A Working Perspective for Marxist Art History Today Author(s): O. K. Werckmeister Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol.

14, No. 2 (1991), pp. 83-87 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360526 Accessed: 10/01/2009 11:58
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A Working Perspective for Marxist Art History Today

0. K. WERCKMEISTER

Are you speaking? Who benefits from what you are saying there? And, by the way: Does it leave the reader sober-minded? Can it be read in the morning? Is it tied to what is there already?Have the sentences That were said before your time, been used, or at least been refuted? Is everything verifiable? By experience? What experience? Bertolt Brecht, The Sceptic

[.. .] Who areyou?To whom

[. .1

[Preface]
In his perceptive review article on my TheMakingof Paul Klee's Career, 1914-1920, in the OxfordArt Journal, vol. 13, no. 2 (1990), David Craven has characterised my conception of Marxist theory on the basis of an essay I wrote in 1971. Such a reference to work from twenty years ago is problematical for any scholar who, like myself, attempts to continue working in the Marxist tradition.Just about the time when Craven's review appeared, Norbert Schneider Berichte in Germany edited a special issue of Kritische entitled no. 3), 'Zwanzig Jahre danach', (18 [1990], which contained a collection of articles by a number of German art historians who participated in the Marxist challenge to conventional art history in the Federal Republic around 1970, and who were reviewing the situation of Marxist art history twenty years later. Such a review imposed itself all the more urgently after the demise, in the fall of 1989, of the German Democratic Republic, the first German socialist state. The following English version of my is intended as a Berichte contribution to the Kritische It has been review. to David Craven's response revised and expanded, in part as a response to discussions held, in December 1990, with a number of friends in Britain, most notably Andrew Hemingway, Michael Podro, and Alex Potts.

social history of culture. Since the end of the seventies, these scholars have been confrontedwith a conservative turn in politics, legitimised by democratic majorities, which cast into doubt the timeliness, if not the appropriateness, of such a mission. During this same period, on the other hand, the resurgence of the capitalist economy entailed such glaring crisis symptoms that a peculiar all-pervasive crisis consciousness became commonplace. This consciousness did not need to be derived from any Marxist analysis of prevailing conditions and tacitly took their inevitability for granted. The systemic critique of capitalism, which would have distinguished a Marxist assessment of the crisis, promised no redress through democratic politics, which most Marxists themselves upheld against communist party rule in the socialist states of Eastern Europe. Finally, when during the fall of 1989 that rule suddenly collapsed, the insight imposed itself that Marxist politics in action had been bound up with, not just compromised by, oppressive regimes. Hence, Marxist theory no longer seemed to offer a political alternative with a chance of implementation. The lingering political disenfranchisement of Marxist scholarship was all but complete.

2. Values
Between 1968 and 1974, Marxist art historians in the Federal Republic, and to a lesser extent in the United States, put forth a challenge against unacknowledged projections of contemporary social values which until then had sustained the collection, preservation, pedagogical presentation, and public display of the art of the past. During these years, the self-confidence of capitalist culture, at the apparent high-point of its post-war success, was experiencing its firstsustained political crisis. In the United States, domestic affluence coincided with unsuccessful neocolonial warfare in South-East Asia; in the Federal Republic, post-warreconstructionhad been accomplished without confronting Germany's National Socialist past. It was in order to dispel the attendant cultural self-gratificationby an art transfigured into absolute aesthetic values that Marxist art historians launched their accounts of art as ideology, as a tool of propaganda, as a product of social strife. The turn to conservativepolitics since the end of the seventies, the second period of the post-war resurgence of capitalism, deprived those radical aspirationsof their political perspective,even though 83

