Lacan with Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy: From "Modernist Myths" to Modernism as Myth (original) (raw)

The history of art since 1945 is typically understood in terms of the ascendance, crisis, and transformation of modernism. In this account, a select group of 19th and early 20th-century European avant-gardes established the models by which subsequent advanced art would be produced and judged. The influence of centers like Paris, Berlin, and Moscow was disrupted by the events of World War II, after which New York City became the hub of an increasingly global art world, one in which modernist styles were the common language. However, the dominance of modernism, which began to be challenged in the 1950s, was gravely undermined in the 1960s as successive movements like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art challenged its most basic assumptions. In the decades that followed, as these critical tendencies themselves became accepted wisdom, modernism was transcended (as in the case of postmodernism), recuperated (by artists like the Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s), or transformed (as when contemporary artists use modernist histories as the basis for artistic research). In recent years, prominent critics and curators have even tested the idea that “modernism is our antiquity,” serving much the same role for us as the classical era did for the modernists. Like all “master narratives,” this one has its share of truth, and we will begin our survey of modern and contemporary art by studying its core features. We will evaluate some of the most influential critical accounts of modernism and modernity, viewing these categories from political, economic, and artistic perspectives. Surveying the development of the historic avant-gardes in Western and Central Europe, we will define and contrast two competing critical models: one based on a commitment to formalism, the other on the transformation of art’s social function. Turning to the postwar period, we will explore the moment of “high modernism,” when various forms of abstraction were thought to be the paragon of artistic achievement –– and when this consensus supported the new cultural politics of U.S. hegemony. Moving forward, we will examine the ways in which the dominance of modernism came into question, whether in new forms like Happenings and installations, or in locations outside the North Atlantic that were thought by many to be “peripheral.” We will pay close attention to the numerous forms that questioned modernist dogmas during the 1960s and 70s, including performance, actions, Arte Povera, Land Art, artists’ publications, social practice, and various modes of media art. The course will end by examining some of the many ways in which modernism has survived its supposed demise, whether on the art market, across the biennial circuit, or even in the experimental forms that would seem to have left it behind. However, even as we tell ourselves this story about modernism, we will also be critically attending to its oversights. In surveying the broad range of pre-war modernisms, we will ask how and why American critics like Clement Greenberg privileged a formalist modernism over other possible definitions, considering how these other models might allow us to better grasp the interplay between different media, or between art, technology, and mass culture. When possible, we will consider examples from fields that were often overlooked by modernist critics, including dance, textiles, and design. We will think critically about the role that exhibitions and museums have played in popularizing and historicizing art. The course will pay especially close attention to the ways in which the international hegemony of modernism was contested from its supposed margins, analyzing practices from Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. In doing so, it aims to revise our understanding of how this history might yet matter in the present and future.