Summer 2002
Volume 28, Number 4

A Critique of T. J. Clark's Farewell to an Idea
by O. K. Werckmeister

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The history of European art since the French Revolution has been conditioned by an increasing disparity between the relentless modernization of the capitalist economy and an art at odds with the social consequences of modernization that was called modern nonetheless. Before, the querelle des anciens et modernes had been fought out, and eventually resolved, in an artistic culture ideologically diverse yet institutionally cohesive. Now it was to perpetuate itself by aligning artistic breakthroughs with a principled dissent from social norms of aesthetic expression. The result was a two-track history of art in which traditional and modern art kept coexisting in mutually adversarial postures. The political culture of democracy has blunted their confrontation by accommodating modern art as an art of free expression. Still, politically disenfranchised middle-class and upper-middle-class segments of the public have persisted in making modern art into an aesthetic venue of opposition to the social order. Because capitalist modernization left enduring social conflicts in its wake, adversaries, advocates, or both took modern art for a vicarious expression of political dissent, whether modern artists intended it or not.

In rejecting the professional standards of official art institutions--academies, artists' collectives, or salons--the culture of modern art did in effect challenge the underlying social

See Also Marcel Franciscono: History, Textbooks, and Art: Reflections on a Half Century of Helen's Gardner's Art through the Ages (Winter 1977) Peter Brooks: Aesthetics and Ideology: What Happened to Poetics (Spring 1994) O. K. Werckmeister: Walter Benjamin's Angel of History or the Transformation of the Revolutionary into the Historian (Winter 1996) O. K. Werckmeister: Hitler the Artist (Winter1996)

systems. The key term of the challenge, revolution, made professional concerns into political interventions, real or imaginary. It resonated with the frustrated aspirations of the defeated middle-class revolutions of 1848Ð49 all over Europe. An art styled revolutionary gave voice to a displacement of those aspirations into the conditional freedom of the public sphere. Here they were demoted from politics to ideology. Ever since, the deliberate ambivalence of the explosive term has infused the discourse on modern art with a political rhetoric all the more overblown the less its participants saw a chance to act upon the political process itself.

The artistic culture of the labor movement, the only force with the political muscle to contest capitalist modernization to the point of revolutionary practice, initially had no truck with modern art as an expression of dissent. It relied on traditional art to convey political messages to mass constituencies excluded from middle-class educational privilege. It needed a recognizable imagery of labor's lived environment to denounce its oppression or to extol its self-empowerment. To subject art to an aesthetic and ideological subversion of its reference to reality, and obscure it in the process, would have been a self-defeating thing to do for a mass-based, activist political culture. The labor movement did not envisage social groups marginal by fate or choice in need of an artistic counterculture to match. It staked out claims of its own to the artistic culture of the mainstream, of the grand tradition. Imaginary alternatives to the social order, enshrined in alternative artistic ideals, were irrelevant for its political goal of securing the economic conditions for a consolidated social life of work and family. For these reasons, the art embraced and promoted by the labor movement most often drew on the idealization inherent in the representational art sponsored by the state and the conservative middle class. If it shed idealization, it tended to be realist, even naturalist, in form. This art could blend into the artless forms of broadsides, cartoons, caricatures, and posters where it became politically functional.

The only time modern art entered into a political, not merely ideological, engagement with the Left, it had its revolutionary claims subjected to a test that ended with its political delegitimization. This was the historic outcome of its short-lived sanctioning by the Bolshevik government in 1918Ð23. It is the fundamental contradiction of Soviet art history that after the October Revolution, state-directed artistic culture drew only minimally on traditions of nineteenth-century socialist art beholden to working-class themes and audiences. Instead, it was dominated by artists of the modern persuasion at its most extreme. Their ascendancy during the first five years of Soviet power was a pragmatic process of political institutionalization. It was carried forward by a handful of strong-willed artistic individuals, de facto leaders in the minority modern art world of the prewar years. But even though these artists went as far as conceding a potential dissolution of all artistic culture into a Bolshevik lifestyle, Lenin and Trotsky judged them to be ideologically dysfunctional. It took a decade of protracted struggles to divest them of their self-assumed political prerogatives. They were reduced to serving Soviet foreign cultural propaganda in Western Europe. However, once realism was finally reasserted as the dominant style of Soviet painting, at the start of the First Five-Year Plan, it had largely ceased to represent a working-class culture. It became a contrived and controlled propaganda device for a cultural policy of repression.

The key term of the two-track history of art is avant-garde. In its original understanding by Saint-Simon and nineteenth-century writers dependent on him, it was linked to the term elite. Artists, along with other intellectuals, were thought to be legitimized by their professional standing to both forecast and predetermine the progress of society at large. This unproblematical transition from artistic avant-gardes to social elites stopped functioning once modern artists and their sympathizers contested the elitist institutions designed to anchor art in the social order. However, it did not take long for modern artists to recover the status of elites on more restricted terms. They were accommodated in an increasingly elastic artistic culture that licensed them to aestheticize or dramatize their divergence from the norm. Avant-garde scholarship has tended to perceive this transition as a compromising paradox only because it has ignored the ideological function, assigned to intellectual elites in democratic societies, of giving voice to social and political dissent. Since the Enlightenment, bourgeois culture has provided a forum for a principled, or abstract, reasoning about alternatives to the political status quo with no immediate venue of political enactment, whose impact on the conduct of politics has depended on the variable interactions between public sphere and political institutions in the democratic state. Modern artists in the incipient Bolshevik state, on the other hand, attempted to politically validate their self-exaltation as an avant-garde by relating it to Lenin's notion of a minority party as the vanguard of revolution whose competency and determination entitles it to lead without a mandate from any constituency. Soviet political authorities were quick to disabuse them of such self-delusions, eventually putting even their professional associations under the tutelage of political officials. Thus, any assessment of the postures of dissent assumed by or ascribed to avant-garde artists will hinge on a comparison between democracy and communism as alternative political settings.

