Hal Foster Research Articles

Serra and Us

Abstract Yve-Alain Bois discusses and describes the many essays that October editors and contributors have written about Richard Serra, particularly Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain himself, Leah Dickerman (most recently), and Hal Foster (most abundantly). The article begins: “I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that no artist can be more immediately identified with October than Richard Serra, particularly during the journal's first decades. Several of its editors or editors-to-be wrote repeatedly about his work, in the journal and elsewhere, and he himself participated directly in the life of the publication via a lengthy interview, not to mention his unwavering financial support since issue 39 (Winter 1986). “In 1991, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents appeared in the October book series; edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk, it offered nearly three hundred pages of documentation concerning the legal battle waged (and lost) by the artist to prevent the destruction by the American government of the site-specific work it had commissioned for Federal Plaza in New York City (installed in 1981, it was dismantled in 1989). Needless to say, the October gang came en bloc to defend the work at the public hearing (the testimonies of Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Douglas Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, and regular contributor Abigail Solomon-Godeau figure in the book). “In 2000, the first volume of the October Files appeared; edited by Hal Foster, it took Serra as its subject. Memorial tributes are an awkward genre in that they are almost inevitably nostalgic and take a narcissistic turn (“me and the great man”). But what if one were simply to commemorate the prolonged interaction of the journal's editors with Serra's work by chronologically recapitulating the various instances of their engagement? This will be done with pride, for sure, but also as a duty to forestall amnesia.”

The Last Sculptures (For Richard Serra)

Abstract In 2022, Richard Serra installed a massive forged steel column that stood centered and alone in the gallery and whose surface was gouged in a way that resembled bite marks or scars. The gallerist David Zwirner conveyed that the artist had said that this sculpture was his last. Hal Foster's volume of long form interviews with Serra, Conversations about Sculpture (Yale, 2018) serves as a key source as the author explores: What does it mean to bring a career to a close? And what is the relationship between sculpture and death? The essay defines the features of Serra's late style, which played out in a series of forged sculptures ranging from Grief and Reason (for Walter) (2013) to the artist's last work, 2022. These works encompass as set of mnemonic gestures—invocations of the past—that include homages to people of formative intellectual or personal significance; reference to or reengagement with works, propositions, or modes of making from earlier in the artist's career; and the primordial forms and functions of sculpture itself. And in both their literal and affective weight, they invite thoughts of mortality.

Поликодовые тексты в вузовском учебном чтении: методология исследования востребованности и эффективности использования. Статья вторая

Since complex polycode formations, simultaneously transmitting information through multiple channels, are increasingly substituting traditional educational texts, there arises a question whether such polycode texts are effective in university educational reading. The analysis and assessment of their demand and perception effectiveness requires new research methodologies. The research aims at testing the integrated use of quantitative and qualitative methods (surveys and focus groups) to study the demand and effectiveness of polycode texts for university students’ educational reading. The research is based on the concepts of polycode - primarily verbal-visual - text, their communications and ways of generating meanings by Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Hal Foster, Rudolf Arnheim, Will Eisner, Franjoise Barbe-Gall, Yury M. Lotman, Natalia V. Zlydneva, Maria K. Skaf, and others. The quantitative data were collected via an online questionnaire, while subjective perspectives were obtained via focus groups. The obtained data were considered as integrity and compared to identify their coincidences, contradictions, and correlations. The research has confirmed the hypothesis that an integrated approach to understanding and assessing the demand and effectiveness of polycode educational reading by university students provides the most reliable, valid data about the object and subject of research. The indicators obtained via the above methods, taken together and correlated with each other, are complementary and mutually adjusted; therefore, the integrated methodology gives a more well-grounded, more trustworthy, and broader picture of polycode text functioning in university education than those based on data collected via the above discussed methods separately. An integrated approach to the analysis and assessment of the demand and effectiveness of polycode educational text reading has never been applied in the Russian studies of polycode texts before. This attempt brought up the problem of students’ reading competencies for different types of educational content to comprehend the concept of the effectiveness of polycode educational reading by university students and identify its dependence both on the nature of the text and a number of other factors related to the skills of monocode text reading, visual literacy, and reader’s “cultural memory.” When compared, the survey and focus group results showed no direct correlation between the high demand for polycode texts and their effectiveness in university education. The identified reasons for the low effectiveness of polycode educational texts, which are so popular with students now, demonstrated the barriers faced by many students: (1) the lack of reading skills in at least one type of monocode educational text encumbers understanding and grasping the content of the polycode text embedded in it by its author; (2) the reader’s insufficient knowledge and cultural background prevents him/her from understanding any type of text, and first of all, structurally complex verbal-visual formations, requiring recoding of sign systems. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

