The Originality of the A vant-Garde and. Other Modernist Myths The Originality of the A vant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths Rosalind E. Krauss The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England First MIT Press paperback edition, 1986 © 198 5 by Rosalind E. Krauss All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Krauss, Rosalind E. The originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)-History-20th century. 2. Modernism (Art)-Themes, motives. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.)-Psychological aspects. I. Title. N6490.K727 1984 709'.04 84-11315 ISBN 0-262-11093-8 (hb), 0-262-61046-9 (pb) ISBN-13: 978-0-262-11093-8 (hb), 978-0-262-61046-9 (ph) 2019 For Annette Michelson Contents Acknowledgments zx Introduction 1 I Modernist Myths Grids 8 In the Name of Picasso 23 No More Play 1:2 The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism 87 This New Art: To Draw in Space 119 Photography's Discursive Spaces 131 The Originality of the Avant-Garde 151 Sincerely Yours · 171 II Toward Postmodernism Notes on the Index: Part 1 196 Notes on the Index: Part 2 210 Reading Jackson Pollock, Abstractly 221 Le Witt in Progress 21:1: Richard Serra, a Translation 260 Sculpture in the Expanded Field 276 Poststructuralism and the Paraliterary 291 Credits 297 Index 301 Acknowledgments Several contexts have supported the work that is brought together in this book. The most obvious is the magazine October, in which many of these texts were first published. Through its complex relation to the world of current art and critical thought, October provided the impetus fo r these essays. To my co­ fo under and co-editor, Annette Michelson, I owe my greatest debt for the intel­ lectual adventure we have shared over the last eight years. Douglas Crimp, the magazine's executive editor, has fo rwarded the project of the analysis of con­ temporary aesthetic production in immensely important ways; andJoan Copjec, its associate editor, has enlarged this context in the fields of film andpsycho­ analysis. Without our intense collaboration many of the conceptual opportuni­ ties seized by these essays would undoubtedly have slipped away. Two other contexts have simultaneously provided stimulus and critical distance: the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, D.C., where a fellowship in 1980-81 led to the writing of "The Photographic Condi­ tions of Surrealism" and "The Originality of the Avant-Garde"; and the In­ stitute fo r Advancc::d Study, Princeton, where membership in 1983-84 permitted me to conceive these essays as a book. My contact with students at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center of CUNY has consistently provided me a fo rum within which to try out ideas before an audience that has been as exacting as it is responsive. One further context has been both challenging and nurturing fo r texts as involved as these are with the theoretical production of France over the last two decades. This is Macula, a critical journal that was produced in Paris from 1976 to 1982 by Yve-Alain Bois andJean Clay. My discussions with them, as well as with Hubert Damisch, have been of inestimable importance. Other friends and colleagues who have helped with their support as well as their criticism are, Svetlana Alpers, Benjamin Buchloh, Susan Crile, Pierre Fedida, Joel Fineman, Stephen Koch, Richard Howard, Louis Marin, Keith Moxey, Linda Nochlin, Beverly Pepper, John Rajchman, Nan Rosenthal, Margit Rowell, Leo Stein­ berg, Julia Strand, Mark Strand, and Teri Wehn-Damisch. The Originality of the A vant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths Part 1 Introduction Can it be argued that the interest of critical writing lies almost entirely in its method? Can it be held that the content of any given evaluative statement­ "this is good, important," "this is bad, trivial"- is not what serious criticism is, seriously, read fo r? But rather, that such criticism is understood through the fo rms of its arguments, through the way that its method, in the process of con­ stituting the object of criticism, exposes to view those choices that precede and predetermine any act of judgment? When, more than twenty years ago, Art and Culture presented the critical work of Clement Greenberg to the generation of artists and writers who were to cJ,evelop during the 1960s, it presented its readers above all with a system through which to think the fieldof modernist art. And this system, or method­ often referred to, inexactly, as fo rmalist-had far greater effect than the par­ ticularities of its author's taste. Greenberg, fo r example, did not support the work of Frank Stella, but the logic of his system and the privilege it gave to flatness as a pictorial essence or norm provided the conceptual framework within which Stella's firstdecade of production was understood and, widely, ac­ claimed. Profoundly historicist, Greenberg's method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux. That is to say that certain things, like art itself, or painting or sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal , trans­ historical fo rms. But in the same breath it is to assert that the life of these forms is dependent upon constant renewal, not unlike that of the living organism The historical logic of this renewal was what essays like "Collage" or "American-Type Painting" strove to discover, while always insisting as part of that logic that "modernist art develops out of the past without gap or break, and wherever it ends up it will never stop being intelligible in terms of the continuity of art." It is this declaration of the ontic status of art, of its unbreachable, seamless continuity, that led Greenberg vigorously to deny that it is in the method rather than the content of the judgments that the interest of criticism lies. Art as a universal calls forth and is completed by judgment as another universal capacity 2 Introduction of consciousness. There being no way to separate a judgment from its evaluative contents, he would argue that the point of criticism has everything to do with value and almost nothing to do with method. Practically everything in Th e Or£g£nal£ty ofthe Avant-Garde and Other Modern£st My ths stands in contradiction to this position. Written during the decade from 1973 to 1983, these essays chart not only my own critical and intellectual devel­ opment but that of a generation of American critics, although I must add, not fo r the most part critics concerned with the visual arts. For, during the years that Art and Culturis impact was felt in a New York-based art world, other sec­ tions of American cultural and intellectual life were affected by a discourse coming from abroad and challenging the historicist premises on which almost all the critical thinking of this country had been based. That discourse was, of course, structuralism, with its later poststructuralist modifications, the analytic methods of which produced a radical inversion of the position on which Art and Culture depended. On the one hand, structuralism rejected the historicist model as the means to understand the generation of meaning. On the other, within the work of poststructuralism, those timeless, transhistorical forms, which had been seen as the indestructible categories wherein aesthetic development took place, were themselves opened to historical analysis and placement. To reject the historicist model of the way the work of art comes to mean is to propose several things at once. It is first of all to substitute fo r the idea of the work of art as an organism (developing out of a past tradition, imbedded in the history of a given medium) the image of it as a structure. To illustrate this notion of structure, Roland Barthes liked to use the story of the Argonauts, ordered by the Gods to complete their long journey in one and the same ship ­ the Argo - against the certainty of the boat's gradual deterioration. Over the course of the voyage the Argonauts slowly replaced each piece of the ship, "so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its fo rm. This ship Argo is highly useful," Barthes continues. "It affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspira­ tion, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): subst£tut£on (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nom£nat£on (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its fo rm." Barthes's depiction of structure is, in a sense, a narrative rendering of Fer­ dinand de Saussure's definition of language as pure difference, the definition that can be seen as having initiated structuralism. Barthes's subst£tut£on refers to this system of differences. But his notion of nom£nat£on calls on that part of the definition of language that Saussure considered even more important. Observ­ ing that differences are generally the fu nction of two positive terms that are set Introduction 3 in comparison, Saussure insisted that, to the contrary, in the case of language "there are only differences w£thout pos£t£ve terms." With this definitive rejection of "positive terms" Saussure blocked the way for meaning to be understood as the outcome of a correlation between a sound (or word) and an object fo r which the word is the label.