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Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World
Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World
Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World
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Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World

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Cold War Expressionism is an expose of the art world after World War II where a new triumphalism and a growing conservatism on the part of the US helped bring to power a depoliticized art which went under the rubric of Abstract Expressionism and which functioned as an advertisement for American capitalism while erasing the social impulses of prior European Modernisms and the American Social Expressionists of the 1930s and mid-1940s. This book details how more socially aware forms of both creating and distributing art were erased in the McCarthyite moment after the war, the beginning of the flourishing of the modern privatized gallery system which has now led to the art world becoming a site of speculation to rival that of real estate as art becomes one more item on the commodities market. The career of Mark Rothko is discussed as emblematic of an artist caught in this quandary, one who both resisted and succumbed to the corporatization of his art.
The book also discusses the largely ignored blacklist in the art world, where the Abstract Expressionist line became utterly rigid in its exclusion of social content from art while being policed by the New York Critics. The Social Expressionists of the Thirties and Forties often could no longer find work in the new corporatized atmosphere while the Abstract Expressionist work hung in the offices of this new globalized elite. The second part of the book details the forced exile of many of the socially conscious artists of the thirties whose art had threatened in its distribution and its content to become a genuine people’s art. Alice Neel’s fleeing of the downtown art scene and her relocation in Spanish Harlem is accented, as is Jacob Lawrence’s exile in an asylum in the darkest days of the Cold War, as well as Ben Shaun’s loss of critical perception as he became more and more the poster artist for American freedom.
Finally, the book takes up the history of a movement which challenged American dominance after the war but which was the subject of an American blockade in Europe to keep it from truly subverting the American form, that of the Mexican Muralists. Muralist art and distribution is first traced in its historical relation to the Mexican Revolution and then recounted in its moment of triumph at a postwar Venice Biennale where the work of Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros challenged the dominance of the elite, depoliticized American form, only to be the subject of a US State Department campaign against this popular form as it subsequently toured Europe. The book details the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros in the Mexico of the 1950s as he incorporated techniques and forms of abstraction while remaining true to a politically committed people’s art, founded not only on Mexican indigenous forms but also always open to modernist influences including that of the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein.
The book concludes with a description of the contemporary art market and an outlining of the role of the Abstract Expressionist period in shaping that market. It also suggests alternative modes of art outside of the market that counter the elite, formalist tradition and that are today in the forefront of representation while also commenting on and inserting themselves into contemporary struggles on such issues as immigration and climate change.

LanguageEnglish
Publisherdennis broe
Release dateJan 17, 2015
ISBN9781507070406
Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception/Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World

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    Cold War Expressionism - dennis broe

    Cover, Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception

    —Contents—


    Preface

    Introduction:

    Class Struggle and Blacklisting in the Postwar Art World

    Rewriting Art History: To the Victors . . .

    • The Problematic Return of a Prodigal Reality

    Adorno vs. Adorno: Who Gets Custody of the Kids?

    Craving the Bookish Life

    Chapter 1

    Pax Expressionisme: Imperial Art for a New Imperium

    Anyone for a can of Empire Lite?

    • Was Paris Burning?

    How I Learned to Stop Worrying about the Bomb and Start Loving the Incoming Revenue Stream: Abstract Expressionism and the Market

    • Mummy’s Museum

    • For Sale, Art Theory

    The Anti-Social History of Art: Aesthetic Theory and Domination

    • The Opiate of the Elite: Marxism Minus the Masses

    Chapter 2

    Mark Rothko: Forging an Elitist Aesthetics

    Rothko’s Journey: Movin’ On Up and Love/Hatin’ It

    The 1930s: Social Realist Abstraction

    Myth and Global War: Greeks and G.I.s

    The Multiforms: Capital and Abstraction

    Classical Abstraction and the Institution of Empire

    • Shape (ing the Postwar World)

    • Color (Me Triumphant)

    • Size (Matters)

