Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency by Hal Foster review – a deft study of the art of recent decades

The latest in the art world: what has come afterpostmodern irony? And who decides it’s good?

Twenty years ago this summer, some friends and I decided to invent, or at least christen, a new artistic movement. We planned a conference on “Patheticism” and announced an eclectic lineage: Melville’s Bartleby, Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy”, lo-fi music and the slacker ethos. Postmodern irony was over, we declared, and henceforth only feeble, unfinished and frankly melancholic bouts of sincerity would do, artistically speaking. As Hal Foster notes in this deft, opinionated and slightly frustrating survey of the art of recent decades, academic critics in the 1990s lagged, as ever, behind developments among artists themselves. Late in the previous decade, many had already been “drawn not to the high of the simulacral image but to the lows of the depressive thing”. As a long-time editor at the theoretically austere journal October, Foster is well placed to describe a shift away from extolling the fakery of art and imagery, towards instead “a probing of the real” – and also to ask what might have been lost or occluded by this new “reality hunger” (to borrow a phrase from the essayist David Shields). Foster is rightly suspicious of the alleged “end of irony” that was bruited again after 9/11, even as he is eager to name and account for the ideas and methods that have succeeded winking self-reference, conscious sham and political quietism.

Bad New Days – the title is from Brecht – elaborates on five adjectives that best capture the art of the past quarter-century: “abject”, “archival”, “mimetic”, “precarious” and “post-critical”. (As Foster well knows, these are also cliches of critical and curatorial language.) The dark and willing slump into abjection is easily traced in the work of Cindy Sherman, whose early mocked-up “film stills” gave way to grotesque self-portraits with parodic old master props and eventually her unabashed embrace of glutinous body‑horror. Mike Kelley is also crucial to the abject turn, with his pitiful stuffed animals and his banner reading “Pants Shitter and Proud”. Paul McCarthy’s scatological films and installations complete the trio of what we might call the “high American abjection” of the 1990s.

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