The Status of Contemporary Art Criticism
The Status of Contemporary Art Criticism
A Conversation with Rosalind Krauss
As editor of the American art magazine Artforum and then the theoretical art journal October, Rosalind Krauss has followed the development of art criticism for over thirty years from very close by, contributing in no small measure herself to the direction it has taken. On the basis of her experience, how does she define the task of the art critic, now that her position is being criticized from various quarters?As a neophyte art critic and junior editor of METROPOLIS M, I wrote a committed essay for the December 1995 issue called Art Criticism Caught Napping, which was intended as a wakeup call in the face of the most recent developments in contemporary art. ‘Isn’t it high time for some innovation in the field of art criticism,’ I began, ‘for some reflection on its parameters and methods?’ The essay was controversial and attacked by the art critical establishment. One of my responses to this unsettling criticism to my thesis was to apply to Columbia University in a wisk to study with Rosalind Krauss because of that one sentence I had “found” in her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist’s Myths (1985), which seemed to have all the answers to my art critical questions in store: ‘Could it be argued that the interest in critical writing lies almost entirely in its method?’ Rosalind Krauss’s reassessment of critical method arose from her discontent with the conditions and terms of the modernist model proposed by Clement Greenberg, which she replaced with a postmodernist mode of criticism informed by French structuralist theory. Rosalind Krauss, at present University Professor at Columbia University in New York, has written an impressive number of books on the history, theory, and criticism of modern and contemporary art, among them Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977), The Optical Unconscious (1993), Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), with Yve-Alain Bois, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (1999), Bachelors (2002) and Art Since 1900 (2004), the latter with Hal Forster, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh. Given the leading role she has played in the field of art criticism and theory over the past forty years, which continues to inspire many today, METROPOLIS M asked me to interview her on the status of art criticism today. Since the art journals in their different editorial formats remain the backbone of art criticism and Krauss is a critic, editor and co-founder of the two leading American art journals in the postwar period – Artforum and October, I started off with the nature of criticism in those journals.
I would propose a basic distinction between a journalistic form of art criticism as seen in magazines and newspapers versus a theoretically inclined art criticism found in academic journals and catalogues. You have been engaged in both kinds as an editor of Artforum and October. How do you see the distinction between these different forms and what role would you assign to each of them?
‘I have done both. Artforum is a vehicle for reviewing art exhibitions in galleries and museums. October does not have any commitment to that kind of currency, that kind of monthly reviewing. Artforum is a monthly, October is a quarterly magazine. One of the things that October is interested in is providing space for much longer, more theoretical analysis of visual work, or contemporary work, or monographic work, and trying to connect all of the aspects into what you could call a unified field. Artforum does not have space for such a thing, for the kind of theoretical reflection that October is interested in.’
My sense is that what is lacking today is good art journalism, rather than a sophisticated form of art criticism and theory. There is so much going on in the world that one constantly feels this need to have access to adequate art journalism, and yet I don’t think we are properly informed.
‘I think that’s true. I can’t think of anyone who does that kind of journalism, nobody comes to mind, but I may be out of touch with the field of art criticism. The piece I wrote for the October issue of Artforum is an example of a kind of art journalism. It was a review of the exhibition Invisible Colors at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris. The trigger for that exhibition was a book by T.J Clark, which has to do with journalism. With a political group called Retort, Clark published a book called Afflicted Powers, which is about spectacle culture, or image culture, in the present-day. I wanted to elaborate on the political convictions that Clark expresses in this work. I think that review was a piece of journalism, but I would agree that there is not much going on that you would call ‘sophisticated’ in art journalism.’
In your book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, you made a proposition that had a great impact: ‘Can it be argued that the interest in critical writing lies almost entirely in its method?’ How would you answer this question today? Is it necessary to think of criticism in terms of its method?
