Pere-Versions of Love and Hate

They key to understanding the issues we are currently discussing, or at least to understanding these matters as Krauss does, is to read what I've written on Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, Barthes and Althusser as carefully as possible, in order to gain an insight into just how completely our consciousness, for these philosophers and critics, is imbricated within the structure of ideology.



"Without Visible Rival"
There is, for these thinkers, absolutely no way to think outside of ideology, and so we have no way to understand what artifacts - even from the relatively recent past - might have meant within the context of their own culture which is not deeply perverted by the fact that our reconstruction of the past is being conceived and written from within history. Invariable we project the values of our own culture onto the past. And one of the most common ways of doing this, at least or especially within the academy, is to "historicize" the past in development terms. Is there then no alternative to getting the past wrong? Well, there may be, but it will not be easy. How is this to be done? That too is a very complicated issue. But the shorthand answer is this, to replace the history of the past with the genealogy or "archeology" (not understood casually but rather in a very specific technical sense) of the past, the groundwork for which will be the genealogy or archeology of the present.

Althusser, in various of his writings, attempts to theorize the possibility of such a project. The result of his thought, which is long and complicated and greviously difficult, is to argue for the possibility of a wholly material and wholly immanent critique, one which attempts not so much to dismantle as to "transcode" the entire system from within. Such a project, to put things as succinctly as possible, will take the form of a radical inversion of the dominant order, one which will entail as radical reversing of those terms and values which have enjoyed cultural privilege. An alternative history must emerge, one written in the terms provided by the devalued axis. The history of Humanity must be re-written from the perspective of the Monstrous.


This is precisely what Krauss, along with a small group of very close colleagues, has attempted to do in the two-volume survey shown below. Her reward for her efforts has been to win herself the hatred of at least half the art historical world. You may well find yourself, after long consideration, to be numbered among the haters. At a very fundamental level, we don't, from a structuralist perspective, really get to choose. At a certain moment, we find, if we are one of the rare few who to a life in Art or Text at all, that we have either "always already" loved Rosalind Krauss or "always already" wanted to see her hung, drawn and quartered.

Roger Kimball,
"Feeling Sorry for Rosalind Krauss"
New Criterion 1993
(I'll post this when I can get access to it.)






Ideological Claptrap

As a professional art historian who teaches twentieth century art at public university, I find this book to be virtually worthless. Not only do the authors leave out artists from their book because they don't adhere to their own rigid ideological orthodoxies, but the book is very badly written; they undermine their own arguments by constantly lapsing into semi-meaningless jargon. A good postmodernist/ Marxist perspective in a general introduction to twentieth century would be useful, but these authors are too inept and arrogant to bring it off.

One of the worst books I've ever read.

As a visual studies major, I've read my fair share of theory and art history books, and this is by far the worst. It is filled with statements that ramble on for full paragraphs leave you looking for both the period and the point. The reader gets the impression that an intoxicated art historian is rambling on at a party, completely unaware of how uninteresting he or she is, or how little sense is being made. The legitimate information in this book could be presented in a pamphlet. I was forced to read this, and sift through 704 pages of hay to find the needle. I literally read this book while walking on a treadmill in order to maintain consciousness.

Like chewing through tough propaganda

"....an indispensible resource for understanding how our current cultural moment is inflected by changing conceptions of the past" as another reviewer puts it. It sure is that. It certainly demonstrates quiet clearly how some academics choose to reappropriate historical fact in order to fall in line with the narrow, convaluted views and theoretical constructs of a few, who wish to establish themselves as the, self appointed, "new and improved" cannon. Far too many omissions for my liking. It's a huge and relevant Art world out there !! Be warned . . . If you are not prepared for the language (at least Batchelor of Arts Degree level)you may feel like an illiterate Medieval peasant traveling out of your village for the first time in order to enter the doors of Cologne cathedral to hear a man in a pointy hat speaking Latin !!

One star is one star too many

This book appears to have no relevance. The word 'critical' is used frequently but never truly defined in context to art. If the work is taken as valued, it is an illuminating theory with merit. When not valuable it is deemed as privileging, or illegitimately an assertion of the preferences of the artist and a social privilege, i.e. men, capitalists, etc.