Rosalind Krauss and Poststructuralist Criticism

by Leslie Markle

Throughout her career Rosalind Krauss has occupied many roles, from scholar and historian to theorist and critic, as well as, novelist. Her unique interpretations of iconic works in the history of modern art, along with her explanation of the logical evolution and theoretical underpinnings of postmodern production, have at times positioned her as both apologist and soothsayer for contemporary art. As contributing editor for Artforum magazine in the 1960's and early 1970's and as co-founder and co-editor of October magazine, she has made a significant contribution to the shape of postmodern theory. Drawing heavily on the work of structuralist and poststructuralist theorists including Roland Barthes among others, Krauss defined her critical methodology early on as the antithesis of Greenbergian formalism. The theoretical framework for this methodology is based primarily on the elucidation of an artwork as a structure—a social, cultural and historical production rather than an ineffable organism. Due to Krauss' significant contribution to the discourse on art in the 1980's, the background for this critical position as well as its modernist opposition seems worthy of exploration and comparison.

In the introduction to her book, The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, Krauss posits her critical standpoint as being completely antithetical to that of Clement Greenberg developed in Art and Culture,1 published in the early 1960's. This latter work was highly influential in mediating a very particular type of interpretation for modernist artworks. Krauss writes:

. . .it presented its readers above all with a system through which to think the field of modernist art. And this system, or method—often referred to inexactly as formalist—had far greater effect than the particularities of its author's taste. . . . Profoundly historicist, Greenberg's method conceives the field of art as at once timeless and in constant flux. That is to say that certain things, like art itself, or painting or sculpture, or the masterpiece, are universal transhistorical forms.2

However, this field is also, paradoxically, " . . .dependent upon constant renewal not unlike that of the living organism . . ."3 In Avant-garde and Kitsch, Greenberg lays some of the foundations for his methodological system with a critique of modern culture. He frames the avant-garde as the only true arena for creative production, where the difficulty of the content correlates to the authenticity of the expression, only to be apprehended through a sophisticated aesthetic sensibility.4 In other words, since the avant-garde pursues new forms of expression in art, it challenges accepted artistic conventions that are easily assimilated and understood by a bourgeois social order. The new forms of expression Greenberg refers to are explorations of nonobjective form in painting and sculpture. The implication of his critical system seems to be that these nonobjective forms represent a pinnacle of artistic expression because they are closest to the essential nature of these art forms. That is, in Greenberg's view, the essence of painting is the exploration and articulation of surface or flatness, and, likewise, the essence of sculpture is the articulation of the three dimensions of Cartesian space: ordinate, abscissa and zenith.5 Paradoxically, however, in Greenberg's system, these essential forms are important, not because of their literal surface or three-dimensional form but because they have a purported spiritual depth as being instantiations of transcendental, Platonic ideals. Ironically, the profound quality of these works seems difficult to apprehend, except for a sophisticated and cultivated individual, namely, the critic. For his eminent position, Greenberg relies implicitly, here, on the privileged position given to the so-called fine arts in a hierarchy codified in the eighteenth century.6 In many ways the methodology of his critical system is the logical extension of an art for arts sake conceptual framework. In both its reductive Cartesianism and its historicist redefinition of artifactual production, history and context are diminished in the name of the autonomy of the artwork and the individual's apprehension of the physical instantiations of transcendental, Platonic forms. In Krauss' view this Neoplatonic viewpoint or naïve realism, at least in part, led Greenberg to conclude that it is the value judgments made about works of art that are the ultimate importance of any critical discourse. That is to say, because it is understood that these transcendental forms are apprehended intuitively, their existence must be apriori to any critical construct. Within this conceptual framework, the entire history of the artifactual record may be redefined according to a modernist aesthetic criterion. In Krauss view, this practice is a historicist enterprise, in that it excludes the social and historical significance of objects. Krauss rejects Greenberg's naïve realism, as well as the historicist conceptual framework of his critical system, in favor of a more historically rigorous approach, which involves the attribution of meaning to artworks through an analysis of context. In Krauss' critical methodology, the artwork is not an autonomous organism, but a historically and culturally contingent social product.

