Who's Afraid of Visual Culture?

Contemporary artists are increasingly producing works that mimic fashion photography, derive from television, or otherwise struggle to compete with the production values of the entertainment industries. This is hardly news. But the theoretical discussion of fine art as a cultural practice is still largely dependent on outmoded ideas that "art" defines itself in critical opposition to mass culture. Clearly there is a problem here. The gap between the reality of artists' sensibilities and the theoretical apparatus of much (especially academic) art criticism suggests that the understanding of the relation between fine art and visual culture needs a major conceptual overhaul more in keeping with what's actually going on. Revisiting aspects of early twentieth-century art that provide a precedent for contemporary activity, and that have been systematically excluded from the mainstream of what has come to be regarded as modern art history, is a useful place to start.

The history and critical discussion of modem art that developed with European innovations in abstraction and the avant-garde at its core has never been able to find a place in its arguments for those visual works that figured their engagement with modern life through representational imagery or an enthusiastic dialogue with the mass media. Yet, such work is irrefutably modern in its visual forms and requires a theoretical discussion that considers the relation between fine art and mass culture in its vernacular, popular, and commercial manifestations. There has to be a way to take seriously early twentieth-century visual forms of response to modern life that were not exclusively concerned with either transcending it in favor of a universal language of abstraction or with radical political negation. When the map of visual modernism is redrawn with these works supplementing the familiar coordinates of abstraction and the avant-garde, the topography of modern art will be radically reconfigured to include works whose visual form is specific to twentieth-century modernism, but which draw on visual traditions outside of the fine arts.

The recent exhibitions The American Century: Art and Culture 1900- 1950 and Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age offer an opportunity to do just this. The American Century was curated by Barbara Haskell for the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Graphic Design, featuring works from the Merrill Berman Collection, was curated by Ellen Lupton, Darra Goldstein, and Deborah Rothschild for the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and the Williams College Museum of Art. The American Century, whatever quibbles one has with its curatorial foibles, was a phenomenal display of works and artifacts that demonstrated the unique contribution of American art to the field of modernism. Unprecedented in its scope, Graphic Design also set a benchmark for scholarship and curatorial work in the field. Yet, in marked contrast to the glut of critical, academic, and journalistic attention lavished on recent retrospective blockbuster exhibitions in modern art, there has been a conspicuous absence of serious critical engagement with these exhibitions. The American Century has come in for its usual share of journalistic Whitney-bashing, but Graphic Design barely managed a passing notice. And in a few instances, the deplorable poverty of critical means available for understanding this work has been glaringly obvious. Reading Arthur Danto's review of The American Century was akin to watching some refugee character from a Henry James novel try to wrestle with a greased watermelon at a county fair. [1] As for Graphic Design, in spite of historian and critic Maud Lavin's statements in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue, art history has not only not expanded to include its products in its scope of inquiry, in my experience it has locked down the borders ever more stringently under the threat that expanding research in this field seems to raise. If American art of the early twentieth century remains beneath notice in the minds of many art historians, then graphic design has the status of a dangerous interloper.

The historical reasons for these antipathies go to the core of the theoretical issues opened by the work included in the two exhibitions. Many attempts to recuperate American modernism have been fueled by work informed by the social history of art, the examination of crucial cultural movements in documentary photography, and the instrumental use of images in reinforcing gender, class, racial, and ethnic divisions. But such studied examination of these images has not asserted their modernity as images, their visual specificity with regard to the historical development of forms constituting twentieth-century art practice. The figurative, and often journalistic, reportorial, and diaristic dimension of the most original contributions of American art in this period should be taken seriously as visual forms whose characteristics can sustain a rigorous theoretical discussion of imagery as a site of modern culture. There is a tendency to be apologetic in assessing the illustrational quality of much American art of t he early twentieth century, just as there is an unwillingness to assert that what has been long perceived as a liability in modern American art is in fact its strength: that it was conceived through formal strategies that partake of mass-media culture from the very outset.