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Eyes in the Heat the Question Concerning Abstract Expressionism

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Eyes in the Heat the Question Concerning Abstract Expressionism Eyes in the Heat The Question Concerning Abstract Expressionism Daniel Neofetou PhD Thesis, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London 1 2 The work presented in this thesis is the candidate’s own. Signed:...................... Date:.......................... 3 Abstract Since the 1970s, revisionist art historians have elaborated how Abstract Expressionism was exhibited abroad by the post-war US establishment in order to characterise the movement, especially on Clement Greenberg’s account, as an artistic correlate to United States’ post-war dominance and worldwide imposition of capitalism. However, in this thesis, drawing on the theoretical resources of Theodor W. Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Greenberg’s criticism in fact indicates how Abstract Expressionism stakes a claim against the rule of exchange-value. I interrogate the still prevalent notion that a development which Greenberg would retrospectively identify as a shift from Trotskyism to art-for-art’s-sake in the New York art scene of the ‘30s and ‘40s resulted in a movement, Abstract Expressionism, which lent itself to co-optation by US imperialism. I show that Abstract Expressionism’s deployment in efforts of cultural imperialism was certainly informed by Greenberg’s positioning of it as the pinnacle of the European modernist lineage due to its determinate negation of non-medium-specific elements. However, taking cues from philosopher J.M. Bernstein’s Adornian account of Abstract Expressionism, I then contend that this determinate negation is at the same time the affirmation of particularity delegitimated by capitalism. I then take recourse to both Greenberg’s and the artists’ accounts of their praxis, to show that it entailed a dialectic of construction and mimesis whereby the latter is guided by that which it forms. I then elaborate how, contrary to predominate accounts of Greenberg’s criticism, he in fact indicates the way in which the artworks invite mimetic comportment on the part of spectators, and engage cognition in a manner inextricable from corporeality. I contend that, thus, rather than buttressing the reified pluralism of capitalism, Abstract Expressionism both condemns capitalism’s disregard for corporeal subjects and prefigures the possibility of reconciliation which capitalism debars. 4 Acknowledgements Thanks to Josie Berry for four years of dedicated supervision while I fitfully changed direction in this project, and to Marina Vishmidt for secondary supervision over the final year of writing. Thanks to everyone who was there for me when I suffered a (minor but debilitating) breakdown last year, particularly Luke Carlisle, Kris Tarasova, Miri Davidson and Kat Black. Most importantly, however, thanks to my parents for being as utterly and totally unconditionally loving and supportive as it is possible for parents to be. 5 Contents Introduction 8 Chapter One: Greenberg’s Trotskyism 20 Chapter Two: Social Realism and Reification 36 Chapter Three: Determinate Negation Depoliticised 49 Chapter Four: Extremely Impure Ends 59 Chapter Five: Artistic Abstraction Contra Societal Abstraction 72 Chapter Six: Subjective Sovereignty and Social Democracy 91 Chapter Seven: Making Things of Which We Know Not What They Are 108 Chapter Eight: Greenberg’s Kantianism contra Greenberg’s Positivism 129 Chapter Nine: The Silent World of the Sensible 150 Chapter Ten: Denunciation and Anticipation 179 Conclusion 199 Bibliography 211 Figures 230 6 Abbreviations (AT) Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor London: Routledge (ND) Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics Trans. E.B. Ashton London: Routledge (AVB) Bernstein, J.M. (2006) Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting Stanford: Stanford University Press (ACC) Craven, David (1999) Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent During the McCarthy Period Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (NY) Guilbaut, Serge (1983) How New York Stole The Idea of Modern Art trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (CEC1) Greenberg, Clement (1986) The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 1. Ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (CEC2) (1986) The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 2. Ed. John O’Brian Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (CEC3) (1993) The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 3. Ed. John O’Brian Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (CEC4) (1993) The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4. Ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (PPA) Jachec, Nancy (2000) The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940- 1960.