C99 Review: Neo-Avant-Garde

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Neo-Avant-garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000. xxxiii + 592 pp., £34.50 hb. in UK, ISBN 0262 02454 3

This book presents a dazzling array of critical scholarship by one of the most rigorous and challenging art historians of the late twentieth century. Neo-Avant-garde and Culture Industry is the first of two volumes of Buchloh's selected works, and contains nineteen essays, written between 1977 and 2000, on artists ranging from the post-minimalist sculpture of Michael Asher and Richard Serra, the painting of Gerhard Richter, Nancy Spero and Andy Warhol to the institutional critique of Hans Haacke and John Knight. The second (as-yet-unpublished) volume will assemble Buchloh's more general essays on aesthetic theories, movements and practices.

What this first volume of essays reveals is some of Buchloh's most convincing theoretical statements about the degree of critical autonomy that artistic production has from institutional, economic and political forces in the post Second World war period. At a first glance, Buchloh's dense, theoretical prose might suggest that the practice of art historical criticism is a rather serious and specialised matter, reserved only for those intellectuals familiar with the vocabulary of German 'Frankfurt school' critical theorists.

Yet, Buchloh's deliberate and consistent employment of critical terms and phrases gradually reveals a restless commitment to articulating the particular formal strategies that European and American artists of the post Second world war generation have variously employed to counter the total destruction of artistic production by corporate capitalism, and an emergent cultural logic based purely on exchange and profit. In doing so, Buchloh attempts to recuperate a critical public function for contemporary artistic production in the face of American culture's corporate privatisation.

Clearly, this is no easy task. As Buchloh acknowledges in the introduction, the essays attempt to 'articulate the actually existing degree of differentiation operative in the works of the period' and to 'make these practices transparent' (xxvi). By doing so, Buchloh traces the 'infinitely more subtle and complex range of oppositions and resistances' prevalent in the art practices of the neo-avant-garde (xxvi). In 'Marcel Broodthaers: Open Letter, Industrial Poems', Buchloh argues that Broodthaers' visualization of engraved poems into anodised aluminium effectively counters the transcendent claims of conceptual artists such as Sol Le Witt to escape from the economic and institutional frames of artistic presentation through the use of language. 'Moments of History in the Work of Dan Graham' further challenges the terms in which conceptual art is generally understood.

Charting Graham's use of photojournalism, performance and documentation in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Buchloh argues that Graham's use of different 'non-aesthetic' media (185) extends and radicalises the institutional framework of artistic display rather than simply breaking with it. By contrast, Daniel Buren's work for the Centre Pompidou in the mid-1970s cynically reveals how the public function of the artist is to maintain the 'myth of individual productivity at a time when the working and living conditions of everyday life destroy individual productivity' (121). As Buchloh further emphasises, the role of the public artist is increasingly to operate as a cultural civil servant for multinational corporate finance.

In the same essay, Buchloh's assertion that public monumental sculpture 'seems to occupy the same space and moment in history when memory as the source of dialectical alteration of given reality is destroyed and lost' (123) reveals another important concern that runs throughout Buchloh's essays: the mnemonic function of public art and sculpture in the context of post-Second World War Europe. This concern is most forcefully articulated in Buchloh's searing critique of Joseph Beuys' early performance work.

Focusing on Beuys' mythic construction and subsequent documentation of his own rescue from a plane crash by Tartars in Russia during World War Two, Buchloh argues that Beuys perpetuates a collective social and historical amnesia in post-war Germany, at a time when the historical condition of memory in Germany was at its most fraught. By contrast, the installation work of the French artist, Arman provides a mnemonic counterpoint to the condition of national cultural amnesia. For Buchloh, Arman's assemblage of found objects like dentures, reading glasses and gas masks function as 'memory images of the first historical instances of industrialized death' (274).

Buchloh's repeated pronouncements on the fate of Marcel Duchamp's Readymades - that they fall prey to the very institutional structures of artistic display and aesthetic value which they originally attempted to challenge - is re-articulated in the institutional critique of Hans Haacke. Like Duchamp, the oppositional imperative of Haacke's work has been increasingly co-opted by the corporate administration of aesthetics. What is more, from the present historical moment, it appears rather unfortunate that Buchloh claimed a marginal status for Haacke in 1988, when Haacke's most recent work has included commissioned public art works on the façade and garden of the New Reichstag building in Berlin.

The limitations of Buchloh's European/North American-centred formalist critical paradigm are further revealed in his unguarded statements on the universal condition of identity. Buchloh is certainly correct to emphasise how the global economic restructuring of nation states have radically changed the traditional categories of identity. Yet Buchloh's vocabulary strains to describe the particular historical and geopolitical dynamics of cultural production outside of the western-based, metropolitan art world. In a discussion of Irish identity in James Coleman's Ploughman's Party, for instance, Buchloh vaguely refers to 'temporally and geopolitically determined forms of experience' in a passing reference to the 'stellar constellation and the political emblem of Sinn Féin' (165). And in an essay on the Argentinian artist, David Lamelas, Buchloh seems unable to articulate the cultural and geographical specificity of Lamelas' formal practices.

Despite these blind spots, Neo-Avant-garde and Culture Industry is one of the most important documents of art historical scholarship in the late twentieth century. In an age when light-box photo-conceptualism and the aestheticisation of poverty continue to dominate the metropolitan-based international art market, Buchloh's ongoing commitment to patiently articulate specific forms of resistance in contemporary art practices sets a high standard for future art historical scholarship.

Stephen Morton, Lecturer in English Philology and Visual Culture at the University of Tampere, completed the Whitney Museum of Modern Art Independent Study Program in 2001. His book on Gayatri Spivak will be appearing in September 2002.