Form (and Voice)
Americanists and modernists are perhaps nowhere more different from one another than in their habitual approaches to form. In addressing artworks, Americanists very often take the things and people represented, together with their social context, as the central focus. And while Americanist art history does of course consider the means by which those things are represented, it rarely demands that its artworks embody radical innovation in their form of representation. Indeed, the treatment of a given topic generally opens, above all, onto a larger cultural history of that topic. Distinctions of innovation or quality are relatively unimportant, and the boundaries between art objects and other things, including popular culture images, are relatively freely crossed.
Among modernists, by contrast, form is almost always central. This is no accident: modernist art was defined from the start by formal innovationâby the weirdness of avant-garde depiction. And it was this weirdnessâthe various opacities of representation, we might sayâthat became the central subject of modernist scholarship. Above all, art was interesting insofar as it demonstrated problems, failures, or inadequacies of representation. Add to this the fact that abstract art (central to modernism as it never could be to the long historical field called American art) seemed more or less to preclude any talk of what is depicted. In the last few decades, many modernists have wanted to see a link between radicality of form and radicality of politics. In this mode of scholarship, the new possibilities of thought opened by avant-garde art are far more important than any local or historically specific objects or topics that might be represented, or any ideas that mass culture might formulate about them. Associated with these valuations for many modernist scholars is the imperative (influenced by readings of Theodor Adorno, for example, as well as by modernist art itself) that art take the form of negationâcritiquing previous habits of sight, for example, and ultimately false political consciousness. All these discriminations (formal innovation, problematization of representation, negation of ideology) are judgments of quality. While beauty is hardly a more comfortable topic for modernists than for Americanists, modernists are far keener, if sometimes covertly, to make judgments. As such, modernists tend to be more closely affiliated with criticism than their Americanist colleagues.6
Indeed Americanists are often proactive in their efforts to write about art that they recognize to be aesthetically or politically conservative. On their motivations for this equanimity, however, Americanists as a group have been uncertain: is it merely that much American art has been undervalued, or is quality inherently a corrupt criterion for scholarship? (In our view, the role of scholarly judgment has remained regrettably implicit and undertheorized on both sides: what in fact governs our choice of objects?7)
Modernist formalism sometimes gets cast as a pursuit of quality and innovation. While these Greenbergian tendencies do exist, they represent only an elementary piece of the scholarly modernist formalism of the last thirty years. In such scholarship, radicality of form is prized not merely because it is art-historically fresh, but specifically because it is seen to make available structural rather than superficial or familiar critiques of social reality. Yve-Alain Bois, a leading formalist in modernist art history, has written that, while historically some formalism was merely âmorphologicalâ and hermetic, strong formalist scholarship âenvisions form as structural,â and always brings the scholar back to history.8
Just as they focus on the form of the art they write about, many modernists take a special interest in the aesthetic quality of their own prose. While there are some prominent exceptions, Americanist scholarship as a whole is written in a voice closer to that of general historical nonfiction, aiming to communicate to the broadest readership possible. Much modernist art history, by contrast, draws extensively not only on the vocabulary of translated French and German theory but also on its academic-poetic style. Rhythm counts highly, and the pleasures of the text sometimes trump its straightforwardness.
To summarize this distinction, we might observe that Americanists and modernists agree on something important: the central topic of art-historical inquiry is how things are represented. The difference is that, while the how in question is for Americanists largely cultural and social (what constructs of race are at work in a picture, say, or what ideas of nature?), for modernists the how is at first structural-formal (what modes of representation are being used?), opening only through such questions onto political matters.
History (and Politics)
If the two fields are distinguished by the degrees and characteristics of their orientation to form, they are likewise distinguished by the lenses they use to view history. The vast majority of Americanist scholarship operates in the mode of the social (or, perhaps more precisely, cultural) history of art. Contextâchronological, local, and nationalâmatters, so scholars carefully offer information about an artistâs studio, her training and reading, her relationship to recent problems reported by the popular press, and, at least somewhat more than modernists do, her biography. Following recent models in cultural history, this âlocal knowledgeâ becomes an entry point for understanding broader cultural issues and the social forces that underlie them.
Most modernists, by contrast, tend to see the impor...
