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at once posits and reveals human consciousness as sovereign). Discontinuity is resisted, as is any decentering (whether of class, family or language). In art, of course, historicism's subject is the artist and historicism's space is the museum - history is presented as a narrative, continuous, homogenous and anthropocentric, of great men and master works. MODERNISM'S POSTMODERNISM Purity as an end and decorum as an effect; historicism as an operation and the museum as the context; the artist as original and the art work as unique - these are the terms which modernism privileges and against which postmodernism is articulated. To postmodernism is articulated. To postmodernism, they inform a practice now exhausted, whose conventionality can no longer be inflected. Pledged to purity, the mediums have reified - hence, postmodernist [[image]] Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, 1930, oil on canvas, 48 x 48 cm art exists between, across or outside them, or in new or neglected mediums (like video or photography). Historicized by the museum commodified by the gallery, the art object is neutralized - hence, postmodernist art first occurred in alternative spaces and/or in many forms. As the place of art is re-formed, so too is the role of the artist, and the values that heretofore authenticated art are questioned. In short, the cultural field is transformed, aesthetic signification opened up. The field transformed is the first condition of postmodernism. In "Sculpture in the Expanded Field", Rosalind Krauss details how modern sculpture entered a condition of "pure negativity: the combination of exclusions... (it) was now the category that resulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture."11 These terms, she notes, are simply the terms "architecture" and "landscape"; set with the others, they form a "quartenary field which both mirrors the original opposition and opens it."12 It is in this "logically expanded field", suspended between these terms, that the postmodernist forms - "site-construction," "axiomatic structures" and "marked sites" - exist with sculpture. To Krauss, they break with modernist practice, and so cannot be thought of in terms of historicism. Here, art-historical context will not suffice as meaning, for postmodernism is articulated not within the mediums but in relation to cultural terms. These forms are conceived logically, not derived historically, and so must be regarded in terms of structure. To be seen as such, postmodernism must posit a break; this one, with the mediums and with historicism, is crucial - it seals modernism and opens the cultural space of postmodernism. Crimp and Owens also posit a rupture, though, focussed on other artists, they detail its advent somewhat differently. If, for Krauss, the signal is an expanded field, for Crimp it is a return of "theater" (tabooed by late modernism), and for Owens an "eruption of language" (also "repressed") and, more importantly, a new postmodernist impulse, "allegorical" or deconstructive in nature. Again, these critics first pose postmodernism against late modernism, whose classic text is seen as the essay "Art and Objecthood" by Michael Fried.13 Therein, Fried objects to the implicit "theater" of minimalist sculpture: "art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater", runs the often-quoted line, with "theater" defined as "what lies between the arts." To Crimp, this intuition signals modernism's demise: the important work of the '70s, he notes, exists precisely between the arts; moreover, such work - especially video and performance - exploits the very "theater" (or "preoccupation with time - more precisely, with the duration of experience") that Fried deemed degenerate. In effect, minimalism's implicit "theater" became postmodernism's explicit "theater." Extrapolated, much contemporary art can be derived, or so Crimp writes in the essay "Pictures": If many of these artists can be said to have been apprenticed in the field of performance as it issued from minimalism, they have nevertheless begun to reverse its priorities, making of the literal situation and duration of the performed event a tableau whose presence and temporality are utterly psychologized; performance becomes just one of a number of ways of "staging" a picture.14 Owens also cites the Fried dictum as late modernist law, which he relates, as a "belief in the absolute difference of verbal and visual art", to the Neo-Classical order (i.e. the temporal arts, poetry, etc,. over the spatial arts, painting, etc).15 Such a hierarchy, Owens writes, is based on a "linguistic criterion," one which the modernist visual arts repressed. The emergence of time, intuited by Fried, is then marked by an "emergence of discourse": …the eruption of language into the aesthetic field - an eruption signalled by, but by no means limited to, the writings of Smithson, Morris, Andre, Judd, Flavin, Rainer, LeWitt - is coincident with, if not the definitive index of, the emergence of postmodernism. This "catastrophe" disrupted the stability of a modernist partitioning of the aesthetic field into discrete areas of specific competence; one of its most deeply felt shocks dislodged literary activity from enclaves into which it had settled only to stagnate - poetry, the novel, the essay... - and dispersed it across the entire spectrum of aesthetic activity.16 Owens regards much of the work that ensued (e.g. conceptual, story, even site-specific art) as textual 17; here he quotes Barthes: "a text is not a line of words releasing a single "theological" meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God), but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash."18 Such "textuality" is a poststructuralist notion, based on the idea that the sign is not stable, i.e. that it does not enclose one signifier and signified as such. Similarly, the postmodernist work is seen less as a "book" sealed by one original author and final meaning than as a "text" read as a polysemous tissue of codes. So, as Barthes writes of "the death of the author", the postmodernists infer "the death of the artist" (and hence, the death of the subject) at least as originator of unique meaning. POSTS To an extent, the postmodernist line retraces the poststructuralist line. 19 Both reflect upon a culture that is utterly coded. 20 "...within the situation of postmodernism", Krauss writes, "practice is not defined in relation to a given medium - sculpture - but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium - photography, books, lines on walls, or sculpture itself - might be used." 21 In effect, the postmodernist manipulates old signs in a new logic: he or she is a rhetorician who transforms rhetoric (even the mediums are often readymades to be reinscribed). To Crimp, the postmodernist is concerned not with modernist autonomy but with "strata of representation" - "we are not in search of origins", he writes, "but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture."22 In such "pictures", modes (e.g. performance) may be transposed, signs or types collided, so that aesthetic limits are transgressed as cultural codes are opened up. Crimp cites these tactics: "quotation excerptation, framing and staging."23 To Owens, not only are mediums collided, but levels of representation and reading are too: an "allegorical impulse" deconstructs the symbol-paradigm of modernism. "Appropriation, site-specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, hybridization - these diverse strategies characterize much of the art of the present and distinguish it from its modernist predecessors." 24 Much minimal art is based on a given form or public sign. Of the star and cross paintings of Frank Stella, Krauss once wrote, "The logic of the deductive structure is shown... to be inseparable from the logic of the sign." 25 This is not the case with much postmodernist art: the sign's stability, the medium's code, are rendered problematic. 26 For example, the expanded field is "generated by problematizing the set of oppositions between which the modernist category sculpture is suspended." 27 Signification is thus opened: the work is freed of the term "sculpture"… but only to be bound by other terms, "landscape," "architecture," etc. Though no longer defined in one code, practice remains within a field. Decentered, it is recentered: the field is (precisely) "expanded," 12