1. Topicality
Between 1968 and 1974, social democratic trends in the capitalist mass societies of the United States and the Federal Republic appeared to suggest certain possibilities for political and social change to which Marxist scholars were able to relate their drive towards a criticalemancipation from those conservative values which stood in the way of a more truthful
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the attendant sense of perpetual crisis expanded far beyond Marxists to large segments of intellectuals in general. Faced with seemingly inescapable perils, these intellectuals plunged into a diffuse scepticism toward culture as the vehicle of normative values, a scepticism without political alternatives. On the other hand, the financial and technical expansion of culture entailed by the capitalistboom made art past and present accessible with a velocity no longer restrained by principles of ideology, and no longer manageable by historical concepts. The automatic relativisation of values which followed from these two developments deprived Marxist ideology critique of its function as a unified premise of political dissidence and historical inquiry. The coexistence of values beyond political dispute became the positive social ideal of 'postmodern' culture, the culture of capitalist democracy with conservativemajorities. Under these conditions, art history split into two incompatible modes of thinking which were nonetheless accommodated in the proliferatingpluralism of academic institutions. On the one hand, empirical explorations of large scope and minute precision, ostensibly unprejudiced, chary of categorical conclusions about the social significance of art, and taking objectivity for granted; on the other hand, a self-reflexive methodological criticism and introspective theoretical aesthetics, intentionally disowning any commitment to standardsof objectivityas an outmoded way of thinking. Both concepts of arthistorical scholarship, no matter how much at odds they were, shared the scepticism against art as an absolute value. Thus, the opposition of Marxist art historians against the retrospectivetransfigurationof capitalist values into the art of the past tended to lose its purpose and its bite. Their alternative modes of argument - the negative one of ideology critique and the positive one of social utopia - failed to engage a discipline no longer bent on cultural affirmation at the expense of historical accuracy. And yet, the complementary coexistence, in today's art history, of mindless documentary expansion and conceptually overdetermined reasoning calls for a similarly radical critique as did the capitalist transfiguration of values at issue in the years 1968-1974. For such a critique to be consistent, untenable ideological claims of the Left would have to be replaced by a sober-minded insistence on the nonnegotiable conditions of scholarly work. 3. History Before 1968, art-historical scholarship, no matter how specific its procedures, was still ultimately focused on the ideal of the autonomy of art, which took various categorical forms - metaphysical, existential, or, at the very least, aesthetic. The contradiction between such philosophical definitions and the historical character of art was 84

