathological adult states.

In 1923 and 1924, Antonin Artaud wrote:35

My thought abandons me at every level. . . . As soon as I can grasp a form, however imperfect, I pin it down, for fear of losing the whole thought. . . .

The moment the soul is preparing to organize its wealth, its discoveries, this revelation, at that unconscious moment when the thing is on the point of coming forth, a superior and evil will attacks the soul like a poison, attacks the mass consisting of word and image.

What lessons may we learn from him? In his essay "Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent

Van Gogh," Georges Bataille argues that van Gogh's painting needs to be understood in relation to "primitive" cultures.36

The relations between this painter... and an ideal, of which the sun is the most dazzling form, appear to be analogous to those that men maintained at one time with their gods . . . mutilation normally intervened in these relations as sacrifice: it would represent the desire to resemble perfectly an ideal term, generally characterized in mythology as a solar god who tears and rips out his own organs.

Lacan, Deleuze, and Guattari suggest that such extreme disturbances tell us about "normal" experience. The child's "finding in visual space a figure of coherence, balance and wholeness which will model the possibility of subjective stability and will thus serve to prefigure the T " is more precarious than we normally recognize.37

Most philosophers take for granted that extreme states are totally alien to them, and so irrelevant to epistemology. If they read novels, Jane Austen tells them what everyday life is like. But literature offers less sheltered perspectives.38

I am in my mother's room. It's I who live there now. I don't know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I've never have got there alone. There's this man who comes every week.

98 Rosalind Krauss

And of course many recent writers have built upon, and extended, Samuel Beckett's presentation of extreme states.39

He's cut His throat with the knife. He's near chopped off His hand with the meat cleaver. He couldn't object so I lit a Silk Cut. A sort of wave of something was going across me. There was fright but I'd daydreamed how I'd be.

No sign here of Jane Austen. David H u m e famously argues that we possess no idea of the self,

claiming that we are

nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in perpetual flux and movement. . . . The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.

Hume ' s reasoning is very radical. If we cannot have an idea of the self, then what knowledge is secure? But, he continues:

I dine, I play a game of back-gammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I wou'd return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strain'd, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further.40

For Hume , as for most other major European philosophers before Nietzsche, radical skepticism does not disrupt ordinary life.

One way to attack traditional philosophical theorizing, much recent feminist analysis has argued, is to critique its view of gender. H u m e (and other philosophers) discusses the passions, but mostly their claims can be presented without much reference to gender. "The elaboration of fetishism in relation to popular culture," Krauss writes, involves41

the visual Gestalt of the projected female body being the phallic symptom of the viewer's castration anxiety: simultaneously the proof of sexual difference and the site of its denial, since the woman's body, frozen and remade into the elegant Gestalt of wholeness, would thereby be "rephallicized" through the reassuring action of form.

If this way of thinking is correct—and her exposition is more than a little obscure—then genders enter into the most basic definition of


selfhood. How men see depends on their awareness of not being women.

Suppose we take skepticism about the unified stable self as seriously as Lacan or Deleuze and Guattari. Consider the consequences for philosophical art criticism. Greenberg's formalism depends on a philosophy of mind Formless rejects. When in The Originality Krauss presented the structuralist analysis, she offered an alternative to traditional art historical narratives. Her analysis did not depend explicitly on any broader philosophical claims, although it borrowed from Foucault. Formless offers much more dramatic claims, arguing that formalist ways of thinking, and so also Greenberg's ways of thinking about history, are fundamentally flawed. Krauss's claims, if true, thus are very important. But Formless gives little constructive argument. The literature on Lacan presents elaborate argument about details, but little discussion of the relationship between this way of thinking and traditional commonsense views. To develop a serious alternative to traditional philosophical accounts of experience and to show the implications for an account of aesthetic experience would be an enormous task.

Danto's aesthetic theory, clearly presented in the language of analytic philosophy, is highly controversial.42 His historiography is Hegelian, but he sets art within a traditional Cartesian way of thinking about philosophy. Formless makes much more radical claims, but until this theorizing is linked to everyday ways of thinking, it is likely to appear fanciful speculation to anyone unwilling to adopt Lacanian ways of thinking. When my daughter Liz was nine months old, I took a photograph of her looking at herself in a mirror, and used it in a lecture, using discussion of the mirror stage as a license to fantasize. Most art historians who use Lacan's ideas speak as if his far-reaching speculations were well-established fact.43 Philosophers have posed many critical questions about Freud's theorizing, but traditional psychoanalysis is only good common sense compared with Lacan's commentaries. Lack of knowledge of, or sympathy with, Lacan means that few American philosophers take seriously Krauss's recent work. That is unfortunate, for she offers an interesting deep challenge to our commonplace beliefs.44

Much recent art deals with dysfunction, obsession, and fragmentation, treating the unified self as an impossibly Utopian ideal. It rejects the Kantian aspiration to universality—which is central to Greenberg's formalism—in favor of concern with "division of gender, race, culture, class, or ethnicity."45 As Danto goes on to say, "It is

100 Rosalind Krauss

exactly those factors which set the group apart in the image of itself possessed by its members that theorists now insist must also belong to the concrete self that is shaped by the group."46 Suppose we remain skeptical of Bois's and Krauss's claim to undermine traditional philosophical ways of thinking. Even if their general claims remain unproven, Formless is essential for understanding 1990s art. To interpret Kandinsky's paintings, we need to know the theosophical theology that inspired him; to read Chinese paintings, we must learn Buddhist nature philosophy. Analogously, many artists believe in Bois's and Krauss's ways of thinking, so critics need Formless to understand this art. Bois and Krauss call Formless "a user's manual"—they want that contemporary artists recognize in the book articulation of pressing concerns.