언캐니의 논리

Hal Foster shares his basic stance with Rosalind Krauss in the analysis of Surrealism. He focus is internal criticism of Surrealists; the common writing style and Automatism agreed by Surrealist Manifesto are quite inappropriate for the expression of paintings. And he accommodates uncanny logic to solve this problem. Uncanny is an ontological panic associated with the accidental revealing of something fundamentally oppressed. The purpose of this discussion is to reappraise about the logic of the uncanny in Foster's Surrealism to supplement for the problem of representation that he could not analysis. This is representation and representational images were a fundamental and important expression of Surrealism that sought to realize the interpretation of dreams. For this discussion, we suggest the internal contradiction of Surrealism along Foster and Krauss. Furthermore, we reveal that the fundamental part of this internal contradictions is matter of representation, which is ontologically a problem of self-identity and a problem of narcissistic double and likeness as presented in Freud's analysis of the uncanny. Finally, it uses this as a basis for a reinterpretation of the uncanny logic employed in Foster's analysis of surrealism.

Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai’s Archival Art and Organic Ephemera

Of Scrolls and Tears: Trinh Mai’s Archival Art and Organic Ephemera H. J. Tam (bio) Titled Ba Ơi (Dear Father), Vietnamese American artist Trinh Mai’s 2017 mixed media portrait reproduces an enlarged photograph of the artist’s father-in-law, a former high-ranking official in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) named Phơưl Vân Thạch,1 holding a sign of his name at a reeducation camp after the Communist takeover of the country in 1975 (Figure 1). We see Phơưl with a deep frown, his mouth half open as if in mid-speech, defiant despite the abjection imposed by the state. In Trinh Mai’s depiction, this photograph from a haunting past becomes a memorial: carved onto the artwork’s surface are seventeen punctures representing the bullet wounds Phơưl sustained through the war, and the hand-painted Sanskrit words “dear father” cascade around the subject. The incisions reveal the thick texture of materials underneath: swatches from mourning bands worn in Vietnamese funerals and copies of Phơưl’s camp release papers. Less visible materials used in the artwork include rainwater from Vietnam, the tears Trinh Mai shed for her father-in-law, and the natural oils left on the canvas from her fingertips. In Dear Father, as in her other works introduced in this Portfolio feature, Trinh Mai combines the tangible and the imperceptible, discarded objects and living things, official documents and bodily secretions, to give form to the interstitial: between public and private, alive and demised. This critical interstitiality holds the diasporic Vietnamese consciousness that exists outside of dominant national histories in the United States and contemporary Vietnam; as such, the artworks grapple with “the sad and violent history that exists between Vietnam and the United States, and the politics of translocated race, gender, and class that springs from this past” (Espiritu 2010, 200). [End Page 43] Two prominent types of materials appear throughout Trinh Mai’s oeuvre: those that could be considered archival in nature (identification cards, letters, photographs) and organic elements (tears, eggshells, feathers). Combined in each work, their properties complement and transform each other: the organic materials lend their living aura to the historic documents, enabling these objects to conjure the specters of those who carried them through exile; at the same time, the archival materials fuse historicity into the ephemera, which symbolize refugees’ precarious, embodied experiences often unacknowledged in history books. In her use of photographic and written materials, Trinh Mai evinces what art critic Hal Foster (2004, 3) calls “an archival impulse.” Diverse in their subjects and media, Foster writes, archival artists share “a will to relate— to probe a misplaced past, to collate its different signs . . . to ascertain what might remain for the present” (21). For Trinh Mai, the “misplaced past” is the ill-understood story of Vietnamese refugees like her family after the fall of Saigon. Moreover, Trinh Mai’s mixing of organic substances recalls the influence of bioart, which, as Robert Mitchell (2010, 26) explains, couples artistic goals with biological technologies to make statements about the problematic of biotechnology. While Trinh Mai shares with bioartists the desire to solicit a moral response to the living beings and biological processes manipulated into art, her focus and intent in integrating organic materials in her work are different: instead of commenting theoretically on the state of biotechnology and its industries, Trinh Mai situates her work historically and politically in the legacy of the Vietnam War and mourns through her art those deemed disposable by regimes of power, in Vietnam and the United States. Without Trinh Mai’s artistic treatment, Phơưl, the reeducation camp inmate in Mai’s Dear Father, would otherwise have no public recognition: he is disavowed in Vietnam, where the government continues to suppress critiques of its postwar treatment of South Vietnamese, and in the United States, where the American soldier/veteran retains discursive primacy. Neither is Phơưl a “boat person” figure, with its representational burden of helplessness and proof of the West’s humanitarian gift of freedom, as Mimi Nguyen (2012) has suggested. The artist’s father-in-law appears here only through reproduced state documents, that is...

