BENJAMIN H.D.. BUCHLOH. DAVID JOSELIT art sinc m. SECOND. EDITION.
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A landmark study in the history of modern art – revised, updated and expanded ‘The book is important, not because it gives neat answers but because it raises questions’ – Sir Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate
‘Turn off The Culture Show and Late Review, put down Time Out and read this book instead. It has a good clear structure, providing a year-by-year account of what happened. It provides facts and dates but also philosophy. It attempts to bring the past into the present’ – Matthew Collings, The Guardian ‘A survey that understands, brilliantly, that the job of survey books is not to paint a picture of a territory, but to provide a map that others may use to navigate their own course’ – Tom Morton, Blueprint ‘The significance of Art Since 1900 can’t be underestimated: psychoanalysis and poststructuralism are now inescapable methodologies that must be taken on board by mainstream art history’ – Claire Bishop, Artforum
HAL FOSTER ROSALIND KRAUSS YVE-ALAIN BOIS BENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH DAVID JOSELIT ART SINCE
MODERNISM ANTIMODERNISM POSTMODERNISM
‘The definitive history of twentieth-century art … spectacular, and painstakingly conceived’ – Gaby Wood, The Observer ‘The level of discussion is simply far more interesting than in any other guide to twentieth-century art’ – Norman Bryson, University of California, San Diego
1900
‘This is no ordinary survey … it opens theoretical and historical perspectives on twentieth-century art with a sparkling clarity every reader will appreciate’ – Mignon Nixon, Courtauld Institute of Art
‘A remarkable collective work. It criss-crosses the entire twentieth century in complex and fascinating ways. Written by four of the most innovative scholars of modern art history today, it is a landmark’ – Briony Fer, University College London
This sales blad contains uncorrected proofs of sample pages in miniature. The full specification for the book itself is: Trimmed page size: 27.7 x 21.6 cm Hardback 816 pages with 744 illustrations, 510 in colour www.thamesandhudson.com £48.00 ISBN 978-0-500-23889-9 £48.00 (price subject to change without notice)
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SECOND EDITION
HAL FOSTER ROSALIND KRAUSS YVE-ALAIN BOIS BENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH DAVID JOSELIT
ART MODERNISM ANTIMODERNISM POSTMODERNISM
SECOND EDITION
SINCE
1900
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) and Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904)
he Englishman Eadweard Muybridge and the Frenchman Étienne-Jules Marey are yoked in time and by work: not only do they share the same birth and death dates, but also together they pioneered the photographic study of movement in ways that influenced not only the development of Futurist art but also the modern rationalization of labor and, it could be argued, of space–time in general. First known as a photographer of American West and Central American landscapes, Muybridge was enlisted in 1872 by Leland Stanford, the millionaire ex-governor of California, in a racing dispute about the gait of horses. In Palo Alto, Muybridge photographed horses with a battery of cameras; typically, he arranged the images in rows and reshot them in a grid that could be scanned both horizontally and vertically. A book, The Horse in Motion, which Stanford bowdlerized, appeared in 1882, the same year that Muybridge sailed to Europe for a lecture tour. In Paris he was welcomed by Marey, the famous photographer Nadar, the Salon painter Ernest Meissonier, and the great physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz—some indication of the range of interest in this work that registered perceptual units beyond the limits of human vision. Unlike Muybridge, who considered himself an artist, Marey was a physiologist by training who had previously worked on graphic methods to record motion. When he first saw work by Muybridge in the science journal La Nature in 1878, he turned to photography as a more precise and neutral way to register discrete movement. Marey first devised a photographic gun with a circular plate that yielded near-instantaneous serial photographs from a singular viewpoint. He then used a slotted disk in front of the camera to break up movement in set intervals that could be registered on a single photographic plate; it was this work that he first described as “chronophotography.” In order to avoid superimposition, Marey clad his subjects entirely in black, with metal-studded strips along arms and legs (bits of paper were used for animals). Along with the singular viewpoint, this device effectively restored a spatio-temporal coherence to the very perceptual field that was otherwise fragmented. It was more scientific than the Muybridge approach, which did not have a consistent point of view or interval between images, but it was also less radical in its disruption of the apparent continuum of vision. It was this disruption that most intrigued the modernists— the Futurists in their pursuit of a subversive speed, and artists like Marcel Duchamp in their search for spatio-temporal dimensions not previously perceived. But could it be that, like Muybridge and Marey, these artists were also involved in a historical dialectic that far exceeded their work as individuals —a modern dialectic of a ceaseless renovation of perception, of a perpetual liberating and redisciplining of vision that would persist throughout the twentieth century?
