Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art

Ghosts of Ethnicity

Lisa E. Bloom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415232210
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134695737
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Featuring sixty-seven illustrations, and providing an important reckoning and visualization of the previously hidden Jewish 'ghosts' within US art, Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art addresses the veiled role of Jewishness in the understanding of feminist art in the United States.

From New York city to Southern California, Lisa E. Bloom situates the art practices of Jewish feminist artists from the 1970s to the present in relation to wider cultural and historical issues.

Key themes are examined in depth through the work of contemporary Jewish artists including:

• Eleanor Antin
• Judy Chicago
• Deborah Kass
• Rhonda Lieberman
• Martha Rosler and many others.

Crucial in any study of art, visual studies, women's studies and cultural studies, this is a new and lively exploration into a vital component of US art.

1 Clement Greenberg’s modernist shadow

Clement Greenberg is the closest thing we have to a rabbi of “High Art”: in his synagogue of abstraction the artist transcends ethnicity – and class – and everything – to find universal gesundheit through his “signature style”: Frank Stella with the stripes; Newman with HIS stripes; Olitski with the drips … Abstraction is kosher; pop and kitsch, feh, treyf!¹

(Rhonda Lieberman, 2002)

This chapter focuses on Clement Greenberg, the New York art world’s foremost Jewish critic during the postwar period, for the purposes of bringing to the surface the unacknowledged role of Jews and their negotiations of their place in the history of American art, the “New York art world,” and art criticism. In this book, Greenberg serves as a place holder for naming a set of problems around the whitening of Jewish immigrants and immigrant culture in the United States, a process that indeed established a monolithic and flattened idea of Jewishness in the 1940s. The mechanisms through which the American art establishment banished specificity with claims to the universal, most notably through the writings of Greenberg, promoted art world dogmas and norms (Abstract Expressionism, the myth of the individual genius, New York as the center of the art world) that silenced Jewish specificity and Jewish identity, just as Jews were becoming, for the first time, a strong visible presence in the arts.

The anxiety about making Jewishness visible was felt widely among secular Jews in the second half of the twentieth century, and continues to create a fault line generationally among Jewish artists and critics (both men and women). For a number of the artists I write about in this book, Greenberg was a force they have had to contend with in the production and reception of their work. In the interviews I conducted with various women artists, especially the New York-based artists discussed in Chapter 5, many of them made reference to how the critical authority of Greenberg’s writings loomed large for their generation and influenced their own history as artists. Rhonda Lieberman’s statement above is suggestive of how far her generation has come in terms of dealing directly with the unacknowledged role of assimilation and Jewish identity in the history of US contemporary art. She even goes so far as to parody Greenberg as the “rabbi of ‘High Art’” who lays down the law of aesthetics almost as if they were Jewish dietary laws. This recent shift has been due in part to the growing scholarship, including my own, on questions of Jewishness and Greenberg that details how his art criticism emerges through and against historical discourses of ethnicity, race, nationalism, and gender.²

Greenberg stands out in my account because his art criticism became far more influential than that of his left-wing Jewish counterparts, owing in part to his drift in his career from the left to the right of the political spectrum during the McCarthy period, when his writing maintained a greater separation between art and politics. Throughout his career, he was nevertheless consistent in not wanting any notion of identity to be articulated primarily or purely through visual signifiers. Thus none of his writings on Jewishness are linked to his art criticism or specific artists. In some ways his emerging neoconservative views were reflected in his art criticism, and can be seen in his refusal to grant artistic or cultural context much place in his analysis of art, and his narrow definition of what was considered great art. By the late 1940s in a cultural atmosphere informed by anticommunist hysteria that made many artists’ former socialist associations as well as their Jewishness suspect, it was certainly safer to believe that there was a firm separation between art, identity, and politics.

One of the legacies of this period is the image constructed by Greenberg of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s as a “new indigenous school of symbolism,”³ or a purely American cultural product devoid of any ethnic determination, and thus by default, as it were, as white and all American. By omitting Jewishness from his art criticism through formalism and its aspirations to universality, Greenberg was able to erase ethnic differences and thus avoid the problem of having New York and its art critics be associated with “Jews.”⁴ As Margaret Olin points out, “like other minority identities, Judaism enters into his criticism primarily to explain provinciality.”⁵ It is in this respect that Greenberg contributed to what could be termed the whitening of Jewish artists in modern art in the 1940s.

To understand the shift from the 1930s to the 1940s is to comprehend how the status of Jews in the art world changed at a moment when Jews were accepted as white and American for the first time. This chapter links Greenberg’s thinking on issues of aesthetics to the anxieties handed to him by the wider culture, namely, the traditions of European and American anti-Semitism, American nationalism, the Holocaust, and later, McCarthyism. These same demons were inherited by the women artists in this book.

