The MuseumShows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions by Timothy W. Luke;Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display by Ivan Karp; Steven D.Lavine; Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums by PhilipFisherReview by: Howard RisattiArt Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Latin American Art (Winter, 1992), pp. 103-106Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777292 .

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lem is the constant wavering in her text between

"1" and "we" as the speaking subject: "I do not

wish, in the end, to hitch the picture to a mono- lithic reactionary or progressive position" (p. 112); "The argument I present here .. ." (p. 2); "My account differs from . . ." (p. 27). Then: "Indeed, if we sought to generalize about the principal differences between . .." (pp. 2-3); "This anal-

ysis will permit us to conclude that . . ." (p. 26); "As our analysis has already suggested .." (p. 91).

Clayson has written a book about women's

bodies, and nowhere in her text is there an indica- tion that her work has been informed, either intel-

lectually or emotionally, by the intense debates that have taken place in the feminist community over pornography. Nor is there any palpable sug- gestion in this book that a war has been raging in the courts and on the streets over women's

bodies, as rightist fanatics and a Republican gov- ernment attempt to revoke a woman's right to abortion. Only in her introduction, in one brief

sentence, does Clayson invoke the debate over abortion. Since she never returns to the subject, her initial statement reads only as a sop to feminist

politics. It is my hunch that had Clayson in fact identified with any driving feminist question, she would not have had the trouble she did with her

pronouns, and there would have been a feminist

subjectivity in her book. Instead what we get are

T. J. Clark's, Alain Corbin's, and Charles Bern- heimer's commentaries on the prostitutional dis-

course, along with feminist writers and scholars

deployed as experts, salting and peppering a be-

nign art historical text. The reader has no idea what position, or values, the author means to

present, nor in whose interest the discussion is mounted. All the research and insight Clayson has marshaled is turned into just so much information for our perusal.

It is rare when a single author can provide the contradictions and conflicts embedded in a sub-

ject and bring it to life in such a way that makes the reader appreciate its ultimate indeter-

minateness.1 Dealing with Degas is my favorite

among the books because of the variety of voices and attitudes speaking on the same material.

The least interesting essays are the men's, and it's easy to understand why. They are either

doing art-history-as-usual or, it seems to me, they are soliciting their feminist colleagues' approval. Their tone is routinely matter-of-fact: "a small

group of paintings dating from. . ." (p. 81); "one

of Degas' primary concerns in the 1870s. . . was

" (p. 148); "the marked tendency towards

." (p. 194). Their voices fall so flatly amid the

feminists because the issues hold no heat for

them; they have nothing at stake. Women like

Pollock, Dawkins, and Callen have everything at

stake. Listen to Pollock: "The purpose of feminist

analysis is to identify painting and drawings as social images in ways which do not inevitably lead us back to the celebration of art history's singular, creative subject, the artist in general, Degas in

particular, and, as always, Man" (p. 26). And here is Callen, "As a feminist art historian I am con- cerned with how and why patriarchy pictures femininity and masculinity in order to contain women and to empower men" (p. 159). It's that

simple. I do not, however, know why Pollock and

Dawkins have to speak in the authoritarian, school-marmy voices they often use. I'm not ad-

vocating that they check the anger that drives

them, but that they turn it to something other than admonishment. I am thinking of a strategy invoked some years ago by the writer Adam Mich- nik, one of the leaders of the Polish Solidarity movement. He said forces for change would ac-

complish more if their leaders acted as if they were

already where they meant to be, with all their demands realized, rather than continuing to be- have as victims and treating their comrades and students as victims, too. The confidence gener- ated by the assumption of "as if" produced the

complexity of pleasures and seeing suggested by Bershad's memorable piece on Woman with a

Lorgnette; or Callen's dazzling analysis of the dis-

jointed construction and tactility of Degas's pastels; and Dawkins's proud presentation of a

speaking, desiring Alice Michel. It is my opinion that feminist writing is at its

best today when it insists on the particularity of women's experiences and uses a direct and ob-

viously partisan voice. Without disclaimer or

apology, without the trappings of conventional

authority, this voice, driven by political and psy- chological necessity, has helped to transform the old disinterested art history into a frankly embat- tled terrain-and into a place of new pleasures and tantalizing questions.