    Oh That This Too Too Solid Flesh Would Melt: The Period of Repudiation

    • The Painting’s the Thing in Which to Catch the Conscience of the King

    Last Act: Bounded by a Nutshell yet Abstract King of Infinite Space

    Chapter 3

    A Cold Wind This Way Blows: Rooting Out Representation, Silencing the Social, Forcing the Activist Artist into Flight

    If It Walks Like a Blacklist, Talks Like a Blacklist and Quacks Like a Blacklist, It Might be a Blacklist: Economic and Political Effects of Cold War Censorship

    • United We Stand, Divided We Testify

    • Government Intervention: From Kindly Uncle to Big Brother

    • Art as Asset Backed Security: Transforming the Market and Eliminating the Social

    The Snakes Are Loose: Emotional and Aesthetic Effects of the Repression

    Cold War Aesthetics: Making Many Modernisms One Modernism

    • Political Modernism: Not Your Father’s (Or Mother’s) Social or Socialist Realism

    • Popular Modernism: How Artists Learned to Stop Loving and Start Biting the Hand that Feeds Them

    • Social Expressionism: Weimar on the Hudson

    The Wall’s the Thing on Which to Catch the Conscience of the King

    • Coda: The Walls Have Eyes

    Chapter 4

    Three On a Match: Alice Neel, Jacob Lawrence, Ben Shahn in Exile, Asylum and Memoriam

    Alice Neel: Poet in Exile of a New Working Class

    • Cold War Social Expressionism

    • There is a Rose in Spanish Harlem

    • Coda: Neel in the Sixties and Seventies: Mapping the Market

    Jacob Lawrence and the Cold War: The Shock of the New Written on the Body

    Ben Shahn and the Cold War: Out of the Trenches and into the Mausoleum

    • The Turn to Abstraction

    Chapter 5

    The Mexican Muralists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico: The Trials and Tribulations of Abstract Expressionism’s Evil Twin

    Revolutionary Muralists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico

    • Art for the Masses vs. Art for the Money: The Triumph of the People over the Market

    • Mode of Production: How the Art was Made (And the Mexican West Was Won)

    • Collective Funding for Collective Art

    • Mode of Exhibition: Collectivizing the Politics of Perception

    • Mode of Distribution: Collective Diffusion of a Collective Art

    The Eagle Could Sometimes Be A Vulture: Mexican Muralism’s Challenge to US Aesthetic Hegemony within Modernism

    • Mexican McCarthyism: Siqueiros as a One-Man Hollywood Ten

    Dueling Biennales: The Cold War in Venice in the 1950s

    Chapter 6

    The Last Muralist: Siqueiros, Political Modernism, and the Cold War

    Political and Aesthetic Experimentation: Storming Mexico City and the Winter Palace with Pancho Villa and Sergei Eisenstein

    Back to the Future: History As (And Against) Myth

    Men, Women and Machines: Muralism and a Rapidly Modernizing Mexico

    Last Monumentalism: Reviving the Revolution and Toasting the Tourists

    • Postmodern Postscript at the Polyforum: Come One, Come All to the Global Tourist Spectacle

    Conclusion

    Andy Warhol/Paris Hilton, Separated At Birth?

    The Legacy of the Abstract Expressionist Triumph: Making the Art World Safe for Commodification vs. The Anarchist, Alter Globaliste, Anti-Neo-Colonial Challenge To Elite Art

    Art Marked to the Market: The Legacy of Expressionist Commodification

    Alternate Modernisms: The Legacy of Protest

    Bibliography

    Illustrations

    Endnotes

    COLD WAR EXPRESSIONISM: PERVERTING THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION

    Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades in the Postwar Art World

    Copyright © 2014, Dennis Broe

    All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied by any means without the express, written permission of the author.

    PATHMARK PRESS

    Ebook/Cover Design: JW Manus

    Cover Image: Untitled (No. 10), Mark Rothko, 1952–3. Courtesy of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa.

