ABSTRACT
In the late 1970s the attack on artistic representation began to move out of the literary field to the other arts. That move was initiated and led by a small group of art critics: by Douglas Crimp, whose Pictures, a catalog for a photographic exhibition published in 1977, was probably the first American attempt to place recent developments in one of the visual arts in a deconstructionist framework; by Craig Owens, whose ‘Earthwords’ (1979) did the same with landscape sculpture; by Crimp’s former teacher at New York’s City University Rosalind Krauss (‘John Mason and postmodernist sculpture: new experiences, new words’, 1979); and by Hal Foster, who gave the poststructuralist approach wide currency with his The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture of 1983, an enormously influential collection which, apart from Foster’s important preface, included essays by Crimp, Krauss, and Owens. (The Anti-Aesthetic also included an essay by Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson’s first exploration of postmodernism, and it reprinted Jürgen Habermas’s controversial ‘Modernity versus postmodernity’ of 1981, presumably to leave no doubt about its political affinities, even if most of the essays included were not exactly designed to win Habermas’s approval.) In the late 1970s and early 1980s these critics, and the art journals with which they were associated (Crimp and Krauss with October, Foster and Owens with Art in America), gave the debate on the postmodern a new, political direction. The politics of these and other somewhat less prominent critics were based on the generally poststructuralist insistence on the inevitably ‘coded’ nature of the real and its representations and on the more specifically Foucauldian insistence on the interconnectedness of representation and power. Poststructuralism had made a leftist cultural politics a more prom ising project than it had ever been. Under the classical Marxist dispensation, cultural politics had been condemned to marginality because of the determining, fundamental, role of the economic basis. Now that real
power was no longer exclusively tied up with the economic, but had instead become a function of all cultural production, cultural politics could really make a difference. As Michael Ryan put it in 1988:
Rather than being expressive representations of a substance taken to be prior, cultural signs become instead active agents in themselves, creating and evoking new substances, new social forms, new ways of acting and thinking, new attitudes, reshuffling the cards of ‘fate’ and ‘nature’ and social ‘reality’.
