Leon Golub Powerplay: The Political Portraits by Jon Bird (review)

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Suppose someone comes along who does not know “bridge,” and there is no bridge to which I could point and utter the word. I would then draw an image of the scheme of a bridge which of course is already a particular bridge, just to remind him of some schema known to him such as “transition” from one side of the river to the other

[1].

Despite the many psychological and semiotic re-codings of American modernism, it continues to bear imprints of Clement Greenberg’s “canon” of 1939–1940 that derived from the 19th-century European tradition of l’art pour l’art allied to a reactionary academic and social program. Greenberg identified three principal features of American modernism that in certain ways amalgamated the tendencies that had evolved in Europe from Édouard Manet to Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. These were: aesthetic innovation and originality within a given cultural and formalist grammar; tendencies that reflect the process and societal impact of modernization; and an ambivalent “moral autonomy” with respect to historical relations with both capitalism and modern (mass) society. A self-critique of the arts as a form of essentialism frequently took the form of an opposition between representation and abstraction. Interwoven into the canonical narrative was a belief in the expressive and existential capacity of art to operate as a method of individuation along with a set of other features. These include the pursuit of effects of detachment and depersonalization, mechanization and technology; an emphasis on surface reflexivity; a tendency toward transcendentalism; and attention to the internal ordering and relationship of parts in tension with, in painting, undifferentiated composition. It is from such values that one (to many minds) dominant exclusionary monolith of modernism came to be erected (one that paralleled American postwar hegemony of the 1950s and 1960s), a superstructure considered by many to be at odds with the movement’s resistance to totalitarian extension.

Most critics recognize that it was during the 1960s that the central tenets of American modernism began to erode, at the height of Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s self-conscious defense of abstraction. Greenberg and Fried’s formalist emphasis on unitary integration and impersonal flatness was marginalized by persistent figuration and postwar European expressionism; by kitsch and realism’s “recomplication” of the pictorial field; and by new propositions bound to minimalism, process and anti-form. John Cage’s challenge to authorship, materiality and internal structure—seen also in Alison Knowles’s “Make a Salad” of 1962, as well as in the work of artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol—did much to undermine the dominance of formalist theory. Others have joined critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Carol Duncan, who attacked modernism’s myths of originality and “centeredness” and its position of “privileged” and gendered hegemony in dismantling Greenberg’s paradigm.

Reviews Panel: Nameera Ahmed, Fred Andersson, Jan Baetens, John F. Barber, Roy Behrens, K. Blassnigg, Catalin Brylla, Annick Bureaud, Chris Cobb, Ornella Corazza, Giovanna Costantini, Anna B. Creagh, Edith Doove, Hannah Drayson, Phil Dyke, Amanda Egbe, Anthony Enns, Jennifer Ferng, Enzo Ferrara, George Gessert, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Rob Harle, Craig Harris, Harriet Hawkins, Paul Hertz, Craig J. Hilton, Jung A. Huh, Jane Hutchinson, Amy Ione, Boris Jardine, Richard Kade, Valérie Lamontagne, Mike Leggett, Will Luers, Roger Malina, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Florence Martellini, Elizabeth McCardell, Eduardo Miranda, Robert A. Mitchell, Michael Mosher, Sana Murrani, Frieder Nake, Maureen A. Nappi, Martha Patricia Nino, Claudy Opdenkamp, Jack Ox, Jussi Parikka, Ellen Pearlman, Ana Peraica, Stephen Petersen, Michael Punt, Kathleen Quillian, Hannah Rogers, Lara Schrijver, Aparna Sharma, George K. Shortess, Brian Reffin Smith, Yvonne Spielmann, Eugenia Stamboliev, Elizabeth Straughan, Malgorzata Sugiera, Charrisa N. Terranova, Eugene Thacker, Yvan Tina, Flutur Troshani, Rene van Peer, Stefaan Van Ryssen, Ian Verstegen, John...