‘The methodological presupposition of the essays collected in that book was structuralism. The essay ‘Grids’ was structuralist; ‘Notes on the Index’ was also structuralist, because it is very engaged with a structuralist notion of the sign, of the particular sign type called index; ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ was also purely structuralist. Entering structuralism, and being able to extend that out to the analysis of works of art, is a methodological procedure. A lot of the criticism I have done tries to understand the source of energy for a wide range of objects that is deeply theoretical, and all that relates to, or is inspired by, a particular method.’
Yve-Alain Bois wrote a beautiful review of that book. Even if you never used the word history, he eloquently argues that you show that ‘to be a historian, one has to be a critic’, and he substantiates that claim by analyzing the different chapters. Do you agree with Bois, and could one also turn this claim around, and state that ‘to be a critic, one has to be a historian’?
‘Certainly, if you think about the writings of Greenberg or Michael Fried. They had a very strong sense of the historical past and the historical destiny of given bodies of work. Greenberg’s argument about colour field painting emerged from his understanding of abstract expressionism and of the work of Jackson Pollock, and how that developed towards a thinner and more transparent treatment of the surface of painting. Or Fried’s notion of opticality… All of these things have a deeply historical cast. But also the work I am doing presently has a historical motivation behind it in that I am thinking of the eclipse that obscured the idea of the specific medium, or the way in which art finds its signification or meaning through a representation of the medium, or the support for the work of art. That notion of representation could be restated as how a work ‘figures forth’ its own support, and that is precisely how the work becomes specific to its medium.
This idea of specificity is something that came under intense attack from conceptual art and a lot of other movements in the recent past. So a sense of that history, and the way in which it produced this eclipse of the idea of the medium has driven my current work, which is really about the importance of the specific medium, and the fact that various artists now are doing something peculiar like ‘inventing a medium’. So they are looking for supports for their work which are not traditional like painting, sculpture or photography, but using entirely new supports for their work, and those supports can be seen to function somewhat like the traditional medium in the way they supply, or are a springboard for, signification just as in those earlier forms of modernism. I would say that such a reflection is historical and critical at the same time.’
In 2004, you published Art Since 1900 with Hal Forster, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh. Given the fact that this history is written by four editors of October, it has been identified in the press by some critics as ‘The October Century’. Couched in more positive terms, the book could be seen as an apotheosis of October’s critical thought.
Four methodological approaches to the history of modern art are introduced in the book, which are alternately described as ‘theoretical methods’ or ‘modes of criticism’. Consequently, the categorical distinctions between history, theory, and criticism overlap. Together these methods help us understand modern art history, but do we now have to take these intersections of history, criticism, and theory for granted?
‘It is difficult to answer that question, but since you posed it in relation to the textbook, I can talk about the textbook. We embarked on that project because all of us had to teach surveys of twentieth century art, and we all ran up against the same problem, which was that there were no textbooks we could assign to our students. And it is very hard to teach a course without a textbook, because a textbook supplies a kind of repertoire of images that the students can study. So we decided to write one.
We collectively decided not only about the years and the major developments attached to those years, but also that the person who would write that entry would be the one who had contributed the most to the historical and critical discourse on that subject. So obviously the entry that had to do with postwar French art was written by Yve-Alain Bois, because that’s his field. And aspects of German Art were assigned to Benjamin Buchloh, whereas I wrote the entry on analytical cubism and collage. We decided that it was important for us to come clean about the methodological presuppositions each one of us was bringing to the project, so I wrote the introduction on structuralism, Bois was supposed to write on formalism, Foster did psychoanalysis, and Buchloh social art history.
We are now supposed to work on a revision of the present edition. There are many things that desperately need revising, one of which is that we have to have those methodological introductions signed, because as it stands now, you have to project who did which from what you know of the four of us. But there are various other problems. I don’t exactly know what the parameters are that Thames & Hudson would insist on for a revised version, but one thing I know is that they want more emphasis on current phenomena, such as an entry on contemporary Chinese art.’
How do you feel about that?
