The Brooklyn Rail

Period labels are useful for classification, and so essential for orienting ourselves when facing art. To identify an artwork as “baroque” or “modernist” is a useful, if very tentative way of identifying its place in history. And, also, such period labels provide an elliptical manner of describing the larger visual cultures. It’s useful, for example, to consider how baroque and modernist social orders differed, and so lead to the creation of very different art. Everyone is aware of the problems with these labels. Bernini is baroque, but so is Vermeer: That period label includes very diverse artworks. And so period labels can promote a lazy Hegelian way of historical thinking. In graduate school at Columbia, we learned a relevant joke on a final exam: describe one historical event not due to the declining bourgeoisie. The aim of this joke was to point out the ways that period labels can be unhelpful. And yet, granting all of these problems, we need period labels, for they are essential for generalizing.

In the 1980s everyone writing about contemporary work spoke about postmodernism. That was the dominant period label for new work. I remember, for that’s when I came into the art world. The account that most impressed me was Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), a portion published earlier in Hal Foster’s anthology The-Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983). What Jameson offered was a theory of everything, not only visual art, but literature, architecture and politics. And so, if some of the details were incorrect, as I and some other readers pointed out, still the comprehensiveness of his analysis was genuinely impressive. After all, as all of we readers of Hegel know, the inevitable price for an extremely wide range of theory is likely to be such problems with details. That Hegel never got to Italy or Greece didn’t prevent him from lecturing about their art.

Soon enough, then, in the 1980s there were a great variety of competing accounts of postmodernism, drawing on the range of French theorists who were being much read in New York. I have the most vivid memory of one anthology of this writing, which set Derrida against Foucault, Deleuze against Habermas, and so on, in a way that soon became exhausting. Looking back, it’s useful to offer a simpler analysis of postmodernism. Modernism was a relatively secure label, and so if postmodernism was whatever came next, then we needed only consider what art rejected the qualities of modernism in order to define postmodernism. So, for example, while modernism deals in aesthetic pleasure, postmodernism refused to do this. And this led the theorists at October to make a distinction between progressive postmodernist art and the aesthetically and politically reactionary works that refused to be postmodern. Cindy Sherman versus Julian Schnabel, to cite one familiar opposition, revealed that contrast.

Looking back, it seems obvious that this situation could not go on for too long. Once the postmodernists achieved success in the same institutions as their would-be reactionary counterparts, then clearly this opposition has been deconstructed. Sherman appears in the same kinds of collections and galleries as Schnabel. And, in any event, it’s hard to imagine postmodernism understood as a reaction to modernism as a movement continuing for decades. Just as Post-Impressionism came only relatively briefly after Impressionism; so postmodernism only happened for some few years after modernism. It’s too late today for postmodernism to continue indefinitely.

I am deliberately avoiding defining postmodernism in any detail, both because that is a quagmire, as I have said, but also because what interests me here is what comes next. Right now, if you submit an essay or a review identifying a contemporary figure as a postmodernist, my hunch is that the editor will ask you to rewrite, for this concept has lost all of its explanatory value. Why then, I am asking, did postmodernism cease to be a relevant concept? What has happened? What is our period style?

Here it is useful to consider a brief historical sketch. A few years ago covid, the widespread public outrage about murders of Black people, and then the election of Donald Trump made it obvious that our culture had changed drastically. And then rather swiftly the art world took a new interest in Black artists, both contemporary and historical figures. And of course in other minorities. There also was a keen new critical awareness in the relationship of the art world to its financial basis. And of course the recent heated debates about American support for Israel are just one further step on this process. I was, I confess, astonished by the speed and magnitude of these changes, if only because the issues themselves are hardly new. But now responding to change both within the art world and in the larger political culture has become urgent.

Every reader of the Rail knows about all of this. What interests me here is understanding what to make of what has happened. Looking backwards, we can see that postmodernism as definition of a period style was a minor variation on modernist themes. The Octoberists championed different artists than did Clement Greenberg, but their view of history now appears but a variation, a negation if you will, of his crucial themes. Where he marginalized Surrealism, for example, they prioritized it. And while they agreed about the importance of David Smith’s sculpture, for Greenberg his successor was Anthony Caro, while October preferred Donald Judd and the minimalists.

When the Covid struck, I realized that all prior bets were off. What was called for was rethinking of fundamentals. And with the galleries and museums closed, it was a good time to read. Thanks to the hospitality of a leftist site, Counterpunch, I engaged in an experiment, writing and publishing quick, short essays in response to the crisis. One of those accounts, from August 26, 2022 “Why Black American Art Matters Right Now” has some ideas that still deserve consideration. (Some of my phrases here come from that publication.) Malcolm Bull’s Seeing Things Hidden. Apocalypse, Vision and Totality (1999) persuaded me to study a famous book which, I confess, I had never read, W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

Du Bois (1868-1963) had a fascinating career, making his way in 1892 from segregated America to Germany, where he studied philosophy in Berlin. His classic early book The Souls of Black Folk (1903) relates Hegel’s analysis of the master/slave relationship, from The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), to what he calls the double consciousness of African-American culture. The slave lives, Hegel says, at the direction of the master, who appropriates the products of his labor. And because the slave works, he achieves a real advance in self-consciousness, and so dialectical fashion eventually triumphs over the master. It’s not clear whether Hegel describes slavery in Greek antiquity, or in the modern world; or, indeed, whether he had any historical period in mind. Marx found here a prescient description of the proletariat’s triumph in the future communist revolution. And Du Bois applied this account to racism in America. The American Black, Du Bois wrote, has “no true self-consciousness,” but is always looking at himself “through the eyes of others. . . The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.” The goal is simple—the Black American “simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American.”

Du Bois isn’t interested in this book in visual art, but his analysis suggests how to theorize our art world after postmodernism. In the era of modernism, affirmative action was concerned to promote people according to ability, paying special attention to traditionally underrepresented groups. That Kantian way of thinking was in principle blind to race and gender. (Unlike Kant himself, who was in some ways a man of his own time.) If, however, we accept Du Bois’s argument, then there is more to the story. The discussion of double consciousness underlines the way in which there is a difference between being inside and outside of a culture. Black artists are in a different situation from their White colleagues. I speak here of Black artists, but really this analysis applies, at least in general ways, to any non-white, non-male artists.

What I am suggesting, then, is that what has replaced Postmodernism as a label for our period style is the awareness about race that was so presciently analyzed by Du Bois. As yet, we perhaps lack the right slogan to characterize these concerns which, as I have said, are everywhere in the visual culture right now. And so my own very tentative present analysis is meant merely to be a trial balloon, a way of encouraging other, more knowledgeable art writers to engage with this subject, which is of singular importance right now