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A liberation of language: parole in libertà
1909 | The first Futurist manifesto is published
2000 –2010
1911, 1912
2000 –2010
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which retains the traditional sculptural methods of modeling and bronze-casting, the work incorporates industrially produced materials as called for in Boccioni’s own manifesto: leather, found fragments of glass, shards of metal, preformed elements of wood. One of the first fully nonrepresentational sculptures of the twentieth century, it compares most adequately with the abstract sculpture produced in Russia at that time by Vladimir Tatlin. Insofar as collage surfaced as the key technique in the contradictory range of Futurism’s attempts to fuse avant-garde sensibilities with mass culture, Carrà’s Interventionist Demonstration [ 6] is a central example of the Futurist aesthetic as it came to a climax just before World War I. Indeed, the work incorporates all of the devices with which Futurism was most engaged: the legacy of divisionist painting; the Cubist fragmentation of traditional perceptual space; the insertion of clippings from newspapers and found materials from advertising; the suggestion of kinesthesia through a visual dynamic set up by the collage’s construction as both a vortex and a matrix of crisscrossing power lines set as mutually counteractive diagonals; and last, but not least, the juxtaposition of the separate phonetic dimension of language with its graphic signifiers. Typically enough, the phonetic performance of language in Interventionist Demonstration is in almost all instances onomatopoeic. In directly imitating the sounds of sirens (the wail evoked by “HU-HU-HU-HU”), the screeches of engines and machine guns (“TRrrrrrrrr” or “traaak tatatraak”), the screams of people (“EVVIVAAA”), it is distinctly different from the structural
Zang Tumb Tuum of 1914, the first collection of Marinetti’s “free word poetry” was prefaced by his slightly earlier manifesto of Futurist poetry, Destruction of Syntax—Imagination without Strings—Words-in-Freedom. Using a set of expressive typographic and orthographic variations and an unstructured spatial organization, Zang Tumb Tuum tries to express the sights, sounds, and smells of the poet’s experience in Tripoli. This assertion of “wordsin-freedom” emerged from a long and complicated dialogue with late-nineteenth-century Symbolist poetry and its early-twentiethcentury legacy in France. Although deeply influenced by, and dependent upon, the example of Mallarmé, Marinetti publicly declared his opposition to the French poet’s project. Insisting that
1900 –1909
1900 –1909
5 & Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Speeding Horse and House, 1914–15 Gouache, oil, wood, paste-board, copper, and painted iron, 112.9 x 115 (441 ⁄ 2 x 451 ⁄ 4)
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analysis of the phonetic, the textual, and the graphic components of language in Russian Cubo-Futurist poetry or the calligrammes of Apollinaire. The juxtaposition of anti-German war slogans (“Down with Austro-Hungary”) with found advertising material, or the concatenation of Italian patriotic declarations (“Italia Italia”) with musical fragments, continues the technique of Cubist collage but turns this aesthetic into a new model of mass-cultural instigation and propaganda. Its glorification of war is further registered in the drum beats evoked by the words “ZANG TUMB TUUM.”