‘If one of us could do that, that would be great. Yve-Alain Bois wants to do it. What do I know about Chinese art? But I would like to contribute one little piece on the work of the Chinese artist Xu Bing. There is an absolutely beautiful work of his called The Book from the Sky, which is sort of a canopy made of a scroll filled with calligraphy, and then on the ground are open book pages with calligraphy on them. I think it is an extraordinary work. So I could contribute something about Xu Bing, but certainly not the whole of contemporary Chinese art.’
You have been a strong advocate of the introduction of theory within the field of modern art, but I noticed that you have become more critical of the way in which theory has been employed since the 1990s. In Rutger’s Art Review, for example, you mention that ‘theory is not an end in itself, but has to engage with a certain problem’.
‘There are various theoretical directions I disagree with very strongly, and one of them has to do with ‘cultural studies’. I think cultural studies is an abomination, and I’ll tell you why. Basically it is the revenge of the pygmies. The great guru of cultural studies was Pierre Bourdieux, who introduced the concept of ‘cultural capital’. If you are middle-class, your parents take you to the museum, they give you piano lessons, and thus you have a certain access to culture. But if you are from the lower class, you don’t have any of that, and thus your access to culture is very limited. Cultural studies really depends on this notion of cultural capital, and one of the projects of cultural studies is to show that high forms of culture are not high but are related to all kinds of non-cultural impulses.
A good example would be the author Janice Radway, who wrote a book on romance reading, which develops the idea that women read these sorts of junk novels as a way of resisting their lower-middle-class context, generally a suburban or rural context, as well as the imposition of patriarchal power in their home. Romance reading allows them an escape through fantasy, which can be thought of as a form of resistance.
Cultural studies will extrapolate the analysis of literature or literary fiction to these notions of resistance and revenge. It is a way of dismantling works of art or literature, of demoting or desublimating them, thus showing that their pretences are really empty. So it is an effort to undermine the seriousness of high culture by showing the underlying sexuality of certain artist, or something like that – always attempting to desublimate the ambitions of high culture. That is why I think of it as a revenge of the pygmies.’
Talking about theory, it is hard to not to bring up October. In the interview for Rutger’s Art Review, you say that October was founded to ‘make the conjunction between theory and contemporary practice possible’. Was that October’s mission?
‘Annette Michelson and I founded October right after we were both moving away from Artforum; the more accurate account is that we were both fired from Artforum. There was a terrible altercation, a difference of opinion, between the two of us and John Coplans, who was the editor-in-chief, and Max Kozloff, who I believe was the managing editor at the time. The disagreement between the four of us was very intense, and one of the things at stake was this issue of criticism, theory and practice. Annette wanted to do a special issue on video and performance, but John Coplans was just absolutely adamantly against it. The reason why he did not want such an issue was that the magazine would not make any money from gallery advertising if it was a special issue devoted to work the galleries did not sell. So there was an economic obstacle to the kind of theoretical work she wanted to do.
As far as I was concerned, Kozloff had so politicized the magazine, and the writing in the magazine, that it was simply impossible to develop the analysis of work I was interested in. He maintained an idea of the nature and the political import of photography that I neither agreed with, nor thought was interesting, and since at that point I was starting to get interested in photography, and wanted to write about it, we were absolutely in conflict. The other thing that Annette and I felt was that the limitation on editorial space was very constricting. We simply could not develop essays of the length the subject needed, and so we decided first of all that there weren’t going to be advertisements in October, so that the advertisers would not be able to put any pressure on the editorial decisions of the magazine, and would also allow for much longer articles than Artforum had room for. Basically, the project of October was conceived as the total contradiction of everything Artforum stood for.’
Without doubt, October has played a leading role in the introduction of theory in the field of modern and contemporary art. The scholarship of the journal is still rigorous today, but I wonder if a disjunction may have crept in between theory and contemporary practice? There are many artists that produce very important work, but they don’t seem to enter the discourse of October. What about that Chinese artist that you mentioned, for example, Xu Bing? Is the mission of October still the same today?
