Notes on Hal Fosters Antinomies of Art History Jessica Poon Author Background: o A few notes on his training and

current activities: o Undergraduate education at Princeton in English Literature and Art History, 1977 o PhD in Art History at the City University of New York, 1990 o Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, 1997 o Added just some of the books he published and positions hes had in his career, including some of his well-known articles o Selected Publications and Editorial Positions: o Staff Critic, Artforum, 1977-81 o Editor, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture, 1983 o The `Primitive' Unconscious of Modern Art," October, 1985 o Discussions in Contemporary Culture, 1987 o The Return of the Real: Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, 1996 o The Artist as Ethnographer" in Traffic in Culture, 1996 o Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes), 2002 o Art Since 1990: Modernism, Anti-Modernism, Post-Modernism (co-authored with Rosalind Krauss, Yves-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh), 2004 o Editor, October Magazine, 1991 Present Founded 1976 by Rosalind Krauss Contemporary art, criticism and theory o As you can see he began his academic career very early, as soon as he finished his undergraduate degree, which I suppose can attest to the strength of his writing. o Interest in a critical discourse of the place of art history after modernism o Negotiating problems of post-modern in critique and history how the avant-garde constantly struggle to both critique history and its ideologies of gender, race, and class neutrality and engage history at the same time (an issue of contradiction which is central to the article we read) how these histories and ideologies are maintained when art remains within the art institution and how post-modern art can or attempts to break free from traditional institutional practice o His first publication, which is a book that he edited, includes essays from great modern art figures such as Rosalind Krauss, Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, and Edward Said o Just from listing these names you can guess that this book investigated issues of the museum as an institution, the cultural or gendered Other, and consumerism. o So you can see that from his very first writings that he is interested in critiquing modern and contemporary culture. o As for Design and Crime, as a whole, Foster takes a critical look at the post-modern subject, and how in contemporary culture there is a constructed subject o In the first part he looks at design and architecture, and how the focus in culture since Art Nouveau and Bauhaus on design reference to designer jeans in preface has created a

designer subject. o In Part I he looks at architecture and design and how an increasing interest in this part of culture is leading to less focus on art and criticism. o Part II then focuses on art history, which I guess you can say parallels this problem of design vs. art with the shifting focus from art history to visual culture. o In this particular essay he looks at the problem of autonomy in visual culture, although from both the title and his strong introduction on the problems of art history, you wouldnt guess that most of the article was going to be about visual culture (to discuss whether that is an issue later).

Article Outline: o His introduction explains quite well, I thought, the fundamental split at the heart of the art historical discipline which is a simultaneous desire to both declare the autonomy of art as an aesthetic practice, and also to ground this aesthetic into cultural and social history. o This contradiction, while it might have come into renewed focus in the 20th century with Constructivist Art and Clement Greenberg, goes back to the 19th century and to the beginning of art history as a discipline itself. Kant, Hegel, Panofsky, and Riegl were all aware of this root issue and their theories were attempts to reconcile this antinomy. o Even art history as a term as an oxymoron o More recently, Foster argues, there is has been a shift towards the interest in visual culture as a study of the relationship between the viewing subject and the art object, leading to a desire to formulate historical viewers as social constructions meaning that, instead of looking primarily at the object in order to create historical meaning or autonomy, art historians have begun to look at the subject in order to determine a visual eye, how they saw their own relationship to the art object hence the emphasis on the 17th century Dutch viewer, or the 19th century French flaneur. o The turn to visual culture is marked by a partial shift in object away from histories of style and analyses of form toward genealogies of the subject. 89 o Increasing interest in anthropology plays a role in this turn because: a. It emphasizes cultural studies, forms of culture that were previously shunned because of the art historical hierarchy between high and low forms of culture. b. It focuses on fieldwork in everyday life c. Its recent self-critiques ensures the self-reflexivity of ethnography while simultaneously investigating the Other. o This new discipline of visual culture has inherited a similar antinomy because of its excessive emphasis on the present culture. The proliferation of technology and global communication has created a subject that is no longer autonomous. o Since visual culture has turned towards the subject, instead of looking back to how history constructs the subject they emphasize the present as constructing the subject maybe excessively. o And instead of insisting on the autonomy of the art object, visual culture tends to emphasize the dependence of the subject identity on technology, communication, and

globalization this argument takes longer for foster to work out but he says that our privileging globalization has made us look outward towards the computer for information, community, and identity. Within the discourse of visual culture, the integrity or autonomy of the subject is compromised when its relationship as separate from technology and the computer becomes confused. Because of technologys goal of total transparency of information, the computer screen as a window into the world (to recall the Renaissance perspectival window) creates both projections of the human into the nonhuman, as well as projections of technological modality into the subject. (paraphrasing Foster) This is problematic for Foster, and in the end, he suggests that, although the word autonomy has negative associations in aesthetic discourse, as a strategy defined within a political situation it may be an effective strategy in maintaining the integrity of the human subject. Conclusion: Visual culture has compromised the integrity of the human subject. Although the word autonomy has many negative associations in aesthetic discourse, is the desire for autonomy in a world of visual culture still an objectionable one?

