Journalhttp://vcu.sagepub.com/ of Visual Culture Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space Hal Foster Journal of Visual Culture 2004 3: 320 DOI: 10.1177/1470412904048784 The online version of this article can be found at: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/3/3/320 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Journal of Visual Culture can be found at: Email Alerts: http://vcu.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://vcu.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/3/3/320.refs.html >> Version of Record - Dec 2, 2004 What is This? Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 journal of visual culture Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space Hal Foster (in conversation with Marquard Smith) Abstract Hal Foster is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Internationally regarded for his provocative writings on 20th-century art practice, and as an Editor of the journal October, Professor Foster is the author of Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (2002), The Return of the Real (1996), Compulsive Beauty (1993), Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985) and Prosthetic Gods (on the relation between modernism and psychoanalysis, 2004), and editor of the defining The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983), among other books. Forth- coming books include Art Since 1900, a co-authored textbook on 20th-century art, as well as a survey of Pop Art. Here he speaks with Marquard Smith, Editor-in-Chief of journal of visual culture, about these and other things, including polemical thought, cultural criticism, immersion, Visual Culture Studies, and design, architecture and urbanism. Keywords Art History art writing ● ● critical theory ● distraction ● immersion ● October Visual Culture ● Section I: Polemics, Cultural Criticism and Art Writing journal of visual culture (JVC): You obviously like polemics. The second section of your 1985 book Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics is enti- tled ‘(Post)Modern Polemics’, and your most recent book Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) begins: ‘This book is a polemical account of recent changes in the cultural status of architecture and design as well as art and criticism in the West’ (Foster, 1985a, 2002: xiii). A commitment to the idea of the polemic persists throughout: in your thinking, in your writing, and in the journal of visual culture Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 3(3): 320-335 [1470-4129(200412)3:3]10.1177/1470412904048784 Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 321 mode of your engagement that has at its heart a certain kind of fractiousness. It is very much in keeping with the etymology of ‘polemic’ – war – that offers us a sense of the polemic as an art or practice of conversational discussion and controversial attack. Disputation. It is a mode of argumentation, a way of thinking and seeing and writing that is at war with itself.1 I’m curious to know how you feel about polemics in general. More specifically, I’m wonder- ing how much the polemic has to do with your attention to the political, aesthetic and ethical implications of historical ruptures, epistemic breaks and notions of transformation, contradiction, demise: paradigm shifts, or, better perhaps, turning points. Hal Foster (HF): I hadn’t thought about the militaristic etymology of ‘polemics’, though it’s certainly there in other terms we use too – like ‘tactics’, ‘fronts’ and ‘avant-garde’. But, yes, I like to be polemical, though not agonistic: some intellectuals thrive on antagonism, and I’m not one. As Nietzsche says in The Geneaology of Morals, too much criticism is driven by ressentiment. It might be that some resentment is irreducible in critique, but too much makes the whole business bitter, and almost nothing is worse than contempt masquerading as criticism. Foucault says somewhere that scholar- ship was first developed by scholastic monks whittling away at one another, with the world receding behind a pile of nasty missives and marginalia, and there’s a little of this solipsistic infighting still in the academy. There are benefits, of course, in the testing of research and the refining of ideas, but all the divisiveness is dispiriting. Foucault (1984 [1971]) also says somewhere that knowledge is made not only for understanding but for cutting. That’s the key to polemics for me – clarifying stakes, advancing positions. And that’s what drew me to criticism in the first place: the task of cutting through, clearing up, connecting, open- ing out. (I know that sounds grand, but why not?) Early on I was a graduate student of Edward Said, who always insisted on the worldliness of criticism, in the sense not only of cosmopolitanism but of commitment. This points to another etymological relation – between ‘criticism’ and ‘crisis’ – which leads back to your question about ‘breaks’ and ‘ruptures’ as well ... JVC: So that cutting is part of an opening out, a way of being able to imagine or envisage a field or a question or a debate, to actually see something clearly enough? One has to be blinkered enough in one’s polemic to be able to see something clearly enough! [laughs] HF: Well, if not blinkered, at least focused – focused enough to see the prob- lem at hand, to pressure it, to open it up historically. I’ve never seen critical work in opposition to historical work: like many others I try to hold the two in tandem, in tension. History without critique is inert; criticism without history is aimless – a bumper sticker, I know, but one I believe. Sometimes, of course, this connection prompts trigger-happy declarations of the end of this, that, and the other thing. My generation was very seduced by such pro- nouncements of rupture; for one thing, it seemed to promise an avant-garde continued by critical means, an avant-garde of criticism. But then, for many of us, critical theory was the most vital part of the culture, more vital than Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 322 journal of visual culture 3(3) art, literature, music, dance – maybe only film could compare. People suspi- cious of ‘theory’ today forget that, never knew it, or can’t imagine how heady it was. (Or, perhaps worse, they