The Brooklyn Rail

Postmodernism is an interim state, a hybrid patched together to accommodate changing material circumstances. The transition in the 1960s–80s, from modernism to postmodernism marked the shift from valuing historical significance and criticality to the embracing of a post-historical perspective, which encouraged us to imagine ourselves freed from the vision of history as a continuum that shapes all things. In the 1950–60s it was clear that modernism after three hundred years was losing its footing. That we had drifted into a Postmodern era. New technology of simulation along with their influence through social and mass media, had ushered in an era that disavowed the historical—history was now being represented as a collection of isolated moments—a warehouse of stored images, spare practices and parts to be sampled, recycled, or appropriated. Like the technological forms that were replacing the mechanical, postmodernism emphasizes variability and relativity. Its networked economy encourages the belief that re-mixing and reinterpreting things can spark novel dialogues and innovation. As such the post-historical consists of fleeting assemblages rather than a tangible, enduring reality. In the cultural arena this represents the triumph of subjectivism over objectivity, a battle that has been fought since the Enlightenment.

Culturally, these changes manifested themselves with the institutional dismantling of Modernist practices, their master narratives and critical criteria. An indicator of this shift was one of attitude, where in the modernist era artists sought to critically sustain and advance art, with some artists even aspiring to make history, in this new age artists no longer had such aspirations instead, they fashioned on older models, which they propped up on various theoretical narratives. These artists rather than being answerable to history seek instead to satisfy the demands of the marketplace. The notion of newness once a promise of a better future has merely become part of the production cycle.

The cultural anthropologist, George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (1962) proposes we live in history, it serves as an operating system. As such the past sends messages (concepts and practices) forward, some of these have over time been so normalized we do not remember their source, others constitute the return of the repressed whose time may have come, others have been re-visioned, while we live with the residue of others that have decayed. This is the process by which certain practices and discourses are sustained while others because of changing material circumstances lose their relevance.

On various occasions from the mid-eighties till just before his death, in discussions with the art critic, Clement Greenberg, he would at times tell me that art exists only in its history. Though I did not understand what he meant at the time, I have since realized that the history he believed that art exists within is not the same one that art history recounts. From his hybrid Marxist and Kantian view, history for Greenberg was cumulative, and developmental. It moves through distinct stages, though not predetermined ones. It is a material condition and as such while certain moments in art’s evolution might appear prescient, these do not provide the grounds for its further development. Such moments instead are intriguing expressions of art’s future potentiality, yet inevitably in the moment they are dead-ends. Some are forgotten while others eventually return. Examples of this are Wassily Kandinsky’s gestural abstractions from 1908 and Marcel Duchamp’s paradigm-shifting conceptualism from the 1910s. Both had to wait decades before their lessons could be deployed and elaborated. Central to this perspective is the notion that the intentions of artists, as well as their accumulated knowledge do not singularly sculpt art’s destiny. Instead, their intentions and the creative processes that drive them are significantly influenced by an underlying historical mechanism that operates akin to an intricate and all-pervasive operating system. Problematically this can only be intuited.

It is within the evolving constraints of historical and societal forces that both art and artists claim their identity and are given their purpose. As with Hegel’s dialectics, these interact and modify one another. Consequently, the art and artists of any given epoch is the product of these evolving parameters. This scenario is the premise of Arnold Hauser’s four-volume The Social History of Art (first volume published in 1951), in which he makes a distinction between the history of the evolution of the material condition of the cultural production of art and the anecdotal accounts euphemistically called art history, which is an eighteenth century invention. Consequently, the myth of Abstract Expressionism, which is akin to the invention of the Baroque, consists of a narrative imposed upon diverse artists and styles which by the 1950s–60s had been institutionalized. Such anecdotal accounts represent a socio-political narrative, distinct from the trajectory of art’s historical discourses concerning cognition, representation, and identity, which themselves can be traced back to the Ninth Century iconoclasts. As such despite postmodernism’s doctrines which would have us occupy our social narratives, we continue to live in our history.