PREFACE
It is the purpose of this book to expand the discourse of modern art history to include the paintings, sculptures, photographs, performance pieces, videos, and multimedia expressions of people who have heretofore frequently been excluded from modernist studies. These essays do more than simply embrace the notion of a socially oriented or multiculturalist art history; instead, they often analyze the mechanisms--both social and aesthetic--that have created the dominant culture's resistance to difference. Some essays, for example, speak to the need for art history to redefine its relationship to the greater social exigencies and urgencies that stimulate and define cultural production: Kenneth Silver examines the relationship between the rise of French modernism and the political events of the First World War; Mason Klein looks at the social and artistic milieu that shaped Marcel Duchamp's transgressive exploration of sexuality; Andreas Huyssen analyzes the cultural politics of Pop Art; and my own essay discusses Eva Hesse's personal politics of sensual and sexual liberation and their connection to the desublimatory discourses of intellectuals and other artists in the 1960s. Other pieces address the question of the artist's social responsibility, as well as the role of racism, sexism, class, and ideology itself in shaping aesthetic representations: Linda Nochlin asks whether Edgar Degas's antiSemitism should matter in the art historical evaluation of his work; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explores the implications of racist depictions of AfricanAmericans in nineteenth-century popular and high culture; Abigail Solomon-Godeau reveals the ideological implications of Paul Gauguin's demeaning exotification of tribal women; and Lawrence Levine assesses the manipulative and sometimes counterproductive tactics of New Deal photodocumentation of the Depression era's rural poor. Still other essays open pioneering windows onto aspects of context and meaning sometimes underestimated or ignored by art historians: Maud Lavin examines the function of androgyny in the proto-feminist phoromontages of Hannah Höch and other women artists and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s; Jonathan Weinberg liberates from the art historical closet the homoerotic content of Charles Demuth's paintings; Ida Rodríguez-Prampolini elucidates Diego Rivera's intellectual concept of history and its role in his political activism; Ann Gibson explores why the Abstract Expressionist canon champions Jackson Pollock while it casts aside the often equally brilliant work of the African-American Norman Lewis; Douglas Crimp meditates on the role of cultural activism in producing a credible institutional response to society's indifference to AIDS; and Lucy Lippard explores the meaning and possibilities for multiculturalism in the 1990s.

More than a primer on modernism's exclusions and biases, this anthology will hopefully be seen as a valuable methodological tool for art historians. Through various theoretical and critical processes, these essays, whether they discuss the work of one artist or many, offer new ways of thinking about the visual arts. They suggest various reformations of critical thinking, a range of methods, to quote Cornel West in this book's first essay, to dispose of "the monolithic and the homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing." It is ultimately only through this broadening of the discourse that art history can flourish and survive in an increasingly diverse and global society.

In these last few years of the twentieth century, there is emerging a significant shift in the sensibilities and outlooks of critics and artists. In fact, I would go so far as to claim that a new kind of cultural worker is in the making, associated with a new politics of difference. These new forms of intellectual consciousness advance reconceptions of the vocation of critic and artist, attempting to undermine the prevailing disciplinary divisions of labor in the academy, museum, mass media, and gallery networks, while preserving modes of critique within the ubiquitous commodification of culture in the global village. Distinctive features of the new cultural politics of difference are to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing. Needless to say, these gestures are not new in the history of criticism or art, yet what makes them novel-along with the cultural politics they produce--is how and what constitutes difference, the weight and gravity it is given in representation, and the way in which highlighting issues like exterminism, empire, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, nation, nature, and region at this historical moment acknowledges some discontinuity and disruption from previous forms of cultural critique. To put it bluntly, the new cultural politics of difference consists of creative responses to the precise circumstances of our present moment--especially those of marginalized First World agents who shun degraded self-representations, articulating instead their sense of the flow of history in light of the contemporary terrors, anxieties, and fears of highly commercialized North Atlantic capitalist cultures (with their escalating xenophobias against people of color, Jews, women, gays, lesbians, and the elderly). The thawing, yet still rigid, Second World ex-communist cultures (with increasing nationalist revolts against the legacy of hegemonic party henchmen), and the diverse cultures of the majority of inhabitants on the globe smothered by international communication cartels and repressive postcolonial elites (sometimes in the name of communism, as in Ethiopia) or starved by austere World Bank and IMF policies that subordinate them to the North (as in free-market capitalism in Chile) also locate vital areas of analysis in this new cultural terrain.

The new cultural politics of difference are neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream (or malestream) for inclusion, nor transgressive in the avant-gardist sense of shocking conventional bourgeois audiences. Rather, they are distinct articulations of talented (and usually privileged) contributors to culture who desire to align themselves with demoralized, demobilized, depoliticized, and disorganized people in order to empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy, and individuality. This perspective impels these cultural critics and artists to reveal, as an integral component of their production, the very operations of power within their immediate work contexts (that is, academy, museum, gallery, mass media). This strategy, however, also puts them in an inescapable double bind--while linking their activities to the fundamental, structural overhaul of these institutions, they often remain financially dependent on them (so much for "independent" creation). For these critics of culture, theirs is a gesture that is simultaneously progressive and co-opted. Yet without social movement or political pressure from outside these institutions (extra-parliamentary and extracurricular actions like the social movements of the recent past), transformation degenerates into mere accommodation or sheer stagnation, and the role of the "co-opted progressive"--no matter how fervent one's subversive rhetoric--is rendered more difficult. There can be no artistic breakthrough or social progress without some form of crisis in civilization--a crisis usually generated by organizations or collectivities that convince ordinary people to put their bodies and lives on the line. There is, of course, no guarantee that such pressure will yield the result one wants, but there is a guarantee that the status quo will remain or regress if no pressure is applied at all.