Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

The October Revolution

I think Hal Foster can be forgiven a little false modesty when he wonders whether the “ancient history”1 of The Anti-Aesthetic has any relevance today. He must have felt a bit like Mick Jones being harangued by aging Clash fans to play “Rock the Casbah” one last time as the seminar participants pored over every paragraph of an essay he wrote when he was in his late twenties. However, I would argue that these “musket shots”2 from downtown Manhattan continue to affect the discourse around contemporary art in profound ways. The Anti-Aesthetic and the coterie of New York–based critics associated with Bay Press and October (Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Benjamin Buchloh, and others) did much to establish the particular relationship between art criticism and critical theory that continues to define much academic writing on contemporary art in the United States to the present day.3 It’s less a question of specific influences (although these have remained remarkably consistent) than the broader sense of a discipline in crisis and dependent on the insights provided by continental philosophy for new inspiration. Krauss captures this emblematic moment in her 1980 October essay on the “Paraliterary,” in which she defends Barthes and Derrida against the uncomprehending conservatism of Morris Dickstein and other cranky guardians of traditional literary criticism. The new paradigm of postmodern literature, in Krauss’s words, “is the critical text wrought into a paraliterary form,” dedicated not to revealing layers of meaning but to opening up the play of interpretation (“drama without the Play, voices without the Author, criticism without the Argument”).4 The key transposition here, of course, was from the paraliterary as a form of hermeneutic un-doing onto the work of art itself, which would constitute a kind of physical embodiment of the poetic/theoretical text (laying bare the apparatus, making strange, and generally confounding closure, stasis, and fixity in all their guises). It was in many ways a profoundly empowering moment, bringing a much-needed infusion of intellectual rigor and energy to art criticism. The criticism of the 1980s exhibited a capacity to grasp the complex imbrication of the cultural and the political, which came as a refreshing contrast to the ad hominem appeals to “quality” typical of Greenbergian criticism. But what happens now, three decades on, when the generation of thinkers that stormed the Sorbonne is now taught with near-catechistic devotion at the OCTOBER revolution Grant Kester 1. Section 3 of the Seminars. 2. Section 2 of the Seminars. 3. For a fascinating, albeit brief, history of Bay Press see Charles Mudede, “The Mysterious Disappearance of Bay Press,” The Stranger (January 24–30, 2002). http://www.thestranger .com/seattle/the-mysterious-disappearance-of -bay-press/Content?oid=9829 (accessed March 2011). 4. Rosalind Krauss, “Poststructuralism and the ‘Paraliterary,’” October 13 (Summer 1980): 40. Assessments 123 the most privileged institutions of higher learning in the United States, Latin America, and Europe? Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze (and we might now add Agamben and Nancy) are ubiquitous not only in the academy but also, perhaps especially, in the art world, their names regularly invoked in catalog essays, artist ’s statements, reviews, and dissertations. In fact, what is most striking is how little has actually changed in the thirty years since The Anti-Aesthetic was published ; how much the same figures continue to occupy the same reading lists in PhD programs across the country. There’s been a bit of updating here and there as Rancière replaces Lyotard or Badiou nudges aside Baudrillard, but by and large art history continues to be written under the gaze (benign or otherwise) of continental philosophy. In fact, the frame of reference for “theory” has only contracted further. By the late-1990s the relatively inchoate mélange of critical theory that emerged during the eighties (radical pedagogy, semiotics, cultural anthropology, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, queer theory, Western Marxism , and various forms of feminist theory) had been largely winnowed down to the familiar patrimony of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault and, more recently, the quartet of Agamben, Badiou, Nancy, and Rancière (Benjamin and Adorno, although German, are honorary members). My use of the term “patrimony” is deliberate. One of the most troubling aspects of the homogenizing of art theory over the past twenty years has been the gradual recession of feminist approaches and the literal disappearance of women theorists. Figures such as Hannah Arendt, Hélène Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir, Teresa de Lauretis, bell hooks, Luce...