Compare "Notes on the Index," Krauss's identification of the structure of 1970s American art, with this account of 1990s art. How much the visual culture has changed. "Notes on the Index" gives a central role to a linguistic concept, the "shifter"—"that category of linguistic sign which is 'filled with signification' only because it is 'empty.'"47 Photography, she argues, is the indexical art, for "it operates to substitute the registration of sheer physical presence for the more highly articulated language of aesthetic conventions." Paradoxically, the literality of photography thus links it with abstract paintings that signify directly what they physically are.48 The major categories of Formless are base materialism, horizontally, pulse, and entropy. Photography reappears, but in a different context. Like "Notes on the Index," it refers to Lacan, but now using not his opposition between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, but his account of how the subject "is himself fragmented and dispersed, caught up in a system of displacements."49 A central role now is given to the part-objects which constitute the postmodern self.

As The Originality replaces the explanatory language of narrative art history with structuralist terms, so Formless offers yet another novel vocabulary. Leo Steinberg claims that postmodernism changes "the psychic address of the image, its special mode of imaginative confrontation. . . . I tend to regard the tile of the picture plane from vertical to horizontal as expressive of the most radical shift in the subject matter of art, the shift from nature to culture."50 Bois and Krauss locate this break earlier, in Pollock's painting and surrealism; and they find in a very early Walter Benjamin essay precedent for Steinberg's analysis. Steinberg identifies the shift as moving from the natural window of modernism to the horizontal culture. Bois and


Krauss move as far as possible from what we ordinarily identify as culture. When "Other Criteria" identified the change from a vertical and implied horizontal position with what "happened in painting around 1950—most conspicuously (at least within my experience) in the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Dubuffet," Steinberg implied that Pollock's paintings are essentially verticals.51 His 1955 review, "Pollock's First Retrospective," also republished in Other Criteria, says nothing about Pollock's connection with the flatbed.

These differences between Steinberg and Bois/Krauss concern points of detail. What matters most is the agreement that there is a break associated with "horizontality." There is a distinction in kind52

between the "well-built" and the unconstructed, the former being everything man has fashioned to resist the dispersive force of gravity—including, in the field of art, the stretchers that support canvas, the armatures that hold up clay, and all the other rigid materials, from marble to bronze, that are deployed. A function of the well-built/on?/ is thus vertical because it can resist gravity; what yields to gravity, then, is anti-form.

In The Originality, Krauss identified this break with postmodernist sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s; now, focused on surrealism, she and Bois push this break back to an earlier moment.

Formless rewrites Art and Culture using the artworld vocabulary of the 1990s. Like Greenberg, Bois and Krauss begin their history of modernism with Manet. Giving surrealism a central role, they leave cubism out of this story. Greenberg opposed kitsch to serious high art. Bois and Krauss argue that kitsch is present within modernism. Like Greenberg, they are concerned entirely with high art. Greenberg the Marxist depended on dialectical oppositions. Following Bataille's highly personal conception of materialism, Bois and Krauss would transcend binary oppositions. Their antidevelopmental narrative is a negation of Greenberg's Hegelian history of modernism. In radically original prose, Bois and Krauss identify one of our dominant period styles. Future historians who want to understand the reception of Cindy Sherman and any number of other recent artists who develop out of pop art and surrealism will find Formless of great interest. For my present purposes, what is limited about the book as a contribution to philosophical art history is its fatal closeness to Art and Cidture. Bataille functions as Bois's and Krauss's anti-Thomas Steams Eliot, offering very different perspectives on culture after World War I.

102 Rosalind Krauss

Eliot, a royalist, joined the Church of English; Bataille was fascinated with eroticism, transgression, and violence. Bataille provides a way53

to organize and restructure our understanding of more recent practices, beginning in the 1940s with Dubuffet's early materiological explorations, or jumping forward to watch the extinction of light in late Rothko, or to witness the alignment of the body with the earth in the sculpture of the last two decades.

He provides a way to rewrite the history of modernism. The limitation of Krauss's unsuccessful rivals, I argued earlier, is that in retrospect they appeal too fatally close to Greenberg. N o w the same thing may be said about Krauss herself. Formless depends on mere negation of Greenberg's claims. What is "the formless" if not the opposite of formalism?

At some point even the most sympathetic interpreter reaches his limits. When in his Jean-Paul Sartre Danto comes to The Critique of Dialectical Reason, he has little to say. I admire Krauss almost as much as he admires Sartre, but when I come to her discussion of Georges Bataille, then I have relatively little to say.

Bataille's novel The Story of the Eye presents graphic violence. One young woman kills herself; the characters go to Spain, they murder a priest, and "on the fourth day, at Gibraltar, the Englishman purchased a yacht, and we set sail towards news adventures with a crew of Negroes."54 Barthes writes that "Bataille's eroticism is essentially metonymic by virtue of their metaphorical dependence eye, sun and egg are closely bound u p with the genital; by virtue of their metonymic freedom they endlessly exchange meanings and usages. "55His esoteric analysis shows an amazing lack of common-sense feeling for the story.

Krauss's account of female nudes in surrealism faces similar problems. Surrealism, she says,56

can be said to have explored the possibility of a sexuality that is not grounded in an idea of human nature, or the natural, but instead, woven of fantasy and representation, is fabricated. Having dissolved the natural in which "normalcy" can be grounded, surrealism was at least potentially open to the dissolving of distinctions that Bataille insisted was the job of the informe.

Unable to imagine how these pictures could possibly have such a role, I agree, rather, with Danto:57

. . . .


In these photographs, women are shown twisted, chained, stripped, hooded, bound, broken, their sexes splayed. To say that by virtue of having been selected as a system of signs, woman has been lifted out of the plane of sexuality and onto the place of discourse, where she is no longer a natural object, is to allow critical intelligence to be swamped by bad theory.

Once in a men 's magazine, I found the photograph of a nude stretched out over an African sculpture, a picture similar to one Krauss reproduces. (Perhaps the photographer had studied surrealism, or maybe he knew her book.) I would not be tempted to analyze this arousing picture using Krauss's semiotic analysis. The surrealist female nudes Krauss presents, more aesthetic than commonplace pornography, are not very different. Saying this is not to moralize about pornography, but only to observe that Krauss's analysis is hopelessly counterintuitive. Only a formalist could take Barthes's view of The Story of the Eye or Krauss's perspective on surrealist photography.58 Krauss takes toward surrealism the attitude Barthes took toward Sade's pornography:5 9

For Sade, there is no eroticism unless the crime is "reasoned"; to reason means to philosophize... to subject crime... to a system of articulated language; but is also means to combine according to precise rules the specific actions of vice, so as to make from these series and groups of actions a new "language," no longer spoken but acted; a "language" of crime.

