I don't care about history, 'cause that's not where I wanna be

Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks

Last week, Artnet published a revised version of a talk by Donald Kuspit from the International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory that happened in Mexico back in January. I had some problems with it and said so, and then took a cheap shot at the author. As I promised to give the piece more consideration, I’m going to do so here, especially since Jerry Saltz’s new column reminded me of some of what I was thinking.

I’ll start by saying once again that Kuspit makes a lot of good points and there are many areas in which I completely agree with him. I won’t disagree with his argument regarding what might be called critical triumphalism, as when he writes “prematurely declaring an art historically and thus permanently important – as though its media reception was the arbiter of its importance and meaningfulness – deadens it by displacing it into a remote future.” None of us know what the future may bring and it’s hubris to think we can determine what later generations will find important in the art of today. More than that, he’s right to say that certain ways of doing history can have a distorting effect, elevating individuals out of context in a way that falsifies the record. I’ll leave it to others to discuss the justice of the presentation, or lack thereof, of Hans Breder’s role in the work of Ana Medieta at the Whitney, which Kuspit examines. But his broader point is well taken, and, I think, rather standard these days.

But Kuspit goes way beyond these types of complaints.  Most annoying to me is the tendentious antithesis he insists on maintaining between “history” and the “contemporary.” To oppose the terms might seem common sense, though one could point out that histories of the present have been written since Thucydides contemplated the Peloponnesian War. But let’s turn to some examples. From the first paragraph: "It has become excruciatingly difficult and even impossible to write a history of contemporary art -- a history that will do justice to all the art that is considered contemporary: that is the lesson of postmodernism." Or this entire paragraph:

There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading. Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative. In postmodernity that is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary. If every piece of art is contemporary, no one piece can be valued more highly than any other, except from a certain psychosocial perspective. But every perspective turns out to be procrustean because it shuts out art that contradicts its premises.

At the end of the article, Kuspit gives his own idea of how history can be done, implicitly acknowledging that these strained denials of its possibility are not meant to be taken at face value. But from the outset, my reaction is a combination of “so what?” and “no way.” After all, it’s not just the “radically contemporary that can never be delimited by any single historical reading”, nothing can. Kuspit regards it as an indictment of his straw man that it can’t account for absolutely everything; but if one stops to think for even a moment, one realizes that this is always the case for any attempt at understanding. To write a history is to select; we always know that what results is, even at the level of a Gibbon, partial and to some degree caught within its own moment. But that in itself does not render it incapable of offering its own sort of knowledge.

Kuspit speaks of “the judgment of history” as if we should be happy to be rid of it. Forget for a moment that virtually no historical interpretation exists that is not vigorous contested within an interpretive community. Consider rather that judgment is a faculty that we all possess, and we are ourselves creatures of history. It’s understandable to react against the combination of wealth and power that passes for judgment in the art world – and here Saltz’s laments are especially to the point. But given a broader culture that, to my mind, far too often slights history and judgment, I find Kuspit’s approach not only grating but destructive. He has an idea of certain practices he wishes to oppose, and with good reason; but to do so, he finds it necessary to denigrate fundamental aspects of our being. It’s true that money and power seek to usurp the name of history. When has it ever been otherwise? Judgment doesn’t doom us to this state of affairs, it can help rescue us from it. This is the knowledge that Hannah Arendt found in the old Roman’s words: “The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato."

In some ways this isn’t too far from where Kuspit ends up, without his posturing (but, I suppose, with mine.) I'd like to note one last point. Kuspit finds the possibility for a history of art and its continuing generative power in what he calls the work’s capacity for offering “affective-communicational-educational experience”, which is to say, its interest as an object of criticism. Now, criticism can come in all kinds of ways. But what seems to me to be missing from his formulation is a sort of criticism that he makes only fleeting mention of within the article: that which surfaces in other art. We may not be able to know what the future will find of interest in the art of our time; but it will be in large measure determined by that to which artists, and not critics, respond.