Drucker_Who's Afraid of Visual Culture

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Who's Afraid of Visual Culture?Author(s): Johanna DruckerSource: Art Journal, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Winter, 1999), pp. 36-47Published by: College Art Association

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Contemporary artists are increasingly producing works that mimic fashionphotography, derive from television, or otherwise struggle to compete withthe production values of the entertainment industries. This is hardly news. Butthe theoretical discussion of fine art as a cultural practice is still largely depen-dent on outmoded ideas that art defines itself in critical opposition to massculture. Clearly there is a problem here. The gap between the reality of artists'sensibilities and the theoretical apparatus of much (especially academic) artcriticism suggests that the understanding of the relation between fine art andvisual culture needs a major conceptual overhaul more in keeping with what'sactually going on. Revisiting aspects of early twentieth-century art that providea precedent for contemporary activity, and that have been systematically ex-cluded from the mainstream of what has come to be regarded as modern arthistory, is a useful place to start.The history and critical discussion of modern art that developed withEuropean innovations in abstraction and the avant-garde at its core has neverbeen able to find a place in its arguments for those visual works that figured

Johanna DruckerWho's Afraid of Visual

Culture?

their engagement with modern life through representa-tional imagery or an enthusiastic dialogue with the massmedia. Yet, such work is irrefutably modern in its visualforms and requires a theoretical discussion that considersthe relation between fine art and mass culture in its vernac-ular, popular, and commercial manifestations. There has tobe a way to take seriously early twentieth-century visualforms of response to modern life that were not exclusivelyconcerned with either transcending it in favor of a universal language of ab-straction or with radical political negation. When the map of visual mod-ernism is redrawn with these works supplementing the familiar coordinatesof abstraction and the avant-garde, the topography of modern art will be radi-

cally reconfigured to include works whose visual form is specific to twentieth-century modernism, but which draw on visual traditions outside of the fine arts.The recent exhibitions TheAmericanCentury: rtandCulture1900-i950 andGraphic esignn the MechanicalAgeoffer an opportunity to do just this. TheAmericanCentury as curated by Barbara Haskell for the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art, and Graphic esign, eaturing works from the Merrill BermanCollection, was curated by Ellen Lupton, DarraGoldstein, and DeborahRothschild for the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, SmithsonianInstitution and the Williams College Museum of Art. TheAmericanCentury,what-ever quibbles one has with its curatorial foibles, was a phenomenal display ofworks and artifacts that demonstrated the unique contribution of American artto the field of modernism. Unprecedented in its scope, Graphic esign lso seta benchmark for scholarship and curatorial work in the field. Yet, in markedcontrast to the glut of critical, academic, and journalistic attention lavished onrecent retrospective blockbuster exhibitions in modern art, there has been aconspicuous absence of serious critical engagement with these exhibitions. TheAmericanCentury as come in for its usual share of journalistic Whitney-bashing,but Graphic esign arely managed a passing notice. And in a few instances, thedeplorable poverty of critical means available for understanding this work hasbeen glaringly obvious. Reading Arthur Danto's review of TheAmericanCentury

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Thomas Hart Benton. CityActivities with Subway. Fromthe America Today murals,1930. Distemper and eggtempera on gessoed linenwith oil glaze. 92 x 134Y(233.7 x 341.6). CollectionThe Equitable Life AssuranceSociety of the U.S.

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was akin to watching some refugee character from a Henry James novel try towrestle with a greased watermelon at a county fair.' As for Graphic esign,nspite of historian and critic Maud Lavin's statements in her introduction to theexhibition catalogue, art history has not only notexpanded to include its prod-ucts in its scope of inquiry, in my experience it has locked down the bordersever more stringently under the threat that expanding research in this fieldseems to raise. If American art of the early twentieth century remains beneathnotice in the minds of many art historians, then graphic design has the statusof a dangerous interloper.The historical reasons for these antipathies go to the core of the theoreticalissues opened by the work included in the two exhibitions. Many attempts torecuperate American modernism have been fueled by work informed by thesocial history of art, the examination of crucial cultural movements in docu-mentary photography, and the instrumental use of images in reinforcing gen-der, class, racial, and ethnic divisions. But such studied examination of theseimages has not asserted their modernity as images, their visual specificity withregard to the historical development of forms constituting twentieth-century artpractice. The figurative, and often journalistic, reportorial, and diaristic dimen-sion of the most original contributions of American art in this period shouldbe taken seriously as visual forms whose characteristics can sustain a rigoroustheoretical discussion of imagery as a site of modern culture. There is a ten-dency to be apologetic in assessing the illustrational quality of much Americanart of the early twentieth century, just as there is an unwillingness to assertthat what has been long perceived as a liability in modern American art is infact its strength: that it was conceived through formal strategies that partake ofmass-media culture from the very outset.

