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A Working Perspective for Marxist Art History TodayAuthor(s): O. K. WerckmeisterSource: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1991), pp. 83-87Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360526

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A WorkingPerspective for Marxist ArtHistory Today

0. K. WERCKMEISTER

[.. .]Who areyou?To whomAre you speaking?Who benefits from what you aresaying there?And, by the way:Does it leave the reader sober-minded? Can it beread in the morning?Is it tied to what is there already?Have the sentencesThat were said before your time, been used, or atleast been refuted?Is everythingverifiable?By experience?What experience?[. .1BertoltBrecht, TheSceptic[Preface]In his perceptivereviewarticleon my TheMakingofPaul Klee's Career,1914-1920, in the OxfordArtJournal, vol. 13, no. 2 (1990), David Craven hascharacterisedmy conception of Marxist theory onthe basis of an essayI wrote in 1971. Such a referenceto work from twenty years ago is problematical forany scholar who, like myself, attempts to continueworkingin the Marxisttradition.Just about the timewhen Craven'sreviewappeared, Norbert Schneiderin Germany edited a special issue of Kritische erichte(18 [1990], no. 3), entitled 'Zwanzig Jahre danach',which contained a collection of articlesby a numberof German art historians who participated in theMarxist challenge to conventional art history in theFederal Republic around 1970, and who werereviewingthe situation of Marxist arthistorytwentyyearslater.Such a reviewimposed itself all the moreurgently after the demise, in the fall of 1989,of theGerman Democratic Republic, the first Germansocialist state. The following English version of mycontributionto the Kritische erichtes intended as aresponse to David Craven's review. It has beenrevised and expanded, in part as a response to dis-cussions held, in December 1990,with a number offriends in Britain, most notably Andrew Heming-way, Michael Podro, and Alex Potts.1. TopicalityBetween 1968 and 1974,social democratic trends inthe capitalistmass societies of the United Statesandthe Federal Republic appeared to suggest certainpossibilities for political and social change to whichMarxist scholars were able to relate their drivetowards a criticalemancipationfrom those conserva-tivevalueswhich stood in the way of a more truthfulTHE OXFORD ART JOURNAL - 14:2 1991

social history of culture. Since the end of theseventies,these scholarshave been confrontedwith aconservativeturn in politics, legitimised by demo-cratic majorities,which cast into doubt the timeli-ness, if not the appropriateness,of such a mission.During this same period, on the other hand, theresurgence of the capitalist economy entailed suchglaringcrisis symptoms that a peculiar all-pervasivecrisis consciousness became commonplace. Thisconsciousness did not need to be derived from anyMarxistanalysis of prevailingconditions and tacitlytook their inevitability for granted. The systemiccritique of capitalism, which would have distin-guished a Marxist assessment of the crisis,promisedno redressthrough democratic politics, which mostMarxists themselves upheld against communistparty rule in the socialist states of Eastern Europe.Finally, when during the fall of 1989 that rulesuddenly collapsed, the insight imposed itself thatMarxist politics in action had been bound up with,not just compromised by, oppressive regimes.Hence, Marxist theory no longer seemed to offer apolitical alternative with a chance of implementa-tion. The lingering political disenfranchisement ofMarxistscholarshipwas all but complete.2. ValuesBetween 1968 and 1974,Marxist art historiansin theFederal Republic, and to a lesser extent in theUnited States, put forth a challenge againstunacknowledged projectionsof contemporarysocialvalueswhich until then had sustained the collection,preservation, pedagogical presentation,and publicdisplay of the artof the past. During these years, theself-confidenceof capitalistculture, at the apparenthigh-point of its post-warsuccess, was experiencingits firstsustainedpoliticalcrisis.In the United States,domestic affluence coincided with unsuccessfulneocolonial warfare in South-East Asia; in theFederalRepublic, post-warreconstructionhad beenaccomplished without confronting Germany'sNational Socialistpast. It was in order to dispel theattendant cultural self-gratificationby an art trans-figured into absolute aesthetic values that Marxistart historianslaunched their accounts of art as ideo-logy, as a tool of propaganda, as a product of socialstrife.The turn to conservativepolitics since the end ofthe seventies, the second period of the post-warresurgence of capitalism, deprived those radicalaspirationsof theirpolitical perspective,even though

