TOWARDS A HISTORY OF THE MARXIST HISTORY OF ART
‘Here we wish only to affirm that a theory of social and historical change is a prerequisite of any discourse that claims to engage with the historically specific circumstances involved in the generation of art objects or other cultural products.’1
In his entry on the ‘Social History of Art’ for the 1996 anthology Critical Terms for Art History, Craig Clunas begins with the question: ‘What might a social history of the “Social History of Art” look like?’2 In an introduction to an anthology devoted to ‘renewing’ Marxist art history, this is something that obviously needs to be considered. It is also an appropriate question to begin with, for it is a subject to which Andrew Hemingway, to whom this volume of essays is dedicated, has been committed (and, moreover, is still thinking about) over the course of his academic life. Not only has he produced highly commendable models of a Marxist history of art in terms of the production of early nineteenth-century English landscape imagery; the art produced by those artists either in, or associated with, the Communist Party in the United States between 1926 and 1956; and more recently his interpretation of American Precisionism in the interwar period. He has also been concerned for many years in historicizing the shifts within the discipline itself, incisively assessing how a Marxist take on the subject has been affected by political and economic transformations within the wider culture as a whole.3 This is a project crystallized in Hemingway’s study of the Marxist art historian Meyer Schapiro, and codified (if unfinished in terms of his own continuing work on the subject) in his 2006 anthology Marxism and the History of Art.4
What distinguishes this latter text is that it brings together the two significant traditions within the Marxist history of art: the interwar generation of Schapiro, Max Raphael, Francis Klingender, Frederick Antal and Arnold Hauser; and a subsequent New Left one which, radicalized by the utopian impulses of 1968, attempted to regenerate a Marxist art history after the impasse of the Cold War years.5 If the intellectual efforts of T. J. Clark and Otto Karl Werckmeister loom large in this renewal, they nevertheless differ in their approach.6 At his most extreme, Werckmeister has argued that the subject of aesthetics has no basis in the works of classical Marxism and is therefore purely ideological; moreover, in terms of its centrality within critical theory, this subject has become a utopian surrogate for, and obstacle to, the potential for actual revolutionary transformation.7 It should thus be jettisoned for a more thoroughgoing materialist critique of the ideological role that art has played, and continues to play, within bourgeois society.8 Werckmeister calls for specific concrete historical work over philosophical abstraction. For him, the Marxist history of art is a contradiction in terms in that the science of Marxism is by its very nature a totalizing system of thought with disciplinary boundaries being little more than one of the obfuscations of bourgeois thought. Clark, by contrast, in his focus upon the particular historical conjuncture of art and politics in revolutionary France in 1848 and afterwards, has persuasively provided accounts of how art works during moments of social upheaval can become ‘a disputed, even effective, part of the historical process’ and, moreover, have the potential to work against the grain of dominant regimes of power.9 The form of immanent critique here clearly has a relationship to the work of Theodor W. Adorno, and this has become more explicit in later years; while the focus upon the agency of painting in-and-of itself shares more than a passing resemblance to the Greenbergian model of modernist canon building. Indeed, it was the codification of this tradition, and the claims that Clement Greenberg made for this type of painting, with its relationship to nineteenth-century French painting, that became one of the principal sites of critique for the social history of art within the anglophone world. The combination of both – the canon and the claims made for it – became the object of analysis for Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock when they began teaching on the masters programme in the Social History of Art at Leeds from 1979 onwards, a course that had been initiated by Clark several years earlier.10
If Clark’s later writing skirts perilously close to upholding the modernist canon – reading negativity as value where Greenberg reads formal purity – then Werckmeister has consistently sought to knock down such edifices. Whereas Clark stays with the more traditional objects of art history, Werckmeister has instead engaged with a far more diffuse range of cultural artefacts, from the music of Kraftwerk to Japanese anime – objects clearly beyond the purview of a more traditional (and Clarkian) history of art.11 Yet both of them locate this radical impulse within the discipline to the political upheavals of 1968. Werckmeister understands the radicalization of the discipline as a product of the ‘second and general crisis of late capitalist society’ that ran until 1973; and Clark attributed his seminal books of that year to political quietism, representing the shift from his involvement in Situationism to academia, from the street to the archive.12 So whereas Werckmeister locates the radical critique of the discipline within ‘the larger intellectual and academic movements of that time’, Clark reads it as already symptomatic of defeat, with its rapid absorption into what was to become a far-from-Marxist ‘social history of art’ that contributed to a rejuvenation of the subject within the strict confines of the academic marketplace.13 For Clark, then, this shift ultimately played a recuperative role for the discipline ‘as the 60s slipped away and the academic world returned to its old habits’.14 A Marxist art history became the social history of art, which, alongside competing methodologies representing the rival claims of feminism, psychoanalysis, sexuality and race, transmogrified into the smorgasbord that became known as ‘the new art history’.15 (This moment was captured in the title of the well-known 1986 book of the same name edited by A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello.16) This is what we would like to posit as one of the key differences between Marxist art history and the new art history: the former was always in some meaningful way somehow refracted through the struggles of 1968, an attempt to think through some productive relationship between the subject of art history and the broader social upheavals of that moment; while the latter represents an institutionalized effort with no necessary connection to such radical energies.