Note 1. Julia Kristeva achieves this in "Stabat Mater" when she speaks in two distinct voices presented on the same page, side by side. In one column she writes as a theorist about mother- hood, in the other as a mother; see The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 160-86. Jane Gallop, through her ribald wit, rage, and naked competitiveness, accomplishes the same in Reading Lacan (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1985) and The Daugh- ter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982). Linda Nochlin, also through humor and a wild flight of the imagination, accomplishes a certain intended instability in her essay "Courbet's Real Alle- gory: Rereading 'The Painter's Studio,'" in Sarah Faunce and Linda Nochlin, eds., Courbet Reconsidered (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1988), 17-41.

EU NI CE L I PTON is the author of Looking into Degas: Uneasy Images of Women and Modern Life. Her memoiri biography of Victorine Meurent, Alias Olympia, is forthcoming from Charles Scribners Sons.

The Museum HOWARD RISATTI

Timothy W. Luke. Shows of Force: Power, Politics, and Ideology in Art Exhibitions. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992. 258 pp. $37.95; $15.95 paper

Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 480 pp.; 85 black-and- white ills. $42.00; $15.95 paper

Philip Fisher. Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 267 pp.; 9 color ills., 37 black-and-white. $35.00

hen Clement Greenberg wrote about self-criticality in relation to modern art in his 1963 essay "Modernist

Painting," he was making a case for art as an autonomous sphere based on the unique aspects of individual artistic media.1 This article represents the culmination of Greenberg's attempt to disen-

gage art theoretically from the realm of the politi- cal.2 Today we see a new kind of self-criticality, one that operates through a deconstructive mode, scrutinizing not artistic media but institutions in order to relocate art back into the wider world. It is this deconstructive mode of thought that under- lies the art of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, David Salle, David Hammons, and others, as well as the New Art History and New Art Criticism.

That the deconstructive mode should also surface in three recent books in discussions of the museum as institution is not surprising, nor is the fact that all of the authors/editors come from fields other than art history or criticism. Timothy W Luke, author of Shows of Force, teaches politi- cal science at Virginia Polytechnic and State Uni-

versity, while of the editors of Exhibiting Cultures, Ivan Karp is a curator in the Department of An-

thropology at the Smithsonian Institution's Na- tional Museum of Natural History, and Steven D. Lavine, before becoming president of the Califor- nia Institute of Art, was professor of English at the

University of Michigan. Philip Fisher, author of

Making and Effacing Art, teaches English at Har-

vard University.

Deconstructive thinking reflects Marxian be- lief that superstructural institutions (law, politics,

religion, and so forth) have hidden connections to

the economic base. By exposing the hidden inter-

connections between institutions and economics, the deconstructive mode attempts to reveal (de-

construct) the way institutions (including mu-

seums) function to keep power in place. To explain these relationships, the deconstructive mode rec-

ognizes the precedence of context by using a

cross-disciplinary approach that looks outward

from one discipline toward radiating circles of dis-

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ciplines. Practitioners of the deconstructive mode tend to consider it unnecessary to attend to any one discipline in a rigorously specialized way To do so would be to narrow one's vision, to risk, as it

were, mistaking the tree for the forest. Just as it has liberated art historians and critics to tackle social questions, this attitude has encouraged people from outside the field to write about art.

Luke's book consists of reviews of exhibitions that range from George Caleb Bingham's work to Robert Longo's. In many ways it provides the best

example, from among the books under review, of the advantages of the deconstructive approach as well as its pitfalls. In his introduction, Luke

explains:

This book is a collection of politically grounded critiques about art. It refuses, however, to fool around in polite metatheoretical terms [as art writers do?] with abstract questions surrounding "the politics of aesthetics" or "the aesthetics of

politics." Instead, it subversively reexamines how cultural mythologies and political power are ex-

pressed in the showing of artworks by museums.

Hence, these studies relentlessly ask how particu- lar displays of artwork can be seen as political texts rife with conflicted rhetoric about the ideo-

logies of the present (p. 1, emphasis added).

Luke goes on to dismiss art critics in general and "a lot of art writing in the 1980s and 1990s" for not asking: "What is this power [of artworks]? How is it expressed? What are its limits? Why does it work?" "Such direct political questions," writes

Luke,

are rarely raised much less addressed or answered ... because many art critics almost never thread

their way out of the rhetorical sloughs of more formalist or historical styles of aesthetic criticism.

