Rodanthi Vardouli is an architect and theorist whose work centers on the phenomenon of the avant-garde in the Arts. Currently a PhD Candidate in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, her dissertation proposes a gestural theory of the Interwar avant-gardes in Europe, imbued with notions of embodied agonistic praxis and the performative in the humanities. Prior to her doctoral studies, Rodanthi received a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the MIT Department of Architecture, where she conducted joint research between the History Theory Criticism and the Architectural Design areas of study, as scholar of the Fulbright Greece, Alexander S. Onassis and A.G. Leventis Foundations. For her research at MIT, which foregrounded the constructive potential of Kurt Schwitters' Merz-Building in Interwar Hannover for contemporary creative practices (and was co-supervised by Gregory Ulmer and largely inspired by his work), she was awarded the 2014 Arthur Rotch Special Prize for highest academic achievement and original contributions to more than one research fields. Rodanthi also holds a Professional Master's in Architectural Engineering and a Graduate Specialization Diploma (MSc) from the Design-Space-Culture Interdepartmental Graduate Program at the National Technical University of Athens.

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A prominent skeptic of the "avant-garde" premise in the Arts, German-born essayist Benjamin Buchloh is at the same time a most devoted investigator of the complex traits and impulses that accompanied the phenomenon's varied manifestations throughout what Marcel Broodthaers called "the terrible twentieth century." (25) Published fifteen years after his first volume of monographic essays on Post-WWII Art (Neo-AvantGarde and Cultural Industry, MIT Press: 2000), Formalism and Historicity marks a shift in the way the art critic probes the interdependent development of Art's emancipatory claims of social advancement and the ever-totalizing capitalist structure of Western societies. Buchloh no longer weaves monographs of individual artists, but works comparatively: he traces episodes of art that seem to have occurred and reoccurred as models or methods of artistic practice during a number of extremely specific historical moments situated between the 1920s and the 1980s.

This book of art history and criticism, and as the author himself acknowledges “perhaps at times theoretical,” still includes a large amount of notes and comments on exemplary subjects. Yet these references serve the formulation of broader historiographical associations rather than the exhaustive illumination of certain artists’ individual oeuvre. What Buchloh retains however, is the tendency to implicitly or explicitly categorize the artists whose production falls under his scrutiny as revolutionary or "terminal"; as sufficiently or insufficiently radical: Yves Klein, Dan Flavin, Donald Judd being examples of the latter—servants of the spectacle, while Piero Manzoni, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, and Gerhard Richter are the true provocateurs. Buchloh does not hesitate to wittingly acknowledge himself as a "paranoiac" with a continuously increasing list of enemies. He calls out Yves Klein for his artistic narcissism (14) and life-long devotion to spectacle (63), his art being the delusional and fraudulent performance of a petit bourgeois agent provocateur (16), a "profoundly reactionary artist" (343), even a crypto-fascist (17). He regards Donald Judd as an ignorant whose “historically naive” minimalist pride (343) urges him to utter preposterous statements of disdain against European art (35). And the list goes on.

Despite the author’s self-blames for procrastination, the recollection of the twelve essays included in the volume twenty to forty years after their initial publication (between 1977 and 1996) admittedly confronted him with “a residual challenge:” What can these 'antiquated' essays contribute to the debates of a present time, reigned by different assumptions regarding the making of art and its criticism? In this thick volume of critical essays, Buchloh sketches a multifarious era of cultural progressions and regressions, advances and recessions, residualisms and repetitions, radical subversions and systemic recuperations. Despite its relative brief historical duration, this era saw the rise and fall of a complicated Weltanschauung of combative precedence characteristic of numerous group formations that did not accept the progression of Hegelian history but 'marched' to the front and confronted history face-to-face, claiming to possess the solution to the social, political, and philosophical problem of emancipation. Buchloh is not an avant-garde optimist. His account of the avant-garde in the Arts is undeniably a history of failures. Regardless of whether it was doomed to fail or it caved, the course of the radical avant-garde throughout the 20th century evidences that the fate of any anti-systemic act of subversion was to be eventually recuperated either by political propaganda or by the capitalist culture of advertisement, consumption, and the spectacle.