For instance, there is a perverse prohibition against considering the workof even such a figure as Winslow Homer in terms of the ways he used, ratherthan ignored or transcended, the seductive strategies he learned in illustrationalwork. His cunningly contrived vignettes, carefully posed dramatic moments,and touching, even sentimental, instances of human drama are all elements theskilled illustrator brought into fine art. Such a prohibition has its roots in thedisadvantage American culture has always felt in its relation to European art.As an institutionalized discourse, critical modernism promotes Constructivism,Neo-Plasticism, Cubism, and Futurism as the defining movements of modernart. The history of Surrealism's difficult path to critical legitimacy only rein-forces this stereotype-that work using figurative modes borrowed from tradi-tional and commercial realms has traditionally been anathema to the moderncritic dedicated to a resistant, and fundamentally elite, fine art practice. IfSurrealism, a late addition to this canon, has been let in, it is because itseemed to lend itself to the psychoanalytic critique favored by Eurocentricmodernists.

The problem that graphic design poses in bidding for serious criticalattention is more bluntly stated: it simply is not considered art. The idea ofremaking the discipline of art history into the field of visual studies finds itsmost vociferous opposition in the modern period. In other areas-classical,Precolumbian, and Chinese, for example-the fine arts, the decorative arts,and other aspects of visual culture interpenetrate in a way that makes such. ArthurDanto,

Of Time and the Artist, TheNation,June 7, 1999, 27-32.

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distinctions difficult to sustain. But the apparent threat to fine art's privilegedstatus posed by modern visual culture, or such fields as graphic design, hits anerve-perhaps because from the outset modern art's identity was groundedin a turn away from the industrial modes of production associated with theseother art forms.

Reassessing the contribution of American art to modern art requires some

Ir hr u

RURAL ELECTRIFICATION ADI) INISTRATIONU. S. D E P A R T M E N T O F A G R I C U L T U R E

Lester Beall. It's Fine forUs, 1930s. Poster:silkscreen, lithograph.40 x 297(101.6 x 75.9).Merrill C. BermanCollection. Photo JimFrank.

effort if its uniqueness within the modern field isto be asserted. American modern art looks anemicand feebly derivative if one assesses only those palereflections of the European tradition that contributeto the history of abstraction. The work of BurgoyneDiller, PatrickHenry Bruce, or Ilya Bolotowsky, what-ever merits their individual pieces might possess, willalways pale in contrast to the pioneering efforts ofPiet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, or Pablo Picasso,for the contest has always been set up by art histor-ians already convinced of the intrinsic superiority ofEuropean models. On those terms, modern Americanart can never compete for serious critical attention,because it is always perceived to have failed to inno-vate in the areas deemed central to what constitutesmodern art's essential modernity. Even if Americanartists were able to draw on indigenous philosophicalbelief systems within Transcendentalism or nature-oriented animism, as in the abstract landscapes ofArthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, or Georgia O'Keeffe,and thus made their own unique contribution to thefield of abstract formalism, these are not works thatrequire a rethinking of the terms of critical mod-ernism. They simply add an interesting, homespunfootnote.