Trapped in the muck of inappropriate categories, very few art writers escape with useful insights from the discursive ooze of genre, style, or school that bogs down their search for the political di- mensions in art. Rather, they tend to chase both real politics and serious aesthetics farther back into the swamps of formal analysis until both of these subjects simply slip under the surface of

deadly metatheoretical quicksand (p. 1).

Unfortunately, because Luke's book doesn't make

good his claims, these statements unintentionally

appear arrogant, ponderous, and inflated, if not

wholly inaccurate. Not knowing the work in re-

lated fields is one of the dangers of cross-

disciplinary studies. If Luke were more familiar with the work of art writers such as Benjamin Buchloh, T J. Clark, Eva Cockcroft, Thomas Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Max Kozloff, Rosalind Krauss, Donald Kuspit, Lucy Lippard, Linda Nochlin, Sidra Stich, among others, I doubt he would have made such claims. Nor would he identify Frederic

Remington with the Impressionists (p. 33) and mischaracterize Greenberg's position by assert-

ing, "As Greenberg frequently claimed, a painting is nothing but a flat, bounded object that must make a convincing three-dimensional impression out of the emptiness of a two-dimensional plane" (pp. 33-34).

At a time when carefully reasoned argu- ments buttressed by substantial factual data are needed to demonstrate just how cultural values and aspirations are formed and manipulated, Luke

resorts, for the most part, on a by now all too familiar practice of innuendo and unsupported supposition to indict corporate capital. Examples of such polemical rather than scholarly argument abound in his book. Atthe beginning of his discus- sion of the 1990 Bingham exhibition at the Na- tional Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., he states

that, given the tendency of big corporations and

major banks

to define "the general welfare" as the economic and cultural interests of their middle class and

upper middle class clients [ignoring their upper class clients?], who bravely continue to purchase corporate products of dubious worth and leave their personal fortunes on deposit with crumbling American banks, these [corporate] "good works"

frequently take the shape of subsidies for cultural

spectacles to soothe the mental mutilations that these same customers endure in the jungle world of contemporary American markets (p. 9, em-

phasis added).

How can anyone take such a blanket statement

seriously? One has only to think of life-saving medical and pharmaceutical products made by many corporations to call this statement into

question. Farther along in the text, reviewing the Fred-

eric Edwin Church exhibition (also at the National

Gallery), Luke extols what he feels is Church's vision of nature as benign and benevolent, sup-

porting Luke's own view that, "Nature does not

dominate humans in cruel struggles which are red

in tooth and claw" (p. 50). Yet, if this is true, what of the victims of hurricanes, famine, and

pestilence? Furthermore, Luke contradicts himself and his benign view of nature when he character- izes American markets as a "jungle world" and when he writes that "Church was born . . . into

one of the last generations. . . to be still largely at the mercy of nature" (p. 40, emphasis added).

When Luke takes on Southwestern Bell and

Georgia O'Keeffe on the occasion of O'Keeffe's 1987-88 retrospective at the National Gallery, he writes that "the local Baby Bell recognized the worth of bathing in the positive feelings that her [O'Keeffe's] art stimulates among all those phone service consumers, who so frequently daydream about summers in the same cool mountain towns that O'Keeffe loved so much" (p. 77). Unfor-

tunately, we are never told how Luke knew what S. W Bell was thinking or how S. W Bell knew what its customers were daydreaming.

Luke's endeavor is based on the widely held

assumption that corporations profit economically from the "good works" they sponsor-such as exhibitions. Following his Marxist instincts but un- controlled by scholarly methodology, Luke takes this essential point on faith. To my knowledge, no one (including corporations) has substantiated this claim by documenting the "return on invest- ment" to companies of the money they spend on so-called good works.

