Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses

All Greenberg's early successes in writing and editing were in the service of kitsch. In the months before boarding the train through the Rockies, he made his debut as a writer with the first short story he submitted to Esquire. Titled "Mutiny in Jalisco," the tale was a potboiler recounting a skirmish led by Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. A second story, also revolving around the exploits of Pancho Villa, was accepted by Esquire shortly after. He submitted the stories under a false name, Robert Herman Torres, a hybrid of Hispanic and WASP identities. The pseudonym served to disguise Greenberg's Jewish identity, an act of dissembling that, in an anti-Semitic environment, did more than protect his bona fides as an intellectual. Like Walter Benjamin, Greenberg was the eldest son of a Jewish businessman who rejected his father's profession and family expectations to work freelance as a journalist, translator, critic, and editor. And, like Kafka, about whom he wrote with sympathy and insight, he struggled with a dominating father.

In 1935, several years before he read Leon Trotsky's manifesto "Art and Politics," which asserted, "Not a single progressive idea has begun with a 'Mass Base,'" Greenberg already recognized that kitsch and avant-garde culture were inextricably entangled (p. 34). At the time he was convinced that the place of the former was to support the latter, a view that was productively complicated in his acclaimed essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published in Partisan Review in 1939. In this fierce piece of criticism, which takes mass culture and its co-optation by capitalism and the modern state as a primary theme, abstraction is presented as the idealized "other" to kitsch. For the avant-garde artist, he writes, "subject matter or content becomes something to be avoided like a plague," a view he maintained for the better part of the next half century. However, as he knew from personal experience, "Kitsch's enormous profits are a source of temptation to the avant-garde itself, and its members have not always resisted this temptation." (3) Even if his earnings from the Press of the Pioneers and Esquire were relatively modest, they were a major advance on Viking Press's refusal to publish his adaptation of Tristan and Isolde in any form at all. "Kitsch made Greenberg's reputation," Barry Schwabsky rightly concluded in a review of Eyesight Alone for the Nation, the periodical for which Greenberg wrote some of his most trenchant criticism in the 1940s. (4)

Eyesight Alone is an extended complement to Jones's earlier book Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996), which analyzed shifts in artistic practice and economic organization in the 1950s and 1960s. The changing role of art in American society after World War II, as the Pax Americana and the cultural power of the United States spread worldwide, is traced in the first book from the studios of Jackson Pollock and his Abstract Expressionist colleagues to the studios of Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, and Robert Smithson. The trajectory is from the existential to the entrepreneurial, to bluntly summarize a complex argument, from what one generation of artists considered to be sacrosanct--in ways that have now achieved the status of myth--to what a following generation thought could be achieved on a factory floor or under the sign of a corporate logo. By beginning in the 1930s and ending with the present, Eyesight Alone envelops and "completes" Machine in the Studio. I would not be surprised to learn that parts of it were mapped out and written at the time the first book was submitted for publication, and that some of the material from the former manuscript was held back in the interests of apprehension and organizational control; neither book is short. Both books are concerned with the changing impact of the production and circulation of images on viewing subjects, particularly on viewing subjects exposed to what could be seen in New York in the twentieth century.