    Cold War Expressionism:

    Perverting the Politics of Perception

    Bombast, Blacklists and Blockades

    in the Postwar Art World

    Dennis Broe

    The Triumph of Peace Over Destruction. David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1971

    The Triumph of Peace Over Destruction. David Alfaro Siqueiros, 1971

    —Dedication—

    Although in ways this book may be, at least in moments, a refutation of the thought of the two people I am dedicating it to, it could never have been done without their intellectual inspiration and guidance. To Annette Michelson who introduced me to Adorno and to critical thinking and who never fails to dazzle with both her knowledge of the field of aesthetics and her brilliant formulation of the right concept at the right time. To Michael Pelias who, as he has done with so many others, took me under his intellectual wing and in his patient but prodding dialectical manner informally and gently guided me through the history of intellectual thought and then supported me when I took that knowledge and flew on my own and in my own direction. I owe both of you a debt that can only be repaid through my own passing on of your invaluable transmission of both the form and content of intellectual argument.

    —Acknowledgments—


    There are many people responsible for this book, that is, for the process that brought me to and sustained me in writing it. The errors, lapses of judgment, and insufficiently clear formulations are, however, all mine.

    For encouraging me in art and art criticism: Robert Buck, for his very important contribution in validating my ability to think and write about art, for being a patient teacher, and for an exhilarating trip to Amsterdam; Giselle Chaboudez, a wonderful companion in viewing art both in Paris and at the Venice Biennale; Bob Spiegelman, for his consistent and firm support for both the actual writing and for the intellectual development of this project and for his warm and invigorating companionship in the trip to Kassel for Documenta 11; Bernard White and Ralph Engelman for giving me an opportunity to do art criticism on the air on New York’s wonderful beacon of what is still truly public radio, WBAI; Stan Brent for his warm accompaniment to galleries and his knowledge of the New York art scene; and, always, to Liz Ortof for all those Sunday afternoons at the Met endlessly tolerating my opinions on the latest exhibit and always offering her own encouragement and stimulating rejoinders.

    For help in the actual research of this book: Dean Cohen at Long Island University who graciously supported my trip to the Esposizione in Rome to see the Mark Rothko career retrospective and then again supported a trip to London where I saw the recreation of Rothko’s Seagram’s Room at the Tate Modern and who has always had a kind and supportive word to say about my scholarship; Liz Martinez and Norma and Alejandro Herrera for making me welcome in Mexico City and giving me a cultural and political lay of the land; Stuart Fischelson, Larry Banks and Maureen Nappi from LIU’s Department of Media Arts who have continued to inquire about this project with great interest and who have never failed to offer kind words and to respond enthusiastically to my recounting my work. Also thanks to the Art Department and LIU’s stalwart Cynthia Dantzig who has shepherded many of her own books to completion and who responded immediately in the same vein to mine; and to Clair Goodman for her constant enthusiasm and students too numerous to mention but who include Ryan Dilts, Frank Zagottis, and Ken Cohen.

    Fellow writers who have been supportive and crucial to the process include: Jerry Mundis, who after the first book helped me to believe that many books were possible and then showed me how to accomplish that; Judith Chusid and David Rosen, two wonderful partners in writing; Terri Ginsberg, an outstanding editor and a writing and political collaborator; Paul Grant, Dom Dombrowsky, David Legowski, and Mark Zuss whose conversation on politics and arts was always stimulating; and, finally, to Larry, Pat and Dan for showing me how they dealt with the process of writing day in and day out.

    Intellectual encouragement also came from Stanley Aronowitz, Peter Bratsis and the Situations Collective; and, in Paris, from John O’Brien who never failed to shed light on the global situation and who contextualizes it brilliantly; and Ying Ying Wu, Jay Stephens and James Anderson for their encouragement and insight in viewing and responding to Mexican Murals.