But the vigor and authenticity evident in thework of John Sloan, George Bellows, even RobertHenri, with their well developed reportorial andjournalistic line, illustrationally trained eye, andinstinct for successfully communicating a perception of direct experience

through a visual record create the first substantive contribution to modern artin twentieth-century America. This work is important because of its differencefrom modern European art-most significantly because of the use it makesof the figurative and illustrational forms of modern visual culture. By contrast,European modernism appropriated the materials of mass culture through col-lage, but the strategies that are its hallmarks carefully marked the transform-ative distance from vernacular sources through radical formal innovation.Vernacular imagery was generally circumscribed as outside the fine art main-stream until Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown's LearningromLasVegas.Butit figures as a significant influence and source for form (and all that such adialogue suggests in terms of cultural exchanges and the purported identity offine art as a cultural practice) in the Shaker architecture and interior furnishings

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from which Charles Sheeler absorbed patterns of design and visual order.While not posing any of the issues of the later postmodern critiques, the vis-ual strategies by which Walker Evans's photographs of building types helpedto create a distinction between rural vernaculars and more contemporaryarchitectural design played a part in legitimizing narratives of progress. GrantWood's attention to decor and dress within an American culture tied to the

MISs

C l l lY E L W W LV B I E LE G

Vilmos Huszar.MissBlancheVirginiaCigarettes,1926. Poster:lithograph.I1 x 7N(29.8 x 19.1).Merrill C.Berman Collection.Photo Jim Frank.

heartlandand its assertionsof particulardeologicalvalues hadtheirinstrumental ffect as icons articulatingactionswithinthe modern era.Thevernacular, herefore,weavesthroughmodernvisual cultureas stronglyas does the strainof popularartthat shows up in Sloan'sstudiesof social groupings n thestreetsof New York,Bellows'sboxing clubs, IsabelBishop'scarefulrecord of working-classwomen, or ArchibaldMotley'sdancing figures.It is not only the thematiccontent of theseimagesthatpartakes f popularsensibility,but theirway ofbeing rendered n illustrative, artoonish,or representationalstyles, eachof which signals ts own areaof competencewith-in a thoroughlymodern idiom. Thissynthesis s strikinglyobvious in the work of those artists,such as StuartDavisandGeraldMurphy, or whom commercialwork was eithertrain-ing groundor directinspiration.Lessobviously,ThomasHartBentonincorporatednew visualqualitiesof cinematicactionand movie posterlayoutswithin his murals,while ReginaldMarsh'sadmirationof tabloidformats,mass-circulation ubli-cations,andposters s evidentin his compositions,as well ashis attitudes owarddisplayand visualseduction.ThatAmericanartistswillingly andknowinglyabsorbedthe strategiesof massmedia, illustratedpapers,and books andobservedtheir effectsupon the field of visualculture s a thesisthat finds support n everyinstanceof the work displayed nTheAmericanentury.hat so much of this work was motivatedby a compellingbelief in the potency of representation to depict lived conditions and then

argue for their transformation is another major feature of representationalmodernism. Such an attitude informs the work of a number of key Europeansin this period as well, but it is the earnest and overwhelming impetus behinda critical mass of American art of the 192os and 1930s. The complexitiesand contradictions of class relations revealed in many of the works of Sloan,Bellows, and the Soyer brothers, as well as the photographers Dorothea Lange,Lewis Hine, and MargaretBourke-White, still read clearly in spite of thefalling away of the historical moment in which their specificity resides. Thebelief system that sustained such work is pragmatic and positivist in its nature,rather than founded on the principles of aesthetic negativity that fostered diffi-culty and resistance to consumption as tenets of an avant-garde politics. Thislatter model, deeply entrenched in late twentieth-century academic art historycultures, continues to justify the production of esoteric work in the name ofa politics from which it has long been disengaged and to which it served, atbest, a dubious function even in the early stages of its appearance. The notionthat an elite culture performed a political function through production of

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advanced art was put to its crucial test within the Soviet avant-garde's experi-mental and ultimately fatal relation with the post-Revolutionary state bureau-cracy and its repressive regimes. The rhetoric of revolution central to theavant-garde forged its own curious connections between commercial and fineart realms in the work of early twentieth-century graphic designers. Graphicdesign historians, perhaps because of the compromises evident within the his-170

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...................Reginald Marsh.Twenty-Cent Movie,1936. Egg tempera onboard. 30 x 40 (76.2 x101.6).WhitneyMuseum of AmericanArt, NewYork,Purchase 37.43.