This metaphor of the art object as a living organism is prevalent in the views of other professional aestheticians like Stanley Cavell, who Krauss refers to as a formalist or historicist critic. She quotes Cavell as well in her introduction stating, 'objects of art do not merely interest and absorb, they move us . . .we treat them in special ways, invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve only for other people . . .'7 In her view, this biological metaphor is significant in that it serves as a model for understanding the qualities of a work like, " . . .conditions of surface and depth, inside and outside . . .but also those formal features that preserve and protect the life of the organism, such as unity, coherence, complexity within identity, and so on. . ."8 This attribution of qualities of a living organism to the internal or formal organization of artworks has a long history. In fact, it could be argued that such notions go back to antiquity and were also articulated in the aesthetic sensibilities of the Middle Ages.9 However, the conception of the work of art here is a distinctly modern one in that it is linked to an aesthetic apprehension that is supposedly separate from other concerns.10

Within a structuralist/poststructuralist methodology, Krauss avoids the usual art historical practice of attributing meaning through the exegesis of an artist's personal history and the corresponding psychological revelations that might elucidate authorial intent. Instead of attempting to locate the origins of meaning with the artist or her psychological history, Krauss places the work of art in a social and cultural matrix as a possible signifier of meaning, viewing the work of art as a sign in a system of signification. In doing so, she is following Roland Barthes practice of viewing the work of art, metaphorically, as a structure rather than an organism, where meaning is determined as part of a system of substitutions. Krauss cites Barthes use of the story of the Argonauts to illustrate this idea of structure. Ordered by the gods to complete a lengthy journey in one and the same ship against its certain disintegration, the Argonauts gradually substituted each dilapidated piece of the ship with a new one, eventually replacing every one of its parts. Krauss quotes Barthes as writing, 'This ship Argo is highly useful . . .It affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitution (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.'11 Thus, no longer are origins or essences the objects of critical discourse, but, rather, the object of criticism is constituted through a self-conscious analysis of context in the creation of meaning. In approaching the work of art as a structure, Krauss foregrounds the contingency of artifactual production and in doing so elucidates meaning through an analysis of context.

Sculpture in the expanded field—earthworks.
Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty, 1970
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Black rock, salt crystals, earth, red algae, water
3 x 15 x 1500 feet
Art (c) Estate of Robert Smithson/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

In contrast to the intuitive apprehension of transcendental forms presupposed in the NeoPlatonic realism of Clement Greenberg, Rosalind Krauss asserts that meaning is rather a social production within a system of signification. Restricting the construction of meaning to cultural systems is descendent in part from a Kantian epistemology that conceives of reality as constructed by the categories of the mind and where space and time are pure intuitions.12 More recently, of course, it can be viewed as the structuralist extension of this epistemology and the inevitable crisis in interpretation resulting from the insights of Ferdinand De Saussure in his development of semiology during World War I.13 This crisis, inherited by structuralist and contemporary poststructuralist theorists, has profoundly impacted the methodologies of many disciplines. The theoretical implications of semiology are, simply stated, that there is no inherent or essential correspondence between signifier and signified or referent, but rather that the production of meaning results within a system of substitutions with other signs. In Deconstructive Criticism, Vincent Leitch states, "All signs conjoin a form and a concept, a signifier and a signified . . . Significantly, the relationship of the signifier and the signified, the two components of the sign, is arbitrary."14 The notion that there is no mimetic or essential relationship between the signifier and its referent has led, in poststructuralist theory, to a profound revision in many disciplines, including the visual arts. This paradigmatic shift in the theoretical framework for the arts has largely resulted in the abandonment of many of the tenets of modernism, as we have seen in the comparison between Greenberg and Krauss' critical methodologies.

Most notable within this poststructuralist framework has been the shift away from questions of origins and authorship. Historically bound up with the notions of genius and the masterpiece, these ideas have largely been rejected for a less authoritarian critical methodology that foregrounds its own contingent nature. Examples of each of these aspects of the poststructuralist critique may be found in two articles included in The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths. In the first article, entitled, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", Krauss examines the internal logic of the Western notion of sculpture and the way it was inherited and applied in modernist critical discourse. She asserts that this internal logic began to fail at the end of the nineteenth century. Subsequently, the sculptural production of the twentieth century shifted so far from its historical model, associated as it was with the monument that eventually the definition of sculpture was extended by many modernist critics and historians to the point of being meaningless.15 In addition, in attempting to stretch the definition of sculpture to include things like, "Stonehenge, the Nazca lines, the Toltec ballcourts, or Indian burial mounds . . ." historians were performing a historicist exercise, which obfuscated the contextual meaning of those historical examples.16 Rather than fall into the historicist trap, Krauss uses a Piaget group to logically expand and extend the definition of sculpture, creating an expanded field for the three-dimensional arts.

