Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism

Part of the puzzle is that the lingering formalism of the Octoberists' account marginalizes the character of the body in the history of novel and contemporary art. For example, the pair Foster and Krauss narrate the history of art since 1960 as pivoting around Minimalism, itself (they argue) indebted to Marcel Duchamp's legacy of institutional critique as well as other forces (including phenomenology), discounting the importance of the rise of an interest in the material part not only in the abstract phenomenological faculty of perception but also as an enactment of the specificity of an artist's or viewer's particular sexual, sex racial, and other psychic and social (individual and collective) identifications. This occlusion allows them to discuss the work of Kusama and Hesse primarily in relation to the interests of Minimalism, with only brief regards to gendered forms by Krauss (pp 502-4) and to diocese works furthering the concerns of feminism and antiracist cultural practice--by Mona Hatoum and others--positioned within a lineage of white male Minimalist artists by the agency of Foster (pp. 635ff.).

The proceed of this erasure of embodiment is that the narrative laid on the outside in this book is eerily shut up in its underlying ideological construction to the disembodied story told by the agency of Clement Greenberg, that bugaboo of all post-1960 artists and theorists who consider themselves slightly of the moment. While Greenberg's narrative stopped around 1960 and completely eschewed the countertradition support identifies with Duchamp, and this individual thanks largely to Foster and to a certain number of extent Buchloh, includes an array of international (though for the most part American and German) artists of all persuasions from the past forty years, the couple narratives still take for granted that modernism begins in Paris and extreme points with New York and that postmodernism is almost entirely defined by the agency of visual arts activities that take place in or pass from one side the latter. This leads to the virtual exclusion of the British view including the YBAs (Young British Artists), and single passing references to Los Angeles-based artists. one as well as the other begin from assumptions about value that hinge upon formal concerns (though these are, of course, pos true differently by Greenberg). And the two ultimately base broader value depths about what art matters upon an early-twentieth-century conception of avant-gardism, reinforced and refined for the Octoberists by means of Peter Burger's arguments in his 1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde.