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  • What Was Contemporary Art? by Richard Meyer
  • Giovanna L. Costantini
What Was Contemporary Art? by Richard Meyer. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, U.S.A., 2013. 360 pp., illus. ISBN: 987-0-26-213508-5.

Richard Meyer has written an incisive book about “Contemporary Art” as a field whose meaning eludes precise categorization. Proceeding from a definition of the term “contemporary” as “belonging to the same time, age or period; and/or existing or occurring together in time,” Meyer examines the proposition that, as a chronological marker, the contemporary in art occupies an “unstable space” due to time’s perpetual forward movement. He evaluates diverse approaches to the notion of contemporary art based variously on chronology, newness, originality or other features that respond to a given cultural moment, such as those identified with European modernism as it emerged pre-World War I. In so doing, he traces a skeletal “history” of contemporary art as it developed in the course of the early 20th century among establishments that include Wellesley College, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

As a specialization within the discipline of art history, Meyer regards contemporary art as a hybrid endeavor situated somewhere between history and criticism. Whereas a historical approach is one determined by linear chronological development and influence, a critical evaluation proceeds from an artwork’s intrinsic values, which may or may not be confined to a particular historical moment. Thus, contemporary art history represents a dual practice that combines contextualized treatments of art distanced in time from the observer with observations drawn from the perspective of contemporary experience. Citing 1960s publications by Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried, he notes the erosion of “systematic objectivity” in assessments of contemporary art, replaced by judgments and convictions through which art history evolved into criticism. In light of the surfeit of contemporary art production today and the preponderance of university courses and dissertations in the area (80% in 2011), Meyer’s study seeks to “reclaim the contemporary . . . alongside other moments, artists, and objects” so as to temper viewpoints confined to the limits of one’s own lifetime with a “more neutral condition of temporal coexistence between two or more entities.” This position reflects an idea initially proposed by Thomas Crow whereby art that persists over time can become newly relevant to later socio-historic contexts, disrupting distinctions between then and now by rendering the past newly present. At the same time, Meyer advocates a measure of intellectual distance from the present so as to encourage due weight of critical evaluation in the assessment of recent phenomena.

Meyer offers three key case studies of (then) current contemporary art events or exhibitions occurring over the course of the early 20th century that contribute to a revised understanding of contemporary art and its properties: a 1927 undergraduate course at Wellesley College, “Tradition and Revolt in Modern Painting,” the first of its kind; a 1937 MoMA exhibition of facsimiles of cave paintings labeled “Prehistoric Modern” that challenged the idea of chronology; and a 1948 controversy over Boston’s Institute of Modern Art’s decision to change its name to The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) to distinguish it from MoMA’s Eurocentrism, prompted in part by Surrealist exhibitions that James S. Plaut, then director of the Boston museum, described as “deliberately perverse” manifestations of “deranged minds.” Within this framework, Meyer examines other relevant exhibitions that juxtapose the art of the past with that of the present to fulfill Alfred H. Barr’s intent to elicit meaningful comparisons between seemingly unrelated artistic tendencies. These events include exhibitions presented at the MoMA and Boston’s ICA during the 1930s and 1940s on subjects ranging from Russian icons and Persian frescoes to Italian Old Masters and industrial glass and plastics. Meyer’s conclusion emphasizes the at times contradictory relevance of the historical past to the “unbounded consciousness” of the present thorough models of trans-historicity that extend to more recent artistic production: a 1985 interview with Andy Warhol [End Page 96] conducted by Benjamin Buchloh in which Warhol refers anecdotally to the obsolescence of the human hand in the gathering of rhinestones in New York’s...

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