try to pick it up again, in an abstract, neo-radical sort of way, as if nothing had changed in the meantime.) JVC: Let me just backtrack for a minute. This distinction, or lack of a distinc- tion, this imbrication, you’ve brought up between historical work and criticism is significant, and something I was hoping to ask you to consider. It raises a couple of questions for me, or maybe one question in two parts. The first part has to do with the difference between the kind of writing, and the kind of thinking, you do in your Art History writing and how this is distinct from your art writing or art criticism – if at all. Could you draw out some of the differences between the imperatives of, or the particular kinds of tasks involved in, writing as an art historian on, say, 17th-century Dutch still-life painting or Primitivism or Surrealism or contemporary art practice even, and writing contemporary art or cultural criticism (Foster, 1985b, 1993, 1995)? The second part of the question has to do with ‘History’ itself, and I wonder if it feels to you that your more art historical writings are more concerned with a reconsideration of the past in the present, while art criticism seeks to delineate the present on behalf of the possibilities of the future? I ask this question as someone involved in Visual Culture Studies who cares about history, or the problem of ‘history’. In light of the accusations of ahistoricism so often directed against it, if for no other reason, I’m provoked to have to think through the question of history very, very seriously. History is not ‘dealt with’ as an issue, as some say. It can’t simply be put to one side! [laughs] To do so demands such wilfulness ... HF: I began my intellectual life as a critic in New York in the late 1970s, a time when intellectuals could still be semi-independent. Today most critics are bred and born in the academy, at least in the States, and often they stay there too. This is a not a dig at the academy, which remains a partial haven of neces- sity, but a lament for the dissolution of that semi-mirage called ‘the public sphere’. Yet back in the days one could survive as a critic in the interstices of institutions – writing for magazines (I wrote for Artforum early on), doing the odd catalogue for a museum, giving a lecture or a seminar here or there – there were still pieces of a critical space to hold on to. By the mid-80s, how- ever, the squeeze was really on: the market began to swallow the art world almost whole, the klieg lights of the media were turned on it as well, and I made the move back to the academy then. I had been senior editor of Art in America along with Craig Owens, and for a time its pages were open to critical work; then things shifted, with artists like Jeff Koons, dealers like Mary Boone, collectors like the Saatchis, and museum directors like Thomas Krens, and that niche closed. The last thing those people wanted was critics; I mean really ... Of course I made my move back to the academy also for reasons internal to my work: criticism had opened up historical projects for me and for others in my milieu (Craig, Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp ...). In different ways most of us felt a connection between critical theory and postmodernist art Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 323 that led us to historical practices. I came to contemporary art by way of Minimalism, and sooner or later it brings you to Constructivism, a movement that was still occluded in most accounts of modernist art. Like many others, I was also struck by feminist work, by its questioning of sexuality and repre- sentation, and eventually it led me to look into Surrealism. And so on: the tracks differed, but the impetus did not: contemporary work opened up historical practices, which in turn fortified us in the present. Personally I was also taken by the example of three disparate critic-historians a generation ahead of me: Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, and T.J. Clark. Each had a contemporary stake that grounded historical inquiry but also made it cut in motivated ways – late-Modernist abstraction for Michael, Minimalist and Postminimalist art for Rosalind, Situationist critique for Tim. So I came to alternate between contemporary criticism and Art History. Recodings (Foster, 1985a) was a collection of criticism mostly written for Art in America and October; Compulsive Beauty (Foster, 1995) was a book on Surrealism, originally my dissertation; then I turned back to postwar art with The Return of the Real (Foster, 1996). I raised an abiding concern in its first chapter where I attempted to refashion the opposition drawn by Peter Bürger (1984) between prewar historical avant-gardes and postwar neo avant-gardes. Burger had connected the two forcefully, but also to the dimin- ishment of postwar art as a farcical repetition of the prewar. I wanted to reframe, but not to undo, the connection between historical and neo avant- gardes. What troubles me now is the apparent disconnection of much practice from both avant-gardes. As a result I have come to attend more to continuities than to discontinuities; I don’t think we can assume the value of ‘rupture’ anymore. Like Design and Crime (Foster, 2002), my new book, Prosthetic Gods (Foster, 2004), ranges across the last century. JVC: Talking of the 1980s, you were involved centrally, and thus implicated in, the delineation of Postmodernism. I’m thinking here not just of the cru- cial edited collection, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Foster, 1983), but also of your own writings in journals, anthologies and books (Foster, 1984, 1996). At this moment in time, how would you account for the demise or turning away, implicitly or otherwise, from discourses of Postmodernism that we have witnessed in the last few years? I also wonder to what extent you think recent writings that are critical of Postmodernism, and, even more significantly, of ‘theory’ in general – culminating in, say, a book like Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (2003) – have not only had a pro- found effect on the withering of Postmodernism per se but also seem to be intent on papering over theory’s awkward, necessary, productive cracks. Which is to say, such debates often suggest that