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (EA) Jones, Caroline A. (2005) Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureacratization of the Senses. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press (VI) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1968) The Visible and the Invisible trans. Alphonso Lingis Evanston: Northwestern University Press, (PP) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1993) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting eds. Galen A. Johnson, Michael B. Smith Evanston: Northwestern University Press (MAIA) Motherwell, Robert; Reinhardt, Ad eds. (1951) Modern Artists in America New York: Wittenborn Schultz (SWI) Newman, Barnett (1990) Selected Writings and Interviews ed. John P. O’Neill. New York: Alfred A. Knopf (MA) Schapiro, Meyer (1982) Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: George Braziller (LA) Trotsky, Leon (1970) Literature and Art ed. Paul N. Siegel London: Pathfinder 7 Introduction In an interview with Robert Burstow published in Frieze upon his death in 1994, the critic Clement Greenberg denounced the notion that ‘the State Department supported American art and that it was part of the cold war, and so forth’ as ‘a lot of shit’ (Burstow 1994: 33). In this, he was referring to the revisionist accounts of Abstract Expressionism forwarded by art historians since the 1970s, which interrogate how and why, in the years following WWII, Abstract Expressionism was promulgated in overseas exhibitions or organised by bodies with vested interest in US capitalism, particularly the United States Information Agency (USIA) and the International Council at the Museum of Modern Art (IC). While the differences between these accounts will concern us throughout this thesis, all of the revisionist historians contend that Abstract Expressionism was exported as a cultural buttress to the US post-war economico-military dominance of the world, particularly in Western Europe, and all of them argue that this decision was not arbitrary; that something in the artworks rendered them amenable to such co-optation. The most cited of these accounts is certainly Serge Guilbaut’s How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (1983). However, it was preceded by shorter essays by scholars such as Max Kozloff and Eva Cockcroft, and succeeded by other book- length studies, most recently Nancy Jachec’s The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism (2000). Now, these accounts have consistently faced criticism.1 However, their conclusions are nevertheless so pervasively accepted that, as Claude Cernuschi notes, ‘art historians and social critics now repeat [them] without deeming it in need of justification, documentation, or defence’ (1999: 32). As Irving Sandler, author of the once canonical and resolutely apolitical account of the movement, Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of American Painting (1970), has recently written in frustration, ‘Guilbaut’s allegation has come to be the received wisdom for several generations of art historians’ (2009: 173). For an 1 I will address some of these objections throughout this thesis, notably that of David Craven. However, for surveys of the responses, see Francis Frascina ‘Looking Forward, Looking Back: 1985-1999’ (2000). 8 indication of the extent to which this is the case, one need only note that the writers of both the lead catalogue essay and educational guide to an exhibition as institutional as Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2016, felt obliged to acknowledge the movement’s co-optation and cursorily exculpate the artists.2 Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of their conclusions, the revisionist accounts are, broadly, remarkable for precisely their lack of attention to the artworks in question. Their accounts rest almost entirely upon discourse on the artworks and the ends to which the artworks were deployed. For the revisionist historians, it is as if, to quote Benjamin Buchloh in a contemporaneous review of How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, ‘the ideological machinations [...] and critical follies to which a work was originally subjected’ exhaust ‘the esthetic construct itself,’ which in fact is ‘a force that continues to operate in the present and that outlives the forces that originally attempted to contain it’ (1984: 21). The question of the extent to which the ‘esthetic constructs’ of Abstract Expressionism align with these ‘ideological machinations’ was taken up in the ’90s by the art historian T.J. Clark, under whose supervision Guilbaut developed his thesis as a doctoral dissertation, in the essay ‘In Defence of Abstract Expressionism’ (1994), later republished as the final chapter of his book Farewell to an Idea (1999). Clark works from the premise that Abstract Expressionism still holds a hegemonic grip over the present possibilities for art. For Clark, the task of modernism was to ‘imagine modernity otherwise’ (1999a: 9). To do so, however, he contends it
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