‘Well, I think that its readership today consists mainly of students. Students are very engaged with the journal, because they think of it as somehow relevant to, and preparing them for, doing and writing their dissertations, and writing them in a way that engages with the critical and theoretical discourse that empowers the subjects of their study. The kind of essays we want to publish continues this notion of a convergence of history, theory, and practice.
I think the work of Hal Foster is a very good example within recent issues of October, because of how he makes theory and history converge on certain issues. The way I know about Xu Bing is through Robert Harris, who is the Professor of Chinese art at Columbia, and who is also now Chair of the Art History Department. He introduced me to the work of Xu Bing. It would be hard for me to write an essay on Xu Bing for October right now, but if he would publish an article in October on Xu Bing that would be wonderful. In fact, I am going to ask him to do it.’
It can be argued that Greenberg represents the last great conventional art critic. As is evident from Greenberg’s longstanding activity as a critic, he clearly sees himself as a ‘critic’s critic’. In ‘How Art Writing Deserves its Bad Name’, Greenberg argues that art criticism got a negative reputation through its flirtation with other disciplines, which results in what he calls pseudo-history, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, etc. After Greenberg, all sorts of art critical personae have emerged that would perfectly fit into Greenberg’s category of the figure of pseudo-critic: The critic-cum-historian, the critic-cum-theorist, the academic critic, the poet critic, and, more recently, the critic-curator. How would you define the art critic today?
‘If we define criticism as advocacy for the best contemporary artists, such advocacy is often manifested by exhibitions, making the curator-critic a very important facet of the critic’s persona. One of the prime examples of this would be the exhibition Michael Fried organized at the Fogg Museum in the early seventies, called Three American Painters, which I think was a breakthrough exhibition. There is a catalogue published by the Fogg museum, but I think its text is reprinted in Fried’s book Art and Objecthood. I am trying to think of other important exhibitions which established this kind of critical perspective. One of them is the exhibition I did with Yve-Alain Bois on the notion of formlessness, the catalogue of which was republished by Zone Books. That exhibition is basically extrapolated from the work of Georges Bataille, and Bataille’s notion of the ‘informe’. The formless becomes a kind of grid through which we pass what we think of the most important work of the 1970s and 1980s. So that is another good example where the critic-curator operates, showing the importance of the critic-curator.’
I did have a question in mind about the relation between the critic and curator, but I was thinking of it more negatively in the sense that the curator has turned into the star figure at the expense of the critic. However, you have basically convinced me about the critic-curator. When I think of the people that I admire within the field of curating today – like Okwui Enwezor or Hou Hanru – they all do view themselves as critics, too.
‘That was certainly also the case of Bill Rubin. Rubin was formed by Clement Greenberg, and he very much wanted his work at the Museum of Modern Art to operate as a kind of forum, in the sense of criticism, even if some of it was at odds with the positions of Greenberg. Rubin was an extraordinary critic. One of his most important exhibitions, the first he did, was called Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage. That show was Rubin’s statement of his critical position, which he formed in opposition to Greenberg’s position on surrealism, which Greenberg despised. So it could be seen as Rubin’s declaration of independence from Greenberg.
Another critic-curator was Kirk Varnedoe, whose work was also amazing: His Twombly exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art was extraordinary, and so was his Pollock exhibition. He was anxious to present artists whom he felt did not have sufficient exposure within the contemporary field. That was also his determination for the Twombly exhibition. So the critic-curator is a very important category in terms of contemporary criticism, although the one I really abominate is Robert Storr. I thought his Richter show was absolutely horrible. The only thing Storr shows is that he does not understand the work of Gerhard Richter.’
You have indeed argued somewhere in an interview that a major characteristic of the critic is advocacy: ‘It is not just reading or analyzing art’, you explain, ‘because that is an academic exercise. Criticism involves more active advocacy than one finds in the academy.’ You conclude that criticism today is no different than when you started writing. Why have you advocated two artists in particular since the late 1990s: James Coleman and William Kentridge?