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the attendant sense of perpetual crisis expanded farbeyond Marxiststo large segments of intellectualsingeneral. Faced with seemingly inescapable perils,these intellectuals plunged into a diffuse scepticismtoward culture as the vehicle of normativevalues, ascepticism without political alternatives. On theother hand, the financialand technical expansion ofcultureentailedby the capitalistboom made artpastand present accessible with a velocity no longerrestrainedby principles of ideology, and no longermanageable by historical concepts. The automaticrelativisationof values which followed from thesetwo developments deprived Marxist ideologycritique of its function as a unified premise ofpolitical dissidence and historical inquiry. Thecoexistence of values beyond political disputebecame the positive social ideal of 'postmodern'culture, the culture of capitalist democracy withconservativemajorities.Under these conditions, art history split into twoincompatible modes of thinking which were none-theless accommodated in the proliferatingpluralismof academic institutions.On the one hand, empiricalexplorations of large scope and minute precision,ostensibly unprejudiced, chary of categorical con-clusions about the social significance of art, andtaking objectivityfor granted; on the other hand, aself-reflexive methodological criticism and intro-spectivetheoreticalaesthetics, intentionally disown-ing any commitment to standardsofobjectivityas anoutmoded way of thinking. Both concepts of art-historicalscholarship,no matterhow much at oddsthey were, shared the scepticism against

art as anabsolute value.Thus, the opposition of Marxist art historiansagainst the retrospective ransfigurationof capitalistvalues into the art of the past tended to lose itspurpose and its bite. Their alternative modes ofargument - the negative one of ideology critiqueand the positive one of social utopia - failed toengage a discipline no longer bent on culturalaffirmation at the expense of historical accuracy.And yet, the complementary coexistence, in today'sarthistory,of mindless documentary expansionandconceptually overdetermined reasoning calls for asimilarlyradical critique as did the capitalisttrans-figurationof values at issue in the years 1968-1974.For such a critique to be consistent, untenableideological claims of the Left would have to bereplaced by a sober-minded insistence on the non-negotiable conditions of scholarlywork.3. HistoryBefore 1968, art-historical scholarship, no matterhow specific its procedures, was still ultimatelyfocused on the ideal of the autonomy of art, whichtook various categorical forms - metaphysical,existential, or, at the very least, aesthetic. Thecontradiction between such philosophical defini-tions and the historical character of art was