From Vorticist Dreams to Futurist Nightmares: John Dos Passos’s Novels of the 1920s

While long having noted John Dos Passos’s early fiction’s debt to Italian Futurism, critics have paid scant attention to the author’s interest in English Vorticism. In his best-known novels of the 1920s—One Man’s Initiation, Three Soldiers, and Manhattan Transfer—Dos Passos pits the two avant-garde movements against each other. Drawing on theories of violence by Hal Foster and other critics, I argue that Vorticism’s insistence on controlled movement frequently and unwittingly gives way to Futurist chaos and dispersal—just as the characters in these three novels, often in the very attempt to maintain equilibrium at high speeds, spin self-destructively out of control. Those who do survive the speed and violence of modern life risk a different form of death, one in which their souls are gutted and replaced with a mechanization that makes them a physical and spiritual threat to others who come within their orbit.

Archiving Africa: Notes for the Contemporary African Filmmaker

First presented as a keynote at the 8th I-Rep International film festival in Lagos, Nigeria, in March 2018, this paper triangulates the links between processes of archivization, African filmmaking, and activist cultural work. The central task I set for myself in the paper is to answer the question, why should the African filmmaker be interested in archives and processes of archivization, especially in the age of digital media and the politicization of culture? By “archives,” I am referring to the artefacts generated for the filmmaker in the form of historical traces in the public domain and the texts s/he creates in the form of cultural narratives. Drawing links between archival work, film-making and the politicization of culture, I argue for a recognition of the strong relations between culture, politics, and social transformation, and submit that an awareness of how these three realms are interconnected should occupy the interest of the modern African filmmaker. Part of the wider argument I make about the potential of archives as a narrative resource in African filmmaking is to nudge contemporary African screen media producers to embrace what Hal Foster refers to as “an archival impulse at work internationally in contemporary art” in which art functions to reinvent archives from mere “excavation sites” into “construction sites” for counter narratives and memory.

4. Object and Objecthood in Post-Minimal Sculpture

AbstractIn this material, we analyse the way in which a paradigmatic period for the evolution of art and sculpture as we see it today, the years 1960-1970, shaped the contemporary perception of the visual arts, in terms of reconnecting a spiritual approach and the art manifestation and perceptibility. The theme allows a radiographic introspection into the visual expressions, the diversity of materials, techniques, artistic and aesthetic solutions. The main goal is to facilitate the understanding of the mechanisms that led to nowadays perceptions of art (and of sculpture, as the main vehicle of operating with objectual and space). As most of the minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture orientations can be analysed though the perspective of various prominent artists or researchers such as Donald Judd and Hal Foster, we also assist to major shifts in institutionalizing anti-aesthetic or less-traditional art movements.

