ON CLEMENT GREENBERG

 DURATION AND THE DIALECTIC OF MODERNISM IN CLEMENT GREENBERG’S CRITICAL PRACTICE

Project Proposal for the Getty Research Institute (circa 1990)

 by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Using the rich collection of Clement Greenberg’s papers in the Getty Institute, I would like to examine the notion of duration in Greenberg’s art criticism. From the corpus of Greenberg’s literary criticism, one may extrapolate a concept of duration and historicism that may qualify the perceived technical aestheticism of his critical practice. I would like to explore this unappreciated aspect of Greenberg’s achievement in the context of the Institute’s theme of “duration.”

By consensus, Greenberg is considered the critic most responsible for formulating the principles of modernist art in the United States. One of the key documents that established Greenberg’s moral and ideological vantage-point is the 1939 essay, “Avant-garde and Kitsch.”  While avantgarde art embodies the drive toward originality and resourcefulness, for Greenberg, kitsch is “the epitome of all that is spurious” in our time (1961, 10).What distinguishes kitsch from avantgarde is that the latter “imitates the processes of art,” while the former “imitates its effects.” In other words,  the interaction between viewer and avantgarde art requires a duration of “reflection upon the immediate impression left by the plastic values,” whereas, for kitsch, there is no such process because “the reflected effect has already been included in the picture.” No temporal distancing occurs; the awareness of time is repressed because kitsch “predigests art for the spectator.”

Greenberg’s focus on ”art’s area of competence” is thus not a static or ahistorical prejudice. As Charles Harrison puts it, Greenberg stresses art’s “intentional and self-critical preoccupation with the demands of a specific medium, and its originality with regard to the precedents that medium avails” (1996, 146-47). Greenberg locates the temporality of modernist art in the class-divisions of our time which underlie the vicissitudes of taste. Greenberg’s intuition of time, in particular the duration of styles, demonstrates a sharpened awareness of the dialectical tension between an established norm and divergences from it. This is evidenced by his view of method as implicitly contingent on social and historical  determinants: for example, collage as practiced by Braque and Picasso underwent mutations in their conflation of surface and background in pictorial space. Ultimately, the use of any method depends on the fundamental question of choosing between representation and illusion, a choice that is ultimately “a question of a vision and an attitude” (1961, 83).

 It is in Greenberg’s essay on “The Plight of Culture,” published in 1953, that we see the antithesis of autonomous aesthetic value and illustrative content (realist or referential topics or themes) rearticulated in the antithesis between leisure and work. Greenberg reflects on a time when work and culture can again be “fused in a single functional complex” as in archaic societies—a utopian vision that Greenberg registers in valuing the experience of “quality” and the emergence of a new style in post World War II American artists. 

Greenberg’s essays on literature exhibit provocative insights that transcend the rigorous rationality of his analysis of painting. His essays on Bertolt Brecht and Franz Kafka are, in my opinion, judicious and extraordinarily penetrating: they situate discourse not only in the sociopolitical and cultural contexts but also in the problematique of the genres and literary conventions that explain the necessity of their innovations. Greenberg discerns several tempos of duration in Brecht’s poetry (the momentary, the epic, the anecdotal, the ironic), while in Kafka’s enigmatic fables, he apprehends the duration of Jewishness as ”in-dwelling form.” Both writers, in Greenberg’s appraisal, dramatize a modernist intuition of duration as a topology of instances where subjectivity is created and performed as a response to the exigencies of ethnic/class predicament and individual life-circumstance.

    What I find challenging as a topic of research for me as a scholar of cultural studies is Greenberg’s theorizing of the dialectics of tradition and innovation. By examining Greenberg’s unpublished papers during my year at the Institute, I intend to elucidate the contours of this dialectic insofar as it will show the historical matrix of Greenberg’s seemingly reified notion of art as technical innovation or quality that moves spectators.

       As a prologue, I offer as exemplary touchstones two passages where Greenberg reveals submerged texts of determinate temporality subtending his judgment of taste. One is his remark on the “western” genealogy of black/white pictures. It appears that the duration of an art-work hinges on the persistence of certain cultural values specific to society; this persistence is open to alteration relative to the position of the creative agent or sensibility. Greenberg subsumes cultural difference in the multiplicity of conventions in this passage where he responds to the speculation about the origin of the black/white callligraphy of Pollock and Franz Kline: 

…the new emphasis on black and white has to do with something that is perhaps more crucial to Western painting than to any other kind. Value contrast, the opposition of the lightness and darkness of colors, has been Western  pictorial art’s chief means, far more important than perspective, to that convincing illlusion of three-dimensionality which distinguishes it most from other traditions of pictorial art (1961, 220-21). 

Here a comparative study of differing traditions with diverse temporalities is called for, precisely the opening for the play of “extrinsic” forces.

The second passage I would like to take as a thematic focus for my inquiry into Greenberg’s occluded historicism—duration as a succession of normative convention and its deviations—is the hitherto neglected lecture he gave in 1970 on “Counter-Avantgarde.” In prescient glosses on the Futurists and Marcel Duchamp, Greenberg anticipates the moment of postmodernism when he bewails the standardization of newness, innovation, and originality: avantgardism fetishized “the startling as sheer phenomenon or sheer occurrence” (1973, 435). But genuine avantgarde art springs from a dialectic of expectation and satisfaction, a syncopation of the enduring and ephemeral: 

Superior art comes, almost always, out of a tradition…and a tradition is created by the interplay of expectation and satisfaction through surprise as this interplay operates not only within individual works of art, but between them. Taste develops as a context of expectations based on experience of previously surprised expectations…. To repeat: surprise demands a context. According to the record, new and surprising ways of satisfying in art have always been connected closely with immediately previous ways, no matter how much in opposition to these ways they may look or actually have been… The classic avantgarde’s emphasis on “purity” of medium is a time-bound one and no more binding on art than any other timebound emphasis….(1973, 440-41). 

Within the thematic framework of “Duration,” I want to investigate Greenberg’s theorizing of duration in the shift of tastes and conventions in the history of Western art. Greenberg has been charged (by Victor Burgin [1986], among others) as mistakenly collapsing “the project of art into art criticism,” hence the dogmatic narrowness of his strictures and formalist criteria. But an alternative reading is possible. I believe that Greenberg’s work involves a more complex understanding of the experience of time and duration, what Micheline Sauvage calls the “superposition of temporal modes,” than what appears in his concern with technical and methodological problems of the medium in the visual arts. It is unquestionable to me that Greenberg’s literary criticism clearly demonstrates a highly nuanced and discriminating conception of culture as a dense sociohistorical field, a site of contestation and struggles among diverse political and ideological forces and agencies (see Bourdieu). During my Getty scholarship, I intend to substantiate this thesis by utilitizing the holdings of the Research Library and the resources of other scholars in the Institute. It will be for me, and hopefully for others, an exciting time of intellectual conversation and reflection.

REFERENCES

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993.  The Field of Cultural Production.  New York: Columbia University Press.

Burgin, Victor.  1986.  The End of Art Theory. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

Greenberg, Clement.  1961. Art and Culture.  Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

-----.  1973.  “Counter-Avant-Garde.”  In A Modern Book of Esthetics, ed. Melvin Rader.  New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Harrison, Charles.  1996.  “Modernism.”  In Critical Terms for Art History,” ed. Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff.  Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Sauvage, Micheline. 1961. “Notes on the Superposition of Temporal Modes in the Works of Art.” In Reflections on Art, ed. Susanne K. Langer.  New York: Oxford University Press.