Only a formalist could read Sade as a philosopher of language. No serious political activist could take this attitude.

One goal of the philosophical art criticism is to critically discuss the relationship between art and morality. In her recent work, Krauss fails to do this. Bois's and Krauss's fascination with blood, dirt, mud , shit, spit, and other formless things marks them as aesthetes. They are interested in how such " low" things can make their way into the artworld. In that way, their concerns converge with Danto's explanation of how Warhol's Brillo Box became an artwork. When worthless informal things become art, they are transfigured. Claes Oldenberg's ray guns, Robert Morris 's felt, and Ed Ruscha's photographs of city lots have become precious artifacts displayed in well-guarded museums. Bois and Krauss substantiate, but do not extend, Danto's analysis of this transposition of the banal.

104 Rosalind Krauss

This most recent stage in the development of Krauss's thought is best unders tood allegorically. When October was founded, it was not absurd to hope for an alliance between radical avant-garde art and leftist political movements . Krauss and her colleagues aimed to build bridges between the art they admired and political protest, as happened in the October revolution. But the total disappearance of communism in the late 1990s and the absolute wor ldwide dominance of capitalism have made such Utopian ways of thinking obsolete. In the 1970s, Tim Clark asked, "[H]ow could there be an effective political art? Is not the whole thing a chimera, a dream, incompatible with the basic conditions of artistic production in the nineteenth cen tury . . . . Could there be any such thing as revolutionary art until the means existed—briefly, abortively—to change those basic conditions."60

And Clark added:61

"Yes! Long live the Revolution!"

"Still! In spite of everything!"

These are Courbet's instructions to the connoisseur, and Baudelaire's to himself, in 1865. They don't seem to me to have dated.

Now they are dated, as Clark's recent book on modernism makes clear. Clark claims that "the question of how an artist should respond to revolution remains unsolved."62 His question, so important in the era when Krauss broke with Greenberg, today is merely of historical fascination. As Clark notes, aesthetes often are problematic political activists. Baudelaire's keenest desire in the revolution of 1848 was to shoot his father-in-law. When Krauss's recent writings abandon the political ambitions that inspired her and the other Octoberists, she responds in an authentic way to the changed art and culture.

Reading Formless, I momentari ly identify with Erwin Panofsky when he refused to interpret the "magnificent nightmares and daydreams" of Jerome Bosch, quoting instead Adelphus Muelich:63

This, too high for my wit, I prefer to omit.

But who knows what I am missing?64


In evaluating a perspective, we must always ask, "To whose life does it contribute?" There is absolutely no reason to think that a perspective that is good for one type of person will also be good for another—not to speak of "all others."

In rejecting Krauss's perspective, I can speak only for myself. You may find it of passionate interest.

For me, the perfect characterization of Krauss's style of philosophical art criticism comes in Diderot's Rameaus Nephew when the philosopher describes the nephew:65

He is a compound of the highest and the lowest, good sense and folly. The notions of good and evil must be strangely muddled in his head, for the good qualities nature has given him he displays without ostentation, and the bad ones without shame. Moreover he is blessed with a strong constitution, a singularly fervid imagination and lung-power quite out of the ordinary. If you ever run into him and his originality does not hold your interest, you will either stuff your fingers into your ears or run away.

Were Krauss to present the theorizing of Formless as a fantasy, I would have boundless admiration for her bold ingenuity. But I fear that she takes her claims literally. In my recent book on Baudelaire's art criticism, I ask to what extent we may learn from him "while admitting that sometimes his ways of thinking are positively repugnant."66 I would now ask the same question about Krauss. But here, again, my perspective is personal and so no doubt subjective.

NOTES

1. Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 64.

2. Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), p. 204.

3. See Krauss's "Using Language to Do Business as Usual," in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (London: PlarperCollins, 1991), pp. 79-94.

4. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 58 n. 25.

5. See my "American-Type Formalism," in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (New York, 1977), pp. 461-469; and my Poussin s Paint-

106 Rosalind Krauss

ings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), chap. 3.

6. Fried, Art and Objecthood, p. 168. 7. Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of Da

vid Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 37. 8. "Stella's New Work and the Problem of Series," Artforum

(December 1971): 44. 9. See Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and

Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 282. 10. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961),

p. 30. 11. Ibid., pp. 72, 75, 77, 218. 12. Krauss has noted that "Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler's seminal

interpretation of cubism" borrows from "structuralizing art history in Germany" ("1959, 9 January, The Ministry of Fate," in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 1003). See also Yve-Alain Bois, "Kahnweiler's Lesson," in his Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 65-97.

13. A different perspective on Krauss's use of Pollock is found in James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

14. Krauss's semiotic theory was anticipated in her 1972 catalog essay on Joan Miro, which refers in passing to Nelson Goodman and Michael Foucault. Miro was interested "in Medieval Catalan fresco painting, where depth is symbolized in the flat rather than absorbed into a system of illusion"—the concern of Picasso in the cubist works Krauss analyzes ("Magnetic Fields: The Structure," Joan Miro: Magnetic Fields [New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1972], p. 16). Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois acknowledge (Krauss, "The Motivation of the Sign," in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium, ed. Lynn Zelevansky [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992], p. 283 n. 8) the essential assistance of an unpublished lecture by Leo Steinberg, first given in 1974.

15. Krauss and Bois, "The Motivation," pp. 287, 262. 16. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works, p. 33. 17. Krauss and Bois, "The Motivation," p. 262. 18. Ibid., pp. 263, 302. 19. See my "Painting as Performance Art: The Case of Picasso,"

in Picasso. Graphic Magician. Prints from the Norton Simon Museum (Stanford, CA: Stanford University," 1998), pp. 75-96.


20. Much of the discussion of "The Motivation" revolves around debate about the extent of Picasso's knowledge of Mallarme's poetry, a tangential issue.