‘One artist I would now add to that group is Ed Ruscha, and another is Christian Marclay. There were two exhibitions that were very important to me, which allowed me to get to know the work of Coleman and Kentridge, and where I felt compelled by their work because they were doing something that I would call ‘inventing a medium’.
One of these exhibitions, the one on Coleman, was in the DIA Art Foundation, and the other, the exhibition on Kentridge, was at MACBA, the Barcelona museum of contemporary art. In both of these exhibitions I realized how each one of these artists was, to use that earlier expression, ‘figuring forth’ the support or ground of the work they are doing. An example of this is Kentridge, whose work is basically a form of animation. The way an animator works is that he makes a drawing, then he making a tiny little alteration to it. What seems to occur once you see these things together in succession is that the figure or whatever the animator has drawn is moving. So that is the basis for the way in which Kentridge operates: He makes a drawing and then he erases a little bit, changing or adding to the figure; and each time he makes one of those little changes, or additions, he takes a single frame of film, so that when the whole strip of film is put through a projector, the drawing seems to be in motion. So this method of erasing parts is very important to the work.
There is a wonderful film by Kentridge, called History of the Main Complaint (1996), showing one of the characters driving through a landscape in the rain. You see the car from the outside. What you see then are the windshield wipers, wiping the rain on the windshield, in a perfect image of his very act of erasure. From this time on I began to see how both Kentridge and Coleman were ‘figuring forth’ the nature of their different supports, which I thought was a brilliant recall of the operation of self-reference modernist art had assumed from its beginnings. I think I had already made that claim about the medium, but that was what triggered my advocacy of those two artists.’
I understand that you are interested in these artists because they are as you say ‘inventing a medium’, and in various essays on Coleman and Kentridge you explain what this idiosyncratic medium would be in each case, and how it is possible to work within a specific medium even if you are crossing the boundaries of what others would see as various media.
Still there seems to be a paradox there: Why do you hold on to the notion of ‘medium’ while the world is in the grip of a whole plethora of media? Is that because you want to set criteria for art in the age of media conditions, or as you phrase it in the title of your book, ‘art in the age of the post-medium condition’?
‘I want to stay away from the word ‘media’, because that gets us immediately into video and television. As a critic, one impulse for my desire to resurrect the idea of the specific medium has to do with my sense that media, in the sense of video and television, had a very deleterious, negative impact on art in the contemporary landscape. What I refer to in particular is installation art, which is very dependent on the presence of media. I am thinking now of the installations of Bill Viola, which are dependent on video. And that would be media. It is my dislike of work like Viola’s and his installations that brought about my conviction that there has to be an alternative. The alternative is not media but the medium. That is a completely different thing.’
Since this conversation is supposed to be about the status of criticism, I would like to pose a question about art criticism in relation to crisis by going back in time a bit. In an early interview conducted by Studio International (1975), you mention that you felt short of a critical language when confronted with the innovative sculpture of Richard Serra: ‘I didn’t have any terminology, any language, any aesthetic criteria, to understand that work, to make sense of it, since I was completely formed by the modernist position.’
You must have gone through many other crises of critical stance caused by artistic innovations like that of Serra’s. On the basis of your long experience with contemporary art, could you perhaps say something general about the recognition and nature of such crises?
‘This relates to the question you asked before about criticism and history. I think many critics function in relation to a kind of historical analysis that gives them a sense of historical channels through with art has run in the past and travels through now, and the sort of destiny of art. So there is a historical trajectory the critic believes in, or has come to accept. For myself that trajectory has been modernism, itself grounded in the idea of the specific medium, from the perspective of which the destiny of art is moving towards abstraction. That had made me tone deaf, I would say, to other developments in art, and the Richard Serra case was one of the most striking to me.
