Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION Figure 10.1 Cecil Beaton, “Jackson Pollock’s Abstractions,” Vogue, March 1, 1951, p. 159, © Vogue, The Condé Nast Publications Inc. There is a line of art stretching back to David and Shelley which makes no sense—which would not have existed—without its practitioners believing that what they did was resist or exceed the normal understandings of [bourgeois] culture, and that these understandings were their enemy. This is the line of art we call modernist. 2 2 T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 364; subsequent page references to this volume will be placed within parentheses in the text. 153
THE AVANT-GARDE IN FASHION Just as—to take another matter discussed in Clark’s book—the Russian Revolution embodied aspirations for a better world, modernism attempted to break with artistic expressions of the existing social reality, acting out, consciously or unconsciously, utopian aspirations. In his 1939 essay “Avant-garde and kitsch,” Clement Greenberg had explicitly tied the emergence of what he was later to call “Modernist” art to the rise of a socialist opposition to capitalist society in the nineteenth century. The socialist critique was absorbed, “even if unconsciously for the most part,” by artists and writers who drew on revolutionary ideas to define themselves in antagonism to “the bourgeois,” their normal public. This antagonism served them well when class conflict threw into question “all the verities involved by religion, authority, tradition, style, . . . and the writer or artist [was] no longer able to estimate the response of his audience to the symbols and references with which he works.” 3 Once artistic form—the material of which now destabilized “symbols and references” is made—is detached from its former standardized representational uses, the artist comes to try to make an object which will be meaningful by virtue of having no subject-matter beside itself. This can, in practice, only mean an object whose significance is given by the materials and practices of art-making. “This is the genesis of the ‘abstract.’ In turning his attention away from subject matter of common experience, the poet or artist turns it upon the medium of his own craft.” 4 Modernism in this way turns cultural resistance to the established social order into the formal stuff of art. In an earlier essay on Greenberg’s theory of art, Clark declined to join in with “the patter about art being ‘revolutionary’.” 5 What then does it mean to speak, more mildly, of art’s “resistance” to the dominant culture? Clark’s answer in the Pollock essay evokes the familiar “shock of the new”: it is to refer to “some form of intransigence or difficulty in the [art] object produced, some action against the codes and procedures by which the world was lent its usual likeness” (p. 364). That Clark means something with more bite to it than such modern art-appreciation bromides suggest emerges in his more detailed discussion of Pollock’s abstract painting between 1947 and 1950. In Clark’s view, figurative painting by the 1940s was “an agreed order of images . . . overlaid with lies” (p. 364). Pollock’s painting, by rejecting figuration in the particular way it did, proposed the existence of “a kind of experience . . . not colonized or banalized by the ruling symbolic regimes,” which is “not occupied by the usual discursive forces because it is a wilderness” (p. 335). But if this was modernism’s ambition in the particular conditions of New York City in the late 1940s, the Vogue story, Clark writes, actualized “the bad dream of modernism,” (p. 308) the thought that “however urgent the impulse had been to 3 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-garde and kitsch,” in idem, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 4. 4 Ibid., p. 6. 5 T. J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s theory of art,” Critical Inquiry 9:1 (1982), p. 156. 154
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ART IN ITS TIME Art writing normall
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First published 2003 by Routledge 1
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CONTENTS List of illustrations ix P
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PREFACE In writing this book I have
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1 INTRODUCTION The ten chapters tha
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INTRODUCTION ideology, as I am atte
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INTRODUCTION process as practically
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INTRODUCTION articulation of nonver
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2 SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM The days
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM which it di
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM chaotic mov
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the faces o
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.2
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM Figure 2.3
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM private str
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SOME MASKS OF MODERNISM the artist
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ART AND MONEY action taken to turn
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ART AND MONEY Diderot’s version o
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ART AND MONEY Luxury and corruption
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ART AND MONEY financed not only by
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ART AND MONEY of Plato with whom th
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ART AND MONEY When a handful of spe
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ART AND MONEY might confuse the hon
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ART AND MONEY complaint about the r
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ART AND MONEY comparison with Kant
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ART AND MONEY experience of the bea
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ART AND MONEY worthy inheritors of
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME It is, we mus
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME strength. Cri
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In Rousseau
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME two centuries
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME exemplified b
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME Figure 4.1 Jo
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME “beautiful
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME and political
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME The paintings
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME In this pictu
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world will be long in freeing itsel
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69 Figure 4.2 Eugène Delacroix, De
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BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME always has a
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the sublime and the beautiful—cal
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART “Spiri
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART als, wit
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART The dist
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART members
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART image, e
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THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART which de
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6 MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION IN THE AG
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION Almost none
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION models were
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION But we are
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION They repres
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION have alread
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION And they pr
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MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION It is evide
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Page 132 and 133: 8 THE AESTHETICS OF ANTI-AESTHETICS
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Page 196 and 197: Adams, Abigail 48 Adorno, Theodor 5
Page 198: play 41ff Pocock, J. G. A. 28 n. 16
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Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

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