21. "We Lost It at the Movies," Art Bulletin 76, 4 (December 1994): 580. As she indicates, this strategy required more motivation than was provided in The Optical Unconscious.

22. See Norman Bryson, Word & Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1981), chap. 1.

23. Norman Bryson, "The Politics of Arbitrariness," in Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (London: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 97.

24. A usefully brief account of semiotics in relation to surrealism appears in Krauss's "Nightwalkers," Art Journal 41,1 (spring 1981): 33-38.

25. Andrew Forge, "Painting and the Struggle for the Whole Self," Artforum 14,1 (September 1975): 48.

26. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p. 90. 27. Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order: Outline of a

Theory of Knowledge (1929; reprint, New York: Dover, 1956), p. 38. 28. Willard van Orman Quine, Word & Object (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1960), pp. 4-5. 29. Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on

Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 8. 30. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 2.

31. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p. 156. 32. Hanna Segal, in Klein (Glasgow: Fontana Collins, 1979), sum

marizes her ideas. 33. Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psycho-Analysis 1921-1945

(London: Hogarth Press, 1968), pp. 51, 57. 34. Richard Wollheim, F.H. Bradley, 2d ed. (Baltimore, MD: Pen

guin, 1969), pp. 278-279. 35. Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans.

Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), pp. 31, 45.

36. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1985), p. 66.

108 Rosalind Krauss

37. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p.89. 38. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels (Molloy), trans. Patrick Bowles

with the author (1955; reprint, New York: Grove, 1965), p. 7. 39. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (New York: Anchor, 1995), p. 1. 40. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1896), pp. 252-253, 269. 41. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p. 102. 42. See my "Indiscernibles and the Essence of Art: The Hegelian

Turn in Arthur Danto's Aesthetic Theory," forthcoming in the Library of Living Philosophers volume devoted to Danto.

43. My "Art History in the Mirror Stage. Interpreting Un Bar aux Folies-Bergere" History and Theory, 29, 3 (1990): 297-320, is repub-lished in 12 Views of Manet's Bar, ed. Bradford Collins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 71-90, Most of the essays in this volume discuss the mirror stage. Mirrors are discussed in empirical ways in Jonathan Miller, On Reflection (London: National Gallery, 1998).

44. What might add to the plausibility of Krauss's recent theorizing is the extension of her account backward historically, to deal also with old master art. Formless has some suggestive remarks about Caravaggio. A fuller account appears in Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998).

45. Arthur C. Danto, Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 137.

46. Ibid. 47. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 197, 209. 48. Lucio Pozzi, her example of such an abstractionist, became a

figurative artist. 49. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p. 92. 50. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 84. 51. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, pp. 84, 263-267. 52. Krauss and Bois, Formless, p. 97. 53. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Antivision," October 36 (spring 1986):

154. 54. Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye by Lord Auch, trans.

Joachim Neugroschel (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), p. 67. A fuller sample of Bataille's ideas appears in his Eroticism: Death & Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (1962; reprint, San


Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1986). See also Krauss's "Michel, Bataille et moi," October 68 (spring 1994): 3-20.

55. Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye," p. 125. 56. Rosalind E. Krauss with Jane Livingston, LAmour fou: Pho

tography & Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), p. 95. This way of looking at photography is anticipated by her earlier discussion, which draws a parallel with collage; "Irving Penn: 'Earthly Bodies,'" Arts Magazine 55, 1 (September 1980): 84-86. A sympathetic reading of Krauss's writings on surrealism appears in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), Preface.

57. Arthur C. Danto, Review of V Amour fou, The Print Collector's Newsletter 17,1 (March-April 1986): 67.

58. Bois thinks like a formalist in describing Picasso's Nude in a Garden (1934).

She is both an ovoid and a Mobis strip, her limbs curled up against her but never hiding anything: breasts, navel, sex, anus, all are visible, and the continuity of her curves appeals to our sense of touch.

Yve-Alain Bois, Matisse and Picasso (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), p. 102. 59. Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Lay ola, trans. Richard Miller

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 27.̂ 60. T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France

1848-1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p. 179. 61. T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848

Revolution (London: Thames and Fludson, 1973), p. 161. 62. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois, p. 182. 63. Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and

Character (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 357-358. 64. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault

(Berkeley: University of California, 1998), p. 149. 65. Denis Diderot, Rameaus Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream,

trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1966), pp. 33-34. 66. High Art. Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism.

(University Park: Penn State Press, 1996), p. 11.

AFTERWORD

The Fate of Philosophical Art Criticism

The artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius; he will have to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Art History.

Marcel Duchamp

The artwriter too may shout that he is a genius, but he also needs to wait for the verdict of readers in order that his claims are taken seriously. Now when we have a picture of Krauss's development, it is time to evaluate her achievement. What has she accomplished?

A successful philosophical art critic projects an interpretation of his period style, getting his contemporaries to see art through his eyes. Greenberg did this. Krauss, his most important successor, should be evaluated by the same standard. Krauss's dream (and mine) is that philosophical art criticism be intellectually demanding. Contemporary art should be discussed with the same conviction and intelligence as the old masters. Krauss's nightmare (and mine) is that art criticism be merely promotional writing, the art critic just a servant of the art market. She (and I) want art criticism to be more than mere journalist reporting. We want art criticism to make a difference. Are our hopes justified?

112 Rosalind Krauss

A philosophical art critic often presents complex theorizing, but if his work is to have any impact, it must be popularized. Few of Fry's contemporaries understood the nuances of his account of the aesthetic attitude, but everyone could see the importance of his championing of Cezanne. The details of Greenberg's historiography are academic, but it is easy to grasp his claim that Pollock takes up the modernist tradition. Danto's argument that the history of art has ended is esoteric, but his way of thinking is associated with the postmodern museum. The museum expanded by identifying new kinds of art, but now when growth ends, that institution will change, in ways Danto's writing may help us understand.

