An Allegory of Criticism*

An Allegory of Criticism* DAVID JOSELIT I subvert: 1. to destroy completely; ruin1 In the 1980s a new critical desideratum arose: to subvert. Works of art—especially those engaged in various modes of appropriation—were seen to unveil the mechanisms of commercial culture, and in so doing to deliver a fatal blow to the society of the spectacle.2 When Sherrie Levine, for instance, rephotographed the reproduction of a modernist photograph, or Jeff Koons imprisoned a pristine vacuum cleaner in Plexiglas, these works were interpreted as blunt reiterations of reified social relations. In a dazzling instance of vulgar Freudianism (especially remarkable for an art world besotted with Lacan), such acts of revelation were themselves regarded as politically efficacious, just as the analysand’s free associative speech is supposed by her analyst to release her from the grip of pathology.3 What I wish to remark on, however, is not the legitimacy of such judgments, but rather the distinctive nature of their form. It is worth noting that in the years between the respective heydays of modernist and postmodernist criticism in the United States, the locus of aesthetic value shifted from quality to criticality—from the “good” to the “subversive.” I take it as axiomatic that with postmodernism the art object began to absorb the critic’s function into itself, rendering the boundary * An earlier version of this text was delivered as a lecture at the Clark/Getty conference “Art History and Art Criticism” at the Getty Research Institute in February 2002. I am grateful to both institutions for their support and especially to the Clark Art Institute, which granted me a fellowship in 2001–02 to work on this and related projects. This version of the text also reflects my participation in the roundtable “The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” published in October 100 (Spring 2002). 1. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), p. 1728. 2. Subversion is clearly related to avant-garde models of revolution but it is also quite distinct from them. Whereas the revolutionary paradigm suggests a clearing away of tradition and the establishment of a new—perhaps utopian—social order, subversion seems arrested at the initial moment of destruction, having few, if any, programs for a new society. 3. My criticism here pertains to the writing around appropriation techniques rather than to the art itself, which I think has yet to be given its due. OCTOBER 103, Winter 2003, pp. 3–13. © 2003 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703762874188 by guest on 23 September 2021 between art and criticism confusingly porous, and more or less causing the lat- ter’s obsolescence.4 An analysis of this condition begs three sets of questions. First, what exactly constitutes efficacy in an art work and how does an aesthetics of “subversion”—or its more recent lexical cousin, “criticality”— function as a politics? Second, what kind of critic is the artist? And third, what is left for the critic to do? Craig Owens’s theory of allegory is a good place to start. Building on a variety of thinkers, and especially Walter Benjamin, Owens developed a pithy model of postmodern allegory in a two-part essay published in successive numbers of October in 1980. Early on in the text he offered a fundamental defini- Sherrie Levine. After Walker Evans: 4. 1987. tion: “Let us say for the moment that allegory occurs whenever one text is doubled by another. .”5 Allegory, then, is the doubling—indeed, the multiplication—of “texts” within and around a work of literature or art. Such doubling (or multiplication) necessarily functions as an act of interpretation—a mode of criticism that is built into the work. Owens makes this point explicitly through a comparison: “In modern aesthetics, allegory is regularly subordinated to the symbol, which represents the supposedly indissoluble unity of form and substance which characterizes the work of art as pure presence.”6 If allegory is the rhetorical figure corresponding to postmodernism, the symbol, in which essential experience is made manifest, corresponds to American midcentury modernism. Owens’s distinction clarifies the fundamental role of the critic in assessing modernist art: it is s/he who recognizes the essential link between gesture and the unconscious among painters of the New York School, or opticality and “grace” in the canvases of their successors. Such an act of recognition is superfluous to the critical doubling of allegorical (postmodern) art, which is by definition self-conscious. Here is where the violence enfolded in the term “subversive” surges forth in the seemingly benign concept of allegory. An allegory destroys the autonomy of the text. Benjamin 4. For a provocative discussion of the obsolescence of criticism see the roundtable “The Present Conditions of Art Criticism,” October 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 201–28. 5. Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” [1980], reprinted in Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock; introduction by Simon Watney (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 53. For another important and influential account of allegory and postmodern art that, like Owens’s, relies heavily on Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum 21, no. 1 (September 1982), pp. 43–56. 6. Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse,” p. 62. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703762874188 by guest on 23 September 2021 An Allegory of Criticism 5 compares allegory to a ruin, and, as The American Heritage Dictionary affirms, to subvert is to “destroy completely; [to] ruin.” The allegory of my own title denotes something simpler than the nuanced associations elaborated by Owens. For in this essay I have elected a single figure, Michael Shamberg, as the protagonist of a fable—an allegory—of criticism. Shamberg was not a major figure in art criticism; indeed, he had little to do with art at all. This very marginality vis-à-vis the art world in combination with his current power and influence in the realm of commercial culture make him a fit object of allegorization. As will become clear in the course of this text, Shamberg’s story has everything to do with the shift marked by Owens: from an art of essence to an art of appropriation rooted in allegorical extensions of the mass media. In that sense, I hope the allegory of my title will carry the complexity of Owens’s use of it after all. For what I will demonstrate is a second order of doubling or multiplication, not solely of texts, but of the publics interpellated by those texts. II At different points in his career Michael Shamberg worked as a writer, video activist, and Hollywood producer, earning himself a significant place in the history of video, television, and film. In these capacities he was among the first to recognize the thoroughgoing commercialization of public space brought about by television’s explosion at midcentury. He called this phenomenon “Media-America,” and in his 1971 book Guerrilla Television, he identified an array of visual practices of the 1960s and ’70s, ranging from psychedelia to video art, which were aimed at democratiz- ing or revolutionizing the electronic nation. The allegory suggested by his career pivots on the difficulties of sustaining such criticism. Most professional art critics produce little more than sophisticated press releases. Such writings are valuable to art history as documents, which may be read symptomatically in the brilliant ways that figures like T. J. Clark have done. I am less interested in this diagnostic use of criticism than in those moments when critical writing becomes prescriptive— when it invents new kinds of objects rather than simply interpreting those it finds readymade. Shamberg’s story is exemplary in this regard because he tried in a variety Guerrilla Television. © 1971 by Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation. Designed by Ant Farm, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Ltd. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/016228703762874188 by guest on 23 September 2021 6 OCTOBER of ways to construct new networks for criticism. These efforts fall roughly into four stages, which I will describe briefly. Phase 1: Industrial Journalism. After graduating from college in 1966 and writing for a newspaper called Chicago’s American, where he covered the Democratic Convention in 1968, Shamberg worked for about a year for Time and Life. It is well known that these publications require a highly Taylorized form of writing where individual authorship is less important than a “house voice.” As Shamberg remarked in an interview of 1971, “I quit because I felt irrelevant, not co-opted.”7 This distinction is significant because it indicates Shamberg’s career-long recognition that constructing an audience is as important as constructing an argument. At least one of his assignments for Time did prove relevant. In the issue of May 30, 1969, Shamberg published an unsigned review of the video exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. In his opening paragraph, Shamberg perhaps unwittingly summarizes his program for the next decade: The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. It has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco parentis is that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television generation struck there too, but the rebellion was half in fun: an art exhibition at Manhattan’s Howard Wise Gallery entitled “TV as a Creative Medium.”8 Included in TV as a Creative Medium was Wipe Cycle (1969), a work by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, which particularly impressed Shamberg.

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