When Luke does rely on hard data, his argu- ment is compelling, as in his essays on exhibitions of the work of Hans Haacke (chap. 11) and Sue Coe (chap. 12), and on Sidra Stich's exhibition "Made in U.S.A." (chap. 9). These exhibitions, however, incorporated actual data into their con- struction. Stich's even included a scholarly cata-

logue and lengthy exhibition labels. As honorable as Luke's intentions are, and I

think they are both honorable and timely, if this is

supposed to be "relentless" and "subversive" crit-

icism, scholars should pay more attention to "60

Minutes," a television program that at least tries to

argue its cases with hard, factual data. To argue without concrete facts simply undermines efforts to get people to think seriously about changing the way they treat the environment, other human

beings, and social and political issues in general, something that Luke admirably is after.3

Karp and Lavine's book comprises papers

presented at a 1988 conference called "Poetics

and Politics of Representation."4 That the collec-

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tion focuses on ethnic festivals as well as art and

anthropological museums reflects the current Marxian-derived belief that museums, like other institutions, construct cultural identity and, there- fore, are powerful political and economic instru- ments of the dominant culture. This attitude to- ward institutions, a significant theme in America

today, has fueled, in part, the multiculturalism issue. Throughout the book, the theme crystal- lizes around the belief that minority and non- Western cultures are either not represented or are represented differently (negatively) in main- stream Western museums.

Framed specifically around the question of whether the value of objects comes from their social significance or visual/aesthetic interest, this theme pits the anthropological view of objects against the art historical view. Svetlana Alpers, an art historian, argues for visual interest in her essay "A Way of Seeing." She notes that "it is only recently that peoples or groups, nations, and even cities have felt that to be represented in a museum was to be given recognition as a culture" (p. 30); it is this belief that has raised political questions about the museum and the nature of exhibitions. Museums, as Alpers points out, are places to see

visually interesting things; however, "some cul- tures lack artifacts of visual interest. And politics aside, museums are perhaps not the best means of

offering general education about cultures. It is not

only," notes Alpers, "that cultures are not the sum of their materials, but also that books and/or films

might do the job [of educating people about other cultures] much better" than museums (p. 30).

Because art museums are a relatively recent Western creation for the display of aesthetic ob-

jects, difficulties are now being encountered as

they are asked to "represent" non-Western cul- tures. As Alpers puts it, "our way of seeing can

open itself to different things, but it remains ines-

capably ours" (p. 30). Art historian Michael Bax- andall, in his essay "Exhibiting Intentions," at-

tempts to resolve the problem inherent in museums as places to display aesthetic objects by suggesting that there are three active agents in museum exhibitions: the object maker, the cura- tor, and the viewer. While he finds objects "in- tended for exhibition" (i.e., works created as aesthetic objects) the least problematical for mu- seums (p. 39), most non-Western objects are reli-

gious, ceremonial, or functional and do not fit this

category. Because of this, so as not to misrepre-

sent the cultural significance of such objects by curators who are under the influence of the "dominant culture," Baxandall suggests the cura- tor allow the viewer to make the connections between object and maker through data placed on labels (p. 40-41). This requires a perceptive, literate, and knowledgeable viewer or, in other words, a scholarly person capable of interpreting written and visual material. At the same time, Baxandall's attitude calls into question the value of curatorial scholarship.

As curatorial scholarship has been chal-

lenged, the general viewers role in the creation of exhibitions has been expanded. This is evident from Elaine Heumann Gurian's aptly titled essay "Noodling Around with Exhibition Opportu- nities." That she is the deputy director for public programs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian is quite telling in that her main concern is with getting people in the door. To do this, she suggests consulting viewers during the creation of exhibitions by asking "visitors what

they wanted to know about the subject" as well as

installing "feedback boards on which the audi- ence could write their comments, thereby putting the teachings of the audience beside the teachings of the producers [curators]" (p. 180, emphasis added). It seems in her view that rather than an intellectual endeavor, the exhibition is like T.V. en- tertainment in which everyone's questions, in-

sights, and preferences are of equal value. What is

important is just to tune in. And, to make this

happen, the "authoritarianism of the staff [cura- tor]" should be replaced so as to "empower the audience" (p. 180). That empowerment comes from time-consuming and rigorous study (i.e., scholarship) is dismissed by Gurian who believes "exhibition content can be understood by the audience immediately" (p. 181).