Some of Krauss's concerns no longer remain of interest. The leftist political protest art, which was one starting point for October, looks to be a dead end. And her structuralist critique of autobiographical art history, which grew out of her reading of Barthes and Foucault on the "death of the author," is obviously counterintuitive. Picasso was the most autobiographical of artists, the man whose life is being so fully documented by John Richardson—who could think his life irrelevant to his art? But these are points of detail. The larger question, yet unanswered, is whether her ways of thinking will become popularized.

Art writers are rhetoricians, for they practice interpretation by description.1 When, for example, Bernard Berenson says that Caravaggio's Madonna di Loreto "stoops" toward the pilgrims "but seems to feel the burden of the Holy Child's weight as He blesses," this is such an interpretation.2 In the next three sentences, Berenson compares this image with paintings by Murillo and Velasquez. His seemingly unassuming account carries real art historical weight. Most art writers, Michael Baxandall's fifteenth-century humanists as much as critics in Artforum, do interpretation by description.

In rejecting formalism and presenting her antiformalist narrative in Passages, then the structuralist analysis in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, and, finally, deconstructing structuralism in her semiotic account of cubism and Formless, Krauss projects a sequence of interpretations by description. Are these interpretations true? It is important that none of them depend centrally on demonstrable falsehoods, but Krauss aims to be convincing, plausible, and suggestive. Her concerns thus differ from a philosopher's. Wittgenstein rejected the analysis of language in his Tractatus in favor of the account of Philosophical Investigations because he identified errors in his early book. Krauss's new interpretative approaches supersede her earlier ways of thinking because she responds to novel art.

Afterword 113

Interpretation by description tells what perspective to take on a painting. Thomas Crow writes of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptychs (1962),3

lays out a stark and unresolved dialectic of presence and absence, of life and death The left-hand side is a monument; color and life are restored, but as a secondary and unchanging mask added to something far more fugitive. Against the quasi-official regularity and uniformity of the left panel, the right concedes the absence of its subject, openly displaying the elusive and uninformative trace underneath.

His distinction in kind between Warhol's early art which "fosters critical or subversive apprehension of mass culture and the power of the image as commodity," and his later, more commercial work, sets Warhol's individual pictures in an account of stylistic development. In Manet 's A Bar at the Folies-Bergere, Tim Clark writes,4

the girl in the mirror does seem to be part of some . . . facile narrative. . . . But that cannot be said of the "real" barmaid, who stands at the centre, returning our gaze with such evenness, such seeming lack of emotion or even interest.

There is a gentleman in the mirror. . . . Who is this unfortunate, precisely? Where is he? Where does he stand in relation to her, in relation to us?

Sydney Freedberg describes another picture wi th mirror, the Parmigianino Self-Portrait in Convex Mirror (1524, Vienna):5

Into this demonstration of illusionistic realism, and actually dominating its effect, are intermingled other motives.... There is the very fact that he has chosen, as the basis for this scientific demonstration, an extreme complication of a problem in realistic representation. . . . It is true that Francesco has counterfeited a real image on his panel, and that he has done so with remarkable scientific truth. But though the counterfeit is visually exact as a rendering of a thing seen, the thing seen is not in itself an ordinary image, but a singular distortion of objective normalcy.

If we see these paintings as Clark and Freedberg describe them, then we judge their accounts to be convincing, plausible, and suggestive.

It is not a matter of fact that interpretations by description are true or false. An interpretation by description, which fails to be persua-

. . . .

114 Rosalind Krauss

sive, is like a joke that isn't funny or a metaphor that is not illuminating. We cannot know a priori if an interpretation, joke, or metaphor will be convincing.6 Only the public response shows which jokes, metaphors, or interpretations work. Nietzsche's perspectivism, perhaps problematic philosophically, is a superlatively acute description of art criticism.7

Let us be on guard against the danger old conception fiction that posited a "pure, will-less, aimless, timeless knowing subject.... There is only a perspective knowing"; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our concept of this thing, our "objectivity" be.

Each perspective provides a viewpoint yielding insights unobtainable from other vantage points. Interpretation by description, an open-ended process, offers one perspective, while implying that alternative interpretative points of view are possible. Were it possible to describe the painting as it really is, then there could not be legitimate disagreements among commentators. But because the goal is to get us to see according to an interpretation, the painting may convincingly be described in more than one way An artwriter can be both strongly committed to his interpretation and recognize that legitimate alternative points of view are possible. We both believe that we have advanced beyond our ancestors and anticipate that our successors will find plausible ways, today as yet unimagined, to interpret the art we describe.

Nothing in the writings of Descartes, Hume, or Wittgenstein directly affects public life. (The political writings of Locke and Kant affected public life.) If the argument of Descartes' Meditations are correct, then those who perform the act of meditating return to ordinary everyday experience knowing that their prephilosophical beliefs are justified. Busy, practical men are not likely to take the time for such meditations. In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein says that the goal of his book "would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it."8 An ambitious art critic would not say that. When Greenberg's ways of thinking became generally accepted, museums everywhere sought Pollocks and David Smiths. Because now an anti-Greenbergian vision of postmodernist art has triumphed, exhibitions of contemporary art in New York, as in Pittsburgh, Sydney, Wellington, and Stockholm,

Afterword 115

are organized differently.9 Art criticism changes how contemporary art is displayed, sold, and written about. This is why we value critics, in some degree, according to their capacity to convince their contemporaries to accept their way of thinking. If Descartes' epistemology is false, it requires revision. Indeed, the entire history of post-Cartesian philosophy is a sequence of radical rethinkings of his epistemology. Philosophical art criticism has different goals, and so a different history. We do not admire Krauss because we think she has shown the arguments of Fry and Greenberg to be false. (In The Optical Unconscious she says she can do that, but to take her claims at face value is to misunderstand her accomplishment.) We admire her because she has developed an original novel interpretative strategy.

Philosophical art critics deal not with reality, but with appearances. If someone is thought attractive or witty, then they are. With appearances there is no distinction between how things seem to be and how they actually are. But if someone is generally thought to be born in Berlin, it is possible, still, that they really were born in London. The fact may not ever be known. Appearances are defined by consensus, and those conventions change. When feminists warn that fashionably thin models encourage teenage anorexia, they ask that styles of sexual attractiveness change. Chris Rock tells jokes which would astonish his precursors—Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, the Marx Brothers, Oscar Wilde. Testing the limits of acceptable public speech, the successful humorist learns how far to go, and when to stop. Styles of humor change with the times, for what is funny depends on an implicit social agreement.

