ABSTRACT
One of a set of three terms – along with emergent and residual – devised by the cultural^ historian and theorist Raymond Williams as a means of identifying the historical force, or influence, of specified cultural phenomena. In art^ historical terms, for instance, the dominance of, for example, a particular style (e.g.: cubism), or an artist, or an institution, or a critical^ perspective might be shown within a certain socio-historical moment – relative to the influence and status of other contemporary styles, artists, institutions, or critical perspectives. Williams suggested these terms as a means to attempt to account for complex cultural and artistic change in modern societies. In any given historical moment, he argued, different styles, artists, institutions, and critical perspectives could be seen as dominant (most influential), or residual (losing power), or emergent (coming to prominence). However, Williams envisaged these terms always being used flexibly and heuristically – that is, through analytic trial and error – rather than in a dogmatic fashion. To give an example. By the mid 1960s the dominant critical account
of the origins and meanings of modernism in the visual arts was that by Clement Greenberg and his followers in the US and western Europe. This account later became known as ‘Greenbergian modernism’. Its dominance consisted in the pervasive forms of its influence: as a codified intellectual perspective and a habit of assumptions or ‘common sense’ that others active in the art world shared and reproduced in various ways. This happened, for example, (1) through institutionalised university and art school teaching programmes that encouraged artists to think along Greenberg’s lines; (2) through the writing of criticism, catalogue, and art historical essays formulated in Greenbergian terms; and (3) through the curatorial^ practices of particular museums and galleries conforming to (or, at least, not challenging, Greenbergian precepts; e.g.: those of the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Together these practices constituted a consensus formed around Greenberg’s particular version of art-for-art’s-sake^ discourse, the importance of one reading of Kant’s philosophical aesthetics, and the value of abstract art. These inter-linked notions were produced, within this account, as ‘true’ and formed the paradigmatic (i.e.: chosen, dominant) set of ideas, procedures, and methods for understanding what stood then as advanced, avant-garde art. At the same time in the early 1960s, however, a number of other
practices and critical perspectives were also present and active – some residual (for instance, the belief that a moderate abstraction, containing
some naturalistic elements, should characterise modern art: ‘School of Paris’, or Picasso and Matisse-led modernism); some emergent (for instance the sense that a new kind of art, concerned with aspects of mass culture, was important: pop art, as it would be termed). As this simple example is intended to indicate, the term dominant,
as part of the set Williams proposed, is an analytic and theoretical proposition or hypothesis – useful as a means to begin to ‘think through’ a particular historical situation, but not necessarily adequate to all of the empirical complexities one might find there. Its value lies in being a tool that can provide a schematisation – an outline – of the range of ideas, artefacts, practices, and values present, and always interacting dynamically, within any historical moment.