When Clark writes in his ‘On the Social History of Art’ (an acknowledged reference to Hauser) that ‘it is easier to define what methods to avoid than propose a set of methods for systematic use’, he is clearly distancing himself from that former generation of Marxist art historians mentioned earlier.17 By flagging up the ‘taboos’ of ‘the notion of works of art “reflecting” ideologies, social relations, or history’; or talking about ‘history as “background” to the work of art’; or offering analysis depending upon ‘intuitive analogies between form and ideological content’, Clark is making a sideswipe at the likes of Schapiro, Raphael, Klingender, Antal and Hauser.18 In this way they are positioned – as right-wing critics liked to argue – as historians who worked with a simplistic economic model of cultural analysis that directly reads off the class interests of those who patronize art into the formal composition, and ideological character, of the works produced. Yet the work of these earlier pioneers within the Marxist tradition cannot simply be subsumed under the kind of crude historicism that characterized the Second International and must instead be seen as part of a broader attack upon a Stalinist economism that attempted to grant a greater specificity to the cultural by introducing a more complex set of relations between the base and the superstructure. They were successful in this to different degrees. While Klingender can probably be understood as the one member of his generation who most crudely conceives of artistic production and analysis within a Soviet framework indebted to Georgi Plekhanov, Raphael and Schapiro instead had a more sustained and complex engagement with modern art, and Hauser and Antal were always critical of any tendency within the discipline that reduced extra-artistic phenomena to mere background material.19
As early as his ‘The Marxist Theory of Art’ of 1932, Raphael was distancing himself from both bourgeois and historicist accounts of the discipline and was using the dialectical method to grant art a greater autonomy than it had been formerly been allowed.20 According to John Roberts, this was possible because in the 1920s Raphael had read Marx’s ‘Introduction to a Critique of Political Economy’, which expanded the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859, and was published by Karl Kautsky in his journal Die Neue Zeit in 1903.21 Marx’s discussion of methodology in this text, in particular his dismissal of the dialectic as a unitary philosophical method, allowed Raphael to counter both economist and historicist misreadings of Marx. It also allowed him to break the crude binary opposition between modernism and social realism that became increasingly entrenched after 1934, when the latter became the official Soviet line in all matters aesthetic. While Raphael, like Schapiro (who befriended him while he was in New York), never uncritically celebrated modernism per se, both were clear that it represented the most significant art of their time, and they therefore treated it with the theoretical sophistication that it properly deserved.22 For Schapiro, modernism in the visual arts was deeply contradictory in that, while representing a historically progressive ideal of individual freedom within bourgeois society, in its mediation via the privatized market it was in part constitutive of class divisions under capitalism.23
If the anti-fascist diaspora of the 1930s led Raphael to New York, then the Hungarian Antal left Germany for Britain, where he became part of a Communist Party-dominated critical art milieu that included Klingender as well as the likes of Anthony Blunt and Herbert Read. Unlike the community of exiles that washed up in New York, which had a strong and vibrant anti-Stalinist and, at times, pro-Trotskyist element, that in London was more orthodox communist with a concomitant emphasis on realist and popular traditions within the arts (Read’s sympathetic embrace of modernist formal innovation being the notable exception here).24 This probably marked the work of Klingender more than the others, particularly during the period of the Popular Front – although even here it had the positive effect of widening the purview of the objects deemed suitable for art-historical enquiry, as well as radical readings of canonical artists such as Hogarth and Goya.25 Despite this more orthodox communist milieu, it would be wrong to characterize, for example, Antal’s work as purely a form of crude reflectionism for, as Roberts makes clear, he ‘was instrumental in weakening some of the historicist and populist inflections of vulgar Marxist art history’.26 Formed within the intellectual circles of Central Europe, he had contact with a far more sophisticated conception of art history as a discipline, and Marxism as a totalizing critique, than that enjoyed by the likes of Klingender in Britain.27 This enabled him to develop a more nuanced and complex position than the latter, and one, moreover, in which he could challenge the typically orthodox Soviet valorization of realism over modernism; yet at the same time assert the value of artists such as Hogarth and Goya for the very formal complexity being celebrated by the likes of Clive Bell and Roger Fry within the tradition of pictorial modernism.28
These interwar initiatives within the field of the Marxist history of art in Britain find their fruition in the postwar work of Hauser, also an émigré from Hungary to Britain and – like Antal – a participant in the Sunday circle organized around Georg Lukács and Béla Balázs, and then in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.29 His two-volume The Social History of Art of 1951 was the first major attempt in the anglophone world to produce a non-isolationist history of art.30 The wide-ranging synthesis of the history of art from cave painting through to the industrial art of film was widely criticized, by no less a figure as Ernst Gombrich as well as others, as being too sweeping in its range and guilty of a type of class reductionism that was typically deemed to characterize Marxist art history in the interwar period.31 In response to these attacks, and in an effort of self-criticism, Hauser then published The Philosophy of Art History in 1959, which is not only anti-Hegelian and anti-historicist but also contains the first mention in English of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ from 1936.32 Despite the fact that the work drew deeply from the spheres of the social sciences and philosophy, for Roberts ‘Hauser’s book was at the end of one tradition, and not at the beginning of another, for all its prefigurations’.33 Yet the work was largely ignored and it was business as usual within the subject, as the Courtauld Institute of Art and its connoisseurial commitments reigned supreme during the Cold War period.