In one of the most interesting essays, "Reso- nance and Wonder," Stephen Greenblatt, a pro- fessor of English, recognizes both the visual (art/ aesthetic) and the contextual (anthropological) aspects of objects. "By resonance, "writes Green- blatt, "I mean the power of the displayed object to reach out beyond its formal boundaries to a larger world .... By wonder I mean the power of the

displayed object. . . to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention"

(p. 42). Greenblatt doesn't see a need to choose between one or the other, as do many anthro-

pologically oriented multiculturalists. Citing as an

example Albrecht Direr's pleasure in viewing pre- Columbian gold objects, he asserts:

DiJrer's remarks suggest that it [his pleasure] de- rives at least in part from respect and admiration forthe ingenia of others. This respect is a response worth cherishing and enhancing. Hence, for all my academic affiliations and interests, I am skep- tical about recent attempts to turn our museums from temples of wonder into temples of reso- nance (p. 53).

Other writers in this collection, especially those who are not art historians, disagree. The most extreme view is expressed by history professor Carol Duncan in her essay "Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship." She sees museums and the art within simply as "ceremonial sites" for state control (p. 92). And she sees the great artist as a type fabricated by art history to fill the demands of the museum world. "A voracious demand for Great Artists... is obligingly supplied by legions of art historians and curators trained for just this purpose" (p. 99), to fill state museums so that the "state could demonstrate the highest kind of civic virtue, and . . . citizens could know themselves to be civilized" (p. 98).

While most of the essays with an anthro-

pological slant are not particularly concerned with the aesthetic dimension, their authors also are

generally not as cynical as Duncan. Some of the essays about ethnological museums would be helpful reading for people concerned with art. Especially useful in this regard is James Clifford's study "Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections." His essay explores the possibilities of a working relationship between "majority mu- seums" and "tribal museums" without, however, diminishing the complexities involved in such a relationship (p. 225). While not all the issues, mul- ticultural or otherwise, are staked out in this col- lection, there are enough thoughtful points of view to make the volume interesting for people with either an art or anthropological bent.

In contrast to the two previous books, Philip Fisher's Making and Effacing Art concentrates on the art object and its relation to what he calls "museum culture." As a result of Enlightenment ideas about systematic, rational thought, there was a resocialization of objects in the modern

period, and with "the invention of museums and histories of art, new spatial arrangements of ob-

jects along with a new historical sequencing re-

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socialized the European past by permitting it to rename itself art history, while ignoring those ob-

jects unable to be made part of that history" (pp. 5-6). As a result of this resocialization into a "his-

tory of objects," Fisher contends that new objects were created, "objects that have as their single, overt design, the desire to join history" (p. 6), the

history of the museum. From this he concludes that "the 'subject' of the museum is not the indi- vidual work of art but relations between works of

art, both what they have in common (styles, schools, periods) and what in the sharpest way clashes in their juxtaposition" (p. 8). This attitude allows for all types of objects from various cultures to enter the museum, calling into question the

criticisms of those multiculturalists who see the aesthetic display of non-Western objects as a form of cultural domination. For as Western objects lost their ritual significance, they were appreciated as

"visually interesting" things. From here, Fisher

argues, "It seemed plausible to accept these mute

objects [objects from foreign cultures] precisely because the civilization [of the West] had already set itself to silence its own objects for the purposes of the new category of art" (p. 20). While Fisher makes this process of "silencing" much too willful

(I think it occurred as a result of the replacement of religious faith by Enlightenment ideas of ratio-

nalism, a replacement that undercut the ritual and

mystical significance of religious objects), his re-

marks do suggest that museums, rather than de-

basing non-Western objects, raised non-Western

objects to the level of art, to a level equal to the

most precious of Western objects.5 In the remainder of the first half of his book,

Fisher proceeds to demonstrate why abstract art is "the natural art of a museum culture" and why "linear ordering and the cancellation of content are the two museum practices that come to be recorded within later art, where it occurs not only as one content among others, but as the essential

subject matter" of art (p. 21). He does this through an interesting interpretation of the works of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. To Fisher, their works ex-

emplify these aspects of abstract art by the way they "efface" (expunge) literal content and by the

way they control the sequencing of works that surround their own through a "strategy of the series" or a disjunctive compositional format

(chaps. 3 and 5). The second half of the book deals mostly

with the relationship of museums and, more espe-

cially, works of art to industrialization. "Museums

became more and more central exactly in cultures

touched most deeply by the factory system" of

mass production, writes Fisher. They became

"storage areas for authenticity and uniqueness

per se, for objects from any culture or period whatever that were 'irreplaceable' or singular" (p. 165). For Fisher, it is not only the museum that is affected by industrial production. In a lengthy discussion echoing Meyer Schapiro's observations about CUzanne's still lifes, Fisher argues that the still life, being an arrangement of objects without

internal, natural relationships, is a human manipu- lation of objects along rational lines similar to the

thinking inherent in industrial production (p. 209).

