Site Specifics: Modernist Mediums in Modern Places
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Site Specifics: Modernist Mediums in Modern Places Eugene Vydrin Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Eugene Vydrin All rights reserved ABSTRACT Site Specifics: Modernist Mediums in Modern Places Eugene Vydrin This dissertation argues that the modernist doctrine of medium specificity, the idea that the autonomy of the arts arises from artworks' investigation of the properties and limits of their materials, grounds artistic production in the place where it was produced. The identity of artistic mediums (writing, painting, sculpture, and land art) depends on their literal placement in physical, geographic environments. Medium specificity requires site specificity. In the aesthetic, art-historical discourses I consider — Gertrude Stein's account of Cubism, Soviet avant-garde writings on Constructivism, Robert Smithson's texts on landscape, earth art, and Minimalism — the mediums of art-making are located in places that serve simultaneously as construction sites, sources of raw materials, and models of aesthetic form. They are both the subject of representation and the representational means, the work's content, form, and substance. Art derives its physical properties, its subject matter, and its formal laws from the geography, topography, and geology of the sites at which it is made. Stein retroactively models Picasso's Cubism (and her own plays) on the spatial juxtaposition of houses and mountains in the Spanish landscape. Shklovsky discovers Constructivist principles (and those of his own formalist aesthetics) in the daily life of post-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Smithson finds a model for earth art and for the recovery of history from universal entropy in the “dialectical landscape” of Central Park. For all three of these aesthetic theorists and practitioners, natural processes are entangled with social history, reciprocally modifying each other at the intersections of the built and the found. The specific site is constituted by such intersections and models site-specific art as a legible composition of modern life. By literally taking place, the site-specific artworks these writers describe, theorize, and propose acquire historical specificity, an identity that both indexes the social order that gave rise to them and resists or revises it. This autonomy of the artwork is the stake of site-specificity. An artwork's capacity to resist its present, to be autonomous from or non-identical with the dominant mode of production of its time, is a function of its localization in a socially determined site. A site-specific work is made from materials that are arranged in real space and organized by the laws governing this space. By turning social materials and social laws into its own constructive principle, such a work makes them perceivable and reveals the historical processes at work in them. Manifesting history in its material composition and formal arrangement, the site-specific artwork both remembers and remakes it. Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter One “The Trouble with Including Looking”: Gertrude Stein and the Cubist Landscape…………………………………………..31 Chapter Two “Iron, Glass, and Revolution”: Constructivist Form and the Mediums of Modernity………………………………66 Chapter Three “This Strange Place”: Petersburg as Medium in Viktor Shklovsky’s Knight’s Move…………………….110 Epilogue “A Jumbled Museum”: The Mediums of History in the Writings of Robert Smithson…………………….149 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..167 i Acknowledgments Film credits and casts of characters in certain novels (I have only ever found this in mysteries) list characters in order of appearance. An alternative to both the motivated hierarchy of social standing and to the arbitrary hierarchy of the alphabet, the order of appearance arranges the cast along a diachronic axis. The list is placed in time, acquires a historical dimension. The order of appearance is contingent on the circumstances of characters’ arrivals on the scene, circumstances extrinsic to each of them. It is determined not by a system of relative values established by one or another cultural code, but by the meandering progress of the narrative (and its author) from one character to another. The order of the characters’ appearance is the order of the plot itself. I could never arrange the people I am about to thank into any relative order. They are, each of them, incomparable, and each has helped me, taught me, rescued me in ways that are absolutely particular, unrepeatable, and unrepayable. And each of them arrived on the scene just in time. So, in order of their appearance in my life, my infinite thanks to those who are behind every word of this dissertation: Yuliya Bir and Mikhail Vydrin, my parents, have supplied the infinite conversation and the bottomless teapot. Yelena Buroshko, my grandmother, has for decades created original works of painting by repeating preexisting