It was the expansion of working-class and lower-middle-class student numbers in the 1960s and the opening up of the new universities and polytechnics, combined with the emergence of a local Marxist theoretical culture indebted to continental philosophy, that would revivify the Marxist history of art in the early 1970s. Roberts has also rightly pointed to the specific role of British art schools within these wider shifts in access to higher education, and the radical theorization of visual culture that they undertook, which then provided the ideological lead in the critique of traditional art history.34 This radicalization of the subject took place slightly earlier in Germany and the United States and was, as Werckmeister has made clear, part of the political unrest that swept Western European and American universities during the economic crisis of 1968–73, prompted most notably by the Grand Coalition between Christian Democrats and Social Democrats in Germany, and by the Vietnam War in the United States.35 As early as 1968, progressive art historians in Germany formed the Ulmer Verein für Kunst-und Kulturwissenschaften at the congress of the Verband Deutscher Kunsthistoriker in Ulm with the intention of radically reforming the subject in opposition to what they perceived as the reactionary nature of the discipline within a German university sector that still included former National Socialists.36 They launched their own journal in 1974 – Kritische Berichte – which published articles by a range of radically committed historians, including Horst Bredekamp, Jutta Held, Berthold Hinz, Norbert Schneider and Martin Warnke.37 As Hemingway has made clear, however, this generation of Marxist art historians was never that interested in the example set by their interwar predecessors and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the institutionalization of the Frankfurt School within postwar West German academic culture and its appropriation by the New Left, turned towards critical theory as the most useful model for radical intellectual work.38 Werckmeister, as mentioned earlier, provided a pervasive critique of this preoccupation with aesthetic philosophy in general, and the Frankfurt School in particular, to argue instead for the need for detailed and systematic conjunctural analyses of art works to expose how they worked ideologically within bourgeois society.
It is worth pointing out here that Werckmeister had been teaching at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1965, and this geographical distance not only allowed him perhaps to resist the allure of the Frankfurt School as a model for radical intellectual labour, but also meant that he was to play an important role within the institutional history of the radical art community in the United States. And the word ‘community’ is appropriate here because, as Hemingway has pointed out, unlike its counterpart in Germany, this grouping included both artists and art historians – itself a product of the fact that it was bound up with the rise of militant artists’ organizations and the women’s movement, with the College Art Association (CAA) being the principal institutional forum for both art historians and artists alike.39 Just like in Germany, a group that had been radicalized by the political crisis in the United States formed the New Art Association within the CAA in 1970. It included art historians such as Carol Duncan, Patricia Hills, Linda Nochlin and Alan Wallach. While this organization was already fading by 1972, many of its members would provide the personnel for the Caucus for Marxism and Art History (subsequently renamed the Caucus for Marxism and Art) that came out of the 1976 CAA session organized on the theme of ‘Marxism and Art History’ by Werckmeister, Clark and David Kunzle – the latter two also at this point in California. Like its predecessor, the Marxist Caucus included radical artists among those who participated in its sessions, including Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula.40 Despite the early vitality of the Marxist Caucus, it nevertheless failed to generate enough interest to produce its own journal, and it folded by 1980. And, like its German counterpart, it showed relatively little interest in the work of the interwar generation of Marxist art historians. Yet as early as its first session, the fault lines between the competing versions of what a post-1968 Marxist art history should be were already sketched out in respective papers by Clark and Werckmeister, and both were highly conscious of how their proposed models sat alongside a now solidly reconstituted ‘social history of art’ that was essentially denuded of any conception of class as a transformative category.41 It is also worth noting that many of those involved with the Marxist Caucus would go on to produce some of the most important politically engaged work within the subject in that decade and afterwards. 42
In Britain this institutional radicalization happened later, mainly because, as Hemingway himself has remarked, academic art history was a relative latecomer, with those involved numbering far fewer than in the United States. As a consequence, the discipline in this country did not have its own professional body until the formation of the Association of Art Historians (AAH) in 1974.43 While there was interest in the conjunction of art and social history in individual papers at AAH conferences, and Clark gave a plenary in 1977, the first session devoted to the relationship between Marxism and the history of art was that organized by Adrian Rifkin in 1980 entitled ‘Art / Politics’.44 Marxist art history also had an institutional base in academia with the above-mentioned masters programme in the Social History of Art at Leeds from 1976 onwards. Key moments in the formation of this counter-tradition for Orton and Pollock include the publication of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in 1972 (and the critical response to this from the left) as a broadside against the conservative conception of art presented in Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation television programme and book of 1969; the publication of Kurt Forster’s manifesto-like critique of the discipline in his ‘Critical Art History or the Transfiguration of Values’ in the pages of New Literary History in 1972, which included within its roll-call of Marxist art historians Schapiro, Antal, Hauser and Werckmeister, among others; the 1973 texts by Clark on the relation between art and politics during the revolution of 1848 and its aftermath; the formation of the Marxist Caucus in the United States; and the free-and-easy traffic between North American radical art historians and their British counterparts after the formation of the AAH as an institutional home in the United Kingdom, as well as the role of its journal Art History in publishing work by both British and American Marxist art historians after 1980.45
These transformations within the discipline, and the emergence of a renewed Marxist history of art after the impasse of the Cold War years, have to be situated alongside other institutional and academic shifts that fed into this process. The important collective work done at the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham under the leadership of Stuart Hall from 1968 until 1979 is just one.46 The broadening of the scope of the term ‘culture’ to include working-class customs and rituals that was such an important part of the Centre’s output no doubt served as a critique of the comparatively limited nature of the term within traditional art history, one that threw a vivid spotlight upon the relationship between the latter and the art market. Its work also acted as one of the places where the ideas of contemporary continental Marxists entered into British academia, in particular that of Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci – a form of radical sociology that its counterpoint in the anglophone world had successfully resisted at all costs.47 Another influence on the development of Marxist art history was the complex theoretical work done in the journal Screen under the new editorial board between 1971 and 1982, which combined a similar emphasis upon continental Marxism with a focus upon Russian Formalism, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and psychoanalysis as a way of reading film – again a shift from the rarefied objects of high art to the objects of industrially produced mass entertainment, with an engagement with the radical contemporary cinema of Jean-Luc Godard and, in particular, his collaboration with Jean-Pierre Gorin in the Dziga Vertov Group, as a counter to the blandishments of typically Hollywood fare.48 And just as the focus upon class at the CCCS gave way to a discursive practice that would go on to privilege race in the process of identity formation, then Screen would increasingly become preoccupied with gender and sexuality, and how these were understood in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis, as the prism through which to read film.
