Foster Hal. Recodings. Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics

Bay Press, 1987. — 253 p. — ISBN 0-941920-04-6The essays in this book present a constellation of concerns about the limits and myths of (postmodernism, the uses and abuses of historicism, the connections of recent art and architecture with media spectacle and institutional power, and the transformations of the avant garde and of cultural politics generally. As a hetero­ geneous text which for better or worse often takes on a negative cast, it may be easier to say what this book is not. Though it records one reading of recent developments in North American and West­ern European art and criticism — specifically, the conjunction of (post)modemist art and (post)structuralist thought — it is not strictly a history or a theory (a telling distinction in any case). Nor is it meant to signal the close of any cultural moment (such closure is usually the critic s own). However seduced I am by ideas of histor­ical ruptures and epistemological breaks, cultural forms and economic modes do not simply die, and the apocalypticism of the present is finally complicit with a repressive status quo. At the
same time, the socioeconomic preconditions of the modern no longer obtain, at least not in original configuration, and many of the theoretical models of modernism and some of the “great narra­tives** of modernity are in doubt, at least as originally conceived (Jean-Frangois Lyotard cites these: “the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or
working subject, or the creation of wealth