|
BACK AND FORTH
Predicting the future is an enticing but notoriously inaccurate enterprise. This is especially so within the context of an art world which has so often imagined that its principle function is to be avant-garde, to offer the moribund present a glimpse of how life should be lived / thought / experienced in the future. Fortunately, as an historian, this futurology is not a part of my mission.
Or is it? Historians look to the past as a way of making sense of the present. History is the story of how one becomes the other, of how the past turned into its future, which is now. History can therefore also be a form of futurology, a discourse about *how* futures come to happen, or even about which futures should have happened. It's been said that if we don't learn from history, we'll be condemned to repeat it as farce, or perhaps even as tragedy. But I'm not sure that history, art history at least, cares much about learning from the past or about seeking to prevent its repetition. It's more concerned with commenting on the present and inventing possible futures. We historians look back in order to move forward.
Here's one (historical) example of what I'm talking about. In his 1975 essay "On the Social History of Art", Tim Clark freely admitted that his interest in the art of the mid-nineteenth century was driven by a desire to "reconstruct the conditions in which art was, for a time, a disputed, even an effective, part of the historical process." He was interested, in other words, in a time when art mattered, and in articulating why and under what conditions this mattering occured ("these are distinctions with some relevance to the present."). His definition of the "social history of art" was mostly couched in terms of what this method would not do; for example, "instead of analogy between form and content, to discover the network of real, complex relations between the two." His 1980 reading of Manet's *Olympia* presented what amounted to a case-study of this method in action, using the relative paucity of contemporary critical responses to the picture to argue that it demonstrates "a simple ineffectiveness", a "failure [to signify] on *Olympia's* part." In short, Clark argued that the way Manet chose to paint his picture made its potential messages, about middle-class hypocrisy and the commodification of sexuality, illegible to its readers in 1865. Opaque rather than ambiguous, the painting was too avant-garde for its own good; "it erodes the *terms* in which the normal recognitions are enacted, but it leaves the structure itself intact."
This essay was originally published in Britain's *Screen* magazine, then renowned for its merger of marxist, psychoanalytic, feminist, and semiotic critical methods, and Clark pointedly suggests that his commentary on Manet's work also raises "some theoretical questions which relate to *Screen's* recent concerns." Film-maker Peter Wollen took the bait and replied in an extended letter published in the following issue. Wollen saw Clark's argument as having little to do with Manet's picture and everything to do with himself, that is with a type of avant-garde art practice then exemplified by Wollen's and Laura Mulvey's 1976 film *Riddles of the Sphinx*. According to Wollen, Clark's analysis favours Courbet's realist approach to political representation over Manet's modernist one, and "is in effect a root-and-branch rejection of the whole modernist movement, including its radical avant-garde sector."
If we accept Wollen's reading of Clark's art history, then we have to see this history as an effort to project a possible future for art making in which certain kinds of realism are to be favoured over more formally avant-garde strategies. I've already suggested that all art history is like this, even if not all historians are as self-conscious about it as Clark. In the context of this question about an "as yet unknown art", it makes me wonder about what future my own historical writing presumes and projects.
In essence, Clark and Wollen were arguing over which of two available avant-gardes were more likely to be politically effective in present and future art practice. But both assume the political function of the avant-garde within mass culture. The artistic avant-garde, so this assumption goes, represents a space of resistance to the blandishments of globalized capital. Good historical criticism should privilege this space, thereby offering a model of practice (both artistic and social/political) alternative to that continually propagated by and embodied in the products of a normative, capitalist culture.
The problem I have with this argument is that it tends to turn a blind eye to the contradictions and spaces of critique inherent in all of capitalism's products, including, for example, its non-avant-garde ones. My own work of late has concentrated on trying to develop a form of historical criticism that can do justice to vernacular photographic practices. How, I want to ask, can we develop a way of dealing with these practices that emulates their own way of being, that acknowledges rather than represses their particular qualities and characteristics, including their small and complicating acts of resistance to the status quo? I've been arguing that vernacular photographic practices in fact issue a serious challenge to existing histories of photography, a challenge that insists, not simply on their inclusion in the medium's grand narratives, but on the total transformation of the narrative itself. I obviously envision a type of contemporary art that does something similar, that finds ways to infiltrate our cultural, economic and political systems without declaring itself as an overtly oppositional practice, that functions as a kind of virus, enacting a repetition of the same, but with a minute (and, for the host, potentially fatal) difference. The question is, how will I know this practice when I see it? That could well be the question addressed to the writers of the next of these Anthologies.
Geoffrey Batchen
Albuquerque
|
|
|