In a pre-introductory statement, titled "Introducing an Introduction," Buchloh states his determination to establish a distance from and reset the tone of his own critical writings. The statement itself is followed by a republication of an Artforum article, in which the art critic had bidden a bitter farewell to the critic's traditional role, identity and function. In this article, titled "Farewell to an Identity," Buchloh had cautioned the audiences about the controversial forms of spectatorial agency brought about by the emancipated subjectivity and aesthetics of deskilling propagated by the avant-gardes. It appeared that the process of assumed aesthetic liberation manifested in the tendency of cultural consumers to determine their own competence of reading and seeing had become just another territory for capitalist intrusion and appropriation. The postulate of "Everyone an artist" had in the course of capitalist expansion become a spectatorial pursuit of restraining and reifying the self's performative expressions under a pretence of the freedom to act out one's "true" self.

The birth of the spectator and the resulting demise of the critic that Buchloh announced in 2012 was widely received as opaque negativity, cynical pessimism, disenchantment placed into the abyss: Not only is an artwork doomed to remain unthreatening to its capitalist context, but any attempt at effective ideological criticism, in other words our ability to call bad things out, seems to be fading out as well. Admirable as it is for an art critic to take responsibility over how disheartening his texts may be received as by his readers, the modified version of the Artforum article does not seem to convey any solace or resolution. Contrariwise, it makes the disquieting point even more emphatic: In a social condition shaped by market-distribution networks and functioning under the laws of consumption, total control, and the spectacle, Art cannot but reproduce ever-deepening dependence and domination even though it formally strives for emancipation and liberation. At best, it can produce reminders of innovation, but no actual opposition.

Oscillations

The titular essay (“Formalism and Historicity”), written in 1977, sets the example for the oscillation between models or methods of art history and practice (formalism and historicity, shock and mythification, spectacle and agonistic praxis, reification and elusiveness), which permeates the volume's structure, and based on which its twelve essays are paired in this review.

This first essay revolves around a historiographical question related to the peculiar randomness of “reception history” and its transformation into “production history” through omissions and misreadings. Buchloh’s account is preoccupied with ignorance: Why choose a certain artist over another, and for what reasons do groups of artists omit or suppress certain artistic information? Behind eighty pages of highly informative and critically comparative insights on art, lays the titular suspension between two methodological traditions and theoretical models in the production of art and the study of the art world. These correspond to two different spheres of aesthetic signification that overlap in the evolution of the field of artistic practice and discourse: the traditional formal manner (formalist aesthetics), which deals with the work in a descriptive and objective manner, and the historical (ideological analysis of cultural production), which considers a work’s latent or manifest political and ideological implications in relation to the cultural limits within which art exists at a given time. Buchloh points out the decrease in art’s actuality and effectiveness in the Postwar era, in the sense of its inability to affect the condition that brought it into being even though its postulate to do so grew unabated. The essay is divided into shorter monographic sections in which Buchloh compares pairs of artists to exemplify the differences between the cultural production of Europe and the US since the late 1950s: Georges Mathieu is examined as an “involuntary caricature” of Jackson Pollock, Yves Klein’s life of spectacle is paralleled to Donald Judd’s empty minimalism, and juxtaposed to Allan Kaprow's performative experiments as well as Niele Toroni’s transparent travail peinture. Ironist Piero Manzoni, decollagist Jacques Villeglé, the unobtrusive Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, the famous Marcel Broodthaers, and Gerhard Richter are also positioned into what Buchloh calls “the postwar lacunae:” a historical condition in which the artist was necessarily confronted with the drama of self-determination after the forces of the subconscious were unleashed by the great Surrealist revolution.

“From Faktura to Factography,” published in 1984, marks another theoretical oscillation between the titular modes of historical artistic praxis. More specifically, the essay evidences the transformation of a politically emancipatory avant-garde practice (modernist montage) from an instrument of mass enlightenment to the standard of totalitarian propaganda, in short its acquiescence to the needs of the ideological apparatus of the culture industry of Western capitals. More specifically, he explains how Faktura—an operative term οf Russian productivist aesthetics, which encompassed the philosophical and tangible implications of constructed-ness entailed in the collage procedures—was recuperated by a utilitarian aesthetic of documentary representation or inscription of facts (factography) under a newly unified totalitarian single-image panorama imagery.