torical record, are more disposedthan many art historians have beento point out the transformations thatqualify these earlier claims for thepolitical efficacy of visual forms.At first glance it might seem thatTheAmericanCenturynd Graphic esignhave very little in common. But inimportant ways, the issues they raiseare complementary in bringingmethodological problems in the crit-icism of visual modernism intofocus. Graphic esign urveys the con-tributions to the developmentof modern forms of commercialart in the first four decades of thetwentieth century, stopping shortof the years of World War II andits aftermath. Its scope is European,Russian/Soviet, and American inscale, and most of the works are

poster designs for events, propaganda and information campaigns, or productadvertisements. This highly visible arena for graphic design, its most publicface, nevertheless leaves out the many other domains in which graphic artinterpenetrates daily experience through newspaper, magazine, and productdesign. More pervasive by far than fine art, commercial work has been thevehicle for the dissemination of aesthetic developments since the early modernera-which is to say at least as far back as the sixteenth century, when inno-vations in print technology made the mechanical reproduction of images andtext a viable commercial proposition. Modern graphic design produced andreflected the style of its various sites and moments of production, and chal-lenges to fine art's claims for visual form as an instrument of social change canbe mounted on the evidence of graphic art's capacity to continually redefinethe ideological value of any given visual style. As the curators point out, thevery forms that originated within radical movements of the early twentieth-century avant-garde as graphic advertisements for Futurist and Dada sensibil-ities quickly became tamed and assimilated into corporate and state campaigns.That they were tamed is significant, of course, and until relatively recently thefully illegible and chaotic compositions that characterized the most radicalpages of Tristan Tzara or Filippo Marinetti's works would not have been madeuse of in any commercial venue.2 But in a general sense, the visual innova-tions that were formed in the crucible of radical artists' independent and

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ephemeralpublicationsprovidedone of the majorsourcesfor the rapidlyexpanding ndustryof graphicart and design in the twentiethcentury.Othersources,as in the case of Americanartof the period, can be traced o com-mercial llustration,vernacularmagery,and the alreadydevelopedfields ofgraphicarts:photography, ypography,ettering,printmaking, ndposterwork.In the rush to establishcriticallegitimacyfor the historyof graphic

` Q t H H H M CDesigner unknown. Vpokhodza chistotu (Get on the Marchfor Cleanliness), Lithograph.26%x 20/6 (67.6 x 52.2).MerrillC. BermanCollection. Photo Jim Frank.

design, its fine art credentials end to beplacedin the foreground.The irony ofreturningauthorship o some of these worksis significant, or therewere designers orwhom being absorbed nto a cause or cam-paignwas an important tatementagainstbourgeoisexultationof individualityandartistic dentity.Therewere also phasesofearly twentieth-century esign in which thesignatureof a graphicartistbecame a sellingpoint for an ad-when the identifiable tylesof a LucienBernhard r a Cassandre ddedamarkof qualityto the product being sold.The complicated lirtation hatgraphicdesignhas had with fine art has broughtabout sev-eralcyclesin which anonymityandcelebrityarealternately onsideredappropriate ttri-butes of a designer's dentity.Butbeyondthesuperficialrendinessof these ideas is a moresignificantconcern:graphicdesign, like fineart,but perhapsmore conspicuously, s asmuch the result of historical,economic, andsocial forcesas it is of aestheticchoice.Insofaras the visual forms of graphicdesign inscribeideologicalvalues and culturalattitudes n theveryspecificmodes of their composition,fin-ish, treatment,and other featuresof visualrhetoric,they arepotent indicesof the socialconditions in which they areproduced.Thekind of visualanalysis hat DeborahGoldstein,in her catalogueessay Sellingand Idea, bringsto the discussion of a partic-ularfashion for isolatingcommodities nto objectsand reifying products hatresisted such easydepiction(gas, for instance)in the 1910iosays something

profoundaboutthe ways visualmeans of advertising nablestrategiesof eco-nomic productionandconsumption.Likewise,Lupton'soriginaland highlyinformeddiscussionof the relationsbetween actualmodes of print productionand the depictionof the visual hallmarks f photographyand advanced ech-nologicalinnovations n typography she discussesa posterhand-drawnbyAleksandrRodchenko o createthe appearance f a manipulatedphotographicimage) is an exemplary tudyof the links between visual form and ideologicalvalues. Suchmethodologiescould be productively eapplied o the studyoffine art, if the sense of historical orces,rather han aestheticautonomy,could