When Orton mentions the importance of Clark’s work in his reflections on the formation of a Marxist history of art, he refers not to the example of Hauser, whom Clark mentions (ironically or not), but to Pierre Macherey’s symptomatic and thoroughly Althusserian reading of the literary canon.49 Orton’s and Pollock’s radicalization as art historians precipitated not a return to the older interwar generation but rather to Marx himself, in particular The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and the Grundrisse, filtered through the new theoretical work being done within the more radical contemporary contexts of sociology and film. These interests converged in the magazine Block, which was produced at Middlesex Polytechnic from 1979 to 1985. This institutional basis clearly registers just how integral the emergence of the new polytechnics and their widening intake, as well as non-traditional academic departments like art and design catering to a more working-class student population, were to the development of a Marxist art history in Britain.50 A close relationship to art practice is reflected in the fact that the magazine opened its pages to artists, including Terry Atkinson, Martha Rosler and Jo Spence, some of whom contributed not just art works, but critical and historical texts as well. That Block published important work in Marxist art and design history and theory in its first three years is undeniable: it included an article on Max Raphael by John Tagg, and calls for a proper appraisal of the work of the interwar generation of Marxist art historians.51 But the model of Marxism that it drew upon was very much that forged within the pages of Screen: a mélange of the Marxist structuralism of Althusser and his followers, a semiology indebted to Roland Barthes, and a theory of the subject found in Lacanian psychoanalysis. As Hemingway puts it: ‘In the fervid embrace of French intellectual trends, the achievements and complexities of the German-language tradition of art history were consigned to the has-beens.’52 If these models shared, in some form or other, a relation to Hegelianism, this was to have no place in the cultural politics of the 1970s, especially after Althusser had supposedly detached Marx from these pre-scientific residues and opened up a space for the non-sublimated complexity of the whole that could now be analysed by a whole range of different disciplines.53
Jon Bird has argued that there were in fact two intellectual paradigms at work in the pages of Block: one that emphasized the social and material components of cultural production, and another that focused upon representation and the way it interpellated subjectivity.54 Yet these two strands were not as compatible as some at the time had hoped. The potential and necessary rapprochement between Marxism and feminism was always part of the New Left project that came out of 1968, and, even if this was never finally realized in any satisfactory way, it did lead to extremely promising and productive work.55 The feminist critique of Clark’s model of art history had begun as soon as the seminal texts of 1973 had been published: the claim that in his celebration of male artists Clark not only reproduced the same canon as the traditional art history he supposedly set out to contest, but also that both his model and its conservative counterpart were essentially interchangeable in their subordination of women. Clark had attempted to address these criticisms in his discussion of Olympia published in Screen in 1980, yet despite these efforts, the type of Marxist history of art he practised came under virulent attack in a reconfigured Althusserian strain of feminism in the pages of Block.56 The importance of Pollock’s critique in ‘Vision, Voice, and Power: Feminist Art History and Marxism’ is undeniable in that it mobilized the latest theoretical insights from continental philosophy and film theory to take apart the masculinist assumptions of Clark’s model of Marxist art history, as well as the interwar tradition that predated his post-1968 variant.57 While she critiqued certain types of feminist art history from the vantage point of Althusserian Marxism, she nevertheless called for a ‘fruitful raiding of Marxism for its explanatory instruments’ for the purposes of advancing feminist critique, with any belief in the potential reconciliation between the two positions seemingly remaindered.58 Even when Pollock attempts to keep Marxism and feminism in some kind of productive relationship, there is a problem. As Roberts has made clear, a purported feminist historical materialism – as Pollock later defined her project – in which gender is not substituted for class, but instead shown to be somehow coterminous with it, and with race as well, is not actually any form of Marxism at all.59 As he puts it, historical materialism foregrounds class relations and class exploitation as the primary mode of analysis, ‘[n]ot because the working class is the most oppressed social group, but because its structural relationship to the means of production expresses the fundamental asymmetrical relations of power locked into the capitalist system’.60 This does not necessarily mean that Marxism is a mono-causal system of historical explanation, but neither is it a totally open one based on symmetric relations of power, as Pollock seems to posit. As such, Roberts is clear that Pollock’s critique of Clark was right in its criticism of his ‘classist’ treatment of gender, but wrong in its positing of gender difference as the fundamental historical division within bourgeois society.61
Nevertheless, the feminist critique of the Marxist history of art fed into the emergence of the new art history with its distrust of singular modes of explanation and a corresponding emphasis upon methodological difference that became a characteristic feature of intellectual life in the post-Althusserian period. This, like the Marxist history of art practised by Werckmeister and Clark, also has its roots in 1968, in particular the May events in France. For if the combined student and working-class action that brought Paris and other parts of the country to a standstill was crushed, or dispersed, then these radical impulses found a more durable expression in developments in contemporary French theory. As Perry Anderson makes clear: ‘structuralism proper … passed through the ordeal of May and re-emerged phoenix-like on the other side – extenuated and modulated’.62 If structuralism, at least in its Althusserian manifestations, offered points of contact with Marxism, then poststructuralism was, by contrast, resolutely anti-Marxist: it emphasized the discursive over and above the ideological, and was even more vociferously anti-totalizing, these themes being exemplified paradigmatically in the work of Michel Foucault. Thus the critique of Marxist art history – or its containment within a reinvigorated ‘social history of art’ as part of an academically institutionalized eclecticism – is cognate with the wider intellectual trends within academia as a whole. The fact that these shifts coincided with a period of political and economic retrenchment after 1979, and then the fall of the wall and the consolidation of the capitalist market within the sphere of the former Soviet Union and beyond after 1989, comes as no great surprise. That many of the figures associated with the radicalization of the subject in the aftermath of 1968 were able to establish successful teaching and publishing careers is not necessarily symptomatic of the success of the Marxist history of art in overturning its more traditional counterpart, but more – as Hemingway has argued – that their practice had been absorbed into academic art history and tolerated as one of just a number of competing methodologies within a reinvigorated discipline.63 This is a process of which Clark, Werckmeister and others of their generation were acutely aware from the mid-1970s onwards.