My understanding of art through modernism made it difficult at first to understand how brilliant this work was. I cannot think of other examples of important art I failed to recognize, which I would therefore think of as a crisis. I am sure there are many, but I can’t think of them at the moment. When I first saw the work of Coleman it wasn’t that I thought it was not interesting, I thought it was of great importance, but it just took me a while to figure out how to locate the interest of the work. So it wasn’t the same kind of failure that the Richard Serra case was, and certainly not with William Kentridge. When I saw Kentridge’s work in that exhibition in Barcelona, I was immediately convinced how important the work of this artist was, is. And the same with Christian Marclay.’
I don’t think I have seen Marclay’s work…
‘If you ever get the chance to see it, you must. It is wonderful. I saw an exhibition of his in London at the Barbican Gallery, which was showing a work called Video Quartet. Essentially it is a work constructed of four screens separated by just a little bit of blank space. You see these four screens in a horizontal display, like a frieze, on each of which is projected a DVD with a compilation of film clips from various famous movies, most of them sound films, running synchronously with one another, even if all of these clips are moving separately. The very experience of synchrony is projected by examples like the image from West Side Story of the gang members snapping their fingers. Or the sound track and scream of Janet Leigh in the shower scene of Psycho. It is absolutely brilliant, but then there is also that extraordinary moment when you suddenly realize that it is also about silence.
So Marclay figures forth synchronous sound to produce this extraordinary experience of silence. Before sound films, of course, there were silent films – synchronous sound was only invented in 1929. So the support of synchronous sound to accompany images is very discrete in the history of film. One of the most brilliant moments in Video Quartet is where one of the film clips shows a bunch of cockroaches falling onto a piano keyboard, and then running over those keys: for me it is an image of the most complete silence. So you have this metaphor of silence which is made to intervene in all of this sound. The reason that there are four screens, I think, is so that they can function as images of synchrony. At one point you see all of these moving things, like a video clip of a turning phonograph record, or of a roulette wheel spinning around, or yet another turning thing, I can’t remember what it was, but you see all of that across the four screens creating a synchrony between the separate images.’
Coming back to criticism and crisis, in the round table discussion at the end of Art Since 1900, Hal Foster points to the challenges and concerns of globalization in the context of contemporary art and culture, while Benjamin Buchloh refers to the ‘ever-growing complexity and totalizing conditions of advanced capitalism’, and of ‘unforeseen technological developments’. Given these major cultural changes, do you feel that the modes of criticism in Art Since 1900 are in need of revision? Do you think we need ‘new’ concepts, ‘new’ methods?
‘Sure, we do. There are various movements that have gone on for several years, one of which is ‘relational art’, but unfortunately this is a blank in my knowledge of art practice. There are various blanks I think I have, that the October board has.’
Peter Weibel makes a strong case for rereading art history from a media perspective – from constructivism and kinetic art in the 1920s, to performance and fluxus art 1960s – so as to understand the contemporary situation of media art on the intersection of technology, media and art. What would be your response to that?
‘I am very interested in the history of film. If you think of film as part of media, then I would tend to agree with Weibel. But he is thinking of different media, he is thinking of video. And there I totally disagree with him. I think that that art is still really, really bad. I don’t say it’s always been bad, but it is now. The worst thing I ever saw was a video installation by Pipilotti Rist. One consisted of a series of three video panels – her breaking the glass of a car while walking, for example, and another one was an installation of tiny video monitors scattered around a recreation of her apartment, like hidden cameras recording and projecting intimate details of her life. Do you know that work? It is absolutely horrible. There is something so narcissistic about it, which makes me think of my essay on video as narcissism.’
I would like to end by asking you to sum up what the task for criticism is in the near future.
‘I have been trying to explain my position on criticism and its task all through this interview. Most succinctly, it is to advocate work one thinks is serious and can be compared to the best work of the past. This is something contemporary practice has drifted away from. The responsibility of the critic is to bring us back to it – emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically.’
Sjoukje van der Meulen Sjoukje van der Meulen
Sjoukje van der Meulen
(PhD Columbia University) is assistant professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at Utrecht University with a research focus on contemporary art in the European Union