This model simultaneously expands the idea of sculpture and opens it up to be inclusive of other disciplines, which had heretofore been excluded from the Western hierarchy of the fine arts.17

In the second article, "The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths", Krauss deconstructs how the paired notions of origin and originality functioned within the conceptual paradigm of modernism by examining the strategies through which postmodern artists differentiate their production from that of the modernist avant-garde.19 Here, Krauss serves as apologist for contemporary movements of the time such as appropriationist or simulationist art, in order to provide a thesis for its conceptual relevance. She examines the work of Sherrie Levine and others in order to give insight into contemporary strategies for subverting the necessity of formal innovation and the association this has within the avant-garde to notions of genius and the masterpiece. In the work of appropriationist artists such as Levine, the modernist canon of typically male authorship is doubled or replicated. The result of this doubling problematizes not only the issues of identity and authorship and the concomitant notions of origin and originality within the mythology of the modernist canon, but also, potentially, the practices of provenance and valuation in relation to the privileged artifact. However, with the passage of time it seems that this strategy of doubling has, in actuality, not only served to create the rift that Krauss has claimed for it, but also a wedding of the two artifacts, particularly in the marketplace.

More recently, some historians and critics have challenged the influence which poststructuralist theory has developed within the discourse on the visual arts, while others have reaffirmed it. In his essay, "Third Wave: Art and the Commodification of Theory", Sylvere Lotringer argues that the initial claim for radical subversion of the mythologies of the modernist canon and their correlative hierarchies within the marketplace has largely led to complicity on the part of several postmodern artists employing strategies of simulation.19 The intellectual historian, Martin Jay has likewise challenged the supposed homogeneity of notions of vision within Western thought as it has been characterized by much of French poststructuralism. In his book Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision In Twentieth Century French Thought, he asserts that the history of Western thought, characterized as ocularcentric in much of twentieth century French thought, is more diverse than many poststructuralist writers have allowed.20 He subsequently attempts to redeem the value of some historical ideas in regards to vision which he feels have been diminished as a result of anti-ocularcentric discourse. In contrast to Jay, historian Donald Preziosi, author of Rethinking Art History, uses the insights and ideological critiques that have emerged from within poststructuralist discourse to analyze and revise the historiography of the discipline of art history. Using the insights of Michel Foucault and others, he examines the philosophical underpinnings of the discipline in order to dismantle its historicist practices and reaffirm a more historically sound methodology. He writes," The point to be made here is that it is necessary to attend to the entire set of processes whereby artifacts used as artworks are produced and reckoned with in the engenderment and sustenance of individual and collective realities (that is ideologies), if we are to (I) see the logocentric and instrumentalist paradigms in a clearer and more enhanced light; (2) reverse the parochialism of focus so endemic in the modern academic discipline; and (3) reconnect the contemporary discipline with its prewar engagement in important philosophical, cognitive, and psychological issues."21 Here he parallels Krauss in his insistence on the foregrounding of methodology in order to lay bare the ideological framework. At another point in Rethinking Art History, Preziosi links the practice of art history with its ideological apparatus. He writes, "All history is perforce a production—a deliberate selection and an evaluation of past events, experiences, and processes. Any museum, in incorporating selections and silences, is an ideological apparatus."22 This seemingly self evident statement parallels the insights of poststructuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault. In fact, Preziosi's words here seem to echo the words of Foucault from his book Discipline and Punish:

Perhaps, too, we should abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests. Perhaps we should abandon the belief that power makes mad and that, by the same token, the renunciation of power is one of the conditions of knowledge. We should admit rather that power produces knowledge . . .that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.23

In applying these insights to the examination of the ideological apparatus of art history, Preziosi writes, "It might be said that one of the primary functions of the art museum in its modern history has been to install the Cartesian self in a hall of mirrors (Albertian vedute) in which that Subject can be re-cognized. Indeed, it might be suggested that the art museum reduces all installable objects to positions of predication in an Albertian subject-predicate frame, wherein the composed object is made to work to reflect the beholder's Subjecthood. It could hardly be otherwise in an institution that situates Caravaggio and Duchamp on perfectly equivalent pedestals."24 In foregrounding the philosophical framework of the discipline, Preziosi makes the contingency of this historicist enterprise self-evident. Much like Krauss' critique of Greenberg's critical system, Preziosi is performing a poststructuralist revision of the history of the discipline itself in order to articulate a clearer understanding of artifactual production through an emphasis on context.

In the application of structuralist and poststructuralist insights to the discipline of art theory and criticism, Rosalind Krauss seems to have anticipated many of the more prevalent issues in the discourse on the visual arts in the last thirty years. Her emphasis on the social structures and mechanisms by which art works communicate meaning as well as her rejection of the Neoplatonic realism of Clement Greenberg, has had a lasting impact on that discourse. Over the course of a long career, spanning numerous influential publications, she has attempted to articulate, as well, the way in which criticism itself works to create and mediate that meaning. This self-conscious enterprise has led to unique and insightful interpretations of iconic works in the history of modern art. Finally, her writing about contemporary artistic production has made a significant contribution to marking the landscape of postmodern theory.

publication date: September 2004