explained away by apodictic or elaborate conceptual models of historical 'meaning' - illustration, expression, reflection, correspondence, and the like. The social processes of the production and reception of art, on the other hand, were all but ignored in such equations. Thus, the Marxist challenge to conservativeart history came to insist on a history of art as a product of society, subject to its economic conditions and political organisation. Yet, rather than consistently developing this initial challenge into an agenda for a radicalised historical research, most Marxist art historians insisted on conceptualisations of their own, conflating the theoretical requirements of historical work with the various orthodoxies of Marxist cultural theory or policy outside the field. Hence, they fell back into a competition with the value-oriented art history of conservativeobservancewhich could not be decided on the strength of evidence alone. In the following twenty years, art history as the social history of art production irresistibly came to prevail in the discipline, but on grounds other than those advanced by its Marxist critique. The historic reasons for this startling trend remain to be explored. Internally, it was prompted by art history's institutional growth, interdisciplinary expansion, accumulative bibliographical cross-referencing,and scientific research technology. In the end, the social history of art became a commonplace pursuit for which only the methods remained subject to debate. It has never yielded any consistent conclusions beyond specific fields of inquiry, on how art is in fact determined by the social process. The term 'context' became the codeword for this state of indeterminacy. The Marxist tradition can provide the categories with which to confront this diffuse, deceptive expansion of an indeterminate social history of art, since cause and effect are the fundamental categories of Marxist thought. Such categories are to be distinguished from the implicitly judgmental, interpretative terms of conventional Marxist art history, which have preempted the historical inquiry instead of setting its goals. Terms such as base and superstructure, bourgeoisie and proletariat, have long turned from firm foundations into dead weight. They have fallen short of the differentiated perceptions made in radical art-historicalresearch,have not stood up to legitimate questioning from nonMarxist scholars, and have been mired in hairsplitting theoretical debates on the part of Marxist scholars themselves. If the basic Marxist notions of capital, class, and ideology continue to be viable it is because they determine the range of questioning, are shared to that extent by non-Marxist scholars, and thus yield common ground for inclusive debates. It is the insistence on historical determinacy itself, not the assurance of how it works, which remains intrinsic for Marxist thinking. As long as it can be maintained in the form of an undeterred agenda rather than a pre-established belief, the Marxist
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tradition has an advantage over most current 'theories' of culture in that it necessitates a straightforward interdependence of theory and empirical scholarship. 4. The Scholarly Process Conservative art history up to 1968 was based on a relatively undeveloped state of scholarship, without today's profusion of illustrated catalogues, fascimile editions, architectural surveys, and source collections. Bibliography was still manageable enough for individual scholars to base their work on selfaccumulated, exhaustive surveys of the pertinent literature.Since bibliography provided art historians with no accumulative synthesis of the evidence, it prompted them to construe the coherence of their studies from philosophical or aesthetic principles sustaining the reasoning of individual minds. On this premise, they even attempted to put into circulation self-coined art-historical terminologies whose exegesis rather than application is the task of 'methods' seminars today. When, after 1968, Marxist art historians began to expose those hybrid constructs from limited knowledge and conceptual self-assurance as ideological projections of social values, they did not call for replacing premature conceptualisation altogether with an expansive critical process of research, since they were in no position to influence the academic organisation of scholarly work. They were reduced to asserting a theoretical superiority of their own sociological or aesthetic sets of concepts against those of their opponents and thus remained beholden to the same categoricalmode of transfiguring subjective thought. In the course of the following twenty years, the printed materials of art history have become unsurveyable. Thus, any concept of art-historicalsynthesis was being removed from a verificationfor which the technical means seemed availablebut elusive. Teams of technical subordinates or associates were working out classification systems, first bibliographic, then electronic, in order to keep the processed evidence accessible. But the principles on which they operated pertained to materials management, not to historical reconstruction, and hence left the technological process of accumulative scholarship unsuitable for assimilation by the individual mind. Hence, continuing efforts at art-historical synthesis by individual scholars began to look increasingly arbitrary.They were often advanced with a manifest contempt for empirical research,justified with the need for a new beginning, and argued on the grounds of alternative 'methodologies' drawn fromother disciplineswith no regard for their generic differences. Now the philosophical sub-disciplines of aesthetics and art theory, which had all along offered'higher' alternativesto art history, were being revalidatedand updated by reference to new philosophical authorities. Since their foundations rested on turning subjective aesthetic
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into categorical and therepropositions, experiences from verification foreclaimedexemption by artany historicalevidence at large, they offered suitable fora processof scholarship whosetechnopalliatives logicalexpansionhad gottenout of hand. of thought As is well known,the Marxisttradition includedno aesthetictheory.The copious originally literatureon Marxist aesthetics which was subsequently written notwithstanding,this tradition offers and demands a theoretical reflection of historicalscholarshipas the fundamentalmode of culture,as opposedto its conceptual understanding explication.Here artisticwork and artisticexperience, both of whichcannotby theirverynaturefind can becomeaccessible as any theoretical equivalent, viewof historynot conelementsin a comprehensive judgmentsof individual tingent upon the aesthetic of aiming scholars.Such a viewoffersthe possibility for an inter-subjective validation of art-historical research. 5. Theory The new Marxistart historiansof 1968challenged of the fieldwithclaimsto a the conventional majority theoretical superiority which enabled them to subject its axioms to an ideology critique. The historiographicalreflexivity of their aggressive approachpromptedthem to base their work on a continuous philosophical tradition that reached backto Hegel and beyondMarxin both directions, forward to the writingsof the Frankfurt Schooland of French post-war Marxist writers. They soon the scattered surpassed heritageof isolatedMarxist art historiansfrom the thirtiesand fortiessuch as Antal,Hauser,Klingender, Raphael,and Schapiro, who had remainedprofessional outsiders duringthe Cold War,and who had drawntheirstarkconcepts mainly from a straightforward reading of Marx's own texts. What Marxistart historians did not do, however, was to inserttheirworkinto the continuousprocess of revisionto which the Marxisttraditionbegan to be subjectedin the academicdisciplinesof philosophy, sociology,and politicalscienceat this time. Thus, they missed the chance to live up to the standardsof theoreticalstringency, the vast opportunities for empirical verification,and the acute to world-historical political accountability change, which are germaneto those disciplines.Politically, Marxistart historyin the 'West'never engagedin any debatewith the culturalpolicy,arthistory,and art theoryof communiststatesin the SovietUnion and EasternEurope.Recoilinginto didacticreconsiderationsand competitiverefinementsof its own

