Formalist art criticism and the politics of meaning.

• Date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Tekiner, Deniz
• Published date: 22 June 2006
• Author: Tekiner, Deniz

FROM THE 1940s UNTIL THE LATE 1960s, FORMALIST CRITICISM FUNCTIONED TO appropriate modernist art to the market interests and conventional sensibilities of the art world. By its judgments of taste, it certified the worthiness of art objects for markets, facilitating processes of the reception of artworks as commodities. It thus functioned symbiotically with art marketers. By its support of the market apparatus and its invalidation of social concerns as they are expressed through art, formalism upheld conservative agendas. Limiting its attentions to form alone, it obscured the relationships of art to social contexts and the socially critical implications of art.

Formalism dominated art criticism in the United States during the postwar period, a time in which the center of gravity of the Western art world shifted from Paris to New York, the U.S. experienced an economic boom, complacency characterized political life, and dissent was scarcely tolerated. The North American art critic Clement Greenberg was the leading prolocutor of formalism during this time. Many less prominent critics followed his lead. Greenberg's criticism, which was published mainly in Partisan Review, The Nation, and Commentary, carried on a European formalist tradition that was led in the early 20th century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Greenberg believed that the subjects of the visual arts should be their respective media. Painting should be about paint, and sculpture about the materials of sculpture. It follows that politics and narrative, as extraneous to the art media, debase the purity of visual art. Formalists evaluate art according to physical qualities such as color, size, shape, line, texture, and so on, and treat the ideational content of works as irrelevant. They view themselves as being mainly protectors and upholders of high aesthetic standards.

Many art critics now favor "contextual" approaches. As nicely summarized by art historian Howard Risatti (1988:31), such approaches seek "to understand how art functions socially, economically, and politically in relation to status and power and the construction of worldviews," Contextual approaches may be more capable of evading the collusions with market forces and conservative interests that marked formalism during the period of its hegemony. As Risatti points out, "because object validation is not something contextualist art history primarily does, it presents a threat to this whole apparatus of culture as object worship and to the status and power that this apparatus supports" (Ibid.).

In The Function of Criticism, Terry Eagleton (1984) shows that contemporary literary criticism, though it is ensconced in academic domains, tends to be complicit with market forces and the ideologies that support them. He shows that contemporary literary theory, even while it is supposedly anti-authoritarian, is complicit with established structures of power by its epistemological nihilism, its social insulation, its intellectual abstraction from the affairs of everyday life, and its consequent impotence as an effectual form of social criticism. Eagleton's critique of literary theory is comparable to the Frankfurt School's critiques of scientism and positivism that charge that much of scientific inquiry is complicit with systems of domination. These critiques suggest that systems of ideas that attain prominence in intellectual or scientific worlds often tend not to unsettle, if they are not directly complicit with, established structures of power. The compliance of intellectuals with these structures is thus secured without direct coercion.

Formalist art criticism is also subject to this charge. By excluding considerations of idea content and social context, it obscured the substantive concerns that artists frequently sought to express in their works. Thus, while Piet Mondrian wrote extensively on art's role in a dialectical revelation of harmonized oppositions, for example, by reading Clement Greenberg on Mondrian we could learn no more about this than that the artist "has theories" (Greenberg, 1986: 64). Greenberg's disregard of the idea content of Mondrian's art was typical of his approach. Even in cases in which artworks, according to the extensive writings-of artists such as Mondrian (Holtzman and James, 1993) and Wassily Kandinsky (Lindsay and Vergo, 1982), were heavily invested with ideational or affective content, Greenberg evaluated such works only in terms of their formal properties. If he acknowledged the content at all, he gave it short shrift, dismissing it a priori as not pertinent to the value of art.

As modernist art became more abstract, its symbolic content became more obscure. Symbols were an integral part of Christian art from the medieval period through the Renaissance. Christian art, however, used a lexicon of traditional symbols that were widely understood. During the early 19th century, Romantic artists developed a new lexicon of natural symbols that would serve their aesthetic of the sublime. Their "symbolic landscape" spoke a universal language of natural forms that might be generally understood by any viewers capable of feeling nature's grandeur and power. As more abstract lexicons were developed by French Symbolism, Mondrian, Kandinsky, and North American Abstract Expressionism, the intended meanings of artists became more opaque. Without knowledge of the explicatory literature by authors such as Georges-Albert Aurier, Paul Gauguin, Mondrian, Kandinsky, John Graham, and Barnett Newman, a viewer could not be expected to know that some modern artists sought to represent such things as Platonic forms, the triumph of spirit over matter, the balanced relations of physical and ideal oppositions, or the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious. Consistent with Romantic traditions, much of modern art opposed and resisted processes of the rationalization and disenchantment of life (Rosenblum, 1975; Tekiner, 2000). (l) As with Romantic attitudes toward the sublime, many modern artists construed their transcendental subjects as signifiers of freedom, and their artworks as expressions of a liberated imagination.

The opaque symbolic lexicons of the modernist arts proved to render many works vulnerable to misleading interpretations by formalist critics who ignored the explicatory literature and the statements of artists. North American Abstract Expressionism was especially vulnerable, because few of its artists wrote at length about art. Among the group, the only prolific writer was Barnett Newman (1990: 108), who conceived of art as "a carrier of the awesome feelings ... felt before the terror of the unknowable." We have one book by artist John Graham (1971: 95), who in the late 1930s accurately anticipated the movement's general purposes to "reestablish a lost contact with the unconscious ... in order to bring to the conscious mind the throbbing events of the unconscious mind." The meaning content of Abstract Expressionism as shown through artists' writings and statements was eventually well exposed, but only after the movement had passed its prime. During the period of its reign as the foremost modernist movement, Greenberg and other formalists took full avail of Abstract Expressionism's susceptibility to misunderstanding. (2)

Greenberg's perspective as an art critic can be best understood by considering its development. Early in his career, he advocated formalism as a way of resisting kitsch, which he viewed as a product of mass culture, and which in turn was an effect of the industrial revolution. As he wrote in 1939 regarding the birth of kitsch, "newly urbanized masses set up pressure on society to provide them with a kind of culture fit for their own consumption. To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised, ersatz culture, kitsch" (Greenberg, 1939: 10). He viewed formalism as a way of insuring high art against a loss of autonomy by militating against absorptions of high culture by mass culture. Greenberg's defense of abstract painting is consistent with his formalist position. He argued that art could best ensure its integrity by its exclusion of representational content. Greenberg declared that the modern arts must preserve their autonomous status, "by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provided was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity." This would require each art to "narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of this area all the more secure" (Greenberg, in Frascina, 1982: 5). The exclusion of extraneous content, according to Greenberg, was accomplished by North American Abstract Expressionist art, which Greenberg called "American-style painting." (3)

Greenberg's criticism thus provided an intellectual basis for the support of tendencies toward greater abstraction in modern art, tendencies that culminated after World War II in North American Abstract Expressionism. Greenberg's for malist focus on aesthetics...