Theorizing Memory

by Johanna Drucker

Columbia University Press
Due/Published January 1996, 224 pages, paper
ISBN 0231080832

Theorizing Modernism is a rereading of the modernist tradition in the visual arts that provides a unique view of the history of modern art and art criticism through a psychoanalytic and poststructuralist stance. Concentrating on canonical critical texts and images, the book examines modern art through a rhetoric of representation rather than through formalist criticism or the history of the avant-garde. Three themes organize the work: attitudes toward the space - social, literal, and metaphorical - of modernism as representation; assumptions about the ontology of the object (from aesthetic formalism to deconstructionist interpretation); and theories of the production of subjectivity (from artist and viewer to subject position). The first section reviews the spatial metaphors used to describe modern life, from Baudelaire on the work of Constantin Guys, through Jean Baudrillard on the paintings of Peter Halley. The second section examines the writings of such modernist critics as Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and Clement Greenberg on the object as a formalist construction. The final section explores concepts of the artist as a producing subject and of the viewer as a produced subject with respect to such artists as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Sherrie Levine. This book is a major contribution to the study of modern art history. Theorizing Modernism, in Professor Drucker's words, "is not an analysis of modern visual culture, nor of modernity through the visual arts. It is a study of the changing strategies of visual arts and critical writing according to a rhetoric of representation through three themes that examine concerns central to the cultural production known as modern art."