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  • New Realisms: 1957-1962: Object Strategies between Readymade and Spectacle
  • Stephen Petersen
New Realisms: 1957-1962: Object Strategies between Readymade and Spectacle edited by Julia Robinson. The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, U.S.A., U.K., 2010. 294 pp., illus. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-262-51522-1.

This catalogue for a major exhibition (at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid) makes a strong case for rethinking, repositioning and ultimately redeeming the fraught term "New Realism" in postwar art history. It argues as well for the inclusion into the art-historical canon of works that, falling chronologically somewhere between the emergence of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol—and being far messier than those of either—have received scant scholarly attention relative to their historical import. Strategies developed by an international array of artists in a few short years set the stage for everything from pop to performance, conceptualism to land art, institutional critique to installation and new media. The 200-plus works in the show, by some 30 artists, among them Jean Tinguely, Robert Whitman and George Brecht, are diverse, provocative, frequently difficult to categorize and, in their ephemerality, oftentimes hard to collect and preserve.

As the book's introduction, by the exhibition's organizer, Julia Robinson, makes clear, the idea of New Realism, although almost self-evident as a counter-trend to abstract expressionism, has long been a problematic one. As a translation of the French term Nouveau Réalisme, it shares that movement's lack of programmatic coherence. And if the 1962 exhibit New Realism at Sidney Janis Gallery marked the triumphal emergence of American pop art (Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, etc.), it also, as Robinson shows, led to the shunting aside of the European variants and precedents, featured in the show but critically dismissed and even mocked in the American press.

Still, "new realism" may be a most apt term to describe the freewheeling proliferation of object-based artistic interventions at the dawn of the 1960s—not only Nouveau Réalisme, but happenings and proto-Fluxus events. Robinson uses the plural, "new realisms," broadly to refer to this international range of performative practices that recast the Duchampian readymade as commodity, display and spectacle. This was, she argues, a critical moment in history, when one dominant mode of artistic production and dissemination (abstract paintings, supported by an increasingly official modern art establishment) gave way both to a new aesthetic (assemblage, happenings, installations) and to alternative exhibition venues, notably the upstart galleries of Iris Clert in Paris and Anita Reuben and Martha Jackson in New York—all three, significantly, run by women. With a subtle understanding of the emerging international art world, Robinson traces a common thread linking Yves Klein's Void of 1958 and Claes Oldenburg's Store of a few years later. Eschewing national bias and a monographic approach, her larger project is an important contribution to a field often characterized by one or both.

A set of three scholarly essays offers new insights into the presentational strategies and theoretical underpinnings of the Nouveau Réalistes, an occasional group of artists, mostly French, assembled and promoted by critic Pierre Restany. Critically maligned but commercially successful, Nouveau Réalisme has lately begun to get the serious treatment in Anglo-American scholarship that it deserves (see Meredith Malone's excellent 2006 dissertation, Nouveau Réalisme: Performative Exhibition Strategies and the Everyday in Post-WWII France [University of Pennsylvania]). In this volume, Hannah Feldman, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen and Ágnes Berecz each focus on a little-known aspect of the group. Especially welcome is Berecz's nuanced deconstruction of the critic-impresario Restany's rhetoric, its aims in France and abroad, and its problematic reception in a transatlantic context.

Also, reprinted here is a large portion of Benjamin H.D. Buchloh's 1971 essay "Formalism and Historicity," which essentially launched the field and defined the terms of postwar European art history in the United States. In a new introduction, Buchloh acknowledges that the dichotomy he originally proposed between American formalism and European "historicity" or dialectical materialism, as well as the oppositional status he accorded certain Europeans [End Page 71] in contrast to their history-blind counterparts...

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