Universalism and particularism

[Eastern European Jews] have been and still are the most particularist people on earth; yet they have been accused of making it their particular mission to destroy particularity, to internationalize, to create the brotherhood of man.⁶

(Clement Greenberg, 1943)

This statement by Greenberg emphasizes the contradictions and paradoxes of a certain US modernist Jewish dilemma as it was understood in the 1940s. Taking the perspective of the informed Jewish insider, Greenberg praises the Eastern and Central European Jews’ predilection for a contradictory set of local and global attachments, as well as a discomfort with nationalism, particularly the historical European nationalism that assumes only a superficial recognition of Jews as authentic citizens of the nation. To circumvent the national, Greenberg celebrates a discourse of universal humanism that “produce[s] the supreme example of the gratuitous and disinterested man.”⁷ He is referring here to the lack of self-interest on the part of Jews who advocated a discourse of universal humanism that would erase all difference.

Greenberg’s interest in the contradictions inherent in a certain Jewish subjectivity appears within the larger context of his critique of the (anti-Semitic) view that cast Jews as outsiders, people with a hidden language and manner of thinking that makes them “devious.”⁸ One of the ways Greenberg tackles this stereotype is by delineating the complexity of the very idea of the Jew and of the Jewish response to this projection of difference:

The last thing the Jew is, is tricky, and the last thing he thinks of is his front to the world. The ostentatious Jew – that myth of the Anglo-Saxon world – is ostentatious only about his wealth, and unlike maharajas and Vanderbilts, makes no other claim by his ostentation than that of his wealth. And when he loses it he does not bother to keep the lace curtains hanging in the front parlor.⁹

Greenberg’s emphasis on the Eastern European Jews’ abhorrence of mainstream culture’s hypocrisy and its insistence on etiquette and decorum, present in this passage, is also important in understanding the quote that opened in this section. Just as he suggests that as a people Eastern European Jews do not bother to keep up appearances, he also notes that when Jews are threatened with marginalization or exclusion from nationally imagined communities, they will not abide by the niceties of appearance for the sake of propriety.

The paradox of Greenberg’s dualistic thinking, in which he sets particularism against internationalism as a way to transcend the national, has quite a powerful legacy in the present. However, I would argue that his ideas, though they may have enabled a certain way of thinking that was effective at the time they were written, no longer provide us with an accurate map of US social relations in 2006. The discourse of the devious Jew is no longer as widespread as it was during World War II, when Greenberg started becoming active as a writer in the United States, nor is the pure internalization of a negative image of Jewishness as prevalent for my generation as it was for Greenberg’s. Another major change that has taken place is that an earlier generation’s predilection for the universal is now being replaced by a more contemporary notion of the global and the transnational combined with the local. The latter is not as tied in with a discourse of imperialism as the forms of “globalism” and “universalism” championed in the 1940s. In addition, new conceptions of locality and connectedness are emerging, which are not so bound up with a discourse that sees ethnicity as distinct from a spectrum of other identities and differences. Contradictory and constantly shifting relations can now define a given community that can be both local and transnational simultaneously. As a result, social solidarity and belonging are no longer stigmatized in the same way as they were in the forties, and there is now a place for ethnicity in cosmopolitanism. This is in contrast to the cosmopolitanism of Greenberg’s day which often failed to recognize the social conditions of its own constructions, presenting itself as freedom from social belonging rather than a special sort of belonging, a view from nowhere or everywhere rather than from particular social spaces. As a result, to examine in greater depth the politics of location in the history of art of Greenberg’s period, the cultural identities of artists and art critics need to be taken into account, especially when analyzing, in retrospect, a discourse of modernism which with its extremely universalistic orientation was conceived by its proponents to dislodge the notion of identities altogether.

New York art discourses in the 1930s and 1940s

In the growing field of visual cultural studies, there has been interest in inflecting into the discourse of contemporary art history a much more self-conscious and critical analysis of how power relations work, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationalism as opposed to the power relations typical of the market-based institutions of New York art galleries, museums, and art magazines. One of the ways this is currently being done is by deconstructing the notion of the New York art world as monolithic and unchanging. Critics such as Irit Rogoff, working in the area of visual culture, explain how the New York art world is “a world unto itself, with a distinct cultural and linguistic tradition and a vehement sense of territoriality.”¹⁰ Rogoff proceeds to formulate this particular art world much the way that historian Benedict Anderson theorizes the nation as “an imagined community” or as a performative space where roles and relationships both of belonging and of outsider status are acted out.¹¹ In some key ways, the New York art world and the nation in Anderson’s sense operate analogously. Both are mythic yet very powerful and effective communities that are built on shared fictional narratives. Both have key performers (artists, critics, curators, and art dealers in the case of the art world) with the discursive power to define how they situate themselves as well as Others within this community that they interpret and control. Both arouse, in Anderson’s words, “deep attachments” of belonging and “command profound emotional legitimacy.”