    For helping to sustain my emotional and spiritual fitness during the project, I must thank first and foremost Ed Levy, a great friend, fellow writer and bulwark without whom this work would never have appeared; Linda Provenza for being there and for her interest in Alice Neel; John Carrigan and Liz Ryan for their gentle prodding in keeping me going; Mark Margolius and Rich Kealing for their consistent calm and mental serenity in the midst of some self-generated storms; Colleen Brady, Rich Hershenson, and all the folks at Roosevelt, at the Center in New York and the Cathedral in Paris, three places where I found serenity. To Peter, Dean, Janice and Lynn and all those from my practice who helped me face the adversity that comes up in a writing project and to grow through overcoming the challenge. Finally, to my parents and siblings who offered a kind ear whenever in my journeys I would need to hear the comfort of home.

    PREFACE

    Art in a Post-racial, Post-industrial,

    Post-theoretical Society

    Or

    Why Can’t We All Just Get Along to the Market?


    In the age of Obama, where cooperation is the keyword and cooptation is a dead word, the commodification of the art world proceeds a pace with that of all other spheres of activity. The use value of the art object, that is, its actual meaning, now being only a flag that signals its approaching worth as exchange value on the auction block This re-valuing of the art object in terms now, almost solely, of its market appropriation did not begin in this era though or even at the onset of the Reagan-Thatcherite neo-liberalism that Obama seems so keen to cave into in the wake of the worst structural collapse and most pointed financial corruption since the Great Depression. It began in the post-war era with the rise of Abstract Expressionism, an approach to art which proved readily commodifiable. This current frightening forgetting of the past, where a near economic collapse can two years later be extinguished by the flimsy evidence of a jobless recovery for the very rich, likewise compels us to remember those moments in the 1930s and 1940s when art, the US, and the global economy as a whole were in flux. This was a moment when the formally progressive currents in modernist art were also imbued with the socially progressive spirit of a world where artists were part of a general campaign for equality and where the traces of that campaign and the critique of a society which rejected that tenet in its own construction were part and parcel of their work.

    This book traces how and why that tendency was struck from modernist art, how the Abstract Expressionist triumph meant also the elimination and virtual blacklisting of the social strain of a politically committed modernism which we will call Social Expressionism, since even the name it appears under in the art world, Social Realism, so perilously close to Soviet Socialist Realism, brands it as regressive. The victory of Abstract Expressionism at the onset of the Cold War when the US was the most powerful country in the world, a victory sanctioned and promoted by the forerunners of today’s global business elite, the Cold War corporate liberals, attempted in its wake to rewrite all art history and see itself as the culminating moment in that history, a move that is, as Edward Said notes, a typical one in any imperial ideology. This repression, instituted during the time of McCarthyism, claiming to be the ultimate moment of modernism, devastated two alternate currents in modernist art, the Social Expressionists in the US of the 1930s and 1940s who were exiled and abandoned and the Mexican Muralists who at the Venice Biennale in 1950, posed an alternative to the American Style that might shine as a beacon of resistance to subjugated peoples but who were equally shunned after that triumph.

    This victory was also concurrent with a movement in the art world from more collective means of engagement involving public funding, union support, and mass involvement with art to the return to a more privatized elite art world and the boom in the selling of art and first phase of the financialization of the American art market. This readying of art for the market by an utter dilution of its social content, that is, the triumph of Abstract Expressionism, has continued to exact a heavy toll on the contemporary global terrain in terms of the increasing surrender of art to the dictates of a market that behaves in its cycle of boom and bust much like the housing or dot.com markets, and, in the continued warding off in the mediatized art world of the West of social content and activism as primitive and regressive. That this interdiction is often (perversely) maintained and supported by what constitutes the left in the art world is either an oddity of the splintering of that left in the Cold War itself and/or the mark of the utter absorption of this aspect of the Western Left into the global corporate mainstream.

