In Advance of a Culinary Review

With the hindsight of half a century, Greenbergian formalism may now be seen not as the prescriptive, proscriptive, restrictive paradigm it was intended to be, but rather as a threshold between aesthetic types, a descriptive mechanism that pertains only to a very limited set of aesthetic objects, linked to a brief moment in history and responding to a specific polemic. The reduction of artistic activity to the least common denominator of material specificity was perhaps the last great instance of criticism as exclusion, and if it has a posterity in contemporary art theory and aesthetics, it is an ironic one, counter to the intuition of its author: an increased attention to the manner in which the materiality of the signifier is polyvalent, unstable, synaesthetic, nomadic. For we learn from this theory not only the value of respecting the exigencies of the flatness of the canvas, but also, a contrario, that the ambiguities created by projecting a three-dimensional field onto two dimensions are themselves infinitely renewable and continually marvelous. To say this is to do nothing less than rethink five centuries of representational painting and revise our vision by paying attention to the fact that the window of classic perspectival representation is also a plane, and a canvas, and a screen, and a dream. At its zenith, Clement Greenberg’s formalism was already being pressured by the performative tensions of Fluxus, Situationism, Lettrism, Happenings, mixed-media, multimedia, “intermedia,” and sundry other artistic exploits that would complicate matters beyond any possible formalist recognition. In a sense, the history of modern art criticism is one of augmenting the visibility of painting with the complex matrix of synaesthetic possibilities, beginning with latenineteenth-century considerations of the haptic qualities of painting, while the history of modern painting is one of literally enhancing the visible with materials that engage the other senses.