explainedaway by apodicticor elaborateconceptualmodels of historical 'meaning' - illustration,expression,reflection,correspondence,and the like.The socialprocessesof the productionand receptionof art, on the other hand, were all but ignored insuch equations. Thus, the Marxist challenge toconservativearthistorycame to insiston a historyofart as a product of society, subject to its economicconditions and political organisation. Yet, ratherthan consistently developing this initial challengeinto an agenda for a radicalisedhistoricalresearch,most Marxist art historians insisted on conceptual-isations of their own, conflating the theoreticalrequirements of historical work with the variousorthodoxies of Marxist cultural theory or policyoutside the field. Hence, they fell back into acompetition with the value-oriented art history ofconservativeobservancewhich could not be decidedon the strengthof evidence alone.In the following twenty years, art history as thesocial history of art production irresistiblycame toprevailin the discipline, but on grounds other thanthose advanced by its Marxistcritique. The historicreasons for this startling trend remain to beexplored.Internally,itwas promptedby arthistory'sinstitutional growth, interdisciplinary expansion,accumulativebibliographicalcross-referencing,andscientificresearchtechnology. In the end, the socialhistory of art became a commonplace pursuit forwhich only the methods remained subjectto debate.It has never yielded any consistent conclusionsbeyond specificfieldsof inquiry,on how artis in factdeterminedby the social process.The term 'context'became the codewordforthis stateof indeterminacy.The Marxist tradition can provide the categorieswith which to confrontthis diffuse,deceptiveexpan-sion of an indeterminate social history of art, sincecause and effect are the fundamental categories ofMarxist thought. Such categories are to be distin-guished from the implicitly judgmental, inter-pretativeterms of conventional Marxist art history,which have preempted the historicalinquiry insteadof setting its goals. Terms such as base and super-structure, bourgeoisie and proletariat, have longturned from firm foundations into dead weight.They have fallen short of the differentiated per-ceptions made in radicalart-historical esearch,havenot stood up to legitimate questioning from non-Marxist scholars, and have been mired in hair-splitting theoretical debates on the part of Marxistscholars themselves. If the basic Marxist notions ofcapital,class, and ideology continue to be viableit isbecause they determine the range of questioning,are shared to that extent by non-Marxist scholars,and thus yield common ground for inclusivedebates.It is the insistenceon historicaldeterminacyitself,not the assurance of how it works, which remainsintrinsic for Marxist thinking. As long as it can bemaintained in the form of an undeterred agendarather 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 straight-forward interdependence of theory and empiricalscholarship.4. The Scholarly ProcessConservativeart history up to 1968 was based on arelatively undeveloped state of scholarship,withouttoday's profusion of illustratedcatalogues, fascimileeditions, architectural surveys, and source collec-tions. Bibliographywas still manageable enough forindividual scholars to base their work on self-accumulated, exhaustive surveys of the pertinentliterature.Since bibliographyprovidedarthistorianswith no accumulative synthesis of the evidence, itprompted them to construe the coherence of theirstudies from philosophical or aesthetic principlessustaining the reasoning of individual minds. Onthis premise, they even attemptedto put into circula-tion self-coined art-historical terminologies whoseexegesis rather than application is the task of'methods' seminars today.When, after 1968,Marxistart historiansbegan toexpose those hybrid constructs from limited know-ledge and conceptual self-assurance as ideologicalprojections of social values, they did not call forreplacing premature conceptualisation altogetherwith an expansive critical process of research, sincethey were in no position to influence the academicorganisation of scholarlywork. They were reducedto asserting a theoretical superiority of their ownsociological or aesthetic sets of concepts againstthose of their opponents and thus remainedbeholden to the same categoricalmode of transfigur-ing subjectivethought.In the course of the following twenty years, theprinted materials of art history have become unsur-veyable.Thus, any concept of art-historicalsynthesiswas being removed from a verification for which thetechnicalmeans seemed availablebut elusive.Teamsof technical subordinatesor associateswere workingout classification systems, first bibliographic, thenelectronic, in order to keep the processed evidenceaccessible. But the principleson which they operatedpertainedto materialsmanagement, not to historicalreconstruction,and hence left the technologicalpro-cess of accumulative scholarship unsuitable forassimilationby the individual mind. Hence, continu-ing efforts at art-historical synthesis by individualscholars began to look increasingly arbitrary.Theywere often advanced with a manifest contempt forempirical research, ustified with the need fora newbeginning, and argued on the grounds of alternative'methodologies'drawn fromotherdisciplineswith noregard for their generic differences.Now the philo-sophical sub-disciplines of aesthetics and arttheory,which had allalong offered'higher'alternatives o arthistory,werebeing revalidatedand updated by refer-ence to new philosophical authorities. Since theirfoundations rested on turning subjective aestheticTHE OXFORD ARTJOURNAL 14:2 1991

experiencesntocategorical ropositions, ndthere-foreclaimedexemption romanyverificationyart-historicalevidence at large, they offeredsuitablepalliativesora processofscholarshipwhosetechno-logicalexpansionhadgottenout of hand.As is wellknown, he Marxist radition fthoughtoriginallyncludedno aesthetic heory.The copiousliteratureon Marxist aesthetics which was sub-sequently written notwithstanding, his traditionoffers and demands a theoretical reflection ofhistorical cholarshipas the fundamentalmode ofunderstandingulture,as opposed o itsconceptualexplication.Here artisticwork and artisticexperi-ence,bothofwhichcannotbytheirverynature indanytheoretical quivalent, an becomeaccessible selementsn acomprehensiveiewofhistorynotcon-tingent upon the aestheticudgmentsof individualscholars.Such a viewoffers hepossibility faimingfor an inter-subjective alidationof art-historicalresearch.5. TheoryThe new Marxistart historiansof 1968challengedthe conventionalmajority f the fieldwith claims o atheoretical superioritywhich enabled them tosubject its axioms to an ideology critique.Thehistoriographicalreflexivity of their aggressiveapproachprompted hem to base their work on acontinuous philosophicaltradition that reachedbeyondMarx n bothdirections,backto Hegelandforward o the writingsof the Frankfurt choolandof French post-warMarxist writers.They soonsurpassedhe scatteredheritageof isolatedMarxistart historians rom the thirtiesand fortiessuch asAntal,Hauser,Klingender,Raphael,andSchapiro,who had remainedprofessionalutsidersduring heColdWar,and who haddrawn heirstarkconceptsmainly from a straightforwardeadingof Marx'sowntexts.WhatMarxistarthistoriansdid not do, however,wasto insert heirwork ntothe continuousprocessof revision o whichthe Marxist raditionbegantobe subjected n the academicdisciplinesof philo-sophy,sociology,and politicalscienceat this time.Thus, they missed the chance to live up to thestandardsof theoretical tringency, he vastoppor-tunities for empiricalverification,and the acutepoliticalaccountabilityo world-historicalhange,whichare germane o thosedisciplines.Politically,Marxistarthistory n the 'West'neverengaged nanydebatewiththe culturalpolicy,arthistory,andarttheoryof communiststates n the SovietUnionand EasternEurope.Recoiling ntodidacticrecon-siderations nd competitive efinements f its ownlimited literature, it fell behind the state of debatewhere it mattered, that is, outside its bounds.The steadydifferentiationand complicationof therevision process to which the Marxist tradition isbeing subjectedin those disciplines,where studies inMarxism have become specialisations of their own,

