Bachelors (October Books)

Rating:
Summary: Fairly unconvinced
Review: I haven't read all of the essays in this book. I might not want to. I think I've read five of the eight and parts of two others. Overall, I have not been particularly impressed. My introduction to Krauss came in an essay she authored on James Coleman, which I read for a class in college. It was particularly sophisticated: employing ideas from Barthes and Benjamin, she touched on ideas about obsolesence and signifiers that fail to signify, and in doing so brought a fresh perspective to an artist I never understood. In short, Krauss took difficult art and made sense of it. Unfortunately, in this book, Krauss takes on the foundation of the feminist canon but refuses to do feminist readings of their work. In fact, she attempts to perform an overhaul not just of critical appreciation of Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Claude Cahun, etc., but attempts to dismantle feminist theory altogether. In the very weak essay on Cindy Sherman, Krauss overlooks obvious feminist elements of Sherman's imagery (how they mimic the form of the pornographic centerfold, for example) with some talk about the "fetishization of the vertical" and the "sublimation of the subject into the horizontal." Worse, she tries to undo Laura Mulvey's seminal essay on film theory by pointing out a few assumption's Mulvey makes. Krauss never fesses up to her own assumptions. It's not persuasive art criticism.

Basically, Krauss's method is always to locate in the art some formal element which can then be tied to a critical theoretical term. Thus, the horizontal is a rejection of "the fetishization of the vertical"; Sherrie Levine putting single objects in glass cases is an enactment of Deleuze's "machine". Krauss reveals how artists thematize critical theory rather than perform critical readings of the work. Thus, important artists for her are those who anticipate theoretical developments. Frankly, I think Krauss is attributing meaning to formal elements which do not inhere to the element itself. And how many times can an art critic point to multiplicity and a destabilizing of identity as "avante-garde" and subversive?