    Nevertheless in this Obamanable age, in which the planet has never faced such devastation and while the income gap continues each day to widen not just in what was the Third World but now through the attack on pensions, health care, and wages in the West as well, other forms of art have appeared to counter the high modernism of the Cold War in which individualism and freedom meant an art that, though bounded by a nut shell considered itself king of infinite space. But we must look outside this continually extended empire or in its nooks and crannies for this other art, in places like the Comic Book Art of the Collective at World War III, in the Austrian anarchist group PublixTheatreCaravan, and in the global work assembled and contextualized by Okwui Enwezor at Documenta 11, to find an art where hope resides. Here we may find an impulse where the expression, albeit dialectical, of the world’s grief leads to a rallying for change rather than, as is the case of art following from the Abstract Expressionist moment, a world where despair masquerades as the only possible hope.

    INTRODUCTION:

    Class Struggle and Blacklisting in the Postwar Art World


    Holmes: I call your attention, Watson, to the strange case of the hound, baying on the moor.

    Watson: But Holmes, there was no hound baying on the moor.

    Holmes: That, my dear Watson, is what is so strange about it.

    From The Hound of the Baskervilles

    The first response to any suggestion that there might have been a blacklist in the art world, might very well be, paraphrasing Watson, Huh? for there is not much trace of any kind of an organized blacklist. The argument here though is that this lack of a trace may be an indicator not of the non-existence of the phenomenon but of the fact that its success was so complete that, like the hound, even its trail was extinguished.

    Indeed the art world was presented as a case of the triumph of democracy, as Abstract Expressionism, whose roots after all were tied to left wing, even Trotskyite critics, epitomized all that was good about the rule of American freedom. It was an art form, indeed the final art form, where art, on the one hand, was at last unbound from politics to embrace pure formal speculation, and on the other hand, could still be, in the last instance, political, in the way that, as Adorno notes, by turning its back on politics could, in a much more profound sense, give an indication of the nature of commodity production under capitalism.

    But herein lay the problem. Abstract Expressionism was promoted by the State Department as the official art of the Pax Americana, of the developing empire, of the free world. Its freedom from figurative art was also an injunction to in no way take up politics directly. In the wake of its triumph a whole wave of Popular Front artists from the Depression and the New Deal were forced to go underground, not blacklisted expressly, but told by galleries that their work was no longer valued. In a sense the doctrinaire channeling of all art into a single form of sanctioned representation worked more effectively than a formal blacklist to rid the art world of expressly political artists and works. (To say nothing of the fact that, like Socialist Realism in the Soviet Block, Abstract Expressionism, what Nelson Rockefeller termed free enterprise painting (Saunders 258) had its own rigid rules of conformity and its own czar in the doctrinaire Clement Greenberg who made earlier art movement gurus like Surrealism’s Andre Breton seem the epitome of pluralism.) In addition, this sanctioning was in a way more far-reaching than, for example, the blacklist in Hollywood, since art history was rewritten in light of this triumphalism and the entire history was then seen as culminating in art finally freeing itself of figurative representation. Abstract Expressionism was, to pre-invoke Fukayama, the end of art history.[1]

    Though no artists went to jail, the moment was similar to the blacklist in the film industry in that it struck at the earning capacity of the Popular Front artists, though it was much more subtle in that this less formal blacklist did not seem to be restricting what the artists could say. It was merely following the dictates of the critics, and art world fashion as a whole, not forbidding political work, but simply representing a consensus within that world that did not outlaw, just merely did not sanction, overtly political art. Yet the strictures were just as effective as an overt blacklist in banning political representation, and at a time when the idea of empire and empire building was in desperate need of debate. In addition, the claim that fashion was simply dictating the current mode of representation, i.e. that of abstraction, came at a time when for the first time fashion was the market, that is, when artists for the first time were thrown upon an art market without government subsidy, a market that was largely made up of corporate consumers whose taste, as in the fashion industry, then dictated what filtered into middle-class mechanical reproduction of prints.