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is as hard to masteras is the proliferationof evidencein art historyitself. Moreover, its results cannotjustbe transferred o the social history of art. Since arthistory was in turn never invited to contribute tothem in any interdisciplinary fashion, social andpolitical scientists tend to entertain schematic cate-gorical notions about the social significance of artwhich would not stand the test of art-historicalscholarship.Instead of linking up with those disciplines,Marxist art historians during the eighties weredrawn to theoretical traditions aimed at expandingthe aesthetic experience beyond form to meaning.They rushed to respond to a panoply of poststruc-turalist interpretativemodes - linguistics, semio-tics, aesthetics of reception - which promisedinherently aesthetic clarifications and formulaicgeneralisationsof historicalproblems. The Marxisttradition,whose theme is the historicalfoundationsof artisticculture ratherthan the objectivesecuringof aesthetic experience, was no match for the con-ceptual sophistication of the new theories in thisparticularrealm. Hence, Marxistarthistorians,par-ticipating in the progressivesevering of theoreticalargument from the process of scholarship, allowedthemselves to be reduced to theoretical contests inwhich they frequently attempted to hold their ownby syncretically drawing on their adversaries'thought. Forfeitingmuch of its criticalpotential forrefutation,Marxist arthistorythus secured for itselfthe definitiveacademic acceptance as one particular'method' among many to be selectively exploitedalong with other competing offerings.A new phase of Marxistarthistorycan counteractthose forays into aesthetic theory by including theaestheticexperienceof images, forms,and meaningsinto the historicalrecordof its inquiries as far as theevidence will carry.The multifarious source litera-ture of art production and artreception, which dur-ing the past twenty years art historians of allpersuasions have documented and correlatedwiththeir studies of the art works themselves, offerstheevidentialbasis for a historicalrecoveryof aesthetics,unencumbered by theoretical concepts but refinedin technical and psychologicalprecision.6. PracticeThe implicit assumption that Marxist intellectualwork is founded on and aimed at a politicalpracticehas imbued the writingof numerous Marxistarthis-torians,from the time of their resurgenceafter 1968,with a lingering self-righteous pathos rarely vin-dicatedby any politicalgoals, let alone results.Sincethe Marxist tradition allows for much theoreticalcoherence in the expression of political convictions,and since its protestsand demands tend to take theform of statements about the rightfulcourse of his-tory, Marxist art history often failed to engagescholars of different persuasions in debates ongrounds of evidence. Scholarly disagreements were