their rediscovery of ethical imperatives draws attention to the ways in which critical theory always already denied the ‘big questions’ of love, of evil, death, metaphysics, reli- gion, and so on. I don’t recall critical theory ignoring these things, quite the opposite. But by asking ‘the big questions’, the questions that we’ve all been accused of ignoring for years, are these more recent discussions offering ways out of what seemed like the often suffocating ecstasy of Postmodernism or, rather, presenting us with gleeful, condemnatory sleights of hand that Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 324 journal of visual culture 3(3) allow their authors to slam almost 35 years of critical thinking, as well as earlier traditions, in one fell swoop? Or, alternatively, is the whole caboodle a knee-jerk response to the events leading up to and including September 11th, 2001, and their aftermath ... HF: I never understood the term ‘theory’, or rather, I always understood it as a reification, a reduction used first as a rallying cry and then as a whipping boy; it functions mostly as a term of abuse today. Of course there is no ‘theory’ as such; there are ‘only’ philosophical models, theoretical methods, critical interventions, different resources used in different ways at different moments. And of course you can’t just pick and choose – you have your own formation, your own investments – but you can use the different tools you have as pertinently as possible. Again, for my generation critical theory was a very lively arena; there was a displacement of energy there not only from art but from politics too (both had lost their way a little in the 1970s). It was lively; it was also crowded – maybe that’s why some onlookers lumped it all together as ‘theory’. In the States, the reception of the French masters – Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, Irigaray, Kristeva ... – overlapped in part with the reception of the Frankfurt School, especially Benjamin and Adorno. This was a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it made for an amazing array of concepts that could be tested against film, literature, mass culture, art and architecture; on the other hand, these concepts were often thrown together. (That’s another thing ‘theory’ means to its common-sense enemies: messy thinking, bad writing. Often these charges are defensive gestures against difficult thought or, worse, contrarian politics, but sometimes they are warranted too.) Moreover, one could hardly match the brilliance, let alone the ambition, of most of the masters; for many of us it was hard enough just to understand them. And yet in-between the confusion and the intimidation there were crit- ical elaborations: for example, the way that Screen put into play different fig- ures – Brecht, Althusser, Lacan ... – to think through developments in cine- ma, questions about subjectivity, new political formations, or the way that October motivated Poststructuralism to theorize Postmodernism, and the Frankfurt School to periodize both. These elaborations were not only about tweaking imports, as is still often claimed: in the States and in Britain, ‘native’ innovations – pragmatist philosophy, Marxist cultural studies, feminist theory – were also developed. The theorizing of Postmodernism is where all these different projects came together for some of us; and, even as our Postmodernism was set against one formalist account of Modernism, it opened up other readings. As a result both Modernism and Postmodernism have long seemed like incomplete projects to me, not dead ends that we can now ditch for the paradise of beauty and spirituality or the big questions of good and evil. Modernism and Postmodernism can’t be dismissed any more than ‘theory’ can be dispensed with. The rest is just people getting bored and moving on to other, hipper scenes, or beating up on caricatures of their own making. This is not to play down the consequences of either: the first produces a know-it-all/know-nothing fatigue that affects everyone; the second can spread a real pall and do great Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 325 damage (if this sounds paranoid, log on to a neo-con site like ‘Campus Watch’ some time). Of course, people on the Right have long beaten up on us decadent Postmodernists; it’s sad when some on the Left do so as well, and downright scary when the two attacks converge, as they sometimes do now. Of course, certain aspects of all these ‘post’s – Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Postcolonialism – are easy enough targets; they can appear morally relativistic and politically irresponsible. But why throw out all the babies with the bathwater? Certainly the bashing got a lot worse after 9/11: open season was declared on ‘pomo’ and ‘poco’ in particular, which were cast as the twin sources of our intellectual, ethical and cultural rot, to be cauterized if we were to prevail in the ‘clash of cultures’. It would all be hilarious if it were not so deadly serious. Remember the old New Yorker cartoon, showing a cocktail party on the Upper East Side, with a fashionable lady saying to a scruffy young man: ‘Oh, you’re a terrorist. Thank God – I thought you said you were a theorist!’? Well, after 9/11 some people didn’t bother with that distinction much any more. As for Terry Eagleton, I can’t say what his motivations are (besides burnishing his self-image as the Only Truly Left Critic in the World); but these attacks are not new to him. In any case, some of what he demands – ques- tions of ethics, questions of responsibility – have already returned within the very critical theory that he is keen to expose as shiftless and apolitical. Section II: Immersion: Between the Avant-Garde and the Spectacle JVC: Autonomy, as part and parcel of conversations around the avant-garde, is obviously essential to the determining of modernist aesthetics. It has been a matter of consequence throughout your writings, most noticeably in the early sections of The Return of the Real (Foster, 1996). In Design and Crime, you say that: for many of us ‘autonomy’ is a bad word – a ruse in aesthetic discourse, a deception in ego psychology, and so on. We forget that autonomy is a diacritical term like any other, defined in relation to its opposite, that