LAUSR

respect to historical relations with both capitalism and modern (mass) society. A self-critique of the arts as a form of essentialism frequently took the form of an opposition between representation and abstraction. Interwoven into the canonical narrative was a belief in the expressive and existential capacity of art to operate as a method of individuation along with a set of other features. These include the pursuit of effects of detachment and depersonalization, mechanization and technology; an emphasis on surface reflexivity; a tendency toward transcendentalism; and attention to the internal ordering and relationship of parts in tension with, in painting, undifferentiated composition. It is from such values that one (to many minds) dominant exclusionary monolith of modernism came to be erected (one that paralleled American postwar hegemony of the 1950s and 1960s), a superstructure considered by many to be at odds with the movement’s resistance to totalitarian extension. Most critics recognize that it was during the 1960s that the central tenets of American modernism began to erode, at the height of Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s self-conscious defense of abstraction. Greenberg and Fried’s formalist emphasis on unitary integration and impersonal flatness was marginalized by persistent figuration and postwar European expressionism; by kitsch and realism’s “recomplication” of the pictorial field; and by new propositions bound to minimalism, process and anti-form. John Cage’s challenge to authorship, materiality and internal structure— seen also in Alison Knowles’s “Make a Salad” of 1962, as well as in the work of artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol—did much to undermine the dominance of formalist theory. Others have joined critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Carol Duncan, who attacked modernism’s myths of originality and “centeredness” and its position of “privileged” and gendered hegemony in dismantling Greenberg’s paradigm. There are reasons to regard the “historic moment” as relevant in reconstructing a definition of modernism and to confront the role of history as the canyon (versus the canon) of art’s operative field. In this field, modernism’s aestheticism should be tempered, indeed E X H I B I T I O N S