ABSTRACT

The particular interrelationship between artists of the 1920s and 1930s and those of the 1960s and 1970s has been likened to a return to an unfinished or sublimated project that was never fully articulated in its first incarnation and these two periods have a close relationship in the field of artists’ interventions in galleries and museums. In the main this is due to the re-investment in radical art practices that critique dominant cultural mores. The ways in which artists addressed the practices of galleries and museums in the 1920s and ’30s had neither the momentum nor the impact of later ventures but nevertheless provide significant examples of approaches that would be appropriated and developed to achieve more widespread effects. Foster, characterises this as a ‘return’ (of the earlier ‘radical’ art practices) which he explains by referencing Sigmund Freud’s model of deferred action in studies of trauma: Nachträglichkeit. In this sense ‘one event is only registered through another that recodes it’ 1 and the radical work of artists who were concerned with forms of institutional critique in the 1920s and 1930s is never historically effective or fully significant in its initial moments. The significance of Duchamp’s conceptual art practices, for example, garnered interest amongst artist friends and a few collectors but did not gain widespread recognition and critical appraisal until the 1960s and 1970s. 2 Freud’s theory posits that in the case of shock or trauma (which was a central motif of the avant-garde) the effects are not registered in actions at the time of the shock, but occur later. The full significance of events cannot be registered in an immediate form precisely because it ‘is traumatic – [representing] a hole in the symbolic order of its time that is not prepared for it, that cannot receive it, at least not immediately without structural change.’ 3 ‘Recoding’, 4 Foster’s term, is a return in a reconfigured form where realisation and significance of initial intentions is more fully achieved.