REVIEW: Fail Back—Fail Better: Hal Foster, “Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics”
Cover, Fail Better by Hal Foster. Image Courtesy Duke University Press.
REVIEW
Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics
By Hal Foster
Hardcover ($35)
The MIT Press
By David Sundry
For some years now critique in general, and art criticism in particular, have not only been under attack but, in many circles, outright dismissed. The sources of attack span the full spectrum from bullies and commentators on the right to the inquisitors on the left. And the complaints are numerous: value is often determined by market position and little else and cultural institutions dependent upon corporate and foundation sponsorship, back away from debate. And, ironically, over the past few decades, the post-structural critique of modernism has resulted in a cultural moment where critique is not only rejected but it has been posited that critique is not possible. This movement questions interpretative structures and results in a refusal of authority that undercuts critical evaluation. Judgement is rejected. The moral right of the critic is denied. This unharnessed skepticism is extended to any position or perspective that serves as a basis in which many people in this society are able to speak on another’s behalf. The only surviving position is one of lateral relations, a comparative side-by-side model barely distinguishable from anthropology.
Into this moment, Hal Foster, currently the Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, enters the foray once again with a new collection of forty revised essays titled Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics. The collection is not a history but a gathering together of articles from various publications; journals, reviews and exhibition catalogues that are either hard to find or hidden behind paywalls. The title is a quote from a late Samuel Beckett novella entitled Worstward Ho—“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” And it is an apt motto for another attempt to provide a critical account of current cultural practice.
As Foster states, the collection is a “reckoning” or re-estimation of a group of influential figures in the worlds of art and theory/criticism. The collection is organized into three categories: Some Antecedents, Some Contemporaries, Some Critics. It should be noted that Foster is a highly distinguished theorist, art historian and critical contributor to the cultural field for the past forty-five years. His first collection, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, released in 1983, is a pivotal text. He is the co-founder of Zone Books, a co-editor of October magazine, a previous editor of Art in America magazine, a previous director of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and a previous professor at Cornell. Thankfully, Foster has resisted the post-critique pressures and worked to continuously revise and tirelessly advocate for a critical project and it is this constant critical intervention that animates the varied collection of artist and critic profiles and brings a relaxed coherence to the whole. When read in succession, the collection serves as a mini-overview or informal history from late modernism to the contemporary moment.
The volume emphasizes a basic knowledge about postwar practice that can no longer be taken for granted. As Foster states, he writes from the “center”- meaning he is not overly indebted to semiotics or the social-historical. The reviews are not comprehensive but provide a thumbnail portrait of the salient concepts of the artist’s practice or the critic’s project. The pieces do not oversimplify or avoid complexity but lay out the arguments in a clean and streamlined manner. Ideas gather, build and flow creating a reading momentum. Touchpoints with other artists or critics create nodes or plug-ins expanding the intellectual constellation and help the reader situate the dense field of contemporary practice into a larger framework. The informal manner sidesteps the stiffness of scholarly apparatus without sacrificing content.
Foster effectively employs his editorial decision to bracket “antecedents” against “contemporaries” to first provide an account of a particular moment and then rethink previous critical histories by placing the historical evolution in tension: for instance, Greenbergian Formalism to a reactive, expansive postmodernism. Other tensions: the medium-specific to the post-medium or the pre-war avant-garde to the neo-avant-garde. Further, Foster highlights these historical tensions in order to retrace many of the evolving practice concerns of both these artists and the field in general. For example, in the 1960’s, the body was proffered as immediate presence, then in the 90’s restaged as a performative abjection and recently as fragmented and virtualized in video installations or digital simulations. Again, in the 1960’s, the site was initially conceived as physical location or landscape, then transferred to institutional settings and finally rethought as a type of placeless conceptual field research or archive. Similarly, image is transformed from Pop painting/commodity to mass cultural sign to absorption into media spectacle.
A further revelation occurs if one surveys the vast footnotes provided. Foster’s methodological principles emerge from his repeated citing of certain texts. For example, the model of Kantian disinterest in aesthetics or the idea that the aesthetic is a realm of resolution or reconciliation between our different and often opposed faculties (say reason or science and ethics) is contained in repeated references to Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Another example, references to Foucault’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971) and Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” (1940) highlight Foster’s dependence on the construction of a genealogy that Nietzsche called “effective history” or Foucault referred to as a “history of the present” – a narrative re-framing of the present through a dissenting/resistant/oppositional reading of the past.
Polemic is situational and as the times change, strategies must adapt. Within this volume, Foster still fights to critically resurrect the idea of an avant-garde or, more importantly, to chart its historical evolution from a vanguard, innovative, legislative position (Foster says – think Russian Constructivism) to a resistant, transgressive, symbolic order (think Surrealism) to an indwelling position that works to uncover and widen internal pressure points or vulnerabilities. Neither front-guard nor rear-guard, this new internal fifth column that “trace fractures”, Foster believes, is thriving today.
This collection, in some sense, serves as that genealogy or “effective history” and, interestingly, both Foster and Rosalind Krauss, even T.J. Clark (both extremely influential post-structural and social-historical critics respectively who Foster discusses in the collection), have subsequently evolved some distance back to a position to “argue for a critical dimension within the aesthetic.” “An apostasy from [their earlier] apostasy, a reversion to the Greenbergian discourse of medium-specificity.” They collectively proclaim an emphatic “No” to the post-critical and the post-medium condition. As Foster muses, perhaps the break with modernism was “overstated.” However, this is not to suggest that Foster et al. have surrendered or returned to an earlier historical position. They are revisiting an earlier viewpoint to adapt it, to “open it up, from the inside, to other possibilities” and it is this interior reworking that characterizes Foster’s understanding of the avant-garde in this current moment. But it should also be asked what moment are we opening up? The postmodern? It could be argued that the postmodern is a mannered inversion of the modern, a prolonged internal critique, a project within modernism itself.
Perhaps the best contemporary position for the moment is to revisit the very first selection from Foster’s first book forty two years ago – an opinion “against the grain” then and now – Jurgan Habermas, the central critic of the Frankfurt School, and his “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” (1981). Briefly, Habermas argued that modernism, originally oppositional, had been largely absorbed and functioned as an official culture. And he understood that there were problems with the Enlightenment logic to structure society into three spheres of knowledge: science, morality and art. But, Habermas asserted, the answer was not the transgressive strategy to undercut meaning and break down structure and form. In his opinion, Dada and Surrealist strategies (and post-structural critique) are so many “nonsense experiments”, that emancipatory effect does not arise from negative strategies of anti- or post. If modernism still is the dominant but dead culture then what better way to revise or exceed its original utopian intentions than to, as Foster states, work from within the system to reclaim a necessary expertise and to legislatively advocate for new vanguard propositions that build on top of these foundations. The key term is to build, to construct, to put forward, to produce – not to destructure, destabilize, dissemble. In the end, we have nothing left to lose but to recommit to the “intentions” of the Enlightenment. This return is not a fall back but a fail back to fail better.
David Sundry is Architecture Editor of Bridge.
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