Art Criticism and the Death of Marxism

Art Criticism and the Death of Marxism Marxism is not aphilosophy of history; it i sthePhilosophyof history and to renounce it is to dig thegrave of Reason in history. Afer that there can be no more dreams or adventures. -Maurice Merleau-Ponty [l] For some time now-starting in the era of modernism and continuing into our own postmodern era-much of the analyticalvocabularyof American art criticism has come out of Marxism. This may seem strange, for in this country, unlike in France or Italy, Marxism never had much popular appeal. Not even in the 1930s, during the Great Depression,when Marxism was of great importance for NewYork intellectuals, was the Communist party a real political power here. And yet, Marxism played a central role in defining abstract expressionismand what happened afterwards in the history of art. We find an appeal to Marxism in Clement Greenberg’s often quoted suggestion that “someday”a historian of abstract expressionism “willhave to” tell “how‘antiStalinism ,’which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically,for what was to come” in the development of art [2]. We find it in Michael Fried’s 1965 link of the “dialecticof modernism ” to what he calls “theestablishment of a perpetual revolution-perpetual because bent on unceasing radical criticism of itself” [3]. And we find it in influential American “postmodernist”critic Rosalind E. Krauss’s 197’7description of the Eisenstein film Octobq which was about the Russian revolution: “Itis Eisenstein’s most basic assumption that sculpture, all art, is fundamentally ideological” [4]. its concern with “aspecific historical moment in which artistic practicejoined with critical theory in the project of social construction”-the pre-Stalinist moment of 1920s Russian art culture [5]. Although October’scirculation has alwaysbeen small-it is an intellectual quarterly, not a commercial artjournal-this magazine has been much discussed. To the extent that its political position can be identified, Octoberhas, I grant, most often been associated with poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault. Butjust as Foucault’santi-Hegelian, anti-history The Order o f Thingscannot be understood apart from the Hegelian ways of thinking it criticizes, post-Marxists-however stronglythey react against Marxism-are reallyworkingwithin the radical European tradition that they criticize.The concerns of the liberal democratic tradition of social contract theorists such asJohn Stuart Mill andJohn Rawls, for instance, are alien to Foucault. And so when Octoberidentifies itself on the cover as ajournal of “Art/Criticism /Theory/Politics,” it is fair to add that, although thejournal does not usually take up concrete everyday issues, leftist politics are what the editors have in mind. As Margaret A. Rose emphasizesin her useful history Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the VisualArts, Marx’svery limited interest in painting was very much a product of his German education [6]. For him, the ancient Greeks were the greatest artists. He never wrote much about contemporary art, although he was interested in literature. He never created a theory of the visual arts; he had more pressing concerns . All of the very extensive Marxist literature on aesthetics involves extending Krauss has explained that thejournal she edits is called Octoberinorder to identify 6 1997BAST LEONARDO,Vol. 30, No.3, pp. 241-245, 1997 241 some part of his concerns and intervening in struggles he could not have envisaged. When, for example, in the former USSR, the radical avant-garde lost out, by the early 1930s,to socialist realism, it would have been overly optimistic to think that Marx’s own writings provided any immediate perspective on that situation. What Marx did provide theorists were two themes used by American critics such as Greenberg, Fried and Krauss: a way of thinking about history and an essentially aesthetic model of the relationship between art and the culture in which it is produced. Marx’s dialectic, derived from the grand model of Hegel’s Phenomenology [7], provided a way of understanding historical development that Greenberg and Fried, in their differentways , apply to a subdivision of culture-namely, to art history. There is nothing specificallyMarxist about this analogy between the culture’shistory and the development of art; but without the example provided by...