2. The work of David Carson, for instance,orP. Scott Makela,and others of the end of printsensibilityof the early 1990s.

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be brought to bear on, for instance, the study of modern American art.Graphic design history has an important methodological role to play at thismoment, and should be wary of falling into a celebrity/author/ artist modelof stylistic innovation and history of forms or movements. It is easier to tracea lineage of forms than it is to research the conditions that sustained theirproduction, and this is equally true for fine art, where such questions chal-

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EdwardMcKnightKauffer.Tea DrivesAwaythe Droops, 1936.Poster:lithograph.29 x 19 (73.7x 48.3). MerrillC.Berman Collection.Photo Jim Frank.

lenge the fundamental autonomy granted to modernart, as it is for design. Fully aware of these contra-dictions, the curatorial team responsible for GraphicDesign cknowledged the difficulties of finding anaudience willing to engage with an exhibition ofvisual work that doesn't have a celebrity nameattached to it.

The visual forms of contemporary life, fine artand commercial alike, have been shaped by thehistory of graphic design. If the idea that the sameindividuals made significant contributions to bothfine art and commercial realms in the early twen-tieth century seemed like a radical notion, it wasbecause the act of cross-pollinating fine art withcommerce was perceived as transgressive. The useof fine art imagery for commercial purposes alreadyhad an established track record, and the movementof images back and forth across the borders of fineand commercial art established a precedent for asimilar migration of forms of composition, layout,and communicative rhetoric. The appropriations ofcommercial imagery and design that populate Popart and then postmodern art, are simply part of along history of such exchanges, each with its ownhistorical character and charge. My major criticismof the selection of materials in Graphic esigns that itkept so closely to the history of avant-garde art andgraphics. Such an approach runs the risk of replay-ing the errors of modern art history and stressingthe radical forms, geometric tendencies, and photo-graphic innovations that characterized an importantstrain of design. But it leaves aside the illustrationalwork that featured prominently in product and ad campaigns of the period.3

In effect, Graphic esignmakes a bid for the art status of graphic design and, inso doing, truncates the field along lines quite similar to those established bycanonical modernism. Since much of that work shows up in venues otherthan that of poster art, such as the pages of mass-circulation magazines, itwould have required an unwieldy expansion of the exhibition to includethem. But it would be regrettable if the heterogeneous spectrum of graphicdesign history were reduced to those strains that originate within the genepool of high modernism just at the point when modern art is challenged toexpand beyond those artificial limitations.

3. Refer to the studies by MichelleBogart, RolandMarchand,and so on.

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Each of these exhibitions and accompanying publications had its strengthsand problems, as is to be expected in such ambitious undertakings. Haskell'scuratorial logic is so deeply rooted in the conviction that formal similaritiesshould govern proximity and juxtaposition that substantive distinctions betweenworks were often lost. Likewise, the implicit faith in the capacity of imagesto communicate in and by themselves left many of these works without thenecessary context in which to understand their iconogra-

Marguerite Zorach.Deer in the Forest, 1914.10 x 8 (25.4 x 20.3).Private collection.Courtesy Tom VeilleuxGallery, Farmington,Maine.

phy, let alone their historical significance. The work ofBen Shahn provides an excellent case in point; the detailsof the history of Sacco and Vanzetti, as well known to hiscontemporary audiences as the minutiae of Monica andBill's exchanges were to us a year ago, are no longerimmediately invoked by the image itself. The value of thepainting is not at issue here; rather, the viewer's apprecia-tion of the painting would have been amplified consider-ably by having that history refreshed. More insidious is theassumption that the terms of identity in class, ethnic, racial,or gendered terms can be read from images that themselvesoften articulated the stereotypes according to which sociallines were drawn and then policed. There is a tacit com-plicity with prejudicial distortion in not explaining thatimages of Dust Bowl farmers and migrant workers servedto reinforce the status quo, demonstrating the indomitable

