RETURNING THE GAZE: THE AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE CRITIQUE OF OCULARCENTRISM IN FRENCH THOUGHT

Abstract

The widespread suspicion of the domination of vision in modern culture expressed by many French intellectuals this century has influenced the practice and self-understanding of recent American art. By tracing the impact of such thinkers as Bataille, Foucault and Derrida and artists like Duchamp, this paper seeks to explain the repudiation of the High Modernist valorisation of pure optically championed by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in the immediate postwar era. Although the displacement of the center of gravity of modernist art from Paris to New York after 1945 has been widely remarked, the later »revenge« of French theory, transmitted by critics like Rosalind Krauss and Norman Bryson, has not. Its impact has helped undermine the value of Abstract Expressionism in favor of other movements like neo-Dada, Conceptual Art and Minimalism, which can be understood in part as a denigration of the primacy of visual values.