is, to subjection. (2002: 102) Is it the case for you that the veracity of art, of the art object, of the art viewing subject, and of Art History turns on or distinguishes itself by the question of autonomy? HF: It’s not simple: some avant-gardes claimed autonomy, some attacked it, some did both at the same time. Closer to the present, the question of auton- omy returned in the debates about Visual Culture and Visual Studies. For me, those terms signify an expanded field of art and Art History, respectively, in some respects expanded beyond them as well. And I wonder if, for all the gain here, there might not also be some loss. In the shift to Visual Culture – what I called an ‘anthropological turn’ in The Return of the Real (Foster, Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 326 journal of visual culture 3(3) 1996) – many artists began to work more synchronically, more horizontally, moving from site to site, problem to problem, discourse to discourse. And in some cases this emphasis on the horizontal appeared to diminish the vertical axis, the historical repertoire of forms, devices, meanings, positions within each art. The postwar work that I value the most was able to keep the two axes in contact, in conversation: questions posed by the culture at large were articulated with problems presented by past art, the one brought to bear on the other. So my little role in the Visual Studies debate was simply caution- ary: to urge that the resources of Art History not be foreclosed, and that we not participate unwittingly in the general desublimation of art in the culture at large. (Part of me still believes, with Carl Andre, that ‘art is what we do, and culture is what is done to us’.) And at the end of the day I do believe that any art, any discipline, is differential, defined in its connections and disconnec- tions with other practices. That’s one reason why, for me, autonomy is always ‘semi’; it’s provisional, and at times it can be made strategic ... JVC: OK, but to what end? Why? Is this meant to be a political thing, purely and simply an effort to try recreating or extending the political potential of art, for art, from the moment of the advent of the historical avant-garde, or a way of trying to make sense of the contemporary avant-garde, or of this contemporary Visual Culture industry, and to see ways out of it? HF: Why not both – recreating the political potential and clarifying the con- temporary condition? It’s not as if the two are exclusive; in fact they are inti- mately connected. Of course, one problem is that the term ‘autonomy’ is such a bogeyman: it calls up all kinds of nasty associations: the imperious subject of Kant, the liberal subject with its reflexive ego that can somehow stand apart, and so on. JVC: In a sense, semi-autonomy gets you far enough along to be able to do whatever it is that you need to do ... HF: Maybe, but it often seems a hedge too. Certainly the autonomous subject is mostly gone, even as a fiction, and gladly so. But the alternatives are not always so appealing: there’s the schizoid subject associated with Postmodern culture, the networked subject associated with information society ... JVC: The tired subject! [laughs] HF: Yes, the subject multi-tasked to death. Dr Evil had only one ‘mini me’ to watch over; the rest of us seem to have a whole brood ... Right now, the question of autonomy – or its lack – concerns me most in relation to the heightening of distraction in our media/web world. And this concern has led me to rethink my own take on some art after Minimalism – to think about how it might participate, knowingly or not, in this distractive condition. Twenty years ago, I wrote a text titled ‘The Crux of Minimalism’ (Foster, 1996: 35–70) where I argued that, in its break from the frame of painting and the pedestal of sculpture, Minimalism opened up a line of work in which actual bodies and actual spaces were tested, defined, demarcated. Along with many others, I thought that line – the line of process and body Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 327 art, of site-specific and institution-critical art, and so on – was of primary sig- nificance. Yet it is now clear that the Minimalist opening allowed not only for a progressive differentiation of bodies and spaces, but also for the partial dissolution of those terms. Think of the ‘light and space’ art of Robert Irwin and James Turrell: it seems phenomenological, but its phenomenology is somehow faux, already mediated. And this faux-phenomenological art was further technologized in the video projections of artists like Bill Viola – work that wants to overwhelm bodies and space, to produce a kind of techno- sublime. Today this seems to be the desired effect of much art – digital pictorial photography, say, as well as projected image installations – so much so that this secondary line of art after Minimalism now appears to be the dominant one. And people love it, of course, in large part because it aestheti- cizes, or rather artifies, an ‘experience’ already familiar to them, the intensities produced by media culture at large. For the most part, such art is happily involved with an image space that goes beyond the distractive to the immersive. That’s a story I think needs to be told, and recently in London I tried. The occasion was the Donald Judd retrospective at the Tate Modern, which revealed, to me at least, how much his art was always bound up with the very illusion that it purported to banish. Concurrent with the Judd show was an immense Olafur Eliasson installation, ‘The Weather Project’, with a mirrored orb like some otherwordly sun set atop the Turbine Hall, and again people loved it: in the middle of winter they bathed on the floor, basking in its faux- phenomenological glow. The juxtaposition of the Judd and the Eliasson almost made the argument for me about this post-Minimalist line involving illusion and distraction. Anyway I sketched this account at the Judd confer- ence,2 and afterwards a young woman in the audience said in effect: Essentially I agree with you: this expanded field of art has hooked up with an expanded field of media, but to pull back from it as you do under the cover of terms like ‘culture industry’ and ‘spectacle’ isn’t satisfactory anymore; that response’s too