“Made-Unmade-Remade”: Art, History and Identity in A Postcolonial Kinderhood (1994)

This paper explores Elaine Reichek's 1994 installationA Postcolonial Kinderhood in relation to the histories it resurfaced, namely those of American Jewry, modernism, architecture and interior design. Situating the work in the mode Hal Foster designated as ‘archival’, the paper contends that Reichek’s investment in these histories was decidedly post postmodern, which is to say, with A Postcolonial Kinderhood, Reichek attempted to weave history back together, rather than pull it further apart. This was achieved literally with embroidery, through the eleven hand-stitched samplers that lined the installation’s four walls. Part of the installation’s broader recreation of Reichek’s childhood home in 1950s Brooklyn, these samplers evoked America’s colonial period – the English textile form had been brought over by colonial settlers in the seventeenth century – as well as the subsequent (and various) Colonial Revivals in American architecture and interior design. Yet while Reichek’s samplers faithfully replicated the design, scale and composition of earlier precedents, she updated the form’s textual component by hand-stitching remarks made by friends and family on the subject of their Jewish identity. Through these texts, Reichek brought her samplers into the 1990s while connecting her installation’s address of Jewish identity to a much longer American history. During a period in which the category ‘Jewish art’ was being reformulated as a distinct subset of American art, A Postcolonial Kinderhood presented both ‘Jewish’ and ‘American’ as too entangled with one another to be separated out into two static categories. Pointing beyond the specifics of this particular tangle of art and identity, this paper will hold up A Postcolonial Kinderhood as exemplary of the historical reckoning that played out in American art of the 1990s.

“Made-Unmade-Remade”: Art, History and Identity in A Postcolonial Kinderhood (1994)

This paper explores Elaine Reichek's 1994 installation A Postcolonial Kinderhood in relation to the histories it resurfaced, namely those of American Jewry, modernism, architecture and interior design. Situating the work in the mode Hal Foster designated as ‘archival’, the paper contends that Reichek’s investment in these histories was decidedly post postmodern, which is to say, with A Postcolonial Kinderhood, Reichek attempted to weave history back together, rather than pull it further apart. This was achieved literally with embroidery, through the eleven hand-stitched samplers that lined the installation’s four walls. Part of the installation’s broader recreation of Reichek’s childhood home in 1950s Brooklyn, these samplers evoked America’s colonial period – the English textile form had been brought over by colonial settlers in the seventeenth century – as well as the subsequent (and various) Colonial Revivals in American architecture and interior design. Yet while Reichek’s samplers faithfully replicated the design, scale and composition of earlier precedents, she updated the form’s textual component by hand-stitching remarks made by friends and family on the subject of their Jewish identity. Through these texts, Reichek brought her samplers into the 1990s while connecting her installation’s address of Jewish identity to a much longer American history. During a period in which the category ‘Jewish art’ was being reformulated as a distinct subset of American art, A Postcolonial Kinderhood presented both ‘Jewish’ and ‘American’ as too entangled with one another to be separated out into two static categories. Pointing beyond the specifics of this particular tangle of art and identity, this paper will hold up A Postcolonial Kinderhood as exemplary of the historical reckoning that played out in American art of the 1990s.

Avant-gardes and Postmodernism: The Reception of Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde in American Art Criticism

Although seldom discussed in France, Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde has had a major influence in the United States since it was translated into English in 1984, mainly through the writings of art critics linked to the journal October (Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens). For these authors, the discussion of Bürger’s theses was a way, first, of redefining their own postmodernist position at a time when it had been weakened by the emergence of a postmodernism that was considered reactionary and, second, of revising their conception of the history of modern art by counterposing Clement Greenberg’s formalist, depoliticized modernism with a re-evaluation of the critical or utopian dimension of the historical avant-gardes. However, the context in which the original German version of Bürger’s work had been published a decade earlier was completely different, marked by a crisis in literary studies and a renewal of Marxist aesthetics. This article attempts to retrace the conditions of this intellectual transfer, from the obliteration of the book’s original context to its repositioning in the American postmodernist debate. It also offers a key to reconstructing the theoretical and strategic issues that confronted postmodernist art criticism from the 1970s to the 1990s. Finally, it shows how these debates contributed to a lasting redefinition of the major categories of twentieth-century art historiography.

