When the Critics Saw
From Issue 0: Commitment
The 1970s
A work of art has never graced the cover of the journal October. Since the first issue was published in 1976, the front cover has only ever carried the journal’s allusive title, spelled out in large capitalised letters underneath the smaller italicised headings of ‘art’, ‘theory’, ‘criticism’ and ‘politics’ (in that order). Contrary to the well-worn cliché, October can, and should be, judged by its cover: it adequately captures the spirit of the art criticism it houses, in which text, not images, are prioritised. In October, the critics see so the reader does not have to.
For Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Annette Michaelson — October’s founding editors — returning sight to the critics had been made necessary by the proliferation of colour images in art journals of the 1970s. All three had left major American periodicals to start October, and viewed the illustrations lavished onto the pages of Artforum, Art International, and Artnews as having facilitated the descent of art criticism into “pictorial journalism.” Their journal was presented as the much-needed purge after these visual excesses; it would be “plain of aspect,” the editorial statement declared, including only “limited and judicious illustration.” [1]
The perils of October’s image-lite approach to art criticism are perhaps best illustrated by a sculpture by Jasper Johns; a work that did in fact serve as the cover image for Artforum in 1973, and which was referenced in one of the first articles for Caesura. It is a warning issued from 1961: a pair of glasses sculpted in relief that disable, rather than enable, vision. We find the disabling force behind the lenses, where, in the place of a set of eyes, two mouths are fashioned, poised mid-articulation. Johns titled the work The Critic Sees —get it?
In a world in which aesthetic experience has been severely diminished, if not entirely evacuated, Johns’ sculpture appears to us not as a warning but a prophecy. Worse, when ‘theory’ is used to frame art more than actual frames, it seems we are living in the world October built. Today, it is not just the critics who are blind, but artists and audiences alike. And, as we fumble in the dark, in pursuit of that which has become fundamentally unseeable, it has become increasingly tempting to shake our fists in the air and cry “October!” — some of that fist-shaking has been encouraged by Caesura.
The truth is, in fact, much more devastating. In side-lining the image, the October editors made two assumptions: that critics could see, and that art could be seen. Today, we can see how both have come apart, but in the first years of October this future was as yet unrealised. In other words, it could have been otherwise.
Jasper Johns, The Critic Sees, 1967. Mathew Marks Gallery
Jasper Johns’s The Critic Sees on the cover of Artforum's February 1973 issue. Mathew Marks Gallery
The 1960s
The Critic Sees belongs to the 1960s: that curious decade that holds both modernism’s last desperate gasps and postmodernism’s first tentative breaths. It is also the decade in which the early years of October must be situated — and not just because of 1968. Although it launched in the late 1970s, the first issues largely addressed the art of the 1960s. Indeed, it was Johns’ generation, not the subsequent one, for whom the designation ‘postmodern’ was first used — but more on that later.
Yet art critics of the 1960s — the critics towards which Johns’ swipe was originally directed — were shaped by the 1940s and 1950s, and thus belonged to an altogether different generation than those that would end up writing for October. For these critics — whose approach to criticism can best be summoned by the single word ‘Greenberg’ — the substitution of the aesthetic experience with a linguistic one had produced a different set of problems. With The Critic Sees, Johns was giving art critics — then held in high esteem, with eyes their readers trusted — what he thought was a necessary dressing-down.
In an interview in 1969, Johns specified the offending incident that had inspired The Critic Sees:
I was hanging a show of sculpture and drawings, and a critic came in and started asking me what things were. He paid no attention to what I said. He said, what do you call these? And I said sculpture. He said why do you call them sculpture when they’re just casts? I said they weren’t casts, that some had been made from scratch, and others had been casts that were broken and reworked. He said yes, they’re casts, not sculpture. It went on like that. [2]
For Johns, clearly still bruised almost ten years later, the sucker punch had been that the whole interaction lasted three minutes. Rather than looking, the critic had prioritised the question of genre. In 1961 both critic and artist had an idea of what sculpture was such that they could argue about it — how quaint!
When Rosalind Krauss wrote about The Critic Sees for the second issue of October, she called Johns’s formulation “a cheap shot.” Brushing aside Johns’s dig at the blind critic as “uninteresting,” Krauss chose instead to use the sculpture as a springboard to explore the function of irony in Johns’s (then) recent paintings. For Krauss, these works expressed Johns’s scepticism about genre — a claim that could similarly be propped up by the anecdote relayed above. Krauss argued that in summoning, for example, Picasso, in the painting Weeping Women, Johns addressed “the by-now lapsed and almost impossible mode of History Painting.” [3]
“Now lapsed and almost impossible”: tempting as it is to read Krauss’s analysis of Johns’s work as postmodernism par excellence, we must pay attention to these five words, especially the last two: almost impossible. They betray Krauss’ attachment to modernism, not postmodernism, and succinctly describe the position modernism held in the 1960s imaginary, which Krauss of course clung onto: Lapsed? Certainly. Impossible? Almost. That almost that has persisted over the last forty-plus years of October, whose editors — now numbering fourteen — have been unable to reckon with the unfulfilled potential of modernism. In the journal’s early years, however, that almost could be held in tension with the unrealised potential of postmodernism.