Historically, the way for artists or writers on art to shirk a decision between democracy and communism has been the lapse into anarchism with its utopian disregard for political institutions. So fundamental was their insistence on aesthetic and expressive autonomy that no less than total disengagement from any political organization would do for them. It tended to facilitate the shedding of any restraint, the stridency of any critique. In June 1938, toward the end of the Great Depression, when modern art was under siege from both Right and Left, André Breton embraced this posture in his Manifesto towards a Free Revolutionary Art, edited by Trotsky, and cosigned by Diego Rivera at Coyoacàn, Mexico. Once a committed communist, Breton had become disenchanted with the Communist Party's refusal to honor his uncompromising claims to artistic freedom and even more with the oppressive criminality of Soviet power as it had become manifest in the Moscow show trials of 1936Ð38. With his intransigent projection of a revolutionary art exempt from any political definition, function, or control, Breton thought he could steer clear of the confrontation between communism and democracy. Yet he was inadvertently reclaiming the prerogative of artistic freedom in the democratic state.

[...]

The developments sketched above have long been commonplace parameters for critical historians of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art to position their research, no matter how their conclusions have diverged from one another. As the tradition of modern art has been inexorably historicized, it has been gradually detached from judgmental parti pris, aesthetic or ideological. Art-historical scholarship strives to replace ideological agony by detached analysis, idiosyncratic assertion by argumentative reasoning, categorical judgments by dialogs from divergent perspectives. What it takes to share in this long-term process is a firm historical chronology, a lexicographically accountable set of terms, a critical responsibility to the state of research, and a historiographical sensitivity to the contradictory drives, inherent in the art-historical literature, of advancing knowledge and engaging ideology.

T. J. Clark's bulky new book Farewell to an Idea does not insert itself into such a process with its historiographical continuity and its bibliographical expansion into history-at-large, even though it touches upon many historical, aesthetic, political, and even philosophical issues pertinent to the history of modern art and upon the views of at least some other writers.1 Despite its scholarly style of inquiry it is a remnant of, or a relapse into, an earlier stage of writing on modern art informed by noncontestable aesthetic preferences, single-minded ideological convictions, and summary rejections of contrary views. The self-assurance of this kind of writing has turned negative, however. It is reduced to sustaining a tenacious mix of self-doubt and nostalgia. The idea to which the author says farewell is the commonplace projection of a quest for social or political change onto the art of the modern tradition. Yet, rather than being disabused of its ideological self-delusions, the modern tradition stands vindicated as the living proof that art and politics must finally part company. Modern artists, through their inconclusive engagements with politics, have recaptured the intransigence of their aesthetic self-fulfillment. A hardened reflexivity enables them to resist ideological entanglement. Still, the idea stays on, if only as an object of mourning.

[...]

Clark never spells out the idea whose loss such funereal imagery appears to bewail. He calls it modernism. Verbally transfigured into a near-mythic entity that "wants," "thinks," and even "dreams," it gets imbued with a life of its own. Its enemy is modernity, Clark's term for modernization as a driving force of capitalism's economic, social, and political expansion. Through a sequence of "episodes," the two terms act out a Manichean conflict. Equally monolithic subterms such as capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and the state act in supporting roles. In this scenario, a variable ideological arsenal for two centuries of political debates is fetishized to animate a "cluster of images and actions" (F, p. 9). Consistent with the mythical imagination, there is no final outcome of the struggle. "The myth will survive its historic defeat" is Clark's concluding prophecy (F, p. 408).

Upholding a myth as the ultimate redemption from the doom of capitalism entails the denial of history as a specific determinant of artistic culture. That is why Clark's book lacks any sense of historical continuity. Political events are miniaturized into artistic episodes that are in turn drawn out into picturesque tales. Contingency is Clark's term for this disjointed juxtaposition of art and history. Dispatching any questions of agency or dependence, it is the empty negative of the dialectical teleology inherent in much of the Marxist tradition, the unresolved contradiction between "objective" determinacy and "revolutionary" activism. Losing faith in revolution entails resigning oneself to being subject to historical conditions. Keeping the faith entails the confidence in changing them. The intermediate options are endless. Clark makes a rueful indecision on this point the hallmark of aesthetic integrity. Like Theodor W. Adorno, "a truly melancholy critic, but one with an unshakeable belief in art's redeeming power" (F, p. 337), he reinstates the autonomy of l'art pour l'art, no longer as an apodictic, pained recoil from historical reality, as Adorno did, but as the prize of hard-won disengagement.

1. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn., 1999); hereafter abbreviated F.