The Politics of the Signifier: A Conversation on the Whitney Biennial

Abstract

Hal Foster: The editors of October have decided to begin a series of roundtables in order to explore some of the problems that appear to confront art, theory, and politics with a special urgency in this country today. Recent political events, socioeconomic developments, and institutional changes have transformed the frames in which these practices are enacted and understood. The same is true of historical work in modernist studies, and in future issues we hope to address controversial new readings there as well. For this first conversation we focus on a tendency that to some of us appears pervasive in contemporary art and criticism alike: a certain turn away from questions of representation to iconographies of content; a certain turn from a politics of the signifier to a politics of the signified. For purposes of specificity we concentrate on the art exhibited at the 1993 Whitney Museum Biennial, and we do so aware of the great difficulty of a critique that wishes to question some tendencies evident in the show but not to abet its many reactive detractors. In this conversation Benjamin Buchloh, Silvia Kolbowski, Rosalind Krauss, and I are joined by Miwon Kwon, a doctoral candidate in architectural history and theory at Princeton University and an editor of the journal Documents.