Two years prior to making The Critic Sees, in a response to a review written by the critic Hilton Kramer, Johns quipped: “Well, thank god, art tends to be less about what critics write than what artists make.” [4] Both Johns in 1959, and Krauss in 1976, considered themselves to be in a time when artists knew what art was “about”, even whilst they were challenging it. Fatally, Johns, along with the October editors, accepted the separation of criticism and art: Johns positively, on behalf of art; October negatively, by believing it was merely criticism that needed saving. Because Krauss and her fellow editors believed art to be safe, they made the mistake of assuming that it would be carried forward into the new future October was heralding. And, although this future was never realised, art was severely compromised as a result of this oversight.
Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937, Tate
Jasper Johns, Untitled 2 (Weeping Women), c. 1980, Christie's
The 1990s
Thus far, I have let postmodernism hover in the background. That is because my primary motivation for writing this article has been to untangle October from postmodernism, which is not to discount that they were in bed with one another, but to resist projecting where the journal ended up onto its origins. This is why I dwelled on the 1960s. There, hidden in plain sight, is the postmodernism that could have been. And, just as the 1960s contains postmodernism’s beginnings, the 1990s contains its ends. Crucially, not — as Pamela Lee has pointed out — as an end that implied “a battle lost” but rather one in which a “a different set of rules” were imagined; the ones we continue to play by today. [5]
The early part of the decade saw a proliferation of obituaries announcing the death of postmodernism. Hal Foster — Krauss’ former doctoral student who had joined the October editorial team in 1991 — contributed one in 1993 in which he stated “And we did not lose. In a sense a worse thing happened: treated as fashion, postmodernism became démodé.” [6] The problem with this particular fad going out of fashion was that it had taken sight with it.
In postmodernism’s heyday — the late 1970s and early 1980s — aesthetic experience had been renounced as part of the modernist project, most notably by Foster himself in his 1982 edited collection The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Speaking in London in 1996, Foster confessed the short-sighted nature of this approach, stating that “With Greenberg, we had a very restrictive definition of the aesthetic field, now we have a very falsely liberated one, a formless one.” [7]
Foster’s atonement came too late, the damage had already been done. Indeed, the word ‘formless’ would provide the title of the book published a year after Foster’s talk that best represents the 1990s desperate scrabble to recover aesthetic experience from the jaws of postmodernism. Co-authored by Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois — another 1990s addition to the October editorial team — the introduction boldly stated that “our project is to redeal modernism’s cards — not to bury it and conduct the manic mourning to which a certain type of ‘post-modernism’ has devoted itself […] but to see that certain works will not be read as they were before.” [8] Read, but crucially not seen. Here, Krauss and Bois capitulate to postmodernism even whilst disavowing it.
That sight was off the cards had become evident to Krauss after her experience of curating a retrospective of Robert Morris — another 1960s artist — at the Guggenheim Museum in 1994. Sore from the negative critical reception, Krauss organised a roundtable with her fellow October editors to pick through precisely what had gone wrong. Titled “The Reception of the Sixties,” the roundtable sought to work out what had changed between the 1960s and the 1990s such that Morris’ work would be rendered, in Krauss’ phrasing, “invisible.” [9] The word ‘postmodernism’ was not mentioned once.
In Krauss’ incredulity at the “peculiar and unacceptable” response to the Guggenheim exhibition we catch a glimpse of October’s original ambitions, which had sought to make Morris’ generation of artists more, not less, visible. But we can also see the sleight of hand pulled off by October editors in the 1990s, who deftly managed to escape culpability for the bankruptcy of aesthetic experience by distancing themselves from postmodernism.
Exactly twenty years after the first issue of October was published, Foster resurrected the debate that had occasioned its launch: a critique of art magazines. In 1996, Foster had a new formulation to describe their illustrative excesses: visual culture. “Artforum,” Foster writes, “is less a forum for art than a review of visual culture.” [10] Foster chastised Artforum for presenting images drawn from television and reproductions of art works as equivalents. Extending his critique to the academy, in which art history was in the process of being replaced by visual culture, Foster warned against substituting the one for the other, suggesting that to do so would be at the cost of both art and history. Postmodernism looms over Foster’s critique of visual culture just as it did Krauss’ roundtable on the sixties — its absence in the issue of October in which Foster’s article appeared, a ‘special issue’ on visual culture, is similarly telling.
