In 2004 Thames and Hudson published an impressive book: »Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism«. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, American art historians/theoreticians associated with the »October« magazine, decided to sum up the experiences of the century that has just ended and three years of the new one (the last entry in the book deals with 2003.)

Four introductory essays deal with four methodological approaches which shaped the understanding of art in the last century - psychoanalysis, social history (read »Marxism«), formalism, and structuralism and post-structuralism/deconstruction.
The history of art in the 20th century is divided into segments of nine years each. Every segment is composed of subchapters (I am tempted to use the word »vignettes«) depicting events which, in the authors’ belief, were decisive for that period. In addition to the chronological chapters, numerous boxes scattered around the book provide information about personalities and important concepts. »Art Since 1900« also contains the records of two »round-table discussions«, in which the four authors of the volume converse about »Art in mid-century« and »The predicament of contemporary art«.

This mammoth volume, comprising 704 pages and 637 illustrations, provoked a mixed critical reaction. The majority of reviewers complained about the language of the book as being unbearably polluted by »learned jargon.« Others questioned its choice of »heroes« and events. Timothy Hyman noticed bitterly in his review »An Authoritarian Art History« that the book could be subtitled »the revenge of the seventies.«
He had a point. »Art Since 1900« is not so much about »modernism, antimodernism, postmodernism« as about the »October« group's interpretation of all three. The intellectual rebels of yesterday, turned into today's US academic establishment, do not sum up the history of art of the past century, but their own ideological model of it. While creating a revisionist history of art, the authors did not forget themselves, and tried to define their own place in such narrative. A box on page 472 of the book is dedicated to the »Artforum« magazine and the internal struggle of different groups on the editorial board: »Two of the most productive writers, Max Kozloff and Lawrence Alloway, were hostile to what they characterized as the ›formalist‹ drift of the magazine, insisting that it become more openly political and supportive of the socially relevant mediums like photography. On the other side of this struggle were Fried, Michelson and Krauss. The latter two resigned from the board in 1975 to start their own magazine, »October«, named for the Sergei Eisenstein film that suffered from the Soviet assault against formalism.«

Leaving aside the »social relevance« of such mediums as photography, I want to concentrate on the metaphor according to which Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss are compared to Eisenstein, while Kozloff and Alloway are equated with his persecutors.
There is no doubt that the »revolutionary« name of the new magazine was consonant with the leftist sentiments of its establisher. However, to state that the film »October« by Eisenstein »suffered from the Soviet assault against formalism« is a bit of an exaggeration. If it suffered, it suffered from the attacks of the film director's former comrades from the LEF (Left Front) circle. Eisenstein didn't use professional actors; representatives of the masses performed the revolutionary masses. However, the problem was how to show Lenin. Initially Eisenstein wanted to employ documentary film footage, but was not satisfied either by the quality or the quantity. One of his friends told him that his father, the worker Vasilii Nikandrov, looked like Lenin and enjoyed impersonating the deceased leader - Nikandrov fashioned his beard after Lenin and even wore a cap which looked like Lenin's favorite head wear. The film director decided to make use of the physical resemblance of the worker to the chief of the proletarians. The masses were played by the masses; the role of the leader was performed by his double. Such a crime against factography couldn't easily be forgiven. Even before the release of the film, Vladimir Mayakovsky ardently protested against the impersonation of Lenin, demanding, »Give us documentary shots!« and contrasting Eisenstein's creation with Esfir Shub's film »The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty,« an hour-long montage of pre-revolutionary documentary footage. Osip Brik wrote, »We believe that the smallest deviation from the historical truth in the depiction of the events of October has to fill with indignation every person who is cultivated in the slightest degree.« The leading theoreticians of the LEF named Eisenstein's film »a disgraceful fake that could be trusted only by people completely blunt to historical truth.« Viktor Shklovskii, an open admirer of Eisenstein, stated that the film was a failure because it was »sharply divided into two parts,« one of which is related to leftist art, and the other to official realism. After this, Sergei Eisenstein, in his own words, »turned his back on the LEF.« He couldn't agree with the leftist conception of the »death of the feature film.« In his »baroque« movie (Shklovskii's definition), Eisenstein not only sinned against factography by filming a fake Lenin. It is possible to say that the film director also reinvented the revolution - the storm of the Winter Palace, one of the strongest scenes of the movie, had nothing in common with historical reality. For generations of Soviet people, this very scene was the image of the revolution, treated nearly as documentary footage. (Recollecting Brik's words, we can say that the population of the USSR was »completely blunt to historical truth.«)

