Historicization may be part of what we expect from art, but Fredrick Jameson’s recommendation that one “Always historicize” sounds like a rule. The problem, I think, is the word ‘“always.” It makes it sound as though historicism is always the same and always observed or digested in the same way. “Always” is an absolute, everything else other than absolutely nothing isn’t.
“Always historicize!”, exclaims Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, although to tell the truth I actually tracked down where the quote came from on his Wikipedia page.1 It sounds definitive, determinative, orthodoxly Marxist, until one reads the book carefully and realizes that he is in fact suggesting the opposite: that at the end of this process of “historicization” we will discover what it is about the work of art that cannot be historicized, cannot be explained by history, that remains outside of its designated time and place.
Hal Foster · LRB lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Hal Foster · We are our apps: Visual Revolutions · LRB 5 October 2023 lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
This week, the editors pair two pieces by Hal Foster: his 2012 essay on Artforum’s early years and a new appraisal of The Anti-Aesthetic at forty.“The notion of postmodernism was once a great stimulant to art and thought,” Hal Foster writes in Artforum’s September issue. “Today, it feels like another anti-aphrodisiac of the just past.” The critic’s reflections on the intellectual hothouse that produced The Anti-Aesthetic edited in 1983 by Foster at the tender age of twenty-eight make for rewarding reading alongside his cogent account of the preceding period, now enshrined in the canon of fervid