In the 1990s, the October editors reprised the debates of the 1960s and 1970s as if postmodernism had not happened, or worse, as if it had been merely a passing fad, not an intellectual project they had committed themselves to. But it was with and through postmodernism that we finally lost sight of what art was — visual culture was merely a symptom of that which postmodernism had set in motion. The October editors were blind to postmodernism’s legacy because they were still prosecuting its beginning, even if they dared not use the word.
1979
The word ‘postmodernism’ was first used in the Spring 1979 issue of October, the journal’s eighth instalment. It was used by two authors in two very different ways: one looked forward to the 1990s, the other backward to the 1960s. As such, held within the issue are postmodernism’s beginnings and ends.
The first author is Krauss, who, in her article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” used postmodernism to describe the situation into which Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol LeWit, and Bruce Nauman had entered as one “which can no longer be described as modernist.” [11] For Krauss, that which was not modernist about 1960s sculpture — to which the article was addressed — was its emphasis on installation, display, and viewer response, seemingly contravening the modernist ideal of a self-contained art object. This, the titular ‘expanded field’ that included both sculpture and viewer, was what earned the nomination ‘postmodernism’ from Krauss.
The second author is Douglas Crimp, who had joined the October editorial team in 1977. The article took up “Pictures”: an exhibition that Crimp had organised in 1977 at Artist’s Space in New York of the work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Phillip Smith. These 1970s artists, with their ironic gestures across photography, film, and performance, are the ones whose work today is more readily associated with postmodernism. An artist who was not included in the exhibition, but who is discussed at length in the article, is Cindy Sherman, whose Untitled Film Still series — in which the artist contrived stills from films that never happened — is emblematic of this mode. For Crimp, the postmodernism of these artists could be located in their “radically new approach to medium”, by which he meant, their parodic and pluralist engagement with the conventions of modernist art. [12]
In these articles, we discover two visions of postmodernism. Both forge their ground on the question of medium, Krauss by stretching the possibilities of one medium in particular, Crimp by challenging the conventions of mediums in general. Crucially, one held onto aesthetic experience, the other sought to negate it.
Midway through Two Fencers, a 1977 performance by Jack Goldstein — one of the “Pictures” artists included in Crimp’s article — the artist intentionally cut the lights. “Left in darkness,” Crimp writes, “the audience would attempt to remember that image of fencing that had already appeared as if in memory.” [13] Just as the audience in Two Fencers could remember the image of two men fencing, for theorists of postmodernism, Crimp and Krauss alike, they both had an image of modernism – of aesthetic experience – in recent memory, even when they could no longer see.
There is, however, a crucial difference between the postmodernism of the 1960s practices Krauss discussed, and those of the 1970s (and later 1980s) taken up by Crimp. Concluding his description of Goldstein’s performance, Crimp stated that “the image is forgotten, replaced.” In the 1960s, artists were able to hold these two forces — forgetting and replacing — in tension; in the 1970s and 1980s, the replacement superseded that which had been forgotten, and the ‘new’ image was not an image at all. If we are to begin to attempt to digest postmodernism, we must not view this development as an inevitability. Rather, we must separate out its beginnings from its ends. In its beginnings we can locate the October that could have been, the one we must try to see, so that we might move beyond it. //
Robert Morris, Untitled (3 L Beams), 1965. Artstor
Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #21, 1978. Artstor
Still from Jack Goldstein’s Two Fencers, 1977. flickr.com
NOTES
[1] Rosalind Krauss, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, and Annette Michaelson, “About October,” October 1, (Spring 1976).
[2] Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, (Abrams, 1977).
[3] Rosalind Krauss, “Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony,” October 2, (Summer 1976).
[4] Jasper Johns, “Collage: Letter to the editor,” Arts Magazine 33, No. 6, (June 1959).
[5] Pamela Lee, New Games: Postmodernism After Contemporary Art, (Routledge, 2013).
[6] Hal Foster, “Postmodernism in Parallax,” October 63, (Winter 1993).
[7] Hal Foster, “The Structural Impulse: Towards a New Theory of Postmodernism,” Lecture at the AA School of Architecture, London, 6 June 1997.
[8] Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide, (MIT Press, 1997).
[9] Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, Annette Michelson, Hal Foster, Silvia Kolbowski, Martha Buskirk, and Benjamin Buchloh, “The Reception of the Sixties,” October 69, (Summer 1994).
[10] Hal Foster, “The Archive Without Museums,” October 77, (Summer 1996).
[11] Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8, (Spring 1979).
[12] Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8, (Spring 1979).
[13] Crimp, “Pictures.”