Marc Weiner on Richard Wagner, Rosalind Krauss on Jackson Pollock, Jerome
McGann on the English Romantics, for example, among many, many others.
Foster’s postmodern sociocultural criticism
Within the practices of art, especially the visual arts, awareness of the
pervasiveness of social antagonisms has resulted in what Hal Foster aptly
describes as a “turn [since 1960] from medium-specific elaborations to
debate-specific projects.”^41 Many artists now take themselves less centrally
to make beautiful or well-formed objects or performances in an expressive
medium and more centrally to investigate social conflict. Within this turn,
Foster notes“three areas of investigation [that are shared by both art and
critical theory]: the structure of the sign, the constitution of the subject, and
the siting of the institution [including not only the museum, but also the
university as the home of the disciplines of art and theory].”^42 That is to say,
artists and critics alike now worry, especially in the visual arts, about signs
(and work-texts) as caught up in structures of formal, semantic, and social
opposition (as sketched by Saussure), about how subjects come to have
sectarian social identities and to engage in compensatory fantasy, and about
the relations of academies, publishing houses, orchestras, and universities to
social and economic powers.
Within this broad style of work we typically are presented with what
Foster calls“the return of the real”as“traumatic realism.”^43 The work of
art either calls attention to suffering that is induced by social antagonisms, as
in varieties of art that investigate phenomena as various as homelessness and
the bodily self-image of women, or it“screens”^44 the real via repetition (as in
Warhol’s multiple silk-screen images of Marilyn Monroe): that is, it blocks
attention to the real with a decorative image, but this blocking is repeated so
insistently that we are made aware of the suffering that underliesit. The
“shift in conception...to the real as a thing of trauma...may,”Foster
argues,“be definitive in contemporary [visual] art, let alone in contemporary
theory, fiction, and film.”^45 Foster himself reads the work of Cindy Sherman
as powerfully advancing this sense of the real as a scene of trauma, as she
presents us with images of the manifold things that can be done to her as a
(^41) Hal Foster,The Return of the Real(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. xi.
(^42) Ibid., p. xiv. (^43) Ibid., p. 130. (^44) Ibid., p. 132. (^45) Ibid., p. 146.
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