The Society of Contemporary Art Historians, a new CAA affiliated society founded this year under the leadership of a DC-based trio of younger scholars, packed the house for a lively set of position papers. Topic A: “What is Contemporary Art History?” chaired by Suzanne Hudson and Alexander Dumbadze.
Pamela M. Lee spoke of the scholar’s pressure to “get there first” in staking a claim to the terra nova of contemporary art, and of the subfield’s particular problems of method. For instance: When does a stack of press releases become a reception history? What happens when once-pressing topics simply lose their urgency from year to year? Is the field too subject to the cruel whims of fashion?
For perspective, she cited Leo Steinberg who, in 1962, took compassion on the “plight” of the then-bewildered public. It took about seven years, Steinberg observed at that time, for an artist to shift from enfant terrible to elder statesman. [Seven years - practically medieval! -ed.]
She raised the programmatic question: has postmodernism been too quickly exiled to the dustbin of theory’s history? Is postmodernism not, in fact, an important symptom of the present? She observed that when Jameson and Lyotard were interrogating the “neoliberal,’ i.e. Reagan and Thatcher, they addressed much that is now synonymous with the contemporary.
Miwon Kwon addressed the methodological split between chronologically- and geographically-subdivided fields, from her perspective advising students at UCLA. For instance, should projects in Turkish, Chinese, and Japanese contemporary art be grouped with “contemporary” or national programs, both, or neither?
She reflected on the problem of “the present.” Is this term nothing more than a scarcely credible euphemism for the ahistorical, anti-historical, presentist, amnesiac or exclusively (i.e., non-historically) theoretical? Let us hope not, but to put it more concretely: can you convince a roomful of kids born in 1990 that the 1940s are a part of the present? One’s ability to do so, and conviction thereof, declines continuously and remorselessly.
Also: how does a work made yesterday inform what we know about the past, or what we think we already know about the past? Contemporary art history works best, per Kwon, when it is deconstructive of “contemporary,” “art,” and “history.” We have to keep our eyes on the life of artworks in the present– no matter when they were made. That is contemporary art history.
Richard Meyer turned to the precedent of Alfred Barr. Writing in 1941, Barr wondered: Will students of the contemporary get the same attention as Sumerian archaeologists? At least, Barr mused, they can air-mail Maillol, Breton, Stieglitz, et al. Too late, however, wrote Barr, for the then-recently-deceased Klee or Vuillard.
But there is a catch. How, Meyer queried, would it be possible to reconcile Barr’s breezy theoretical optimism about air-mailing Maillol with his practical frustration at actually trying to deal with the cantankerous, when not totally insufferable, Frank Lloyd Wright on a real-world project.
Grant Kester recalled the theoretical position-taking of the nineteenth century; more specifically, that of Herder and Schnaase. How, they asked, could then-contemporary audiences understand and empathize with the artifacts, made by culturally remote peoples, that were then flooding into European consciousness?
Schnaase’s model posited an active, originary artist in opposition to a passive consumer-reader of works. This logocentric scheme, of course, was basically an apparatus for the validation and legitimization of the transcendentally-disinterested and publicly useful critic.
The structural threat to this scheme arises from the specter of an unregulated hermeneutic and multiple claims of authority, which tend to undermine claims of critical detachment. Today, presumably, we need to do better. But Kester warned of the ever-present tendency to import generic reception models from critical and literary theory into the study of visual art. The task at hand is to develop more nuanced and appropriate theories of reception. [Expect to find wide agreement on that point -ed.]
Olu Oguibe was unable to attend.