easy, its judgment too auto- matic. Can’t you think of other ways to consider this mediated illusion, this immersive experience, if indeed, as you suggest, it is a principal experience that the culture gives us today? That question (I’ve fleshed it out here) has stuck with me, and I’m working on a response now. We are in the midst of a new twist in spectacular media; certainly the 1960s witnessed one too, as did the 1920s before that. At that moment, critics like Benjamin and Kracauer confronted the full effects of photographic reproduc- tion and cinematic training, and they didn’t flee to the high ground of mod- ernist art: they examined the effects, explored how this condition might be reworked. Think, for example, of how Benjamin speculated about tactility and distraction in Dada, architecture and film. And Kracauer went further: he saw, more clearly than Benjamin, the deleterious effects of new technologies on social life – as evidenced in the (ir)rationalization of ‘the mass ornament’, Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 328 journal of visual culture 3(3) for example – but rather than pull back, he asked why not go through? That is his famous ‘go for broke’ wager: what might these technologies render on the other side of their capitalist deployment? Others like Gramsci asked the same thing – even though ‘the other side’ turned out to be mostly an abyss. So how might the question, translated to the present, be phrased? Is there another side to this culture of immersive experience? Might there be a cultural politics that doesn’t leave it to our masters to control every aspect of these terms? Of course this immersion is much more total in its effects than distrac- tion faced by Benjamin and Kracauer, and both terms seem completely other to critical consciousness, and so we often fall back on the model of the autono- mous subject as a crutch. But there are other ways to address the problem ... JVC: So, following the audience member’s question at Tate Modern, how to make more of immersion, make something else of it, to try imagining how immersion might have the potential to work outside of those terms that come before it? I’m reminded of my visit to New York in April, during which two things hap- pened to me that are relevant here. The first is that I got ‘lost’ in a Richard Serra sculpture at DIA Beacon, which was quite an amazing, vertiginous experience. The second is that I stumbled into Robert Irwin’s Varese Scrim (1973) at the Guggenheim’s exhibition ‘Singular Forms (Sometimes Repeated): Art from 1951 to the Present’ – I was so busy trying to look through it I failed to see it! I began to think about what I called ‘the trouble of walking into art’, and I said jokingly to myself, I’m going to write a book entitled Walking into Art, and it’s going to be about all the ways one can literally ‘walk into art’, and it’s going to include chapters on accidents, dis- orientation, labyrinths, losing one’s way, mistakes, vertigo, confusion. As I walked away from Irwin’s Varese Scrim, with the security guard’s scold- ing still burning in my ears, I was reminded of the need to find discrete tropes, modalities, the right ways of figuring ‘immersive’ experiences that are ‘proper’ to the particularity of the works themselves. Of course, Eliasson’s installation that took up every square inch of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern and whose solar glow, its mist and hum, spilled out through the building’s windows and doors was a very singular instance of what happens when you walk into art, and it reminds you that immersion can be completely all-embracing, comforting even. I’m not talking about digital arts, or VR, or the kind of immersion orchestrated by technology- enhanced interactivity but, rather, an interactive art that is born of site- specificity, of place, of location and of a phenomenological affect. During Eliasson’s installation, it’s true that the audience – rather participants – were very happy to pretend to sunbathe, to run around as if they were at the beach, to lie on their backs looking up at their reflections on the mirrored ceiling, moving their arms and legs in an effort to make simulated snow angels. Here’s a kind of immersion that’s very pleasurable, comforting, as I’ve already said, but this installation, and these feelings, are in no way complicit in principle with the culture industry or the society of the spectacle as such. There’s also a generosity in that piece that I like. Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 329 So, I’m wondering about distinctive types of immersion – or at least the points at which a moment of liminality gives way to immersion: what happens when you immerse yourself in, say, digital art like many of the pieces on show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2001 exhibition ‘010101: Art in Technological Times’, or the Eliasson, or inadvertently immerse yourself in a Minimalist art work or sculpture in its purest form? You’ve mentioned the Judd to Eliasson trajectory, and it’s a really nice one. Surely each instance in that changing trajectory, as well as a whole series of other non-artistic immer- sive encounters, from the Diorama and the Panorama in the 19th century to the IMAX cinema or ‘surround sound’ in the 20th century, offer themselves up in their historical, technological and conceptual particularity? Incidentally, the first time I understood Barthes’ and Foucault’s discussions of authorship, more than 10 years before I read them, was when, as a kid, I inadvertently stumbled into, thereby modifying, Carl Andre’s bricks, Equivalent VIII, at the old Tate. That was a moment of understanding how art making takes place, and how meaning making takes place. I’m not a clumsy guy in general, but I’ve obviously got a long history of stumbling into art, I hadn’t realized! [laughs] HF: ‘Walking into’ is different from ‘stumbling into’, and both are different from ‘being immersed’. Minimalists like Andre confront you; they don’t immerse you. Judd is a little different, and Dan Flavin even more so. I think many of us read those ‘literalists’ too literally: we took them (and especially Judd) at their word, found their writing too readily in their work, and thought their art did banish illusion outright, when really it played