What Does Modernism Do?

On April 13 Janet Wolff gave a talk titled "Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim: Modernism, Realism, Revisionism." Wolff is professor of art history/visual and cultural studies and director of the graduate program in visual and cultural studies at the University of Rochester. Her main scholarly focus is on the sociology of art, feminism and cultural theory, and modernism in the visual arts. Her books include, among others, The Social Production of Art (New York: New York University Press, 1981; 2nd ed., 1993), Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983; 2nd ed., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), Feminine Sentences: Essays on Women and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). After her lecture, Wolff graciously agreed to answer the following questions.

Handwerker Gallery: Your talk seems to suggest that the current "end of the century" renewal of institutional interest in Norman Rockwell’s work as representative of a certain realistic tradition should be understood not so much as radical revisionism but rather as an efficient strategy to preserve and maintain the discursive power of modernism, despite the seemingly antagonistic characters of realism and modernism. Would you say that postmodernism, even if we accept Frederic Jameson’s cautionary remark and use it primarily as a periodizing concept, only displaces the difficulties in writing the history of late-20th-century art without providing any critical solution?

Janet Wolff: Actually, I hadn’t really thought of the "Rockwell phenomenon" as serving to preserve and maintain modernism — though I think you are right to suggest that that may well be its effect in the end. At least, the debates about the Rockwell and Parrish exhibitions have, among other things, allowed critics and others (people writing to the press, for example) to reaffirm their Greenbergian views — that is, horror at the invasion of Rockwell into the museum and into the discourse of "art," and confidence in the persistence of what are fundamentally mainstream, modernist, aesthetic values. As for postmodernism, that is certainly something I need to think about more. My focus, in the talk and during my work over the past year, has been on the apparent crisis in late modernism — in critical discourse, in museum and curatorial practice, and in aesthetic evaluation. I have tended to see this crisis (if, indeed, it is as "critical" as I believe) as the response to a variety of different challenges to the "MOMA narrative" — museology, feminism, postcolonial criticism, historiography — as well as the product of parallel moves in the art market (now taking seriously, and paying high prices for, Victorian and realist art, and not just postcubist modern art). But, of course, postmodernism has been closely connected with at least some of these developments, most notably feminist art practice and feminist criticism. And yet, as we have seen, late modernism has persisted alongside postmodernism, able to continue to command critical respect, museum retrospectives, and (not least) high auction prices. To that extent, then, I do think it displaces the difficulties you refer to, without providing a clear solution.

HG: As both professor of art history/visual and cultural studies and director of the graduate program in visual and cultural studies, you are an ideal person to ask what would be a major argument in a favor of the inclusion of visual studies in the humanities curriculum? In addition, what would be the inherent theoretical and critical difficulty of these studies? Here I am referring to the ongoing debate on visual studies.

JW: The first, and most obvious, answer is that the integration of visual studies into the curriculum, at any level, should guarantee students access to the skills of "reading the image" — more and more necessary, I would say, in early-21st-century society. For that reason, what is usually called "media pedagogy" is increasingly taught, even in high schools. Of course, I am very much in favor of this. But I would say it is important not just in the humanities curriculum. Even here the lines are blurred these days. I’m thinking, for example, of important recent work on the critical study of medical imagery — how to "read" an X ray, a sonogram, an MRI scan, and so on. These are no more "innocent" texts than, say, a painting, a film, or an advertisement — they are never detached from questions of ideology and politics.

HG: The title of the book you are working on — AngloModern: Painting and Modernity in England and in the United States — raises the very interesting issue of ethnicity and national/geographical boundaries in an era that is usually considered to be beyond or above this type of inquiry. What are the critical, historical, and/or sociological reasons underlying this choice?

JW: We have known for many years now — since early-1970s feminist art history — that in any period in the history of Western art, questions of gender have played a part in what gets produced, which works are accredited, which join "the great tradition." So my study of early-20th-century art is not original in exploring issues of gender, though some of what I have found has also surprised me — for example, the eventual marginalization of work by certain women artists not because of their gender, but because the work itself (I’m talking about realist and figurative art) was gendered "feminine" and accordingly downgraded. I have also been focusing on the complex intersections of Jewish and other immigrant ethnic identities with art production in this period. Obviously, my own background (my training was originally in sociology) inclines me to explore social-structural features, but I do think that such an approach illuminates a good deal about the actual and discursive relationship of "marginalized" groups to (at the time) marginal art practices, like early modernism.