This process of absorption is nowhere more apparent than in the success of the journal October, which was first published in 1976.64 Here the conflation of contemporary avant-garde theory and the contemporary avant-garde art work forged in the pages of Screen has a clear afterlife within the subject of art history. Somewhat ironically – given a title that would seem to indicate some kind of meaningful relationship to the Soviet avant-garde – October, in its initial stages at least, represented something of a break with Marxist art history.65 Two of its founding editors, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, resigned from the editorial board of Artforum when their colleagues John Coplans and Max Kozloff attempted to shift the journal in a leftward direction to reflect the radicalization of the discipline in the United States in the early to mid-1970s. Instead, the editors of October are better known for promoting poststructuralist theory than Marxism, for which they showed only limited sympathy.66 Influenced by journals such as Tel Quel, they drew upon the likes of Jacques Derrida, Foucault and Lacan in analysing practices that in some cases are informed by the work of these thinkers, although, as with Screen, this was fused with theoretical components from Western Marxism, in particular the writings of Brecht and Benjamin, and especially the latter’s work on allegory. Indeed it was through this emphasis upon the allegorical, as it was read through certain contemporary art practices, that the October group’s particular postmodern project initially became crystallized.67 However, as Gail Day has convincingly argued, by the 1990s any radical impulse in the earlier formulations of this project had become uncritically recuperated to represent little more than ‘a loose symbolic aesthetic of the ineffable nature of art’.68 This model of art history reproduced a binary opposition between the ‘inorganic’ and the ‘organic’ art work, and ‘fragment’ against ‘totality’, in which the attack upon any dialectical component within Marxist art history, initiated within the discipline in its Althusserian formulations, now seemed complete.69
The fate of October, with its undeniable energy and rigour, is in important ways a result of the local conditions of the development of French poststructuralism and its re-emergence in a different field. The negative stance of scholars such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and others towards Marxism had much to do with the stranglehold of an institutionalized French Communist Party, one that combined a crude instrumentalization of theory with unfortunate political tactics, especially in the wake of the events of 1968. In other contexts, these figures’ politically charged analysis of power and challenge to psychoanalysis could have led to an internal critique within Marxism itself – but not in France. These political sensitivities and their discursive habits crossed the Atlantic, but they had different political valences in Tel Quel and October. In the North American art-historical context, heterodox Marxisms willing to shed their name had genuine left credentials and appeal, but merged all too easily and seamlessly with the theoretical eclecticism of a new art history divested of its radical origins and energies. Thus, despite the seeming redundancy of this model of art history for the Marxist history of art, October has, nevertheless, published important translations of Western Marxist theory, as well as some sophisticated neo-Marxist criticism of contemporary art. This is the case particularly after 1991, when Benjamin H. D. Buchloh and Hal Foster, both already contributors to the journal, joined the editorial board on a full-time basis. As with Fredric Jameson, who has since the early 1980s consistently sought to bring the theoretical departures represented by post-structuralism within the orbit of historical materialism and hold them in a productive tension, so the art criticism of Foster and Buchloh has attempted to utilize, to different degrees, the insights provided by these intellectual shifts to bear upon a sophisticated contemporary engagement with European and American neo-avant-garde art practices – all within the remit of a Marxist emphasis upon political economy.70 Buchloh’s political formation was within the German New Left, and his criticism is more insistently dialectical, situated as it is within the tradition of critical theory.71 In a sustained series of largely monographic essays since the late 1970s, he has increasingly turned against the politically pessimistic post-Adornian framework provided by Peter Bürger, with its outright dismissal of the potential political import of any artistic production after the failure of the historical avant-garde in the early decades of the twentieth century, to argue instead that certain artistic practices in the postwar period maintain an important critical distance from the culture industry of late capitalism.72 Indeed it is in the interstices of both – the avant-garde and the culture industry – that the work of the neo-avant-garde draws its critical purchase. If Buchloh rarely makes reference to poststructuralism in his writing, then Foster, in a series of essays since the early 1980s, has regularly sought to argue for a self-reflexive and oppositional postmodern art practice that has a critical relationship to a fully spectacularized commodity culture.73 Buchloh invokes Benjamin and his concept of the allegorical, but more through the prism of Brecht with a concurrent emphasis upon the political project of the historical avant-garde; whereas Foster is clearly more indebted to a Jamesonian model that appropriates some of the key tenets of poststructuralism but turns them against the supposed all-encompassing processes of recuperation that have all too often characterized discussions of the term. In this respect, Foster is also critical of Bürger’s dismissal of the potential political efficacy of the neo-avant-garde.74
As such, the work of both Buchloh and Foster represents an important extension of the Marxist history of art, if not the only contemporary variant, as we believe the essays in this anthology will demonstrate. That it is hegemonic in terms of the present state of the discipline is probably as much to do with its institutional basis within the pages of October – where it sits alongside work that is stridently anti-dialectical, anti-totalizing and unapologetically anti-Marxist – as it is to do with its complex and nuanced theoretical insightfulness in relation to the critical claims they make for certain neo-avant-garde art practices. Despite various institutional and collegial overlaps, none of the contributors to this volume is associated with a particular journal, set of institutions or specific discursive mode. In short, they are not centred upon the Ivy League, the ironic ultimate destination of the new art history, now no longer so new.