임동식의 지속하는 찰나: 퍼포먼스와 타블로 비방

This article explores the art world of Rim Dong Sik, a Korean artist born in 1945, and characterizes his art as an endeavor to project an alternative approach to the conservation of performance. Rim has recently been recognized for the solo exhibition at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) in 2020. He presents unique artworks that comprise outdoor in situ performances, archives as records thereof, and paintings. We will examine his artistic background that straddled Korea and Germany against the backdrop of the germination and development of experimental art in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. Then we will analyze how Rim’s performances, archives, and paintings are fused into a unified construct by focusing on his two representative works presented in Hamburg in 1985. Hal Foster’s “An Archival Impulse”(2004) and Douglas Crimp’s “Pictures”(1979) corroborate the artistic potential of Rim’s archives. His paintings may be viewed as tableau vivant that bridges the gap between performances and paintings.

Hunter-gatherer or the other ethnographer? The artist in the age of historical reproduction

This essay revisits Hal Foster's essay in Marcus and Myers’ The Traffic in Culture (1995), “The Artist as Ethnographer,” through the lens of the Danish-Vietnamese artist Danh Vo's practice of collecting historical material. While Foster problematizes Western artists’ “primitivist fantasies” in the 1990s world of “postcolonial and “multinational capitalism,” I will consider Vo’ 21st century method of acquiring objects through auction sales, negotiations with their owners, and excavating them from their sites of origin, as reversing the roles of “self” and “other.” In purchasing White House memorabilia dated to the Vietnam-American war at auctions and salvaging antique statues from Vietnamese Catholic churches as artistic practice, Danh Vo illustrates what Hal Foster considered the problem of “othering” the self instead of “selving” the other. This essay will consider how Vo could present a case of alterity that returns the gaze and projects Vietnamese history back to the Western viewer. In her review of Vietnamese-Danish artist Danh Vo's Guggenheim retrospective in February 2018, Roberta Smith hesitated to call the artist an artist Instead, she dubbed him, somewhat pejoratively, a “hunter gatherer” and called his collection of historical objects to be illustrative of the “usual fate of non-Western countries: the debilitating progression of missionaries, colonization, military occupation and economic exploitation.” The tone of her review is precisely the kind of attitude on the part of the contemporary art world that an artist such as Danh Vo, and others who have been marginalized from institutions such as the Guggenheim, have been fighting against Yet, Vo's very presence in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim serves to disprove Smith's own “assumption of outsideness” (Foster 1995: 304).

Hirschhorn’s Dilemma, or How Not to Ride Two Horses at Once

In a 2003 interview by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Thomas Hirschhorn clarified his typology of sculptural-architectural forms situated between high culture and mass culture, private sentiment and public expression. The Raymond Carver Altar, Piet Mondrian Altar, Ingeborg Bachmann Altar, and Otto Freundlich Altar take the form of spontaneous memorials that so often mark sites of tragic and violent death. In them, motley collections of laminated photographs, flickering candles, cellophane-wrapped bouquets, and personalised mementos declare collective grief and devotion. Like the Altars, the more expansive Monuments – dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Antonio Gramsci – express what Hal Foster has called an archival impulse, a ‘move to (re)cathect cultural remnants’, namely the work and thought of radical philosophers and artists.1 It was in the face of the ‘failure’ of the Deleuze Monument, which the artist was forced to dismantle prematurely, that Hirschhorn first articulated the principle of ‘presence and production’ that subsequently governed the Bataille Monument, Gramsci Monument, and his numerous other works in public space. 2 Immersive and of limited duration, ‘presence and production’ works are often situated in working class neighbourhoods and realised with the aid of their inhabitants, who have been subjected to the legacies of colonialism and political and economic marginalisation. The Altars and Monuments bear the hallmarks of Hirschhorn’s approach to artwork in public space: adoption of exacerbated weakness in relation to urban surroundings, especially through mimicry of states of devaluation; development of a lexicon of provisional structures; appropriation of the language of non-art material culture; and activation of processes of identification and (as Claire Bishop has stressed) disidentification vis-à-vis the publics to which they are addressed.3

