The Logic of Modernism Author(s): Adrian Piper Source: Callaloo, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 574-578 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2932257 . Accessed: 15/09/2011 20:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Callaloo. http://www.jstor.org THE LOGIC OF MODERNISM* ByAdrian Piper There are four interrelated properties of Euroethnic art that are central to understand- ing the development of modernism, and in particular the development of contemporary art in the United States within the last few decades: 1) its appropriative character;2) its formalism; 3) its self-awareness; and 4) its commitment to social content. These four properties furnish strong conceptual and strategic continuities between the history of European art-modernism in particular-and recent developments in American art with explicitly political subject matter. Relative to these lines of continuity, the peculiarly American variety of modernism known as Greenbergian formalism is an aberration. Characterized by its repudiation of content in general and explicitly political subject matter in particular, Greenbergian formalism gained currency as an opportunistic ideo- logical evasion of the threat of cold war McCarthyite censorship and red-baiting in the fifties.