spirit of the American worker or the inherent and essen-tial backwardness of the disenfranchised poor.Haskell's curatorial approach and her catalogue essayseem to disregard American art historians who have strug-gled to bring these considerations into scholarship in thelast fifteen years. It is as though no critical interrogationof cultural history had ever had a place in American art,and as though the way to celebrate its legacy were with amere presentation of artifacts. The brief wall text panels that accompanied theexhibition used the most cliched characterizations of history, as if the general

public could not handle any critical argument or more nuanced discussion.A title like Nostalgia and Spirituality, used to bracket work ranging frommajor figures in the American Arts and Craftsmovement to Arthur Davies'sinexcusably inept reworkings of late Symbolist painting, seems ill-conceived tocommunicate the integrated vision of aesthetic organicism of Arthur Matthewsor Louis Comfort Tiffany. More disturbing was the inclusion of illustrationalworks by Marguerite Zorach in a gallery where they were supposed to holdtheir own with paintings by John Marin and Georgia O'Keeffe, instead ofbeing contextualized within the history of illustration, book production, andother visual forms. Likewise, showing Rockwell Kent's paintings simply dimin-ished this artist, whose visual strength as an illustrator helped promote a styleof muscular modernity, monumental forms echoing those of proto-fascistEuropean illustrators in interesting, if somewhat disturbing, ways. (By contrast,the juxtaposition of Soviet and American posters for rural electrification, farmreforms, and agricultural programs in Graphic esignmade its curatorial point

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through striking visual means, showing the marked similarity of these workscreated independently in utterly separate circumstances.)The strengths of the Whitney exhibition were many, not least of whichis the vibrancy of this work, and the insights it offers into the experience ofmodernity. These are works whose visual form reveals how modern life waslooked t, as well as what it lookedike-visual codes of modern representational

Rockwell Kent.Pastoral,1914.Oil on canvas.33 x 43% 83.8 x 110.5).Columbus Museum ofArt, Ohio;Gift ofFerdinand Howald.

imagery that constitute a field unpar-alleled within European modernism.Each image is like a teaser, a trailerto a full movie one wants to seeunroll in all its detailed complexity.The use of films, music, and materialculture artifacts enriched the exhibi-tion considerably and broke up thehomogenous prospect of viewinggallery after gallery of static images.Every attempt was made to makethis an exhibition of cultural history,not just a history of fine art. But themere amassing of this significantcollection of objects did not com-pensate for the absence of essentialcritical contextualization as an inte-gral feature of the exhibition. Thecatalogue, with contributions fromevery discipline of American studies,expands on this approach, and, theoverall conservatism of its tone not withstanding, goes a long way to remedythe shortcomings of the exhibition's shortage of contextual panels.

But there was one really offensive moment in my viewing of the Whitneyexhibition that I have to comment on. It was the entrance to the second-floorinstallation focused on the 1940s, which was divided into two discrete units:the war and after. The central gallery was dominated by a scrim image of theatom bomb exploding; without context or qualification, this scrim evoked adisturbingly ghostlike eerieness. The image was framed by two photographsenlarged to wall size (with the exception of a Dust Bowl image serving asbackdrop to the 193os, no other photographs in the exhibition were at thisscale). On the left was the landing of the troops on Iwo Jima, and on theright was the well known V-Day photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse. Thesemilitaristic images of masculinity asserted power in terms of a narrative ofaggression and eros, culminating in the libidinal satisfaction of the explodingnuclear charge. Their unqualified reinscription of the worst kind of imperial-istic mythology assaulted the viewer with an unrelentingly violent force. Theclosing of U.S. borders to Jewish immigrants in the late 193os, the hypocriticalaspects of domestic and foreign policy complicit with genocidal fascism andantisemitism, and the self-righteous justification of the use of the bombs atHiroshima and Nagasaki-all of the elements of historical complexity thatwould qualify the simplistic thematics of a triumphant America saving the

