that a sectarian political interest in advancing the social possibilities of
women may lead to overvaluing some works in virtue of their messages
and their social histories of production rather than their achievements of
aesthetic affirmation, but this risk seems no greater than that of overvaluing
some works by men just because they are made within the traditional media
of art.
Against the grain of recoveries and continuances of tradition–whether
canonical high art traditions or vernacular traditions – avant-gardism
remains a strong presence in contemporary art, particularly in the visual
arts. Since at least Duchamp and Dada in the early years of the twentieth
century, there has developed a continuing practice of antimuseum art. This
arises in part out of the practice, as Kendall Walton puts it, of“destroying the
illusion”^73 that a painting or a sculpture is a simple reproduction of reality.
Perhaps under the pressure of photography, painters in particular began to
feel compelled somehow to make it visually evident that a painting is the
result of an ideational process or a process of thinking and construction.
Representation becomes indistinct, as in John Marin, or bare patches of
canvas are left, as in late Cézanne, or collage is introduced and perspective
is undone, as in Braque and early Picasso, or at the extreme the canvas is
ripped, or slashed, or adorned with feathers or casts or sticks, as in some
works of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, or late Frank Stella. Or a
deliberately puzzling sculptural object is presented, as in Duchamp’sBicycle
Wheel(1913)–a bicycle wheel mounted inverted on a stool. The references
within the modernist texts of Calvino and Barth to acts of authorial produc-
tion function similarly. The point of these avant-garde strategies is to inhibit
the audience’s participation in the fiction that all that is going on is the
“neutral”presentation of an object or world^74 and to call attention instead to
artistic ideation, frequently as commentary on a social context. The experi-
mental films of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol, the late work of Samuel
Beckett, such asBreath(1983), and Berthold Brecht’s use of asides and
addresses to the audience in order to achieve aesthetic distancing or alien-
ation function similarly. A risk of this kind of work is that it will be repeti-
tive, tendentious, and relatively empty, in declining centrally to represent a
(^73) Kendall Walton,Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 276, citing Barbara Rose,American Art Since
1900 (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), p. 52, on the paintings of John Marin.
(^74) See Walton,Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 275.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 277