Clement Greenberg: Late Writings

CLEMENT GREENBERG:

LATE WRITINGS

EDITED BY ROBERT C. MORGAN

MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS. 232 PAGES. $30.

Everyone has their run, Clement Greenberg once surmised, but sooner or later their time is up. Apparently the artist has ten years; let's be kind and say the critic has maybe twice that. By this account, Greenberg's time was up around the late '50s or early '60s, precisely when he ceased responding in his published criticism to new art forms. In terms of his collected writings, this means that the last of the four volumes edited in 1993 by John O'Brian for the University of Chicago Press is the least consequential, as it is largely occupied with negative responses to Minimalism and Pop art. By the same token, it also implies that Robert C. Morgan's new volume, which picks up in 1971 and continues through 1994 (the year of Greenberg's death), should find the critic running into real trouble-and it does. The present collection is divided into four sections. The first, "The Avant-Garde and Modernism," comprises Greenberg's various restatements of his theory of a medium-specific modernism, kicking off with "Counter-Avant-Garde" from 1971, a diatribe against Duchamp and Conceptualism. Here the gibing is still humorous and playful, and so it continues to yield insights: "In all fairness to Duchamp . . . I should point out that he did several things (the 'straight' painting Network of Stoppages of 1914 and Glasses of a slightly later date) that achieve genuinely large, even major quality. ... In those years, Duchamp could fall into inspiration." The same can't be said for the essays from the late '70s, many of them first appearing in Arts Magazine. In "Looking for the Avant-Garde," close analysis of individual works and movements drops away in favor of dismissive judgments about an entire epoch: the postmodern. "States of Criticism," the second section, presents a selection of observations on aesthetics and taste mostly from the mid-'yos that are close in tenor and tone to those bundled together in Homemade Esthetics (2000), although only two of the pieces appear in both books.

The third section, "Art and Culture," is replete with roughly hewn jewels mainly from the late '70s and early '80s, such as an essay on the seventeenth-century Japanese painter Tawaraya Sotatsu and another on Indian monuments. Although several of Greenberg's comments about non-Western art seem misguided, it is wonderful to see him performing the close visual analysis that characterized his writing of the '40s and '50s. The final section contains a series of interviews that are by turns perceptive, exasperating, and just plain hilarious. "There's nothing like the truth," Greenberg bandies to Charles Harrison. "The truth is delicious. You can eat the truth, you can drink it, and you can sleep with it." For all the unevenness of late Greenberg, this volume makes a worthwhile coda to O'Brian's collected writings; as a whole they are requisite to any understanding of American modernism.