What Comes After Farce?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle. By Hal Foster. London: Verso Books, 2020; 205 pp.; black-and-white illustrations. $24.95 cloth, e-book available.

What Comes After Farce?: Art and Criticism at a Time of Debacle. By Hal Foster. London: Verso Books, 2020; 205 pp.; black-and-white illustrations. $24.95 cloth, e-book available.

Binding Trauma

Binding Trauma

Revealing Revelation: Hans Haacke’s “All Connected”

Revealing Revelation: Hans Haacke’s “All Connected”

Site-specific

Este artigo apresenta uma breve retrospectiva da linguagem artística conhecida como site-specific; também debate questões a respeito do o uso do vídeo e a presença (ou não) do espectador nesse tipo de trabalho; e como a câmera pode ser usada como um dispositivo de mediação entre o artista e o público. São analisados alguns dos trabalhos que considerados precursores desse estilo - surgido em meados da década de 1960 - e a ideia de como a remoção ou mudança de lugar de uma obra site-specific pode transformá-la, ou ainda, alterar o seu sentido. O texto também propõe uma aproximação entre arte e antropologia ao abordar que o lugar onde o trabalho artístico é realizado não necessariamente precisa ser um espaço físico. O artigo tem como ponto de partida o pensamento de autores como Miwon Kwon, Nike Kay, Phillipe Dubois e Hal Foster.

O disciplinar e o doméstico: Imagens domésticas nos vídeo-performances de Letícia Parente, 1975–1982

Este ensaio centra-se em Letícia Parente (1930–1991), videoartista e cientista brasileira, cujos trabalhos associam imagens e espaços domésticos, bem como tarefas e objetos quotidianos, a violência, repressão e encarceramento. Ao longo das décadas de 1970 e 1980, Parente criou uma série de performances em vídeo, uma abordagem à performance arte na qual se apresentou perante uma câmara de filmar e não perante uma audiência ao vivo. Embora Parente não se identificasse como feminista, este ensaio interpreta o seu trabalho sob uma leitura feminista, argumentando que ela navegou pelas múltiplas pressões da maternidade, do trabalho doméstico e da sua carreira profissional, desenvolvendo trabalhos experimentais que exploram as tarefas domésticas e que testam os seus limites para abordar as divisões de gênero e raça no trabalho e a violência patrocinada pelo estado da ditadura militar brasileira (1964–1985). Esses trabalhos incluem In (1975), que se concentra no ato de pendurar roupas num armário, Marca Registrada(1975), que retrata a costura/bordado, e Tarefa I(1982), que aborda o acto de engomar, executado em sua própria casa. Nesses vídeos, Parente realiza ações quotidianas de formas que promovem a automutilação e o confinamento, com o objectivo de organizar uma resposta à opressão de gênero no quotidiano das mulheres, paralelamente à violência e ao aprisionamento sofridos pelos brasileiros sob a ditadura. Ao retratar ‘punições’ disciplinares (ou a ameaça de tais punições) sob o manto das tarefas domésticas, Letícia Parente demonstra como as mesmas forças que estruturam a sociedade pública disciplinada também configuram os espaços privados do lar.

Steve Rude interview

ABSTRACT A conversation with award-winning comic book and fine artist Steve ‘The Dude’ Rude about his career, art, and influences. Also discussed are Nexus, Jack Kirby, Alex Toth and Space Ghost, Doug Wildey and Jonny Quest, Star Trek, Russ Manning, Hal Foster, illustration and design, Superman, why superheroes continue to resonate with modern audiences, and the Nexus newspaper strips.