with it all along – in the colours and surfaces of Judd, in the luminous effects and spa- tial washes of Flavin. At the same time, they did change the terms of illusion, and it is never simple immersion: Judd always gives you a bolt, and Flavin a fixture, to fasten down the illusion of the Plexiglas sheet or the fluorescent light. Each time they bring you back to the materiality of the object, the limit of the space, and a sense of your own bodily relation to both. In some ways, Richard Serra pushes this dialectic further: his work is evermore immersive and defining at once. As you wend your way through his ribbons, spirals and ellipses, the space wraps around you in a way that is as psychological as it is physical. An almost intrauterine space is set up that is nothing if not also materially actual. For me, the recent Guggenheim show marked the culmination of the histori- cal reversal I mentioned earlier: the contemporary triumph of the secondary line out of Minimalism, the one that recoups it for the pictorial and the illusionistic, for light and space effects, for projected images and immersive spaces. With Serra you’re made reflexive in your immersion; you’re not virtually obliterated by the experience. With the world of Turrell, Viola, et al., you are: you’re somehow lost in relation to your body, and you stumble not only into the work but through it as well. It’s an effect, beyond distraction, of disorientation, of being lost in space, and one has to wonder about its ideological effects – that is, beyond its sheer aestheticism, which is what attracts people, for again it gives the rush of media intensity with the surplus value of art. Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 330 journal of visual culture 3(3) JVC: Which is why the question of the specificity of medium persists, and why questions of mediation, remediation and discussions of the post-medium come to the fore ... HF: Sure. Which is not to say that specificity is tied to any particular set of materials or precedents. The point is not to delimit what can count as art; rather it is to differentiate between experiences and effects. Now when I say ‘faux-phenomenological’, I don’t mean to imply some prior state of percep- tual purity. Our sensorium is now so mediated that such a state would be impossible to recover even if it ever existed in the first place. JVC: In a sense, it’s a phenomenological response, or a faux-phenomenolog- ical response to the immateriality of material ... HF: What do you mean? JVC: That there is a resurgence of interest in phenomenology at the moment across the arts and humanities, and I never thought about the resurgence in this way but it may well be not just an effort to try reaffirming a certain kind of contact with the body, the body of the viewer, the spectator, the partici- pant, but that that effort to reassert or reaffirm contact comes absolutely as a response to these concerns over dematerialization, or the immaterial, or the kind of immersion that we were just discussing in which art and media converge. And that one’s contact with works of art, along with so many other encounters, is mediated and remediated to such an extent that perhaps a little bit of old-style, clunky, phenomenology is absolutely necessary both as a way to remind oneself of oneself and to think through the implications of the damage, or the pleasures that are done, and done to us, by such immer- sion. And how to get out of it, around it, through it! Maybe we’re just caught in another playing out of that earlier moment of immersion–distraction ... HF: Yes, one term is bound up with another that it opposes. And there is such a dialectic of de/materialization in art after Minimalism, and a stress on the phenomenological does recur whenever the object in question – the art, the body, the space – seems to be too virtualized. That dialectic is already active in Minimalism and Pop – I said as much in ‘The Crux of Minimalism’ (Foster, 1996: 35–70). In the 90s it was again in play in abject art, which insisted, in the face of cyberspace, on the untranscendability of the body, which it often figured as traumatically fixed. And it’s there in the present too, only now the ‘phenomenological’ term is more social, a sort of being-together in the space of art – hence all the talk about ‘the relational’ and ‘the interactive’ today. When artists go on about ‘the space of art as the site of community’, I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry, but I understand the impulse. Section III: October, Visual Culture and that ‘Questionnaire’ JVC: Can I take you back ... I have a question or two about the now leg- endary, watershed ‘Questionnaire on Visual Culture’ that appeared in issue 77 of October in 1996. The ‘Questionnaire’ appeared at a time when Visual Studies was becoming institutionally both constituted and legitimized in the Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 331 US academy. What were the reasons behind presenting the ‘Questionnaire’ at that time – was it an effort to further strengthen or frustrate the prospect of Visual Studies? In your opinion, what were the repercussions of the ‘Questionnaire’ in the American academy, and beyond? And what image of Visual Studies did the October editors have in mind that led you collectively to ask the questions posed? HF: There are a few things one should know about ‘that’ questionnaire. First, Rosalind Krauss and I cooked it up, not the October editors as a group. Second, we meant it as a provocation (that much worked); obviously no one person could hold all the positions presented – some contradicted others – and in any case they were offered only as points of departure, as so many ideas – some ‘received’, some reasonable – to pick apart. That said, Rosalind and I were suspicious, in different ways, about certain aspects of Visual Studies as it was framed at the time (this was 1996). I’ve stated some of the reasons, and others in my contribution to the issue. One thing to stress here is that, in some sense, Visual Studies is always already bound up with Art History, even internal to it, at least in Art History at its best moments (think of Semper, Riegl, Warburg, the early Panofsky, to name only a few, or in our own time Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Jonathan