Harold Rosenberg (1) (1906–1978)

I suspect Rosenberg is not as well remembered as his frenemy Clement Greenberg because he didn't make big theoretical statements. But that's what makes reading him now such a joy (as opposed to reading Greenberg) - his beautifully written essays are based on observation and thought, not on sweeping generalizations and ideology. There is the occasional misstep, like his belief that the complaints of minorities and feminists were misguided, but those are very rare, and every essay and review show more in this collection has some brilliance to impart. show less

This is an impressionistic essay on Gorky's trajectory as an artist. Like everything by Rosenberg, it's sensitively written and features some fantastic observations - pay close attention to his remarks on the role of allusion in Gorky and in modern art in general, simply brilliant.

I picked this book up on the recommendation of the Wikipedia article on the avant-garde: it says that Rosenberg's critique of 1960s artists who thought they continued to occupy an adversarial position with respect to mainstream society was "the most incisive critique of vanguardism" of its time. The Wikipedia article draws on his essay "D.M.Z. Vanguardism," included in this book, which describes the art world of 1970 as "a demilitarized zone, flanked by avant-garde ghosts on one side and a show more changing mass culture on the other" (219). By this he means that a little society of artists, critics, museum directors, and art patrons have, by disavowing the "negative impulses that tormented the earlier vanguards" (219), managed to lump together all of the advanced art of the past century to constitute a "wing of popular taste" where those in the know can draw freely from a tradition of avant-garde activity that is embraced in a wholesale manner. He explains that this "zone" has its own conception of art history, whereby the angst and anger of the Futurists, Dadaists, and other artists of the early 20th century is conceived as a transitory phase, or as little more than a series of "incidents in a victorious march toward new heights of formal mastery (e.g., Stella, Olitski)" (220). Here he is in dialogue with Renato Poggioli's recently-published (at that time) The Theory of the Avant-Garde, which sees alienation, hostility, and negativity as intrinsic to all avant-garde activity. Rosenberg points out that the art of the 60s (Pop Art being the paradigmatic example) has exorcised the avant-gardes' hostility to mainstream culture. He sees this as problematic, though, to the extent that if artists, critics, academics, and museum directors continue to work within the relatively insulated institutional structures of the art world, that world becomes a sort of buffer area where they can freely shed their feelings of angst and alienation. Rosenberg's sharpest appraisal of this situation comes at the end of the "D.M.Z." essay: "Painting today is a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it. Once the vanguard myth has faded, the pretense that art is engaged in self-immolation will have to be dropped" (221-222). Basically, as long as the art world is alive and thriving (new galleries, new shows, new sales), it can be shown that the artists who claim to be revolutionizing art are actually participating in its perpetuation.

I'm not very familiar with the 20th century history of art criticism and I'm not sure how accurately the above paragraph represents Rosenberg's argument. It took me a while to really get into this book, but I started to pay special attention when he began discussing the events of 1968: the general strike in Paris, the resurrection of surrealism in the graffiti written on the walls of buildings in Paris, the generalized call to take the streets and the just-as-generalized attack on the institutions of the art world, and the significance of the demonstration as a "medium of popular expression." He's writing just after 1968, and his essay on "D.M.Z Vanguardism" should be read in this light: the art world has to take into account the way in which Paris 1968 hinged upon the radical critique of the central institutions of the art world--the museum, most of all, but also the university. He cites a group of French writers whose book, Art and Confrontation, represented an early appraisal of the legacy of 1968: how it exposed the "degraded condition of art in our time" (204) while at the same time providing an alternative for what art could be. On the one hand, the art world's continuing emphasis on the individual artist and his creative genius, as well as on the singular art work that can be displayed in a museum or bought for millions of dollars, fails to recognize the way in which the collective protests of '68 sought to topple the cult of individuality. On the other hand, those protests sought to introduce new forms of collective activity, embodied in the demonstrations that responded to the call to the streets voiced by the protesters, and also embodied in, for example, the music festivals of the late 1960s or the participatory "happenings" that also rose to prominence in the 1960s. I think what Rosenberg is saying is that, in a sense, a lot of the advanced artists of the 1960s, in their continued pursuit of formalistic or conceptual purity, failed to recognize that they were still relying on the very institutions that the protests of 1968 wanted to overthrow.

This is not to say that Rosenberg embraces these new forms of collective activity. He clearly points out their limitations, most compellingly in a final essay that uses the final chapter of Kafka's Amerika, where Karl Rossman joins up with the "Nature Theater of Oklahoma" as an example of what some of the consequences of an uncritical embrace of festival/demonstration culture might lead to: "In the Theatre, everyone not only can be an artist but is a work of art. As such, everyone is automatically in 'the right place'; that is to say, in the world museum" (243). The problem is that this would mean the end of art and culture as such, since it would all be incorporated into the vast theater of a world where everyone is equally welcome to do anything at all and have it be art. The mirror image of Kafka's Nature Theatre, where we're all integrated into a world-become-museum, is a sort of "World Game" inspired by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. If in the Nature Theatre everyone takes up a role in a world that is already a museum, in the World Game the artist sees the world as a massive pile of materials from which to compose "'geosocial scenarios' by which to transform the art/reality environment ... establishing a global hookup capable of 'programming a total environment for total man'" (245). Rather than everything already being art, as it was in the Nature Theatre, in the World Game nothing is art, just materials that can be used to compose art. These seem to be the two limit-cases that Rosenberg wants to highlight at the end of his book: they're inverted mirror images of each other, but they both recognize the basic problematic of how life should be expressed in art that has been a central concern for basically all movements of modern or avant-garde art. Here he comes back to his first essay on American art from the 19th century to the 1960s: "Reality-versus-art may be a slogan of the New Left, but it was also a slogan of nineteenth-century American painters, from Catlin through Eakins" (250). I think this is his final conclusion: that new artists should be more aware of the way in which they are repeating the struggles of earlier art movements, which is not at all a bad thing, but which should nonetheless be recognized dialectically when artists claim to be revolutionizing the art world (once again).

A final note: the clarity of Rosenberg's prose is refreshing. I'm not very familiar with U.S.-based art criticism from this time, and I'm not sure how well I've represented his arguments here, but when I read them they were very clear and intelligible. I would highly recommend this book as a historical document that clearly enunciates how the art world sought to come to terms with the protests of 1968, and as a theoretical text that lays the groundwork for a lot of late-20th century art theory that continued to work through some of the issues brought up here. show less

Not one of Rosenberg's better collections. His narrow-minded rants about how no new art can compare to Abstract Expressionism grate after a while, though as always he pulls off moments of brilliance.