Nomen est omen – just as Eisenstein reinvented the revolution, the theoreticians of »October« magazine reinvented the history of 20th century art. This reinvention is based mainly on blowing up the historical importance of certain players and reducing the significance of others. This device was noticed and described by other reviewers, but it still needs explanation. The choice of the heroes is obvious and marked by the time in which the authors of the book formed their views and conceptions. Speaking metaphorically, the role of the worker Nikandrov was performed in »Art Since 1900« by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Benjamin. It is not necessary to argue about the importance of both of them for 20th century culture. The historical quiz question is simple - what was their influence on the contemporaries and the art process of their day?

When Walter Benjamin published »The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction« in 1935, he hoped to create a new »materialistic theory of art.« Unfortunately (or fortunately), he was a bad Marxist. What was really critical is that, despite his visit to Moscow in 1927, Benjamin had a very vague idea about the development of Russian radical theory - his sporadic reading of the translated texts of Trotsky or conversations with Bertolt Brecht, who introduced Benjamin to the ideas of Sergei Tretiakov, hardly could replace reading the actual texts of LEF theoreticians. »The Work of Art« was published in 1935, seven years after the »Novii LEF« magazine ceased to exist.

In his article, Benjamin addressed many problems which were earlier tackled by Brik, Tretiakov, Boris Arvatov and Nikolai Tarabukin. However, not only did he fail to reach their level of radical rejection of traditional (bourgeois) art, but also introduced such »idealistic« definitions as »aura.« To a great extent, Benjamin's exercise was a kind of reinvention of the wheel, and the final product of it could be defined as »LEF Light.« The history of the publication of the article was no more than a chain of misfortunes. It appeared in the publication of the Institute of Social Research - »Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung« - in French translation and was disfigured by its editors, whom Benjamin once in the heat of the moment compared to the German Nazis. German intellectuals - refugees in Paris – disapproved of the text, while its author believed it to be an important breakthrough in aesthetic theory. Adorno leveled sharp criticism at the article, stating that it was un-dialectical and unhistorical. The editors of the »Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung,« who initially planned to use Benjamin's article for a PR campaign in France, dropped the idea, being disappointed with the text. The upset author naively wished to publish his article in Moscow. He sent it to his Moscow acquaintance and competitor, Bernhard Reich (both tried to win Asja Latcis' heart), hoping that he could help to publish »The Work of Art« in the Soviet magazine »International Literature.« It was a vain endeavor. The magazine had no intention of publishing a foreign rehash of LEF theory, especially in 1935, when antimodernism was already in vogue in the USSR. Summarizing the aforesaid, we can state that the article of Walter Benjamin appeared in a low-circulation magazine, was read by a handful of his contemporaries, and was rejected by the majority of them.

At the end of the 1960s, when the cult of Benjamin as a philosopher-martyr, established after World War II in Frankfurt, reached American shores, the essay was finally translated into English (1968.) By an irony of fate, its name, »Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,« was distorted in translation (the correct translation should be »The Artwork in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility.«) By the beginning of the 1970s Benjamin's text attained the status of theoretical Holy Scripture among young American art theorists who were »supportive of socially relevant mediums like photography.« They hadn't even the slightest notion about Russian theory of the 1920s. How could they? Even today, only scattered splinters of the LEF's theoretical legacy are available in translation. To this day, Osip Brik exists in the Western consciousness solely as an image from the Rodchenko photomontage - a short-haired man wearing round glasses, one of whose lenses is replaced by abbreviation LEF. The theoretician Brik remains virtually unknown (the few articles that have been translated could hardly help to understand his rather complex weltanschauung.) The zealots of the American »October« magazine based their theories on a text that reflected a Western point of view. Unfortunately, they were unaware of this.

The case of Duchamp is different from that of Benjamin. If the German philosopher was too late, the French artist came too early. At best, his works were interpreted as tactless jokes (»The Fountain«); at worst they remained unnoticed. In contrast with Malevich or Rodchenko, Duchamp's message about the end of art was not heard by his contemporaries. Maybe if he could have stayed in Europe the situation would have been different; but he lived in America. which despite (and to a certain extent thanks to) all efforts by Alfred Barr, was half a century behind the times. To understand this, it suffices to browse through the American bibliography of works about the artist. »Duchamp’s glass: La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même. An analytical reflection« by Katherine S. Dreier and Matta Echaurren, published in an edition of only 250 copies, is practically the only book about Duchamp that appeared in the US before the beginning of the 1960s.

