Page 27 - Cyberculture and New Media

18 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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assertion that abstraction “also took from perception to purify” implicates
Greenberg’s characterisation of modernism in Bruno Latour’s similar critique
of modernity as largely manifesting through a practice of purification, of
separation of “native” from “modern” sensibility, of pure from impure,
whose culminating process is the scientific method, a methodological holy
grail of sorts for Greenberg (See Latour, B., We Have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1993.) .
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Greenberg, C., Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston,
1965.
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This hybridism is for Latour, modernity’s second practice, a complement to
that of purification.
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Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays,
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It is the relevance of this organicity to modernism that Greenberg dismisses.
While Picasso and Matisse had broken with nature, the work of Stieglitz,
Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Kandinsky, rife with “mystical
overtones”, was for Greenberg a “repudiation of technics and rationalism”, a
metaphysical “messianism” that Caroline Jones connects to multiplicity of
charges: of Greenberg’s view of Stieglitz as an intellectually puerile dandy;
to Greenberg’s view of O’Keeffe as “pseudo-modern”; and to Greenberg’s
inability to free the photograph from its indexicality (Cf. Jones, pp.145-175).
As my later treatment of art and metaphysics reveals, these biases leave
Greenberg outside the portals of cyberculture, with its propensity for
assimilation through layered recoding of historical culture’s many previously
unconnected manifestations.
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“Once society has lost its myth-based community, it loses all the reference
points of truly common language until such time as the divisions within the
inactive community can be overcome by the inauguration of a real historical
community. When art, which was the common language of social inaction,
develops into independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original
religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it
too becomes subject to the movement governing the history of all separate
culture. Its declaration of independence is the beginning of its end”. Debord,
G., The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone
Books, Cambridge, Mass., 1967/1995.§ 186.
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Nor is this merely postmodern hindsight. Documenting Bergson’s rejection
of the conceptual method in favour of the flux-like immediacy of experience,
a 1912 review of the first English translation of Time and Free Will, makes
clear that the basis for just such an essentialist reading of Stieglitz was
available in his own day. Bergson’s “sympathetic insight” as fuel for the
intuitive grasp crucial to a Stieglitz photograph is contrasted with the kind of
formal/categorical reasoning that disrupts the captured phenomenon so that