Operations

A number of essays revolves around allegory as the central medium, concept, strategy and form of avant-garde art, marked by the dialectic between emancipatory conscience and safe formalism. In “Allegorical Procedures,” written in 1982, Buchloh investigates the metaphysics of allegorical appropriation as both artistic technique and ontological “strategy” (174) spanning the 1920s (Georg Grosz, John Heartfield, Marcel Duchamp), the 1950s (Robert Rauschenberg), the 1960s (Dan Graham, Martha Rosler, Marcel Broodthaers), and the 1970s (Daniel Burren, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, Dara Birnbaum). The main reason for this survey of montage applications is to test its effectiveness in the production of his time (that is the early 1980s), by artists such as Jenny Holzer, Sherry Levine, and Michael Asher, who Buchloh sees oscillating between emancipatory world-invention and illusory pluralism, in fact tilting towards the latter. In “Readymade, Objet Trouvé, Idée Reçue,” written in 1985, Buchloh extrapolates on the ready-made as a performative operation of linguistic choice (parole) to discuss the relation between the artwork and the external world as one of naming and designation. On this basis, he traces affinities between the world of postmodern high art and that of fashion and advertising, in the way they convey ideology through language. He proclaims the failure of the discursive practices of the Fluxus and Happening projects, as well as Pop Art’s character of fetishization, due to their instant transformation into spectacle, which he identifies as the reified version of the performative and the modus operandi of the hegemonic cultural industry.

It comes as little to no surprise that Buchloh, a critic who basically generates never-ending questions about Art, would spot his artistic alter-ego in a figure who actually made art out of them: in his assemblages and constructs, allegorist Belgian poet-turned-painter Marcel Broodthaers quite literally forced his accumulations to turn inward and question their own stature as Art: What is an artist, a curator, a museum? In “Marcel Broodthaers: Allegories of the Avant-Garde,” written in 1980, Buchloh explores Broodthaers' allegorical methodologies, ruinary logic, and treatment of language as the deposit of ideology vis a vis the dialectics of memory and critique, obsolescence and innovation, withdrawal and acculturation, inherent in avant-garde practices. By allowing language to dominate over form and alienate the object from its essence, Broodthaers seems to have put his finger on the object-nature of the work of art under capitalism: the eggs and the shells he included in his material concretions therefore standing for the empty cast that takes the life out of the object, much like the system of language does to the linguistic sign.

In “The Museum Fictions of Marcel Broodthaers,” written in 1983, Buchloh places the artist’s fictitious museological taxonomies in a lineage with Duchamp’s Boîte-envalise (1941)—a portable miniature museum in the form of a sample case that contained reproductions of the artist’s work—and talks about such collections in terms of the new form of painting, in which the artist is more preoccupied with the place that contains, frames, and exhibits art, rather than the exhibited art per se. Buchloh read MB's museum fictions as commentaries on how Art as an institution turns radical intent to comfortable form and aesthetic cult by subjecting the work’s language of subversion to the mythological language of ideology. Inside the museum, works produced by avant-gardist allegorical procedures are subsumed to processes of mythification anew: what was supposed to say something else (allegoria> allos, different + agoreuo, to speak), is forced to say the same.

Episodes

The clash between the primary language of the artwork and its subjection to the ideological system of the museum permeates Buchloh’s seminal essay on Conceptual Art, written in 1989, in which the art critic seeks to reconsider the historiographical/ontological framework for addressing the movement. Conceptual Art's linguistic fixation, in other words its aspiration to produce artworks that functioned as analytical propositions rather than perceptual effects, seemed to posit a clear challenge for art history: how could a discipline preoccupied with the study of visual objects produce knowledge about a movement that assaulted object-hood, and whose production was fundamentally based on an extreme elimination of visuality? By discussing the production of the self-declared primary actors in this “tale of many squares” (Sol Le Witt, Robert Morris, Edward Ruscha, Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, and Daniel Buren), Buchloh foregrounds a condition in which art's reality is identified with institutional critique and art practice is raised to a form of art history: a discourse on power. In "Cold War Constructivism," written in 1986, Buchloh illuminates the challenging transition of Soviet constructivist Naum Gabo from the radical context of the historic avant-garde to the aesthetic framework of the neo-avant-garde, offering an exemplary case that problematizes the persistence, re-emergence, and qualitative transformation of key artistic paradigms of the Prewar era in Postwar culture.

Repetition

Another group of essays revolves around incidents of historical repetition or historical re-emergence of avant-garde pictorial strategies and forms with the hypothesis of the depletion of their relevance when wrenched from their original contexts and functions. In “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” written in 1981, Buchloh makes a connection between the return to traditional modes of representation in the art of his time (e.g. Arte Ciphra, and the Italian Neo-expressionism of the 1970s) and the interwar return to figurative art (retour a l’ordre) to demonstrate the workings of nostalgia in the historical transformation of the avant-garde into an ordering system of “aesthetic orthodoxy” (123). In this allegorical diatribe against the reinstatement of figuration in its historical perspective, Buchloh points out that modes of aesthetic production are not resurrected as transgressive forms, but valuable commodities. He draws attention to the historical specificity of innovative codes and the manner in which, on the one hand, regressive phenomena are announced as innovation, and on the other hand, forms that were once innovative serve as “empty vessels waiting to be filled with reactionary interests in need of cultural legitimation.” (144)

Another repetition is examined in the essay “Primary Colors for the Second Time,” written in 1986, in which Buchloh criticizes the re-employment of the pictorial strategies of the radical avant-garde by the post-World War II neo-avantgarde as “cataloged specimens of painting’s last possibilities,” (336) and documents another of its failures, this time with regard to the application of color in painting. In the work of the original avant-garde (e.g. the constructivists), the tendency to monochromy challenged the question of traditional meaning assignment to color, and made possible its employment as an inherent and specific quality of materials, i.e. it put to work its optical rather than denotative function. The reapplication of the monochrome however, necessarily came along with different conditions of response and reception. Buchloh explains how the historicity of an aesthetic strategy makes the possibility of a recycled paradigm to be imbued with a new shock value questionable, as it depends on the spectator’s willingness to suspend their knowledge in order to experience this repetition as “rupture” anew always risking that the recognition of “secondaryness” will subject it a new renewed mythification.

Finalities

The volume's most recent essays concern two finalities: the end of portraiture and the impoverishment of experience in sculpture. In “Residual Resemblance,” written in 1994, Buchloh focuses on the pictorial category of the portrait with regard to the conception of subjectivity, and examines photography as a practice oscillating between the resurrection of reactionary conceits of subjectivity under the auspices of fashion and consumption (redemption of mimetic representation), and an avant-gardist emancipation that opposes these fraudulent claims (infliction of loss on traditional forms of visual experience). In his essay on Sculpture, written in 1996, Buchloh describes how the loss of the public sphere, the increasing poverty of public experience, and the privatization of subjectivity yielded a formal aesthetics of attenuation, exemplified in Giacometti’s skinny figures. Commodity fetishism and the logic of the spectacle were also determining factors in the constitution of a new sculptural paradigm which approximates an aesthetics of display (showcase) devoid of any mnemonic dimension. From the collection of evocative fragments in the surrealist shrines, the art of the 1990s evoked a strangeness emanating from the accumulation of serialized industrially produced objects, as exemplified in Arman’s work.

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 It is evident that Benjamin Buchloh detests grand statements and hypertrophic claims made by artists, and is on guard for calling out empty evocations of originality. The "mournful tone" that permeates Formalism and Historicity emanates from the carefully documented realization that the avant-garde project has in the course of the long twentieth century been transformed into capitalism’s most sacred maxim of producing commodified, marketable, and museologically classifiable objects. In short, Art has been unable to claim and retain the space for existentially meaningful unreciprocated events that can occur everywhere and without rules. But could it ever? Historically the answer is no: capitalism swallows everything; Theoretically, a maybe: systems are not eternal; Practically, a Sisyphean project to be undertaken in both theory and praxis, and for which the critic and the artist need to march aside in constructing the aesthetic structures of an emancipated future, the form of which we could not know in advance.