Crary ...). It’s a little like what I said about the relation between Modernism and Postmodernism in criticism, or vertical and horizontal axes in art: there is a dialectic of Art History and Visual Studies, too, in which the latter term opens up the former, while the former term keeps the latter rigorous. Isn’t that what interdisciplinary work does, that is, if it is truly ‘inter’ and ‘disciplinary’? In any case I don’t see Art History and Visual Studies as quite as antagonistic as they were presented then; and even then I felt there were resources for Visual Studies within Art History and vice versa. The October issue was driven by two primary concerns. The first was the way in which Visual Studies was too taken by the visual, by a fixation on the image, a fixation long questioned in advanced art. (Maybe we drew the line too quickly from ‘the visual’ to ‘the virtual’, but it seemed Visual Studies had done so for us.) The second had to do with the anthropological turn I’ve mentioned, and the atrophying of the mnemonic dimension of art as a poten- tial result. The responses of the more reactive parties in both camps were not very helpful, and in any case there’s a partial rapprochement now. In the end, not only is Visual Studies often internal to Art History and vice versa, but so is Visual Culture in art: some of the greatest moments in Modernism are openings to new or neglected Visual Cultures. JVC: That helps clarify things for me, thanks. Let me pick up on one point you’ve just made: this matter of artists, or academics for that matter, working horizontally, or moving across the present. This is another way of articulating what you earlier called ‘the anthropological turn’. It seems to me that this is also the difficulty at the heart of accusations of ahistoricism directed against Visual Culture Studies. This is in part also to return to your first concern, just noted, of the immaterial dimension of the visual – and I do believe questions of ahistoricism and immateriality are connected here. Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 332 journal of visual culture 3(3) I never quite understood why the study of Visual Culture was, is, at root, considered intrinsically ahistorical and anthropological. And it often seems to me that this very idea of Visual Culture Studies as ahistorical and anthro- pological, and not only the dissemination of this idea, comes from the October ‘Questionnaire’ itself; not so much from the responses as from the questions themselves. I’m interested to know where this characterization of the study of Visual Culture came from? Having now read Design and Crime, I think I have the beginnings of an answer to my own question. And it has something to do with Visual Culture Studies being or being seen to be the ‘visual wing of “cultural studies”’, as you call it (Foster, 2002: 90). Let me quote you back to yourself: As an academic subject ... ‘visual culture’ is ... maybe as oxymoronic as ‘art history’. Certainly its two terms repel each other with equal force, for if art history is sustained between the autonomy implied in ‘art’ and the imbrication implied in ‘history’, then visual culture is stretched between the virtuality implied in ‘visual’ and the materiality implied in ‘culture’. (p. 90) And you continue: In general terms visual studies might be too quick to dismiss aesthetic autonomy as retrograde, and to embrace subcultural forms as subver- sive. Its ethnographic model might also have this unintended con- sequence: it might be encouraged to move horizontally from subject to subject across social space, more so than vertically along the historical lines of particular form, genre or problematic. In this way visual studies might privilege the present excessively, and so might support rather than stem the posthistorical attitude that has become the default posi- tion of so much artistic, critical, and curatorial practice today. (p. 91) Your argument here is that the attention ‘visual studies’ lavishes on the contemporary, and on particular contemporary forms of ‘visual culture’ – the spectacle of visual commodities, technologies, information and entertain- ment, as you characterize it – is both born of and leads to subjective, inter- pretive and ethnographic practices – from psychoanalysis and anthropology – that are themselves in effect dematerializing and dehistoricizing. (In its attention to the visual, it de-materializes art. In its attention to culture, it dehistoricizes history.) This is the case, you say, because ‘just as social imperatives and anthropological assumptions have governed the shift from “history” to “culture”, so technological imperatives and psychoanalytic assumptions have governed the shift from “art” to “visual”’ (p. 92). As I’ve already mentioned, while I’ve never been quite sure why in principle ‘the visual’ is open to accusations of dematerialization or why ‘the cultural’ is charged with a will to dehistoricize, I understand the argument itself. And it’s a relief that someone has finally explained this to me with quite so much Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 333 precision and clarity. So after all that, my question is quite straightforward: is it simply the case that those committed to the study of Visual Culture, or Visual Cultural Studies, or Visual Studies need to attend to history, and historical formation, if they’re not already doing so, as well as privilege the present? Or is ‘Visual Culture’ itself, because of its very etymology, destined to fail to respond to such an appeal? HF: One reason why I was sensitive to ‘the virtuality of the visual’ in Visual Studies was that this was an effect also produced by the formalist reading of Modernism: Greenberg and company had valued Modernist painting as if it were a matter of opticality only, little more than a test of sublimatory eyesight – whether you could transcend your body through your vision. It seemed odd, to say the least, that Visual Studies, which was otherwise so opposed to such criticism, should reproduce its fetishism of the visual. As for the charge that the anthropological is ahistorical, that was tendentious; but again my focus was on art and criticism that had taken up the ethno- graphic model of field work, that moved from project site to project site. I was