Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry

Benjamin Buchloh plays a strange and peculiar role in the history of twentieth-century art writing. Neither exclusively a historian, a critic, or a theorist, he blends these three professions together with a philosopher’s disregard for such distinctions. Today, his most identifiable role has become that of an art-historical moral authority (witness the catalogue for Documenta X, in which two lengthy interviews with Buchloh bracket the exhibition’s entire intellectual project), a role with which, one suspects, he is less than comfortable.
Recently, speaking of Alexander Solzhenistin’s place in post-Communist Russia, economist and writer Lev Timofeyev opined that „in the modern world, moral authorities are proof of a society's inability to lead a decent life,„ a condition that might easily be said to prevail today within the art-historical realm, with its absence of any cohesive pedagogy or methodological school. Postmodernism killed formalism through its allowance for external reference, while poststructuralism has obliterated social art history by problematizing the notion of truth, thus enacting a cat-and-mouse game between various special-interest groups vying for legitimacy (the irony of which being that automatic legitimacy is, by definition, the crux of social art history). The need for guidance out of this endgame requires some sort of prophet, although this may be overstating the role a bit, and Buchloh, for his part, seems to be tentatively yet gamely acceding to this alleged status.
Buchloh’s new (and, it might be argued, his first) book, Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry is a unique instrument. Neither a prolonged narrative nor a mere series of discontinuous essays, this volume instead might be called, on one hand, a diary, and on the other, an archive. A diary because it documents the intellectual and political growth of one of the most plangent and intelligent minds working in art history today, and an archive (one of Buchloh’s favored terms) because from this collection, one sees a working through of a personal narrative, the results of which can only become clear through mnemonic associations between the historically discrete parts. Buchloh’s metamorphosis takes place almost imperceptibly through the nearly three decades of essays included in the book, and it is fascinating to watch the transformation from doctrinaire formalism, to critical theory, to an incipient ecumenicity that has slowly been shifting towards a third (fourth? fifth?) way that might deal adequately with the vagaries of history both inside and outside the permeable borders of art.
That such an alternate methodology might exist is adumbrated at the end of his essay on the décollagistes Hantaï and Villeglé, where he imagines a methodology in which »the structure of the historical experience and the structure of aesthetic production could be recognized within sets of complex analogies that are neither mechanistically determined nor conceived of as arbitrarily autonomous, but that require the specificity of understanding the multiple mediations taking place within each artistic proposition and its historical context.« (p. 254). One thrills at the promise that this passage suggests, and it is exhilarating to think of what might result from an actual implementation of these discursive strategies. Yet for the moment, Buchloh has yet to resolve fully the distinction that must be made between the history of the avant-garde and the history of everything that follows in its wake.
For example, Buchloh writes that Gerhard Richter, in „analyzing in the early 1960s the state of affairs in the aftermath of the avant-garde, should abandon the world of objects and turn to the investigation of reified forms of perception in photography« (p. 379). Scarcely twenty pages away, in an essay five years later, he writes of Richter and Lueg’s Demonstration for Capitalist Realism (1963), a performance in which the two artists installed themselves as living sculptures to problematize the »historical dilemma between high art practice and mass culture (p. 357).«
If one were to substitute »World War II« for »avant-garde« in the former quote, one would recognize another facet of Buchloh’s practice, one that grapples with the validity of the avant-garde following the depravities of the war. In the same way, the »dilemma« mentioned in the latter quote could be read otherwise as a struggle for legitimacy after the Third Reich’s renunciation of abstraction and subsequent embrace of kitschy realism. Buchloh’s dance around the periphery of these profound historical issues are all the more frustrating when one knows how deeply they inform his work. It is almost as if his traditional roots (he was trained as a doctrinaire Wölfflinian formalist) are so firmly entrenched as to restrain the tendency of the branches to grow up and outwards.
The ensuing tension results in Buchloh’s continued situation within an increasingly weary avant-garde teleology extending from Duchamp to Surrealism to Constructivism to Pollock to Pop to Minimalism, choosing artists who, regardless of their level of obscurity, claim affiliation with this same trajectory. Unfortunately for Buchloh, this project of appropriation and inclusion does less to serve his apparent desire to radicalize the modernist project than would an investigation of other modernist histories that truly diverge from European models.
A case in point is his essay on the Argentine David Lamelas. Lamelas seems a perfect subject for an investigation of identity and subjectivity vis-à-vis the repressive regimes of Argentina’s various military dictatorships. I think that it diminishes Buchloh’s argument to insist on Lamelas’s continuity with artists such as Bruce Nauman and Hans Haacke. Buchloh, in his introduction, correctly insists on a crucial difference between American and European postwar art based on the latter’s need to grapple more directly with physical and emotional reconstruction; such distinctions between Latin American and European (or American) art seem equally as urgent. Instead, Buchloh misses the chance to amplify the interplay between historical and formal registers as concerns what he calls »traditional identity formation« (p. xx).
Despite these reservations, I still maintain that there is no one writing publicly today whose profound knowledge of the history of the twentieth-century artistic avant-garde is as learned, nor anyone who is as skilled in presenting this material in a fresh and compelling way. He brings to his arguments an erudition that is all but absent anywhere else, and one cannot read Buchloh without the effect of having to reconsider all of one’s ideas about these critical subjects. Reading (or rereading) his words makes it easy to understand why so many artists and scholars continue to look to him for guidance, moral or otherwise.
When Buchloh writes that ‘[m]odernist painting tells a history of the increasingly radical exclusion of plenitude and totality, of all symbolic and organic completeness of expression and identity . . .,« (p. 399) it is hard not to read this as an implicit declaration of Buchloh’s own critical project: namely, the attempt to reconstruct a totality of twentieth-century aesthetic experience against the emphatic impossibility of achieving such a result. His episodic and aphoristic style revisits various crucial moments and epiphanies along this teleology, but he seems ultimately to realize that a fragmented vision of modernist history—such as this collection of essays provides—is the most honest and emphatic articulation of a desire to repel the »advanced desubjectivization« (p. 551) that he sees as the infelicitous result of an overly spectacularized culture.