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more than "deconstructed." The model for the field is a structuralist one, as is the activity of the essay: "to reconstruct and 'object' in such a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the 'functions') of this object."28 "The Expanded Field" thus posits a logic of cultural oppositions questioned by poststructuralism - and also, it seems, by postmodernism (at least as articulated by Owens and Crimp). Rather than "map" a "field", Douglas Crimp uncovers "strata" of "pictures". This recalls Barthes, for whom the cultural type or "myth" is a composite of signs, and in fact Crimp notes how these pictures often re-present types in a way that "subverts their mythologies."29 But to Crimp, they do more, as they must really, for, as Barthes later noted, demystification is now mythological too (a "doxa" of its own).30 Not only do they question the "ideological signified", but they also "shake" the sign itself (the picture-underneath-the-picture thus has more to do with Derrida's grammatology: the notion that the sign is always-already articulated by another sign). Such, at least, is the claim. To change the object itself: this, to Craig Owens, is the mandate of postmodernism. To Owens, postmodernist art is contingent: it exists in (or as) a web of references, no necessarily located in any one form, medium or even spot. Thus as the the object is destructured, so is the subject, or viewer, dislocated.31 In this postmodernism, the aesthetic field is more than "logically expanded" - its logic is deconstructed. As noted, the modernist order of the arts was, to Owens, decentered by an "eruption of language": the resultant work (often of a "writing composed of concrete images")32 is "allegorical" in nature.33 Temporal and spatial at once, it dissolves the old order; so too, it opposes the "pure sign" of late modernist art and plays, instead, on the "distance which separates signifier from signified, sign from meaning."34 Whereas the symbol-paradigm of modernism proposes that "the art object itself can be substituted (metaphorically) for its referent", the allegorical impulse of postmodernism may effect a "structural interference of two distinct levels or usages of language, literal and rhetorical (metaphoric), one of which denies precisely what the other affirms."35 FIGURES AND FIELDS Krauss, Crimp and Owens all pose postmodernism as a rupture with the aesthetic order of modernism. And yet the concept of the field remains - even if only as a term to define its own dispersal. That is, postmodernism is seen within a given problematic of representation - in terms of types and codes, rhetorical figures and cultural fields. As a discourse, in a space. Its very "illegibility" is "allegorical," its very schizophrenia is strategic. Is it necessary to think in terms of fields and figures of representation? No doubt: what else is there (but the pragmatics of "Energism" or the vacuity of pluralism?) And yet criticism thereby remains recuperative. As a textual practice, postmodernist art cannot be translated: criticism then, would not be its supplement. But then, what would it be? What does criticism do vis-à-vis art perceived as critical? Does it enter as another code in the text of the art? Or does it initiate the very play of signs that is the text? It is "the failure of contemporary theory", Owens writes, not to "see its own realization in Smithson's practice."36 But have the postmodernist critics interiorized this practice? Do they engage the art as its textual nature would demand? "...as soon as one attempts to show..", Derrida writes, "that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that at that point the field or play of signification knows no limit, then one ought - but this is exactly what one cannot do - to refuse the very concept and word sign."37 But this is exactly what one cannot do - such is the epistemological bind of poststructuralism and postmodernism. To Owens, postmodernism, as a deconstructive enterprise, enfolds a contradiction - namely, "the methodological necessity of preserving as an instrument a concept whose truth value is being questioned."38 As an example, he notes that as "sites" for images, Rauschenberg's "paintings" refer to the very that they contest: the museum.39 Such complicity is a conspiracy, for a convention, form, tradition, etc., is only deconstructed from within. Deconstruction, then is reinscription: there is no "outside" (except in the positivist sense of "outside the mediums" - transgression that reasserts the limit). Which is to say, there is no way not to be in a field of cultural terms, for these terms (e.g. the museum) inform us presumptively. [[image]] Donald Judd, Untitled, 1966/68, stainless steel and plexiglass, six 86 cm cubes (originally four units; two added in 1968), collection Milwaukee Art Center Much postmodernist art, then, is referential, yet it refers only "to problematize the activity of reference."40 For example, Crimp and Owens stress art that "steals" types and even actual images, an "appropriation" that is seen as critical - both of a culture in which images are commodities and of an aesthetic practice that holds (nostalgically) to an art of originality. And yet, can a critique be articulated within the very forms under critique? Again, yes: how else could it be articulated? (such a critique cannot hope, however, to displace these forms: at best, it indicts them as "given" or "natural" and stresses the need to think and represent otherwise.) Another question is not so obvious: are the given mediums not mediated? That is to say, is a medium such as painting given as static and neutral, or is it in fact re-formed, re-represented, in and by the very forms that it mediates? POSTMODERNISM Appropriation, textuality... these tactics seem to preclude mediums whose logic is based on authenticity and originality. Painting in particular is problematic to the postmodernist critics, and even photography is seen to hold a vestige of aura - an aura that is elaborated or expunged (in oddly "pure" fashion?) by many artists today. (Indeed, a certain aura or even cult of inauthenticity is active today: the purloined image is now almost the law.) Moreover, to these critics the value of art as expression, as craft, etc., is complicitous with a dated ideology and even political economy.41 To think of art and artists in these terms can only mystify. Today there is, of course, a resurgence in painting, not only a revival of old modes as if they were new, but also a retreat to old values as if they were necessary. Much of it is regressive - or rather, defensive. In the midst of a society suffused with "information", many seem to regard painting - its specificity - as critical. The old avatars (creative artists, authentic art) are returned, precisely because they are untimely, as forces to resist complete mediation (which is to say, complete absorption in the consumerist program of mass media). Such a position, a nostalgic one, would regard postmodernism as complicitous with, not critical of, the media forms that engulf us.42 To a different degree, both these positions simplify. That is, they both seem to imply that art mediums as representations or institutions are somehow apart from other representations or institutions, and so unable to engage them in any critique.43 In the postmodernist critics, this is seen in a tendency to reduce painting to "pure" painting, now regarded as reified and, in 13