3 0 Damien Hirst’s The Dream (2008) shown at the “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” auction exhibition at Sotheby’s, London, September 2008
“apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste.” Appropriately, in fall 2008 Koons staged a show of his recent production at that tourist Mecca, the royal palace at Versailles. Two years later, Murakami caused great controversy with his own exhibition at the same venue. The Japanese artist has exploited the convergence of art, media, and market even more thoroughly than Koons has. If the latter operates with smart selections from the repertoire of Western kitsch, the former develops figures of his own branding inspired by the Japanese subcultures of otaku (often translated as “geek”) and kawaii (“cuteness”). Otaku fans tend to be male adolescents obsessed with particular characters in manga (comic books) and anime (television programs and films); some are action figures to identify with, while others are submissive girls to fantasize about. An early attempt by Murakami in the otaku vein was Miss Ko2 (1997), a combination of a pixie blonde girl with her hair in a ribbon and a buxom porn star in a skimpy waitress costume. Miss Ko2 was not a hit among otaku fans—apparently she did not appear submissive enough—but Murakami has proved more successful with motifs that play on the female-oriented subculture of kawaii, such as his zesty mush-
2 0 Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog (Magenta),1994–2000, installed in the Château de Versailles, France, 2008 High-chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating, 307.3 x 363.2 x 114.3 (121 x 143 x 45)
6 & Carlo Carrà, Interventionist Demonstration, 1914 Tempera and collage on cardboard, 38.5 x 30 (15 1 ⁄ 8 x 11 3 ⁄ 4) 1912
The first Futurist manifesto is published | 1909
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1980 | Dada Fair
Art and the market | 2007c
2007c | Art and the market
4 ( Ai Weiwei, Fairytale, project for Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany, 2007 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs (1644–1911)
As for designing a “logo,” a trap that Newman called the “diagram” and which he paradoxically avoided by addressing the issue at the outset when he opted for the simplest possible spatial markers (his immediately recognizable vertical “zips”), one can also date its beginning to 1948. A case in point is Motherwell’s lifelong Elegy to the Spanish Republic series (more than 140 paintings), based on an ink drawing conceived in 1948 as an illustration for a poem by Rosenberg and destined for the second (never published) issue of Possibilities : pulling out the tiny sketch from a drawer one year later, Motherwell scrupulously reproduced it, with all its scumbling contours and paint runoffs, on a somewhat larger canvas now given the title At Five in the Afternoon, the famous refrain of an elegy by the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca
lamenting the death of a bullfighter [ 3 ]. Such posturing does not necessarily characterize the working method of all the Abstract Expressionists, but the very fact that it was possible at all (and that it would be thoroughly imitated by legions of younger artists once the movement had become widely successful, that is, by the midfifties) merits consideration. Gottlieb’s clouds hovering above an allusive horizon, Kline’s broad and energetic brush-strokes in slicker and slicker black paint [ 5 ], and Still’s dry shards quickly became patented figures of style. Even Rothko’s horizontal partitions of his vertical canvases [ 4 ] fit into this category: were it not for the sustained inventiveness of his color chords, and the ensuing enigmas of figure–ground relations that his works continued to pose till the end, his art may have been exhausted by the artist’s manic overproduction. In short, the seriality of Abstract Expressionism, in the end, had much in common with that of the movement said to have precipi tated its demise—Pop art. Jasper Johns (born 1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008), whose rise to fame immediately
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1953, 1958, 1960c, 1962d, 1964b
Signature style
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1947b | Abstract Expressionism
3 ( Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2010 Installation view
4 Mark Rothko, Number 3/No. 13 (Magenta, Black, Green on Orange), 1949 Oil on canvas, 216.5 x 163.8 (85 1 ⁄ 4 x 64 1 ⁄ 2)
Abstract Expressionism | 1947b
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2010a | Chinese contemporary art