limited literature, it fell behind the state of debate where it mattered, that is, outside its bounds. The steady differentiationand complication of the revision process to which the Marxist tradition is being subjected in those disciplines, where studies in Marxism have become specialisations of their own,

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is as hard to master as is the proliferationof evidence in art history itself. Moreover, its results cannot just be transferredto the social history of art. Since art history was in turn never invited to contribute to them in any interdisciplinary fashion, social and political scientists tend to entertain schematic categorical notions about the social significance of art which would not stand the test of art-historical scholarship. Instead of linking up with those disciplines, Marxist art historians during the eighties were drawn to theoretical traditions aimed at expanding the aesthetic experience beyond form to meaning. They rushed to respond to a panoply of poststructuralist interpretative modes - linguistics, semiotics, aesthetics of reception - which promised inherently aesthetic clarifications and formulaic generalisations of historical problems. The Marxist tradition, whose theme is the historical foundations of artistic culture rather than the objective securing of aesthetic experience, was no match for the conceptual sophistication of the new theories in this particularrealm. Hence, Marxist art historians, participating in the progressive severing of theoretical argument from the process of scholarship, allowed themselves to be reduced to theoretical contests in which they frequently attempted to hold their own by syncretically drawing on their adversaries' thought. Forfeiting much of its critical potential for refutation, Marxist art history thus secured for itself the definitive academic acceptance as one particular 'method' among many to be selectively exploited along with other competing offerings. A new phase of Marxist art history can counteract those forays into aesthetic theory by including the aesthetic experience of images, forms, and meanings into the historical record of its inquiries as far as the evidence will carry. The multifarious source literature of art production and art reception, which during the past twenty years art historians of all persuasions have documented and correlated with their studies of the art works themselves, offers the evidential basis for a historical recoveryof aesthetics, unencumbered by theoretical concepts but refined in technical and psychological precision.

6. Practice
The implicit assumption that Marxist intellectual work is founded on and aimed at a political practice has imbued the writing of numerous Marxist art historians, from the time of their resurgence after 1968, with a lingering self-righteous pathos rarely vindicated by any political goals, let alone results. Since the Marxist tradition allows for much theoretical coherence in the expression of political convictions, and since its protests and demands tend to take the form of statements about the rightful course of history, Marxist art history often failed to engage scholars of different persuasions in debates on grounds of evidence. Scholarly disagreements were 86