Discussion Topics / Questions: o Because Foster is a critic, I found him to be pretty self-reflexive in this article, please say something if you disagree and he is critiquing the lack of self-reflexivity itself of visual culture - this he says we can attribute to lack of distance and time is he too critical of visual culture? o Does he wrap up his argument well? How does his conclusion relate to his intro? o Usage of anthropology how does it play a role here? Using it as a tool, as an instrument, through which he is trying to legitimize art history, trying to solve the crisis of art history. Does foster make a good case for the role or relevance of anthropology here? In the shift to visual culture? o What is Fosters stance on the aesthetic autonomy and social imbrication? Does he think we need to find a way to resolve it? Is foster calling for a way to assert the autonomy of the subject? Is there a way? o Mana: what is it? Is it relevant to Fosters article as a whole? o The post-historical attitude - If visual culture is about having no boundaries should we advocate boundaries?

Can you reach autonomy? Autonomy only exists in opposition to something is impossible? What kind of writing is it? Different from Tanner. Do you have to be an insider to get it? Do you need special knowledge? Need to be aware of contemporary theory in order to resonate with the reader? Yet it is also this insistence on the present that, Foster suggests, might maintain the

problem of the post historical attitude instead of challenging or stopping it. The excitement with which images and visual culture are now viewed, Foster writes, and the suspicion of verbal humanities may lead to an uncritical hailing of visual culture. This enthusiasm overlooks the anxiety that art history is facing in its relevance in todays world. FOSTER TAKES A WHILE TO GET TO THIS POINT, BUT IT IS IMPORTANT. Fosters interest in visual culture is on the institutional implications of electronic information as a parallel or perhaps even a repetition of the past technological consequences of photographic reproduction in art history meaning, that in the same way that the ways in which the technology of photographic reproduction in the mid-19th century changed the way we viewed artistic culture and institution was not thought out until the 1920s and 30s, so too is the technology of electronic information and digital proliferation changing the way we view ourselves as subjects, as communities, and as a common humanity. How long, Foster asks, will it take for us to be aware of the implications of a world-become-information? Foster looks deeper into the possibilities of some of these implications but asking the position of the subject in relation to the computer as information the computer, remaining blind to the presence of the subject and performing automated tasks, positions the subject at an unknown, ambiguous location in relation to it.

Critical eye needed for Tanner on Mannheim and Riegl although strongly based in history and research but not enough explanation of Mannheim Tanner questions the objective stance of the historian how do you we choose who to put into the canons of art history? Who do we exclude? Why? makes you think about the history of art should we always revisit the origins of art history and its very basis when art history faces a problem? Autonomy is defined in relation to subjection. In the enlightenment, Kant theorized this aesthetic autonomy in opposition to the fetish and the irrational. Autonomy has been claimed and declared only in opposition to something whether it is an acien regime, desire, text, politics. Should we claim autonomy now to stand up for the human subject?

Split as necessary part of critique should we find a resolution? Visual culture as no boundaries can consider everything Categorization is it bad? With globalization? Should we keep looking into the future or the present or look back to the old as another antinomy of art history always look back but always looking future Boundaries should we keep them up or take them down in the identity of art history? o o art history today is at a crisis in the face of increasing technology and design into art practices and also institutions turning into the study of visual culture, o always looking back and always looking forwards

o although from both the title and his strong introduction on the problems of art history, you wouldnt guess that most of the article was going to be about visual culture (to discuss whether that is an issue later). --. DOES THIS MEAN THAT HE IS INCLUDING VISUAL CULTURE IN ART HISTORY? He then turns to the semiotic theory of Levi Strauss, who in his theory on the formation of language describes the attempt to cover up, to fill in the gap, so to speak, of an nonequivalence between signifier and signified words that, within a critical discourse, are meant to bring to attention a certain significance, but because this signification has an indeterminate value. what significance is this part of fosters argument? Foster offers the word Kunstwollen, or the artistic will, as an example of a mana term, because it situates a psychological will to artistic form within a period or culture, offering a bridging of the gap.