    The art industry moved closer to Adorno’s model of the film industry being akin to automobile production, with a new Chrysler (or Rothko) or GM (or Pollack) rolling off the assembly line, and further away from his concept of autonomous art. (Ironically the more stridently Adorno and his followers located the argument for an alternative, independent art in the specific formation of painterly abstraction, the further the artists discussed were actually moving from anything like autonomous art, as the invisible hand of the market and its corporate elite replaced the more visible finger pointing of the patrician patron.) The move from the ultimate individualism of Abstract Expressionism to US State Department sanctioned corporate expressionism, representative of American power, instead of being a leap proved instead to be a single brisk step.

    The Abstract Expressionist victory largely overwhelmed the Popular Front artists of the 1930s and 1940s who were no longer welcomed in the Manhattan galleries and museums which now were more important than ever in establishing the kind of art that would be bought in this newly unsubsidized market. Nevertheless they did endure, and not as purveyors of reactionary realism as they were accused, but as continually formal innovators within a context of a politically committed art. Alice Neel, Jacob Lawrence, Stuart Davis, Ben Shaun, Rockwell Kent were only the most visible of a number of artists who were the art world equivalent of the Hollywood Ten, but who remain uncelebrated for their resistance to The American Century. Since there was no formal blacklist in the art world, their resistance has never subsequently been hailed as such. Having never been blacklisted, they were in no need of being resurrected as has happened to many of the Hollywood blacklistees.

    In addition, this impulse was also resisted in the continuing hotbed of political modernism that was post-Revolutionary Mexico. Rivera, Orozco, Kahlo in the 1930s and1940s had added the folk element to modernism in a way that was not a reactionary return to an untroubled past as in the US, but instead a uniting of a pre-colonial past with a post-colonial future. In the 1950s they were most prominently survived by their most radical member, David Alfaro Siqueiros who, fresh from a triumph at the 1950 Venice Biennale, spearheaded an attempt to mount a modernist reply within the art world to apolitical American Expressionism (Stein), an attempt the State Department tried to crush with the aid of a politically reactionary, New York-led cosmopolitanism, in the service of a new colonialism, prominent in a number of the arts but most triumphant in the art world (Saunders).

    The focus here, since Abstract Expressionism grew up in the moment of the triumph of the US Empire, is to use a global perspective to interrogate the blacklist in the art world at the time of the establishment of the rationale for the Cold War and the subsequent Pax Americana. This study describes: first, the institution of the formal, theoretical and, when needed, legal blacklist by the promotion of Abstract Expressionism initially in New York and then the world; second, the effects on American dissenting artists, many of whom were not social or Socialist Realists but rather political modernists forced in a variety of ways, such as Alice Neel’s retreat to portrait painting in Spanish Harlem (Alara), to go underground; and, third, using the case of Mexico, to show how the blacklist attempted to induce a chilling effect on the Mexican muralists yet how they withstood the challenge, continuing to pioneer a modernist art that was not value free and put the lie to the expressionist claim to be the only possible direction for, as well as the culminating moment of, modernism.

    The method here of describing this moment is holistic, attempting to combine the two often separated spheres of political economy and aesthetics. Thus the first chapter of each of the three sections—on Abstract Expressionism, Popular Front Art or Social Expressionism, and Mexican Modernism in the 1945–55 period—will describe the political, social and economic moment and the second chapter will analyze the aesthetic approach growing out of that moment. Vincent Musco’s four characteristics of political economy, an approach that combines (1) an interest in changes within the capitalist system with (2) a sense of the totality of that system, and (3) a moral view of the effects of this phenomenon (4) for the purpose of promoting change (praxis) will be guidelines in deploying this method. A main concern will be the constantly shifting nature of the commercial relations of the art world first at the moment of Abstract Expressionism, then, with the Cultural Front artists, tracing the world they grew out of and showing how they had a difficult time responding to the new imperative, and, finally, with the Mexican artists examining the state and cultural structures which continued to support their art into the 1950s.