Despite these similarities, what is paradoxical about the concept of the New York art world is its simultaneous attachment to and detachment from the US nation, and how this ambivalent connection to the United States actually authorizes its universalizing image of itself. It is fitting that the genealogy of the term New York art world and its attendant cosmopolitan aspirations can be traced to the beginnings of the Cold War and the development of a vital New York art market. As Serge Guilbaut argues in his intellectual history of the period, titled How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, this also was a moment when New York began to have dreams of replacing Paris as the presumed cultural center of the so-called West.¹² Likewise, Abstract Expressionist painting the defining style of this period – was embraced by New York intellectuals not merely as a New York school of painting or as American painting but as a universalist cultural style that transcended the geographically specific. In 1943, the New York Times art page launched this art movement with the headline “‘Globalism’ Pops into View.”¹³ This media recognition coincided with a letter sent out by Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko – both New York Jewish artists – writing as members of the cultural committee of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors:

The current 3rd annual exhibition of the Federation … prompts us to state again our position on art, and the new spirit demanded of artists and the public today. At our inception we stated “We condemn artistic nationalism which negates the world tradition of art at the base of modern art movements” … As a nation we are being forced to outgrow our narrow political isolationism. Now that America is recognized as the center where art and artists of all the world must meet, it is time for us to accept cultural values on a truly global plane.¹⁴

The insistent globalism that defined the terms by which these painters authorized themselves reappears in the writings of both Jewish and non-Jewish art critics and artists of the time, although for our purposes here, I will concentrate on the writings of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, who were key figures in constructing an identity for the New York group.¹⁵ One way in which Greenberg extolled the international significance of these mostly New York-based painters was by explaining how a real culture, an avant-garde, was possible in a nation imagined as a cultural vacuum. Greenberg accomplished this by discursively transforming the abiding perceived limitation of American culture – its putative isolation – into an asset:

Isolation is, so to speak, the natural condition of high art in America. Yet it is precisely our more intimate and habitual acquaintance with isolation that gives us our advantage at this moment. Isolation, or rather the alienation that is its cause, is the truth – isolation, alienation, naked and revealed unto itself, is the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced. And the experience of this true reality is indispensable to any ambitious age.¹⁶

In Greenberg’s formulation, modernity, alienation, and what it means to be American went hand in hand. He turned a previously undesirable way of being in the United States (alienation) into cultural capital. Ironically, he used America’s greatest weaknesses – its geographical isolation, its so-called lack of culture, and its alienation – to great advantage.

Harold Rosenberg’s discursive strategy was similar to Greenberg’s.¹⁷ He also saw the proverbial alienation that artists experienced in America as something beneficial:

Attached neither to a community nor to one another, these painters experience a unique loneliness of a depth that is reached perhaps nowhere in the world. From the four corners of their vast land they have come to plunge themselves into the anonymity of New York, annihilation of their past being not the least compelling project of these aesthetic Legionnaires … The very extremity of their isolation forces upon them a kind of optimism, an impulse to believe in their ability to dissociate some personal essence of their experience and rescue it as the beginning of a new world.¹⁸

For Rosenberg, it was precisely because American artists were alienated that they were antiprovincial, and thus he saw them capable of imagining the creation of a “new world,” a world without alienation. However, the two critics disagreed sharply about how this would come about. Writing in 1947, Greenberg states:

In the face of current events painting feels, apparently, that it must be epic poetry, it must be theater, it must be an atomic bomb, it must be the Rights of Man. But the greatest painter of our time, Matisse, preeminently demonstrated the sincerity and penetration that go with the kind of greatness particular to twentieth century painting by saying that he wanted his art to be an armchair for the tired business man.¹⁹

For Greenberg, this new world could not be achieved unless artists returned to purely visual formal value...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1 Clement Greenberg’s modernist shadow
• 2 Negotiating Jewishness in the 1970s: The work of Judy Chicago and Mierle Laderman Ukeles
• 3 Rewriting the script: Eleanor Antin’s artwork
• 4 The California work of US artist Martha Rosler
• 5 Contemporary feminist art practices in New York
• 6 California feminist art and postnationalist identities
• Notes
• Interviews
• Bibliography
• Index