Crow or Clark or Freedberg might legitimately be compared with novelists. Just as Jane Austen, George Eliot, or Virginia Woolf present fictional worlds—ways of seeing that we find compelling—so too artwriters get us to see art according to their interpretation. This is the difference: The novelist constructs a fictional world; the artwriter describes real objects. Discovery of facts is important. Knowing that Rembrandt's Stockholm masterpiece The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis: The Oath (1661-1662) was cut down is essential to interpretation.10 But it is not a matter of fact that Warhol "lays out a stark and unresolved dialectic of presence and absence"; that Manet's "girl in the mirror does seem to be part of some... facile narrative"; or that in Paramigianino's picture "the thing seen is not in itself an ordinary image, but a singular distortion of objective normalcy."11 It is not self-evidently mistaken to deny any of these claims. Indeed, it would be instructive to compose counterinterpretations denying them.

116 Rosalind Krauss

Warhol's, Manet's, and Parmigianino's paintings were not always seen thus.

How does a style of interpretation catch on and become almost common sense? A great interpreter responds to a shared climate of opinion, defined in part by his writing. Tim Clark's account of Manet very self-consciously projects on late nineteenth-century Paris left-wing social concerns of the 1960s. It is not necessary to share an artwriter's beliefs to admire his or her interpretations. Looking at Marilyn Diptych, I forget my problems with Crow's political claims and admire him for offering a highly suggestive approach to a puzzling painting. Often there seems, at least in retrospect, a natural match between a gifted interpreter and the paintings he describes. Freedberg's finely polished prose is a natural match to Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. (Who can imagine him, Bostonian-born with a self-consciously artificial English accent, admiring Andy Warhol?) Unlike Freedberg, Krauss is not a literary writer. Rejecting traditional aesthetics, she rejects also that fine writing associated with humanist tradition. Perhaps because we tend to focus on very successful interpretations, we tend too easily to forget how much skill successful interpretation by description demands. Much is to be learned by considering interpretations that fail. Like jokes that aren't funny, unconvincing interpretations quickly drop out of circulation.

Philosophical art criticism has lost much of its prestige. The critic and former art dealer Dave Hickey, reflecting on his own experience selling art, writes, "Everyone in this culture understands the freedom and permission of art's mandate. . . . Art ain't rocket science, and beyond a proclivity to respond and permission to do so, there are no prerequisites for looking at it."12 He expresses, no doubt in exaggerated fashion, the frustrations many people have with such theorizing.

A great deal can be learned by studying the changing styles of the most prestigious American commercial journal, Artforum. In its earlier years, through to the late 1970s, the magazine focused on contemporary art in relation to early modernism. Today, as editor Jack Bankowsky has defined his program, Artforum's themes are very different:13

I do not believe that we can maintain a valid relationship to art without attending to the larger realm of visual culture, the advent of technologies, the movements of peoples, the broader field that has come to be called cultural studies.

Afterword 117

As often happens, expansion in one direction involves contraction in another. This willful determination to eliminate boundaries setting high art apart from popular culture comes at a price, that is, exclusion of historical issues. Artforum now responds to major retrospectives of modernists, but otherwise takes little interest in early modernism. Commentary about living artists is concerned with their relation to contemporary culture, less concerned than in the past to identify historically distant precedents.14

Art and Culture treats contemporary high art historically, setting it apart from the broader culture. Employing a very different conceptual framework, Formless: A User's Guide does the same. Cultural studies replaces concern with modernist tradition with discussion of advertising, fashion, gay studies, media images, multiculturalism, and pop music. Andy Warhol is influential because his career can be readily discussed in these terms. Holistic accounts setting individual artworks within the broader culture have replaced formalism.

The origin of academic culture studies might be associated with Dick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979), with his discussion of English pop culture, and the crossover of black youth styles in dress and music into white culture. In some ways, this way of thinking was anticipated also by Andre Malraux's "museum without walls," with artifacts from every culture reproduced in photographs.15 Cultural studies owe much to Roland Barthes's essays collected in 1953 in Writing Degree Zero, translated into English only in 1967, whose fascination with popular culture was shared by T.S. Eliot, to various 1960s intellectuals' love for rock music, and to Tom Wolfe's oddly prescient essays of that decade. And looking further back, in Baudelaire's "The Painting of Modern Life" Constantin Guys "watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendour and majesty.... marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities . . . gazes upon the . . . landscapes of stone. . . . delights in fine carriages and proud horses,"16 and is inspired by the poetic possibilities of banal everyday life.

Faced with any major stylistic change, historians seek to understand that development. The swift move from Raphael's High Renaissance synthesis to Pontormo's mannerism or the rise of cubism calls for explanation. How might we understand this change in Artforum? I do not believe that artwriting has changed just because art itself has changed. Artforum has changed much more radically than most of the art it describes. Many precedents may be found for most of the most novel-seeming art of the 1990s, but it is harder to

118 Rosalind Krauss

find anticipations of the newer styles of artwriting. Artforum now is different because Greenberg's conception of a modernist tradition extending back to Manet has become problematic. Having lost the capacity or desire to think historically, commentators on contemporary art focus intently on the present. When in her structuralist phase Krauss translated historical narratives into Greimas diagrams, she anticipated this development. Treating the possible artforms as all potentially present, here and now, is to treat this structure aesthetically. When she and Bois attacked Greenberg's concept of kitsch, they acknowledged (but did not embrace) the possibility of collapsing distinctions between high art and popular culture. She is less radical than her colleagues in cultural studies, whose ambition is to treat art of all eras as art of the present, abolishing all distinctions between high and low.

