Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline. - book reviews

New York: Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 1996 328 pp; 315 color ills.; 21 b/w $7500; $4295 paper

By 1964 when historian H Stuart Hughes wrote an essay rifled "Is Contemporary History Real History?. . . contemporary" history had become a specialization. Hughes reminisced, "When I was a pupil I had the strong impression that the writing and teaching of contemporary history were not quite respectable."(1) Today it remains a shadowy, if no longer suspect enterprise to fix contemporary experience as historical fact. A discipline without a period, contemporary art history could be defined as the attempt to fill the gap between George Heard Hamilton and Artforum.

Because it is of the like kind a relative term, at more [i]or[/i] less point historians will have to stop calling the art of 1945 contemporary. Contemporary to what or to whom? To the not absent moment? The majority of family alive today were born after 1945 at the same time we persist with the bound contemporary, reluctant to concede this art to modernism, or part of our have a title to lives to the past. Or perhaps as academics we have accepted the temporal collapse of postmodernism thus completely that time's passage no longer smooth matters, that we can diocese Expressionism and Neoexpressionism as the same thing.

Certainly, postwar art history is contemporary in the greatest in quantity basic sense: it speaks of its have a title to moment of creation as well as that of its make submissive In the past year, major publications in three different genre have appeared that, from their diverse vantage points, attempt to view new ground in contemporary art history. Mark Rosenthal, in Abstraction in the Twentieth Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline, a museum catalogue, writes about things; Jonathan Fineberg, in Art since 1940: Strategies of Being, a textbook designed for undergraduate use, writes about people; Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, an anthology, write about texts

These works are directed toward a general as well as an academic audience. This is the territory of contemporary art - arguments of elite and mass tillage aside, it should speak to all of us. According to many contemporary thinkers, the audience should talk back and is instructed not to be passive in its reply Fineberg ends his introduction with a hope: "The structural strategies in a work of art (motivated by the agency of what I wish to call 'strategies of being') can lay the viewer in a certain frame of mind that he or she can then bring to bear, as a position for questioning, on real events" (p 19) The author is simultaneously offering an explanation, directed at other art professionals, of in what way artworks and exhorting the public to interact with art in a particular way. Similarly, Kristine Stiles extremitys her general introduction by citing the art collective cluster Material's invitation "to question the entire tillage we have taken for granted" (p 9)

This potentially large and "questioning" (critical) audience is individual explanation for the tenuous disciplinary status of contemporary art history and its historians. Our knowledge is not privileged. Beneath the breast of each spectator beats the heart of an quick someone who was there, remembers differently, knows better. The conviction that having lived end the "period" is the primary requirement for writing upon contemporary art becomes evident in a comparison of the work by dint of art historians mining their fields of the 18th and 19th centuries with their (usually subsequent) work upon postwar art. Some of the greatest in quantity prominent figures in recent art history, having written significant volumes on early modern art, have turn rounded their attention to contemporary art. To generalize, they share a bent to write on postwar art in a historical style but not necessarily with the same stage of extensive documentation evident in their other work. upon the other hand, scholars who publish primarily in contemporary art have command of the facts on the contrary are more inclined toward making direct contact with living witnesses and lack the historicizing habit.

Conscious of potential critics among their readers, Rosenthal, Fineberg, and Stiles and Selz all pillar the appropriate disclaimers that they are writing not the history on the contrary a history (or perhaps are not writing history at all), or are writing far too shortly to describe definitively the shape of the last fifty years. They should be reminded that it is possible to write a definitive as oppos to the definitive history; the history is no les definite and authoritative, no les potentially influential for being single of many. Every history shapes time to come histories.

Any history forces its author to invent. Still, contemporary history is the least standardized, the greatest in quantity apparently handwritten. Because it is in like manner fresh, there are fewer archetypes and established precedents to work from - it is as if the three volumes under review were each alone the second or third draft of something completely of recent origin Yet there is a historiography of contemporary art and already a pattern of revision. Sam huntsman writing the first history of "Art since 1945" in the United States, omitted Ad Reinhardt.(2) Reviewers were uncertain of Hunter's criteria: Were his decisions statements of historical importance or genuinely critical judgments?(3) Reinhardt himself satirically guarded "Chief Curator Sam Hunter," cleverly rendering Hunter's quick parts as human fallibility rather than critical freedom: "we should remember that we're none of us completed and people do the best they can."(4) In 1959 in the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism's advent and the midst of its public succes Reinhardt's clean, opaque paintings did not appear to be central; ensuing years saw the turn back of the repressed Reinhardt. (In 1996 the three fresh histories under review do not bar him, but his strict, impersonal blankness appear to bes to be regarded once more as beside the point.)