To return to Craig Clunas’s question posed at the outset, what we hope to have made clear in this introduction is that a social history of the social history of art – or what we would want to call more specifically a Marxist history of art in its interwar, post-1968 and contemporary incarnations – has inevitably to be an institutional one. Such a history would track how the various interventions, counter-hegemonic strategies and theoretical disruptions of this tradition were explicitly pitched against the discipline in its more conventionally conservative, connoisseurial and neo-formalist variants – ones that we would like to argue have a strange afterlife in the current headlong rush towards the contemporary and the concomitant celebration of the products of a now fully globalized art market, a development that can in many ways be understood to have its antecedents in the pages of October. In this sense, we present this collection of essays as a continuation of this counter-tradition, seeking to exemplify how the dominant discourses of the subject can be subverted, reread and constantly challenged. As such, the book seeks to demonstrate that a Marxist history of art is an ongoing project, even if it has to consistently renegotiate its position vis-à-vis the ever-present dangers of incorporation and appropriation – now more persistent than ever in terms of the increasing institutional pressures of research assessment exercises and the all-important need for academics to publish. But more than this, the theoretical tools provided by Marxism are not only indispensable in any meaningful attempt to historicize the Marxist history of art, but also because their ability to systematize and totalize are essential to the wider project of critiquing the discipline of art history as a whole, in all its forms, both past and present.
1 Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (eds.), ‘Preface’, Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998), p. xi.
2 Craig Clunas, ‘Social History of Art’, in Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff (eds.), Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd edn (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003), pp. 465–78.
3 Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge and New York, 1992); Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2002); The Mysticism of Money: Precisionist Painting and Machine Age America (Periscope Publishing: Pittsburgh, 2013). It is also worth noting here the important anthology of texts that he co-edited with William Vaughan on the concept of bourgeois society and theoretical issues around the category of class in relation to art produced in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the period 1790–1850; see Hemingway and Vaughan (eds.), Art in Bourgeois Society, op. cit. On the Marxist history of art more generally, see Andrew Hemingway, ‘Marxism and Art History after the Fall of Communism’, Art Journal, vol. 55, no. 2 (1996), pp. 20–7; and ‘Introduction’ and ‘New Left Art History’s International’, in Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006), pp. 1–8, 175–95.
4 Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 17, no. 1 (1997), pp. 13–29; ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’, Marxism and the History of Art, pp. 123–142.
5 It is worth pointing out here that although the major work of Hauser and Antal appeared after the war, this was because of their displacement as exiles, first from Austria and then from National Socialism in Germany. See Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011), p. 10.
6 For perhaps the most sophisticated engagement with the work of Clark, which also discusses the pertinent differences in methodology between him and Werckmeister, see Day, ‘T. J. Clark and the Pain of the Unattainable Beyond’, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., pp. 25–69.
7 For his critique of Adorno’s aesthetic see Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Das Kunstwerk als Negation: Zur geschichtlichen Bestimmung der Kunsttheorie Theodor W. Adorno’, Ende der Ästhetik: Essays über Adorno, Bloch, das gelbe Unterseebot und der eindimesionale Mensch (S. Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 1971), pp. 7–32; and of Benjamin as a misplaced model of a revolutionary intellectual, ‘Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian’, Icons of the Left: Benjamin and Eisenstein, Picasso and Kafka after the Fall of Communism (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1999), pp. 9–35.
8 See in particular Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Marx on Ideology and Art’, New Literary History, vol. 4, no. 3 (Spring 1973), pp. 501–19; ‘Radical Art History’, Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982), pp. 284–91; ‘A Working Perspective for Marxist Art History Today’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 14, no. 2 (1991), pp. 83–7.
9 T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Thames & Hudson: London, 1973), p. 10; The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 (Thames & Hudson: London, 1973).
10 See Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1996).
11 Clark came under particular attack for this from both his supporters and detractors when he followed up the 1973 texts with his book on Manet. See T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (Thames & Hudson: London, 1985). For perhaps the most sustained and trenchant critique from the left, see Adrian Rifkin, ‘Marx’s Clarkism’, Art History, vol. 8, no. 4 (December 1986), pp. 488–95. This alleged hagiography of the venerable tradition of great artists could also be levelled at Clark’s almost fin-de-siècle anthology Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 1999). For an example of Werckmeister’s engagement with cultural works that fall outside of such canonical histories, see Citadel Culture (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1991).