that despite the much greater complexity of transporting 1001 people to Kassel as opposed to shipping 1001 chairs there, it is very likely that the average Documenta visitor had no contact whatsoever with, and perhaps no awareness of, the Chinese tourists of Fairytale, while every visitor would have noticed the presence of 1001 chairs that connote traditional “Chinese identity.” Part of Ai’s fairytale concerns how objects communicate as envoys of persons or nations—and what better image for such stand-ins than empty chairs? Fairytale, then, juxtaposed two different publics that were in danger of completely missing one another: a public composed of Chinese citizens discovering a European city for the first time, and a public composed of largely European and American art enthusiasts discovering a set of Chinese artifacts. Each group no doubt brought their own preconceptions and expectations to the experience and therefore inevitably took away meanings that had as much to do with themselves as with their encounter with the foreign. In other words, Fairytale provides a highly nuanced and multilevel enactment of globalization, not as a small, unified world, but as a world of people and things that travel at different speeds in which connections are missed as often as they are made. In his understanding of the work of art as a composition of different publics—particularly of a Chinese public encountering the West, and a Western public encountering Chinese material culture—Ai provides an apt introduction to contemporary art in China, which since the mid-nineties has been an object of fascination and financial speculation in the West. The art historian Wu Hung has argued that exhibitions are central to an understanding of contemporary Chinese art through their capacity to open small, temporary, but often virulent public spheres where an intellectual and artistic vanguard can incrementally broaden the scope of artistic freedom as well as political speech in China. The first watershed exhibition after the end of Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution in 1976—a decade during which open intellectual and cultural life was severely suppressed and artistic production was narrowly channeled into official Socialist Realist representations in service to the state—was organized by a group called the “Stars” in 1979. This
Dada Fair | 1980
was the same year that China’s leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the market reforms that were to set off China’s massive economic growth in the ensuing decades. The members of the Stars (which included Ai Weiwei) worked in diverse styles, but what historians identify as their most significant accomplishment as a group was their invention of the “unofficial exhibition” in China, typically presented alongside official presentations as a kind of “parasite.” The “Stars” show in 1979, for instance, was installed outside the east gate of the National Art Gallery in Beijing during the National Art Exhibition for the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China; it was closed down by the police, leading to a demonstration convened at Beijing’s famous Democracy Wall, and it ultimately garnered a front-page story in the New York Times, as well as the consternation of the highest ranks of the Chinese government. Ten years later, in 1989, just months before the Democracy Movement (known in China as the June Fourth Movement) was brutally suppressed by the army in Tiananmen Square, another important exhibition “China/Avant-Garde” was closed down twice during its two-week run. This exhibition surveyed a lively range of artists’ groups and experimental activities that occurred between 1985 and 1989 as part of what was called the New Wave, and it encompassed experiments in several media, including performance and installation. This efflorescence of art activity arose partly in response to new flows of information about modern art and critical theory from abroad during the eighties, and partly due to a domestic infrastructure of unofficial art journals, including the Beijing-based weekly Fine Arts in China and the Wuhan quarterly The Trend of Art Thought, which tied together diverse practices
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2000 –2010
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1945 –1949
1945 –1949 3 Robert Motherwell, At Five in the Afternoon, 1949 Casein on board, 38.1 x 50.8 (15 x 20)
starting over,” wrote Thomas B. Hess, “and the whole image [is kept] under rigorous control.”
rooms, smiley flowers, toddlers called “Kaikai” and “Kiki” (his corporation is titled in their honor), and, above all, “Mr DOB.” Named after a manga character, DOB closely resembles a Mickey Mouse whose head (that is all he is) spells out his name (D and B appear on his ears, and his face is an O). Toothy and sinister in his first incarnation, DOB was quickly refashioned as infantile and cute; as it happens, Mickey evolved in similar fashion, and the branding of DOB does seem based on that of the Disney star. Although Japan does not hold to the separation between high and low culture that once marked the modern West, Murakami still spans socioeconomic registers in a way that might be unprecedented. His bright mutants like DOB appear both in the costliest paintings and sculptures and in the cheapest merchandise (stickers, buttons, key chains, dolls, etc.); they can be found in major museums as well as in convenience stores. The graffiti artist Keith Haring had some of this market range in the eighties; his signature figures of “the radiant baby” and “the barking dog” also extended from T-shirts to art work. Yet his “Pop Shop” was small beer compared to the Murakami corporation, which offers such services as advertising, packaging, animation, exhibition development, and website production. At one point, the multitasking Murakami also
5 ( Wang Guangyi, Great Criticism: Marlboro, 1992 Oil on canvas, 175 x 175 (68 7⁄ 8 x 68 7⁄ 8)
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