reduced to inconclusive political debates aboutmethodology.During the eighties, this situationchanged in con-tradictory ways. While Marxist intellectuals hadmost of their political expectationsdisproved,many- though by no means all - were installed inacademic culture, some of them quite prominently.Here they were not merely accommodated withinthe pluralistic spectrum of inconclusive theoreticaldebates promoted as continual enrichments of art-historical methodology. They were also given theopportunity to articulatethe dissents and demandsof underprivilegedsocial minoritieswith no politicalaccountabilityand in forms that fell shortof Marxistalternatives.The exemption of art from any imme-diate political practicalityfacilitatedthis ideologicalaccommodation and imbued it with airs of an exis-tential seriousness and social urgency which comp-ensated for the lack of political constituencies. Thehabitual Marxistpostureof dissentnow offered tselfto causes that were politically incongruous to theMarxist tradition, no matter how justified on theirown terms.If there wereany memoriesof the tacticalalliancesof PopularFrontculture in the yearsbeforethe Second World War, they did not lead to anystrategy.The operationsof Marxistarthistorians,tothe extent that they kept focused on politics,remained defined by, and confined to, the freedomof self-expression n capitalistdemocracy.The traditionof Marxistarthistory,with the pos-sible exception of Meyer Schapiro, is lacking inauthors of the stature of Trotsky, Brecht, Gramsci,Lukacs, or Breton, whose active political engage-ments compelled them to navigatebetween the twopoles of Marxism's political legitimacy, that is, thecommitment to workers' movements on the onehand and to socialistgovernmentson the other.Theensuing conflictsand contradictionsin the theoreti-cal postures of these authors have authenticatedtheir criticalapproach to artisticculture for the veryreason that it was fraughtwith reversals.Marxistarthistorians today operate under no such pressures.Their preferred model, Walter Benjamin, was anintellectualwith no political ties, unsuccessful in hisambition, during the first three years of his exile, tolink up with the political culture of the Left, andhence thrown back on the ideological idiosyncrasiesand enforced continuities of his own reflections.There may be historicreasonsforreenactinghis pos-ture. However, if no political mandate can beinvoked to enhance the scholarly credibility ofMarxist art history, it has to be established on itsown professionalterms.7. How to WorkToday, Marxistarthistory,beforeadvancingany oldor new political claims, is confrontedwith a profes-sional task that no other 'methodology' current inthe field has thus farbeen able to tackle: coming toterms with a collectiveprocess of scholarshipout of

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the reach of individuals, in a field that more thanothersdepends on individualexperience.At present,Marxist art history is better positioned than anyother traditionto raisethe historical definitionof artas part of the social process in the form of an unful-filled demand, as an open programme for research,because it is better equipped to reconcile both theresults and the gaps of knowledge in an advancingprocess of clarification.The materialist premise ofthe Marxist traditionbrings the confidence that lackof knowledge can be resolved through empiricalwork, instead of being transfigured into methodo-logical agony or licence, instead of being compen-satedforby theoreticaltenets and literaryconceits. Itis a premisethatenables it to turn the last sentenceofWittgenstein's Tractatus - 'Worziberman nichtsprechenann,darubermussmanschweigen' into anexpression of assurance. The dialectical inter-dependency of theory and experience, on the otherhand, obliges Marxist art history to integrate thetechnical processes of scholarly work into itsmethodological self-reflection.As a result, its con-sistent implementation faces mounting difficulties.Yet it is spared the interpretativequandaries whichduring the eighties were frequently passed off as a'crisis of the discipline' itself.Since any objective institutional and historio-graphical correlation of scholarly work cannot as amatter of principle be enacted by individuals, butonly on a collectivebasis, Marxist arthistoryis facedwith the question of how to resolve the contradictionbetween the objective nature of scholarly work andthe subjectiveaesthetic foundations of art-historicalexperience. Its claimsto the status ofscholarshipreston making its results relevant for individuals while

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convincing others who do not share their values,which is what objectivitymeans. This question canonly be tackled through a commitment of scholarlywork to responsibledebateswhere propositionshaveto stand the test of collective acceptance or beadjusted to reasoned critique. Today, the academicorganisation of scholarship in capitalist societyinhibits any such commitment, since it is orientedtowards competition, promotes elites, and tends tofavour performatory achievements. And sinceMarxist art history lacks the social base and there-fore the institutionalstrengthto overcomethese pro-fessional standards, it frequently submits to them.To what extent it can at least unfold its criticalpot-ential in the democratic free space of academic cul-ture remains to be seen.In any event, the traditionof Marxisttheorytodayhas reached a stagewhere it can shed the congealedformulas of the past and become the fundamentalquestioning mode of a radicalised historical inves-tigationof culture. In arthistory, it can maintain thefull scope of the correlation between economics,society, politics, culture, and art as a categoricalprinciplewith which to facethe fast-growingmass ofhistorical data. Its ideological function of providingutopian surrogatesforpolitical agendas and its exis-tential function for the transfigurationof aestheticexperiencesinto political self-awarenessmay get lostin the process. But political agendas and politicalself-awarenesscan only become more deliberate andless illusory without the false backing of a scholar-ship made to order. Such a sobering-up is unavoid-able if Marxist art history is to uphold its claims toscholarlystatus, that is, if it is to retain its credibilityfor an unwaveringculturalpolicy of the Left.

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