12 Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, op. cit., p. 284; Clark, ‘Preface to the New Edition’, Image of the People, 2nd edn (Thames & Hudson: London, 1982), p. 6. For Clark on Situationism, see T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, ‘Why Art Can’t Kill the Situationist International’, October, vol. 79 (Winter 1997), pp. 15–31.
13 Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, op. cit., p. 284; Clark, ‘Preface to the New Edition’, Image of the People, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 6.
14 Clark, Image of the People, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 6.
15 As Clark succinctly put it: ‘For diversification, read disintegration.’ T. J. Clark, ‘On the Conditions of Artistic Creation’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 May 1974, p. 562.
16 A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello (eds.), The New Art History (Camden Press: London, 1986). It is worth noting that this anthology did contain essays that were already critical of both the term and what it might represent. See in particular Tom Gretton, ‘New Lamps for Old’, pp. 63–74; and Adrian Rifkin, ‘Art’s Histories’, pp. 157–63.
17 Clark, Image of the People, 2nd edn, op. cit., p. 10.
18 Ibid.
19 On Klingender, see David Bindman, ‘Art as Social Consciousness: Francis Klingender and British Art’; on Antal, see Paul Stirton, ‘Frederick Antal’; and on Hauser, see John Roberts, ‘Arnold Hauser, Adorno, Lukács and the Ideal Spectator’; all in Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art, pp. 67–88, 45–66, 161–74.
20 See Max Raphael, ‘The Marxist History of Art’, John Tagg (ed.), Proudhon, Marx, Picasso: Essay in Marxist Aesthetics (Lawrence & Wishart: London, 1981), pp. 75–112; and Tagg, ‘The Method of Max Raphael: Art History Set Back on Its Feet’, Radical Philosophy, vol. 12 (Winter 1975), pp. 3–10; ‘The Method of Criticism and its Objects in Max Raphael’s Theory of Art’, Block, vol. 2 (1980), pp. 2–14.
21 John Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History! Reflections on Art History and Historical Materialism’, Roberts (ed.), Art Has No History!: The Making and Unmaking of Modern Art (Verso: London, 1994), p. 5. The Grundrisse, of which this text was the opening section, was not published in its entirety until 1939–41 in Moscow.
22 Raphael and Schapiro eventually fell out over their different responses to the Moscow Trials.
23 For Schapiro on modernism, see his celebrated ‘Nature of Abstract Art’, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers II (George Braziller: New York, 1978), pp. 185–211.
24 See in particular Herbert Read, The Politics of the Unpolitical (Routledge: London, 1943).
25 See in particular Francis Donald Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution (Royle: London, 1948); Hogarth and English Caricature (Transatlantic Arts: London, 1944); and Goya in the Democratic Tradition (Sidgwick & Jackson: London, 1948).
26 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., pp. 6–7.
27 See Frederick Antal, Classicism and Romanticism with Other Studies in Art History (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1966).
28 Hemingway, ‘Introduction’, Marxism and the History of Art, p. 6. See Frederick Antal, Hogarth and his Place in European Art (Basic Books: New York, 1962), pp. 213–17.
29 Under the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Antal was chair of Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts and Hauser was a literary theory specialist at the Secondary-School Teacher-Training College alongside Karl Mannheim. See Day, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., p. 11.
30 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, 2 vols (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1951). Reprinted in four volumes in 1962.
31 Ernst Gombrich, ‘The Social History of Art’, Art Bulletin, vol. 35 (March 1935), pp. 79–84.
32 Arnold Hauser, The Sociology of Art (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1982); Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (Fontana: Glasgow, 1973), pp. 219–53.
33 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 8. For Roberts, these prefigurations include a range of themes that would be taken up within the subject after the impact of Althusserianism, most significantly, perhaps, in Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle (Pluto Press: London, 1978), which directly linked its author’s work to the earlier tradition in Marxist art history, even if it in fact represents a distinct break in its embrace of structuralism.
34 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 2. In particular he mentions the important role played by Victor Burgin and Art and Language in this context. On the radicalization of art schools at the time, see Lisa Tickner, Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution (Frances Lincoln: London, 2008).
35 Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, op. cit., p. 284.
36 For an analysis of the development of Marxist art history in West Germany with specific relationship to the residual role of National Socialism within academia, see Jutta Held, ‘New Left Art History and Fascism in Germany’, Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art, op. cit., pp. 196–212.
37 See Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 175–7, for a detailed history of the formation of radical art history in Western Germany in the period in question.
38 Ibid., p. 176.
39 Ibid., p. 177.
40 Again, see Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 177–81, for a detailed institutional history of these events.
41 T. J. Clark, ‘Preliminary Arguments: Work of Art and Ideology’ and Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘From Marxist to Critical Art History’, Papers Presented to the Marxism and Art History Session of the College Art Association and Meeting in Chicago, February 1976, pp. 5–6, 29–30.
42 This, as Hemingway has flagged up, includes Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, ‘The Museum of Modern Art as Late Capitalist Ritual: An Iconographic Analysis’, Marxist Perspectives, vol. 1, no. 4 (Winter 1978), pp. 28–51; Duncan and Wallach, ‘The Universal Survey Museum’, Art History, vol. 3, no. 4 (December 1980), pp. 447–69; Eunice Lipton, ‘The Laundress in Late Nineteenth-Century French Culture’, Art History, vol. 3, no. 3 (September 1980), pp. 295–313; Serge Guilbaut, ‘Greenberg, Pollock, or from Trotskyism to the New Liberalism of the “Vital Center”’, October, no. 15 (Winter 1980), pp. 61–78; and David Kunzle, ‘Bruegel’s Proverb Painting and the World Turned Upside Down’, Art Bulletin, vol. 59, no. 2 (June 1977), pp. 197–202.