reduced to inconclusive political debates about methodology. During the eighties, this situation changed in contradictory ways. While Marxist intellectuals had most of their political expectations disproved, many - though by no means all - were installed in academic culture, some of them quite prominently. Here they were not merely accommodated within the pluralistic spectrum of inconclusive theoretical debates promoted as continual enrichments of arthistorical methodology. They were also given the opportunity to articulate the dissents and demands of underprivilegedsocial minorities with no political accountability and in forms that fell short of Marxist alternatives. The exemption of art from any immediate political practicality facilitated this ideological accommodation and imbued it with airs of an existential seriousness and social urgency which compensated for the lack of political constituencies. The habitual Marxist posture of dissent now offereditself to causes that were politically incongruous to the Marxist tradition, no matter how justified on their own terms. If there were any memories of the tactical alliances of Popular Front culture in the years before the Second World War, they did not lead to any strategy.The operations of Marxist art historians, to the extent that they kept focused on politics, remained defined by, and confined to, the freedom of self-expressionin capitalist democracy. The tradition of Marxist art history, with the possible exception of Meyer Schapiro, is lacking in authors of the stature of Trotsky, Brecht, Gramsci, Lukacs, or Breton, whose active political engagements compelled them to navigate between the two poles of Marxism's political legitimacy, that is, the commitment to workers' movements on the one hand and to socialist governments on the other. The ensuing conflicts and contradictions in the theoretical postures of these authors have authenticated their critical approach to artistic culture for the very reason that it was fraughtwith reversals.Marxist art historians today operate under no such pressures. Their preferred model, Walter Benjamin, was an intellectual with no political ties, unsuccessful in his ambition, during the first three years of his exile, to link up with the political culture of the Left, and hence thrown back on the ideological idiosyncrasies and enforced continuities of his own reflections. There may be historic reasons for reenacting his posture. However, if no political mandate can be invoked to enhance the scholarly credibility of Marxist art history, it has to be established on its own professional terms.

7. How to Work
Today, Marxist art history, before advancing any old or new political claims, is confronted with a professional task that no other 'methodology' current in the field has thus far been able to tackle: coming to terms with a collective process of scholarship out of
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the reach of individuals, in a field that more than others depends on individual experience. At present, Marxist art history is better positioned than any other tradition to raise the historical definition of art as part of the social process in the form of an unfulfilled demand, as an open programme for research, because it is better equipped to reconcile both the results and the gaps of knowledge in an advancing process of clarification. The materialist premise of the Marxist tradition brings the confidence that lack of knowledge can be resolved through empirical work, instead of being transfigured into methodological agony or licence, instead of being compensated for by theoretical tenets and literaryconceits. It is a premise that enables it to turn the last sentence of 'Worziberman nicht Wittgenstein's Tractatus - into an daruber muss man kann, sprechen schweigen' of interassurance. The dialectical expression on of and the other dependency theory experience, art to Marxist hand, obliges history integrate the technical processes of scholarly work into its methodological self-reflection. As a result, its consistent implementation faces mounting difficulties. Yet it is spared the interpretativequandaries which during the eighties were frequently passed off as a 'crisis of the discipline' itself. Since any objective institutional and historiographical correlation of scholarly work cannot as a matter of principle be enacted by individuals, but only on a collective basis, Marxist art history is faced with the question of how to resolve the contradiction between the objective nature of scholarly work and the subjective aesthetic foundations of art-historical experience. Its claims to the status of scholarship rest on making its results relevant for individuals while

convincing others who do not share their values, which is what objectivity means. This question can only be tackled through a commitment of scholarly work to responsible debates where propositions have to stand the test of collective acceptance or be adjusted to reasoned critique. Today, the academic organisation of scholarship in capitalist society inhibits any such commitment, since it is oriented towards competition, promotes elites, and tends to favour performatory achievements. And since Marxist art history lacks the social base and therefore the institutional strength to overcome these professional standards, it frequently submits to them. To what extent it can at least unfold its critical potential in the democratic free space of academic culture remains to be seen. In any event, the tradition of Marxist theory today has reached a stage where it can shed the congealed formulas of the past and become the fundamental questioning mode of a radicalised historical investigation of culture. In art history, it can maintain the full scope of the correlation between economics, society, politics, culture, and art as a categorical principle with which to face the fast-growingmass of historical data. Its ideological function of providing utopian surrogatesfor political agendas and its existential function for the transfiguration of aesthetic experiences into political self-awarenessmay get lost in the process. But political agendas and political self-awarenesscan only become more deliberate and less illusory without the false backing of a scholarship made to order. Such a sobering-up is unavoidable if Marxist art history is to uphold its claims to scholarly status, that is, if it is to retain its credibility for an unwavering cultural policy of the Left.

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