Book Summary: Art Since 1900 - Modernism to Post-Modernism

Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, Art Since 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson 2004)
Art Since 1900 is a comprehensive account of the artwork, artists, and ideas that embody 20th century modernism, antimodernism, and contemporary postmodernism. Its authors represent a collaboration of Columbia and Princeton University art historians whose views are widely accepted within the United States art community. The contains four introductions to the major theories and critical models used to analyze art and cultural production, and then proceeds to a collection of over 100 essays describing key moments, people, and ideas arranged by decade. For the purposes of this annotation I will concentrate on the transition from modernism and post-modernism by picking out three years (1971, 1984, and 2003) as a means of describing a progression from modernism to contemporary post-modernism.

1971 was marked by two significant acts of censorship at the Guggenheim Museum whose controversy helps differentiate modernism from postmodernism. The first incident involved the cancellation of a major retrospective exhibition of Hans Haacke. The two pieces consisted of text and photographs that presented documentary information about the ownership status of large number New York slum apartments (which turned out to be owned by two or three families). While the photographs depicted the condition of the neighborhood where the buildings resided and the text presented public information available from the New York Public Library in a non-accusatory manner, the presentation of the sum total revealed a petit-bourgeois empire of tenement holdings. The Museum Direct Thomas Messer wanted the pieces removed from the show calling Haacke’s pieces “work that violates the supreme neutrality of the work of art and therefore no longer merits the protection of the museum.” By connecting social and economic information together Haacke created a confrontation between New York’s underclass and Manhattans elite, which included institutions like the museum. The combination of these fragments of “text” resulted in artwork that was no longer removed from the economic and political spheres. Modernist ideas surrounding art’s cultural autonomy from socio-economic systems were punctured. A few months later a second scandal occurred with the removal of Daniel Buren’s “Peinture-Sculpture” from the Sixth Guggenheim International Exhibition. The Huge banner Buren installed within the museums central atrium created a conflict surrounding the assumption that the space within which a viewer interacts with art is also neutral and serves as an appropriate illustration of Foucaults theories on power and discourse. The Banner became a confrontation between the artwork and the building, between Buren and Frank Lloyd Wright, and ultimately between art and political ideology. Art it seemed could not be extracted from political ideology no matter how abstract it had become.
The essay 1984a chronicles the shift from conceptual art to a socio-economic discourse. The early photographic works of Ed Ruscha and Dan Graham followed the pop-art tendency towards “de-skilling” by assuming a banal style while taking a systematic approach to concepts like vernacular architecture and other artifacts of “modern” cultural practice. Their work reintroduced the question of public urban space, which had not been revisited since before WWII in modernist art, but did so in a manner that was not as romanticizing as the earlier works of Walker Evans and Dorthea Lange nor did it make a strong critique of American culture. Major essays by Victor Burgin, Allen Sekula, and Martha Rosler explored the idea that photography could once again insert political, social, and historical context and function as an instrument of cultural discourse. Burgin states, “The optimum function of art is to modify institutionalized patterns of orientation towards the world and thus serve as an agency of socialization. No art activity therefore is to be understood apart from the codes and practices of the society, which contains it; art in use is bracketed ineluctably within ideology… We must accept the responsibility of producing art which is more than just art as its content.”
Unlike early modernist photography, Sekula and Rosler demonstrated the post-modern idea that an individual photograph is not a complete “political” expression, but rather serves as fragments of an ongoing discourse. Sekula’s work went beyond the traditional limitations of documentary photography by presenting multiple frames in series. Martha Rosler’s early photomontage work juxtaposed harsh imagery from the Vietnam War into an image of eloquence found in scenes of fashion, advertising, and home décor. She later followed Sekula’s multi-frame approach and explored “the inadequacy of the photographic image” in her seminal work “The Bowery in Two Inadequate descriptive Systems, 1974-5. Roslers work revealed the incomplete nature of any individual artwork and the need for participation in a larger discourse.

The essay 1984b presents the defining characteristics of a post-modernism ideology that had began to form as early as 1968 in the work of Robert Rauschenberg. We are introduced to Francis Lyotard and Frederic Jameson who attempt to describe the significant differences between post-modern and modernity. Lyotard defines postmodernism as occurring at the moment change no longer produced progress (a modernist ideal) but became the status quo as a means of driving the capitalist economy. This in turn, introduced skepticism towards the meta-narratives of captialism. Jameson views Postmodernism from a Marxist perspective as the inevitable response to the beginning of Late Capitalism, which is characterized by globalization, and mobile workforces and capital.

Postmodernism is marked by the dispute of authenticity and originality, rejection of foundational ideology, and through the cacophony of opposing ideas that are joined together in discourse. It views modernist art as not a representation of meaning but a construction of meaning and seeks to deconstruct these metanarratives through image appropriation and the blending of disparate ideas and phenomena.

Postmodernism’s evolution has seen the removal of artist as author and the appropriation and combining of cultural fragments into dialogical discourse. The final essay 2003 advances two current ideas of post modernism: the utopian ideal and the Archival approach to the creation of discourse.

Ready-made art that fosters community collaboration such as group project of Gonzalez, Foerster, Gillick, Tiravanija, and others distribute new ideas on how to respond to consumerism. In the utopian model we see collaboration and interaction as a means of creating meaningful discourse and socialization. The critic Nicolas Bourriard sees modern large-scale “artist-as-curator” exhibitions as art events that are not so much about the “what” of art but the “whom”. “Art is an ensemble of units to be reactivated by the beholder-manipulator”. Whereas the alternative Archival approach services to give voice to sub cultural histories through the uncovering of hidden or repressed dialog. Recent installation work by Thomas Hirschberg and Sam Durant are examples of history recovered from obscurity.
The transition from modernism to post-modern is one from a singular viewpoint to a multifaceted expansion of our understanding of the events and history that form our current cultural practices. Art Since 1900 has certainly provided much of the art-history discourse necessary to elevate one’s own art practice.