October 2, 2006
Review-essays on Benjamin and Greenberg in The Nation
The October 16 issue of The Nation contains two review-essays worth reading. The first, by Richard Wolin, reviews Berlin Childhood around 1900 and On Hashish, the two thin Walter Benjamin volumes recently published by Harvard University Press, alongside Michael Löwy's Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" (Verso). An excerpt:
Yet Benjamin knew that by infusing Marxist thought with the redemptive components that had been banished by the nineteenth-century esprit de sérieux, he was playing a dangerous game. For while orthodox Marxists prattled on about the prosaic ends of "scientific socialism," "experience" (or Erlebnis) had become the exclusive province of the reactionary right—Lebensphilosophie, the German Youth Movement and literary Fascists like Ernst Jünger. Benjamin's lifelong theoretical battle was to wrest the concept of experience from the right's monopoly and to turn it to the ends of the revolutionary left.
The other, by Artforum's own Barry Schwabsky, concerns two new books about the critic Clement Greenberg, Alice Goldfarb Marquis's Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg (MFA Publications) and Caroline Jones's Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (University of Chicago Press). Jones, whose modern art seminar at Boston University first provoked my interest in art history, receives mostly kind treatment:
Readers who want a better understanding of what Greenberg wrote and why, and above all of why what he wrote was so significant, would in any case be better off if they ignored both biographies and did the harder but more rewarding work of reading Jones's dense, indeed sometimes maddeningly verbose, "critical history." Like Marquis, Jones leans on biographical material culled from Rubenfeld and The Harold Letters along with Greenberg's own writings as well as the reactions to (and against) Greenberg by the art critics and historians who followed in his footsteps; but she brings to all this an analytical intensity, an almost ferocious determination to dig into the text, that makes the biographers' declarative flatness seem dull by comparison. The hundred pages she spends analyzing Greenberg's writings on Pollock—minutely sifting the critic's words through her own searching re-examination of the paintings he had in view—are alone worth the price of the ticket.