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world from evil forces-were erased. This felt particularly poignant in amoment in which the reassertion of militarism as a solution to complexproblems has once again found its ripple effects in a domestic agenda readyto be sacrificed to the building of techno-military supplies in war efforts thatcontinually justify rearmament at a high level. Rendering history in simplisticterms as a backdrop to visual art, as if its function were to reaffirm the right-ness of the tale through its mirror effects, is a simulacral approach. It doesnot conceal truth ; instead, it makes the notion of any reflective counterpointseem pointless and impossible because the terms on which the tale is beingtold are sealed into an endless refraction of its own making, utterly remotefrom the considerations of ethics and social accountability.There are many problems in this exhibition that make it more than amissed opportunity to engage with the critical discussion of American art andits place in modernism. It suggests a deeply disturbing tendency that hope-fully does not signal the future direction of the Whitney's curatorial program.Graphic esign,by contrast, provided an intelligent survey of an area of modernvisual culture central to its historical project and critical conception. The cata-logue essays avoided the glibness of Haskell's (albeit informed and lively)coffee-table tone. Nevertheless, the optimism of the curators seems a bit over-stated: the incorporation of the history of graphic design into modern art his-tory is still a highly elusive and controversial goal. It can be argued that thehistory of visual culture requires a synthetic integration of the work in graphicdesign, imagery in advertising, editorial, and commercial contexts, into thehistory of fine art. The dialogue that artists themselves have with these variedhistories and visual vocabularies could be better understood by enlarging thescope of modern art to include visual culture broadly defined.

Throughout the history of modern art, whether demarcated from theonset of Romanticism, Impressionism, or early twentieth-century movements,the identity of art practice has been intimately bound up with that of massculture. Keepers of the flame of critical modernism cast this relation as onein which fine art is the privileged term in any opposition-high/low, elite/popular, authorial/industrial, and they carefully guard the distinctions be-tween them.4 But the complex nature of the relation of fine art to mass-mediaimagery requires a more subtle characterization of the interlinked identityof the two domains. Fine art has become increasingly dependent on mediaculture, and on the forms of visuality generated within mass media, for itsvocabulary of images. The tail of fine art no longer wags the monster dogof commercial production, and thus it seems urgent to expand our historicalunderstanding of this relationship by looking more carefully at those manifes-tations of modern visual culture that can help lay the critical groundwork fora nuanced discussion of this relationship in terms not circumscribed by a dis-dainful dismissal of the early twentieth-century dialogue of modern art andmass media.

The esoteric privilege to which modern art subscribed and by which ithas been supported failed absolutely to provide a solid political base to sustainthe claims on which its original premises were based. Abstraction did not, forinstance, preserve those values on which civilization is founded. And as thetheoretical premises of modernism have become increasingly academic and

4. Thomas Crow's Modernismand MassCulture, which summarizes Meyer Schapiro,T.J.Clark,and much FrankfurtSchool Marxistthoughtin its discussion of fine art's elite identity, s para-digmatic in this regard.The notion of what is fre-quently termed advanced art as the researchand development arm of the culture industry,andof the residual artisanalauthenticity of the artobject as a specialized commodity, are all ele-ments of this characterization.The comfortablehabit of thought that extends from this permitscontemporary artiststo rest assured that theirworks have an inherent integrity hat makes themsuperior on moralgrounds to those that are theoutput of the so-called culture industries.Thisinsidious moral stance is largelyan excuse todefend all the class biases of elite connoisseurshipbuilt into the institutions of highart in academic,gallery,and museum contexts. The continued dis-dainfor the relation between media culture andfine art has retarded the development of usefulcritical rameworks for discussion of a changeddynamic in which fine art's potency as a tool ofradicalcritique and epistemological defamiliariza-tion has been largelycircumscribed by its insularisolation within academic culture.

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institutionalized, the possibility of thinking through the real relations betweenthe production of its critical discourses and the social forces by which theyare shaped becomes increasingly difficult. In being willing to look in the mostspecific way at the work of early twentieth-century American art, and at thework of graphic design, as well as other arenas of modern visual culture, afundamental understanding of these forces will begin to emerge. These arethe forces that shape our current lives, and disregarding them in the nameof an elite critical stance of aesthetic negation and an embrace of the esotericfeatures of early modern art and the avant-garde is something we do only atour peril.JohannaDrucker is a writer and scholar who has published manyvolumes of creative and critical work onvisualpoetry, writing,and contemporary art. She is Professor of English,Robertson Chairof MediaStudies,and Director of MediaStudies at the Universityof Virginia,Charlottesville.

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Drucker_Who's Afraid of Visual Culture