The End Of Formalist Criticism

Clement Greenberg is one of the most important American critics in the 20^th Century.For Greenberg,Formalist criticism is not only a method to analyze and comb the development of Modern Art,but also suggests his critical thought and reflection as a critic of the Western modern culture,which could be achieved exactly in the historical perspective and cultural awareness. Greenberg is a critic who loves to launch debates,and all of his criticism are related to the avant-garde art movement,especially the Abstract Expressionism in the United States during the specific period,and what he criticizes aims at specific issues and his arguments become more complete and justified in the series of debates with other critics.Greenberg's Formalist criticism undergoes a span of three decades,from the time he proposed his theory to the full improvement of it.Until 1960,Greenberg's theoretical system is finally built up based on Formalism-Modernism, which is to say that the Formalist criticism is put into the lineage of the Western modern art history and is raised to the philosophical level and the principles of"self-criticism" and "simplified form" received a systematic interpretation.However,at the beginning of the 1960s,with the Minimalism,Pop Art,Op Art and other streams of novel art appearing in succession,Greenberg's Formalism is challenged.Briefly,on the one hand,the development of the early Minimalism is in line with Greenberg's principle of "simplified form";on the other hand,after Stella's"What you see is what you see",Judd's "Special Object" and the creative idea of "theater" advocated by Tony Smith and Robert Morris, the Minimalism begins to depart from the mainstream of Modernism to the anti-Modernism ultimately.In 1967,Greenberg's "Recentness of Sculpture"and Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" mark the watershed of the Formalist criticism which came to decline then.Although Rosalind Krauss still insists on Formalism in 1970s,her theory is precisely opposed to Greenberg when she combines the Formalisln with the Structuralist criticism.To some extent,the full development of Krauss's Post-Formalist criticism actually means the end of Greenberg's Formalist criticism.In fact,since the mid-1960s,Greenberg's Formalism,as well as his modernist narrative based on the principle of "self-criticism" have been evaluated critically by some critics who attempt to overthrow his theory.For example,Peter B(u|¨)rger advocates the theory of the avant-garde art; T.J.Clark tries to replace the Formalism with the social criticism;Arthur C.Danto not only promotes the theory of "the artworld",but declares the death of the grand narrative insisted by Greenberg.With Greenberg's Formalist criticism as the basic clue,this essay attempts to combine the criticism and theory in the specific periods with the art movements and streams of that time,in order to present and discuss the context of the emergence and development of the Formalist criticism in the United States,as well as its decline and disappearance in the end.