According to Fisher, however, the still life and sub-

sequent use of industrial materials in art does not

deny humanity, as Marx argued when he de-

scribed "all objecthood as frozen human labor, human time, and human need" (p. 251). Instead, Fisher asserts that "through work the human is

injected into matter " (p. 251) and a recognition of this in art "involves us in a willingness to recognize the same presence in bridges, skyscrapers, and

pylons. ....

Each recovery [of the human] in an individual work states that the object world . . .

exists as a rebus, spelling and re-spelling the hu-

man name" (p. 252). 4

Notes 1. See Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," reprinted in Howard Risatti, ed., Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in

Contemporary Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990), 12. 2. Greenberg began theorizing about this at least as early 1939. See his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Clement

Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3. 3. The assumptions and therefore the dangers I see in con-

tinuing to promote the "great plot" theory (i.e., corporations are instruments of absolute control/domination) are nu- merous: because it assumes people don't like their consumer- oriented lives, the theory leads one to presume, in view of the lack of change in these areas, that people are unable to do

anything to implement change, and thus the theory tends to absolve people of responsibility. I think it is time to entertain the idea that we, as a society, may have made so little change in areas such as education, the environment, and rampant con- sumerism mainly because these assumptions may be false. 4. The conference was held at the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in September 1988. 5. Clearly, Fisher's ideas reflect Greenberg's scenario for mod- ern art as an autonomous realm of activity, something that Fisher feels is fundamental to the modern museum's identity and operation. As this view of art is rejected, however, post- modern criteria, criteria that value political and social content, are being used to judge the past performance of museums

originally created around the idea of modern art.

H OWAR D R I S AT T I teaches art history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Cubist Poetry ALAN MICHAEL PARKER

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, ed. Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 362 pp. $45.00

J acqueline Vaught Brogan's Part of the Cli- mate: American Cubist Poetry never quite decides what kind of book it wants to be.

Ostensibly an anthology of American experimen- tal poetry from 1915 to 1942, as published in the "little magazines" of the time, this collection pro- vides a platform for the author's opinions-on Cubism, on Wallace Stevens's exclusion from the

literary canon, on William Faulkner, on Jacques Derrida-which rarely transcend specious asser- tion. What might have been a fine critical study of

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, of the Armory show of 1913, of Alfred Stieglitz and his work on behalf of Cubism, and of how American poets were influenced by the radical aesthetics being bandied about so blithely in the visual arts, instead falls flat. Intent upon her claim that literary mod- ernism as we know it lacks historical credence as a

movement, and that the whole of avant-garde poetry should be considered "Cubist," Brogan presents no analysis of either paintings or poems. There is no rigor to this study, nor is there any close reading of texts, without which the connec- tions between the two arts remain curious, at best. Moreover, as her commentary dwindles into "who published where" and "how this poem looks different from that poem," Brogan rarely

justifies her selections. She has compiled an inter-

esting anthology, and one that might provide fu- ture scholars with significant source material, but her critical histrionics fail to jibe with the poems presented, leaving us with two disconnected halves of one book.

In her prefatory remarks, Brogan offers a def- inition of Cubism in the visual arts:

Somewhat oversimplified, cubism in the visual arts rapidly changed from an aesthetic designed to reintroduce form, largely as a reaction against the ephemeral quality of Impressionism, to an aesthetic which quite ironically but consistently fractured form. This "fracturing" not only in-

cludes the actual forms of objects and the intro-

duction of multiple perspectives, but extends to

the fracturing of the boundary between visual

and verbal representation, primarily through the

use of collage (pp. 5-6).

These two sentences provide the extent of

Brogan's art historical analysis, and there are no

illustrations. Moreover, in this rather general and

literary approach to fine art-in her assumption that ultimate "fracturing" blurs the visual and the

verbal-Brogan reveals an awkward meth-

odological slant. Her bias is clear:

While it may be purely an accident that Picasso

would develop cubist techniques in painting

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