ones, mediated by her own mimetic sense of color. ii I don’t quite know where to find the words to thank Ben Ruby. He was the first friend with whom I talked, argued, and thought in English, with whom I discovered words for ideas I did not yet have and ideas for words we did not know existed. At the Gare de Lyon and on the G train, in loud bars and near his piano at home, Aaron Butler, my friend and roommate, has talked with me about painting and poetry, form and medium, Pater, Proust and Joyce. His knowledge of their texts guided me to passages and discoveries that are at the heart of this dissertation. At NYU, Roger Deakins taught me the methods of literary interpretation and asked me to become conscious of what I do when I read. As Director of Undergaduate Studies, he presided over my life as an English major with true kindness, unfailing guidance, and a wry sympathy for all my enthusiasms. In an introductory survey class on British literature, John Guillory gave me vertiginous glimpses of the worlds of discourse and meaning inhabiting early modern texts. He let an excited undergraduate into his graduate seminar on Milton, in which I wrote down every word. Jeffrey Spear’s class on the Literature of the Transition introduced me to English modernism as a continuation of the revolt of decadence. He was the first to show me the visuality of modern texts and the spectacular excesses of their forms. His openness to his students’ ideas and genuine desire to hear their voices has forever imprinted these texts with the cadence of his own voice and the joy I felt while reading them in his class. Perry Meisel showed me that literary criticism was a poetic act, one that repeated and revised the critical acts of the literature that occasioned it. He taught me Bloomsbury iii modernism, Bloomian Freud, and the chiasmic crossovers of self and world, priority and belatedness, the cowboy and the dandy. His classes were the reason I went to graduate school. More than a decade later, his words continue to return to me in sudden flashes of belated understanding, translated into the language of my subsequent reading. The professors and fellow graduate students I met at Columbia have not only given me the subjects and objects about which I never stop thinking and talking but the very words to speak of them, the language I use every day. I have been with them for more than a decade and could not imagine thinking without them. To describe my gratitude and debt to them would require at least one more chapter (if not an entire dissertation) on influence, imitation, and giftgiving. For now, I will confine myself to some metonymic placeholders for the years of gifts that each of them has given me. David Damrosch’s generosity toward my half-formed ideas about modernism and sympathy for my commitment to aestheticism guided my first steps to a proper understanding of both and helped me figure out why I cared about them in the first place. His own critical practice taught me that historical specificity, worldly breadth, and intertextual close reading are inseparable from each other. My graduate education is unimaginable without Ross Hamilton. In the seminar on Romanticism he taught in my first semester, he built a conceptual edifice that I continue to inhabit. He taught me not only a particular history of ideas but also the idea of intellectual history itself. He was there at every crucial moment, from my first seminar paper to my defense. When, facing a fast-approaching final deadline for completing and defending my dissertation, I asked him to be on my committee, he immediately agreed, iv responded with several rounds of suggestions and questions that immeasurably helped me to frame my argument, and did everything to make it possible for me to finish writing and defend. Neither would have been possible without him. Maura Spiegel brought me into first contact with the narrative experiments of post-war American fiction and gave me a foundation in the philosophical and cultural discourses that accompanied it. Most of what I know of postmodernism has come from her and her seminar. Each of our subsequent conversations has made me wish I could talk over every idea I have with her. I am still hoping to someday have our conversation about Sidney Lumet. Martin Puchner introduced me to the manifesto as a historical aesthetic and a performative rhetoric. His seminar on the manifesto as the emblematic genre of revolutionary modernity, “a poetry of the future,” which tracked this form across aesthetic movements and political programs, was the origin of this inter-medium project. His comments on my prospectus and first chapter set the groundwork for the years of research and writing that followed. Rosalind Krauss’s seminar on theories of influence and her lectures on “Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Modernism” placed and illuminated in one expanded field the post-war theoretical discourses I had been feverishly attempting to piece together with the pre-war modernism I believed they could explain.