concerned with its possible present-ism – that was all. Section IV: Design, Urbanism and the Architecture of Demoralization JVC: To end, I’d like to turn to Design and Crime (Foster, 2002). The second half of the book considers the art museum, Art History and art criticism, or cultural criticism, and we’ve already discussed some of these matters. But the first half of the book is, for want of a better phrase, design criticism. My ques- tion is that in Design and Crime you engage with a series of design-related matters: from Adolf Loos to subcultures; from Art Nouveau to branding and the media industries; from ‘Bruce Mau Design’ to Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas. You also touch on the designed nature of ‘memory-structures’, or musée imaginaire, such as Warburg’s ‘Mnemosyne’ and André Malraux’s ‘The Voices of Silence’ as a ‘history-as-catastrophe’. This attention to architecture, design and the (more rhetorically driven) designing of things, such as history or memory, is not new to your work, but why has it come to the fore now? HF: Because they have become more important in the culture at large, more important than art certainly, the status of which has seemed to diminish roughly in inverse proportion to the rise of architecture (in some ways the architect has assumed the old cultural role of the artist as visionary form- giver). As an inveterate party-crasher I wanted to weigh in on these matters, and to do so in a more public way than October (much of Design and Crime was first published in the London Review of Books). For early Modernists, of course, architecture and design could not be separated out any more than photography and film could be: they were all a part of the expanded field of cultural practice. So architecture and design were always within my bailiwick as a Modernist, however amateurish I was about it. (It’s important, I think, to keep, to cultivate, a little amateurishness sometimes – both in the etymo- logical sense of the love of the thing and in the common sense of non- Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014 334 journal of visual culture 3(3) professional status. The architecture world is full of insider trading and critics on the dole – it makes the art world look transparent by comparison – and it has made me cause some disturbance.) I also wanted to pursue the trope of design in other arenas: designer genes, drugs, personalities, spaces... The ramifications are immense for social life and political culture, to say nothing of the ‘new economy’. But recently another aspect of the problem has come into focus for me as well. I suppose it was triggered by the last text of W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (2003 [1999]), which revisits the firebombing of German cities and the complicated silences that ensued. But it’s also there every morning in the newspaper: the occupation of Iraq, the settlements in Israel (the wall there too), gated communities, ‘homeland security’, the control of space, the militarization of architecture and urbanism. More and more, war is waged in cities. War ‘over there’: the Pentagon sees the battle of Falluja as a paradigm of things to come, and it has begun to enlist architects and urbanists to model these spaces, these sites, to plan not only for their destruction but for their suppression, occupation, control. And ‘war’ right here: think of how our cities have changed since 9/11: the manipulation of the terrorist scare, the accepted talk of ‘defensible space’, the generalized deployment of sur- veillance from scanning your retina to scoping everything from satellites. Here are some topics for art, architecture and Visual Studies, alike. Note 1. See issue 11 of the cultural theory journal parallax (Routledge/Taylor & Francis) entitled ‘polemics: against cultural studies’, April–June, 1999, as a fascinating enactment of such matters. 2. ‘Donald Judd: The Writings’, at Tate Modern, Saturday, 28 February 2004. References Bürger, Peter (1984) Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eagleton, Terry (2003) After Theory. London: Penguin Books. Foster, Hal (ed.) (1983) The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay Press. Foster, Hal (1984) ‘Re: Post’, in Brian Wallis (ed.) Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, pp. 189–201. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art. Foster, Hal (1985a) Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics. Seattle: Bay Press. Foster, Hal (1985b) ‘The “Primitive” Unconscious of Modern Art, or White Skin Black Masks’, October 34 (Fall). Foster, Hal (1993) ‘The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life’, in Emily Apter and William Pietz (eds) Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, pp. 251–65. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foster, Hal (1995) Compulsive Beauty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foster, Hal (1996) The Return of the Real: Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Foster, Hal (2002) Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes). London: Verso. Foster, Hal (2004) Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014  Foster Polemics, Postmodernism, Immersion, Militarized Space 335 Foucault, Michel (1984 [1971]) ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader, pp. 76–100. London: Penguin. Sebald, W.G. (2003 [1999]) On the Natural History of Destruction. London: Penguin. Hal Foster is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Professor Foster is internationally regarded as an Editor of the journal October, and author of Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (2002, Verso), The Return of the Real (1996, MIT Press), Compulsive Beauty (1995, MIT Press), Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (1985, Bay Press), and Prosthetic Gods (2004, MIT Press), among other books, and editor of the defining The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983, Bay Press). Forthcoming books include the co-authored Art Since 1900 for Thames & Hudson, as well as a survey of Pop Art for Phaidon. Marquard Smith is Editor-in-Chief of journal of visual culture and Course Director of the MA in Art History at Kingston University, London. Downloaded from vcu.sagepub.com by Marquard Smith on September 17, 2014