Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art

Essays spanning three decades by one of the most rigorous art thinkers of our time grapple with formal and historical paradigms in twentieth century art.

Sometimes it is good to recall things. It is very good to recall Benjamin Buchloh's struggle with 'critical art' in the 1980s and the beginning of its co-optation by a hungry capitalist/consumerist world. This series of essays from the past magnificently illuminates and clarifies what we have become as a society and cultural world. Reading these crucial texts produced by one of the last remaining real art critics, one is given a helpful set of sharp critical tools for understanding our contemporary world and the struggles of artists within it. Buchloh's forceful and almost psychoanalytical introduction reminds us that we still need to scream, to shout, to wake up, and to refuse, in our changed world, the increasingly successful new motto of the global art market: 'Whatever.' -- Serge Guilbaut, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia The writing of Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has been foundational for the entire discussion around avant-garde and contemporary art. To have these essays in one volume is a gift, a world of thought to absorb, ponder, and debate. -- Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, New York University In this, the second volume of his collected essays, each one as seminal and mold-breaking as the next, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is unflinching in his diagnosis of the predicament of art in the long twentieth century. Formalism and Historicity demonstrates the fascinating development -- and the sheer critical brilliance and importance -- of Buchloh's own thought. Intensely attuned to art's formal as well as historical conditions, this book is a may-day call for art, and his astonishingly vivid historical analysis was never more urgently needed. -- Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art, University College London