From a short perspective (the last century finished just five years ago), it looks now as if the development of visual culture in the twentieth century went through similar stages, though they didn't coincide chronologically in different countries. In Russia, and to a certain degree in Germany, after the heroic narrative of modernism, zero point was reached by the mid-1920s, and was followed by a flood of antimodernism (Klaus Mann correctly noticed the role of contemporary art as the yeast of Nazism - he included abstract painting in the ironic list of things »invented with the diabolic design of insulting and impoverishing the valiant folk between Breslau and Dusseldorf, Munich and Stettin.«) In America such a stage was reached only after the end of the Second World War. The heroic Greenbergian modernism was doomed to be concluded by the end game of the »Brillo Box«. The post-war victory of the School of New York could be explained by its slow development. The passion of the theoreticians of »October« for the problem of mechanical reproduction and Duchamp's »Glass Bead Game« could be explained by the simple fact that aesthetic problems of remote periods only became topical in the US in the 1960s -1970s.
For that generation of Americans, both Duchamp and Benjamin became a kind of frozen spiritual food. Their real influence came to bear not during the period when they created their major oeuvres, but much later. One of them lived long enough to see his triumph; the other died on the run and was buried in an unmarked mass grave.

»Art After 1900« differs from many previous attempts to create the history of art of the last century in that it includes numerous entries on Russian art. Unfortunately, such entries are rich in funny mistakes, many of which were not made by the authors, but collected by them from other publications. This is not surprising, bearing in mind that none of the »October« theoreticians knows Russian. What is surprising, though, is the fact that the LEF still remains an enigma (mentioned only twice in passing) and that such institutions as the Museum of Painterly Culture (Moscow) and the Museum of Artistic Culture (Petrograd) - museums of avant-garde art which opened ten years earlier than MoMA - are not mentioned at all. The Russian entries of the volume are often enriched by references to the reaction of American artists to the appearance (half a century later) of this or that milestone of the revolutionary avant-garde in American exhibition halls or publications - the chapter about Malevich mentions that Donald Judd »was the first to reinscribe these agitated paintings into the theoretical framework of the Formalist logic.« Reading about Rodchenko's »tombstone to painting«, the »Pure Colors«, we learn that »Carl Andre would sing their praises when photographs of them appeared in the West.« I couldn’t help feeling a strange sense of déjà vu - all those attempts to »reinscribe« Malevich's suprematist canvases into »the framework of the Formalist logic« or to judge Rodchenko by magazine reproductions reminded me of what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where young dissident artists tried to reconstruct, not to say fantasize about, the state of art in New York city on the basis of a black-and-white reproduction of Warhol or an issue of »Art in America« accidentally brought to the USSR by some diplomat. It was a nice feeling to see that the comedy of errors is not a predominantly Eastern European genre.

However, if Russia (modernist and antimodernist, but not postmodernist) finally found its place in the »October history« of the 20th century, Central Europe remained a tabula rasa. The authors mentioned Kupka and dedicated one chapter to Wladyslaw Stzreminski and Katarzyna Kobro. However, Czechoslovakia, the only European country where modernism became everyday reality during the 1920s and 1930s, remained unmentioned. Karel Taige didn't succeed in finding his way into the pages of the book. Of the artists qualified as »postmodernist,« only Marina Abramovic was honored by two references (this proves that to live in New York is still vitally important for an artist.) »Art After 1900« remains a West-centrist reading of history. The second part of the book could be defined as America-centrist. Today it is still difficult to evaluate the world importance of such events as the opening in 1980 of Metro Pictures, not to mention the above-mentioned schism in the »Artforum« editorial board. However, placing them on a par with the 0.10 exhibition or the first Dada Fair in Berlin looks slightly premature.

Recently, Russians discovered to their horror that a photo of the storm of the Winter Palace that was included in all Soviet history books was in fact taken in 1927, when Eisenstein was filming his revolutionary epic. The version of history created by the film director survived for more than 60 years and died together with the Soviet Union. I am not sure whether the version of history of 20th century art created by the writers of the October magazine is going to live that long.

 

 

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