    This approach will consider not only the immanence of the art world and of commodity relations within it but also the art world’s relevance to capitalist commodity relations as a whole and its relation to the capitalist system and its primary adjunct at the time in aiding global accumulation, the US government. Too often since Abstract Expressionism, the political in the art world has meant only the artist’s examination of the place of art in the marketplace. The problem, as we shall see, is that this singular expression of the political has become reified and allowed to stand for all political expression. The artists’ ability to comment through their art on their own commodified situation has been converted into a limitation because of the dictum, the Greenbergian command in a perversion of Adorno, that artists must not comment on anything else. This command has been absorbed, as Peter Wollen notes, even as Abstract Expressionism was exceeded by kinds of (conceptual) art that called sculpture and painting into question and brought increased attention to what constituted an art work but that left the remainder of the capitalist totality unscathed.

    This limitation, that art’s only permissible social role was to call into question its own relation to commodity exchange, has inversely made art more easily commodifiable, primarily for two reasons. First, this dialogue is too esoteric for many connoisseurs to grasp, thus rendering the art simply without political import and more market ready while leaving in place the trace, or effect of its supposed rebelliousness, a trace that is neutralized by its audience’s lack, or only partial understanding of, the target at which the rebellion is aimed. (This is a standard strategy in the music industry and has allowed rock ’n’ roll under its corporate guise as rock to maintain a faux outsider status for decades.) Second, the actual political import is grasped by a smaller elite group of connoisseurs who then can congratulate themselves on their forward looking politics while in effect nothing has changed either in the capitalist totality or the art world, except perhaps that, for example, in the realm of conceptual art, commodification has now reached beyond the material into the realm of thought, as what was once an attempt to question the nature of the art object, i.e. the conceptualist slogans, has proven readily adaptable to the market. (To the point where, as Wollen notes, in the case of Conceptualism the triumvirate of art object, art theory and art manifesto (19) cooperate together to provide the conditions for creating a salable commodity. In this sense Conceptualism rather than being an art movement, has affinities, in a comparison updating an earlier Adornian reading of Hollywood genres as similar to corporate lines, to a brand in the way that Naomi Klein describes the creation of a brand as more important than any individual product represented by that brand.) The net effect of this questioning of the nature of the art object has not been a shaking of the art world or the art market to its very foundation but rather an expansion of the market so that what is for sale now includes, beyond the art object, the mental reality of conceptual designs. Increasingly the postwar long march of the non-political isms, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Conceptualism, appears as a tale full of sound and fury, signifying if not nothing, then at least not as much as the movements mystically claim, or alternately, in Frederick Jameson’s terms (1981), instead signaling another milestone in capitalism’s project of colonizing the unconscious, this time commodifying not the object itself but the ineffable, the thought behind the object.

    This book attempts to re-place the political in the contemporary model of the avant-garde, contending that the moment of the dominance of Abstract Expressionism was bound up with the final unhooking of the political from a certain view of modernism, readying this detached art for global domination and for sale, at the crucial conjuncture of both the triumph of American Empire and the privatization of the art market in the US. The book’s conclusion suggests ways that the legacy of Abstract Expressionism today acts as an attempt to limit political expressionism as art becomes truly global. This impulse, which still dominates the US market is fiercely resisted, with the more democratic art forums of Documenta (and particularly Documenta 11 organized by Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor around various global political platforms) and the Venice Biennale (particularly 2007 which featured a variety of artworks from the developing nations which reaffirmed the political in art [Broe, 2008]) often mounting a sustained challenge to the still formidable injunction that art should properly remain silent on the world’s increasingly more violent devastation under a form of capitalism where greed knows no bounds or that art’s sole role must be confined to obscure and wry comments on a certain highly limited and reified area of commodity exchange.

    Rewriting Art History:

    To the Victors . . .

    One of the more far reaching effects of the blacklist in the art world has been the purposeful

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