43 Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., p. 181. For his analysis of the genesis of Marxist art history in Britain, see pp. 181–7.
44 Ibid., p. 181.
45 See Fred Orton and Griselda Pollock, ‘Memories Still to Come … An Introduction’, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed, op. cit., pp. viii–xii; John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1972); ‘Ways of Seeing’, Art-Language, vol. 4, no. 3 (October 1978); Kurt W. Forster, ‘Critical History of Art, or a Transfiguration of Values?’, New Literary History, vol. 3, no. 3 (1972), pp. 459–70.
46 For a classic text in this vein, see Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds.), Resistance Through Rituals (Hutchinson: London, 1976).
47 For a CCCS text that deals more overtly with the theoretical impact of Althusser and Gramsci, see Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, On Ideology (Hutchinson: London, 1978). For an account of the institutional resistance to Marxism within British sociology, see Perry Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, English Questions (Verso: London, 1992), pp. 48–104.
48 For a sympathetic history and analysis of Screen, see Anthony Easthope, ‘The Trajectory of Screen’, Francis Barker et al. (eds.), The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982 (University of Essex: Colchester, 1983), pp. 121–133. Ben Brewster was an important link between the Screen editorial board and New Left Books, which translated and published key texts in Western Marxism from Lukács through to Althusser.
49 Orton and Pollock, ‘Memories Still to Come …’, op. cit., p. xii. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978).
50 See George Robertson (ed.), The Block Reader in Visual Culture (Routledge: London, 1996).
51 See John Tagg, ‘The Method of Criticism and its Objects in Max Raphael’s Theory of Art’; Adrian Rifkin, ‘Can Gramsci Save Art History?’, Block, no. 3, pp. 37–9 (1980); and Alan Wallach, ‘In Search of a Marxist Theory of Art History’, Block, no. 4 (1981), p. 17.
52 Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 182–3.
53 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 9. On the problems with Althusserianism in general, see Simon Clarke et al., One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture (Allison & Busby: London, 1980); and for its implications for art history, see Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., pp. 9–14; and Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 187–95.
54 Jon Bird, ‘On Newness, Art and History: Reviewing Block 1979–85’, Rees and Borzello (eds.), The New Art History, op. cit., p. 37.
55 See in particular in this regard, Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe (eds.), Feminism and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London, 1978); and in the sphere of Marxist-feminist art history, Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in a Critical Art History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993).
56 T. J. Clark, ‘Preliminaries to a Possible Treatment of “Olympia” in 1865’, Screen, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring, 1980), pp. 18–41.
57 Griselda Pollock, ‘Vision, Voice, and Power: Feminist Art History and Marxism’, Block, no. 6 (1982), pp. 2–21. The importance of this intervention, and the problems associated with it, are discussed by both Roberts and Hemingway. See Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., pp. 13–20; Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, op. cit., pp. 183–4.
58 Pollock, ‘Vision, Voice, and Power’, op. cit., p. 21.
59 See Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (Routledge: London, 1988).
60 Roberts, ‘Introduction: Art Has No History!’, op. cit., p. 16.
61 Ibid., p. 17.
62 Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 39.
63 Hemingway, ‘New Left History’s International’, p. 194.
64 For an overview of the first decade of the journal, see Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp and Joan Copjec (eds.), October: The First Decade (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986).
65 For a nuanced account of the political problems with this particular trajectory within October, see Day, ‘Absolute Dialectical Unrest Or, the Dizziness of a Perpetually Self-Engendered Disorder’, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., pp. 132–81.
66 This direction was signalled at the outset in that Krauss and Michelson resigned from Artforum specifically because the editorial board refused to publish Foucault’s 1968 essay ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’, which then appeared in translation in the very first issue of October. See ibid., p. 134.
67 Ibid., p. 134. For an important contribution in this regard, see Craig Owens, ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism’, October, vol. 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 67–86 and ‘The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2’, October, vol. 13 (Summer 1980), pp. 58–80.
68 Day, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., p. 133.
69 Ibid.
70 For the initial, and now canonical, example of this argument, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review, no. 146, (July–August 1984), pp. 53–92; and Day, ‘The Immobilizations of Social Abstraction’, Dialectical Passions, op. cit., pp. 182–245, for a sustained engagement with the work of Buchloh, Foster and Jameson – and the problems with what she describes as the ‘dematerialisation’ in their particular brand of post-1968 Marxism.
71 For a collection of his essays, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2000); and for his own lucid account of his political and intellectual trajectory, see ‘Introduction’, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry, pp. xvii–xxxiii.
72 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (University of Minneapolis Press: Minneapolis, 1984). This influential critique of the autonomy of art as an essentially bourgeois concept argues that only Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism constituted an avant-garde in their turn against the bourgeois institutions of display.
73 See Hal Foster (ed.), ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodernist Culture (Bay Press: Seattle, 1983), pp. ix–xvi, for an early attempt at theorising this critical distinction; and Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Bay Press: Seattle, 1985), for a collection of his earlier essays that apply this to contemporary art practices at that time.
74 See Hal Foster, ‘Introduction’, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996) for his most sustained polemic against Bürger.