Cultural studies is less a theory about visual art than an attitude toward the world, a sense of how to enjoy what Baudelaire identified as the presence of what is here and now.17 It is the attitude of anyone who enjoys being on a crowded street—it is the felt sense that experience of the art in New York galleries is incomplete with turning also to the sounds and visual spectacle outside. The world is viewed aesthetically without making any distinctions or value judgments. "The Truth is the Whole," which to say that in the fullest interpretation of contemporary art, no part of its context can be omitted. This is not a novel form of philosophical art criticism, for this practice is not in need of theoretical justification. That perhaps makes it appropriate that the writer I associate with this way of looking is not an academic, but the editor of Artforum. "The real Warhol 'trick,'" Bankowsky wrote in 198918

was that he (w)as able to maintain under the sign of art a whole sphere of activity that traditionally defied that designation. [Our responsibility] is to write into history those parts of his endeavor—all the instruments and strategies of his self-promotional enterprise—that museum culture inevitably obscures.

Bankowsky's Warhol is quite different from Krauss's. Does he provide a superior perspective? The Political Unconscious asserts that the artwriter must struggle against her precursors, making present what they repressed. Bankowsky's Warhol makes use, in seemingly unenvious ways, of materials at hand in his culture. He finds "modern life" beautiful because it is totally present—nothing is repressed,

Afterword 119

remaining hidden. This is of course an illusion, but it is the aesthetic illusion upon which Warhol builds. He makes of himself a work of art—incorporating into that total artwork which is his life the silly, frivolous, and mean, as much as the gentler and nobler aspects of himself.

Recently Bankowsky has noted: "One of the side effects of Warhol's superadequacy to our moment is that the mirror he holds up seems to accommodate everything in its proximity."19 Danto's claim that Warhol was a great philosopher seemed absurd to some critics.20

He turned the world we share into art, and turned himself into part of that world, and because we are the images we hold in common with everyone else, he became part of us ... if you want to know who Andy Warhol is, look within.

I think, rather, that Danto's claim is very plausible, for here the art of living, that ancient ideal recently discussed by Alexander Nehamas, finds a new exemplification. Unlike professional academics, Nehamas's philosophers of living—Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Foucault—are centrally involved not in making assertions, but in "the construction of character."21 We create a self, Nehamas says, by integrating the materials supplied by accident with "others acquired and constructed on the way." Nehamas the aesthete describes the creation of a self as an act of someone who thus becomes an individual. And that is exactly what Danto's posthistorical Warhol accomplishes. But where Nehamas focuses on the unique individuality of each person practicing the art of living, Danto notes the ways in which Warhol gets each of us to see ourselves in his art. This difference in emphasis perhaps is one identifying feature of posthistorical art, which modifies—but does not efface—the traditional character of aesthetic experience.22 Is it possible, still, to speak of beauty in our era of antiaesthetic art? That question remains to be answered by art writers of the future.

In 1987, in a blurb for my book Artwriting, a commentary on an earlier era of American art writing, Danto wrote, "It is remarkable, the degree to which Carrier has taken what one would have supposed ephemeral and occasional—the literature of art criticism—and given it a philosophical wreight and an almost epic dimension." Is it not striking, how that story continues? It is as yet too soon to understand the fate of philosophical art criticism. Will Danto's argument that the

120 Rosalind Krauss

history of art has ended be judged more convincing than Krauss's historicist account of art's essence? Might Bankowsky's adaptation of cultural studies provide a better perspective than Krauss's recent theorizing? Or perhaps some other, as yet unrecognized, theorizing may provide the best view of our era. However this conflict of interpretations is resolved, Krauss has posed serious questions demanding reflective response. But here an historical perspective is essential if we are to evaluate her achievement.

We are fascinated by Diderot's fantasy of walking into Vernet's landscape paintings, which allowed that critic to engage in elaborate philosophical reveries having little to do with Vernet. We appreciate Baudelaire's fantasies about the beauty of representations of the present, and his love for Delacroix, without moralizing about his misanthropy and misogyny. And we read attentively Roger Fry's worries about the aesthetic value of Cezanne's nudes—as distracting to a formalist, he complains, as erotic Hindu temple sculpture—without necessarily rejecting his analysis. In admiring these artwriters, we do not demand that their claims be evaluated in a literal-minded way. If truth is what you seek, then turn away from artwriting and read philosophy. Great critics have always been as involved with fantasy as the art they discuss. And modern art history, Paul Barolsky writes,23

is far more deeply imaginative than most art historians recognize or are willing to admit... art history, despite its efforts to reject the poetical, belongs, if unwittingly, to the imaginative tradition of writing about art that descends from Homer and Vasari. In the study of literary genres, it should be categorized under historical fiction.

Why then, when we take this view of the great art writers of the past, should we be unwilling to read Rosalind Krauss in an equally charitable way? In admiring her fantasies, but refusing to take them literally, I am only adopting a consistent attitude toward all creative art writing. Whatever the ultimate judgment on her claims, her develo p m e n t over three decades from formal ism to beyond postmodernism is a very remarkable intellectual journey. No one has moved as quickly, no one else has offered so many challenging arguments. That is why Krauss is our greatest philosophical art critic.

Afterword 121

NOTES

1. See my High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), chap. 4.

2. Bernard Berenson, Caravaggio: hlis Incongruity and His Fame (London: Chapman & Hall, 1953), p. 27.

3. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Fla-ven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 53, 49.

4. T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Follozuers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), p. 250.

5. S.J. Freedberg, Parmigianino: His Works in Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), p. 104.

6. See George Lakoff and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 119.

8. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (1921; reprint, London: Routledge, 1962), p. 3.

9. See my reviews: "Pittsburgh. 1985 Carnegie International," Burlington Magazine (January 1986): 63; "Carnegie International," Arts (February 1992): 69; "Sydney. 10th Biennale," Burlington Magazine (October 1996): 714-715; "The World Over, City Gallery, Wellington," Artforum (February 1997): 99; "New York, Whitney Biennial and Other Shows," Burlington Magazine (May 1997): 350-352; "Stockholm. Wounds, between Democracy and Redemption in Contemporary Art. Moderna Museet," Artforum (October 1998: 134-135.

10. See Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985), pp. 319-320.

11. Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture, p. 53; Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, p. 250; Freedberg, Parmigianino, p. 104.

12. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1997), p. 107.

13. Jack Bankowsky, "Editor's Letter," Artforum (September 1993): 3. See my "Artforum, Andy Warhol and the Art of Living: What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art Writing," journal of Aesthetic Education, forthcoming.

122 Rosalind Krauss

14. Compare Krauss's "Welcome to the Cultural Revolution," October 77 (summer 1996): 83-96.

15. See Krauss's "1959, 9 January, The Ministry of Fate," in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 1000-1006.

16. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 11.

17. I discuss this conception of presence in my High Art, chap. 3. 18. His review is reprinted in The Critical Response to Andy

Warhol, ed. Alan R. Pratt (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), p. 210. See also my "Andy Warhol's Moving Pictures of Modern Life," Source 16, 3 (spring 1997): 30-34; and "Warhol and Cindy Sherman. The Self Portrait in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Source 17,1 (fall 1998): 36-40.

19. Jack Bankowsky, Editor's Note, Artforum (January 1998): 6. 20. Arthur C. Danto, Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1999), p. 83. 21. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections

from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 3,4.

22. This paragraph draws upon Nehamas's 1999 lecture "'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters/"

23. Paul Barolsky, "Art History as Fiction," Artibus et historiae 34 (1997): 17.

Index

Abstract Expressionism, 1, 3,17-18,19, 20

Artaud, Antonin, 97 Artforum, 23, 27,116-118

Bankowsky, Jack, 118-119 Bann, Stephen, 73 Barolsky, Paul, 120 Barthes, Roland, 57, 93,102,103 Bataille, Georges, 9, 97, 101-102 Baudelaire, Charles, 117, 118,120 Benjamin, Walter, 100-101 Berenson, Bernard, 112 Bois, Yve-Alain, 81, 87-105 Bryson, Norman, 93-94 Burnham, Jack, 7-8, 59

Caro, Anthony, 37, 90 Clark, Tim, 104,113,116 Crimp, Douglas, 25-26, 61 Crow, Thomas, 23, 26,113,116

Danto, Arthur: art and transfiguration, 75; art's essence, 61, 62, 67; Cartesian philosophy, 99-100; end of art, 112; philosophical art criticism, 4, 6,

10-11,12,119; structuralist art history, 44-46; surrealism, 102-103; Warhol's intentions, 48

David, Jacques-Louis, 24 Davis, Whitney, 24 de Duve, Thierry, 55 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix,

95-96, 99 Descartes, Rene, 60, 89,114,115 Dickie, George, 61-62 Diderot, Denis, 105,120 Duchamp, Marcel, 20, 30

Eliot, Thomas Steams, 101-102 Elsen, Albert, 38-41

Forge, Andrew, 60, 94 Freedberg, Sydney, 113,116 Freud, Sigmund, 75-76 Fried, Michael: influenced by

Greenberg, 27, 28, 75, 76-77; modernism and negation, 34; rival of Krauss, 9-10,11; works: "Art and Objecthood," 87-88, 89-90

Fry, Roger, 95,120

124 Index

Girard, Rene, 73-74, 76 Gombrich, Ernst, 43, 56, 57, 93 Goodman, Nelson, 93 Greenberg, Clement: Abstract Expres

sionism, 1-3; art after Abstract Expressionism, 59, 62; critics, 8, 9-10; discussed in Krauss's early publications, 27, 28, 37-38; formalism, 17-19, 99, 102; Hegelian historiography, 5, 46, 48, 55-56,101; historicism, 57, 58, 71; influence, 114; Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment, 63-65, 66, 67; kitsch, 93; mimetic rivalry, 74-75, 76, 77, 78-79, 81, 82; modernism, 33-34, 35, 47, 89-90, 91; philosophical art criticism, 111, 112

Greimas diagram, 40-42, 46, 47, 77, 89-91,118

Hebridge, Dick, 117 Hesse, Eve, 78-79 Hickey, Dave, 18,116 Hume, David, 98

Jameson, Fredric, 8-9, 41, 42, 47, 77 Jenkins, Paul, 20 Johns, Jasper, 28

Kant, Immanuel, 63-64 Klein, Melanie, 96

Lacan, Jacques, 96, 99, 100 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 38 Louis, Morris, 20, 27

Mangold, Robert, 8 Marden, Brice, 9 Mill, John Stuart, 66 Morris, Robert, 90

Nehamas, Alexander, 2,119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72,114

Nodelman, Sheldon, 38 Nozich, Robert, 63

October, 2, 22-23, 27, 57, 61, 80,104 O'Hara, Frank, 3 Olitski, Jules, 9,11,27 Owens, Craig, 80

Parmigianino, 113 Picasso, Pablo, 79, 91-92, 112 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 8-9 Pollock, Jackson: Greenberg's analysis,

18, 20, 91; Krauss's analysis, 28, 48, 73-74, 78-79, 80-81; Steinberg's analysis, 101. Works: Number 1, 3

Poussin, Nicolas, 88

Rauschenberg, Robert, 23-24 Rodin, Auguste, 11-12, 34, 35, 36,

38-40 Ruskin, John, 76, 77

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11-12 Schjeldahl, Peter, 18 Serra, Richard, 4, 25-27, 37 Smith, David, 28-29, 37-38 Smithson, Robert, 35 Steinberg, Leo, 33-34, 36, 37, 49 n. 1, 56,

100-101,106 n. 14 Stella, Frank, 38 Sylvester, David, 65-66

Tucker, William 7

Ubac, Raoul, 79

Varnedoe, Kirk, 80-81

Warhol, Andy, 9, 60, 61, 67-68, 73,113, 118-119

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36-37,114 Wolfflin, Heinrich, 28, 42-44 Wollheim, Richard, 21, 48, 93, 96

About the Author

DAVID CARRIER is the Champney Family Professor at Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art. He has written numerous works including Principles of Art History Writing, The Aesthete in the City: The Philosophy and Practice of American Abstract Painting in the 1980s, and High Art: Charles Baudelaire and the Origins of Modernism.

[david carrier] rosalind krauss and american philo

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