again” in the aforementioned passage, through his choice of the radio waves, aligns itself with the mass communication media that are so crucial to Alloway’s long front of culture. But there is another takeaway here. Steinberg’s proclamation of Rauschenberg as the exemplar of horizontality whose work “lets the world in” also implies that one no longer knows where art ends and where life begins in his work. Indeed, Steinberg’s passage resonates with Rauschenberg’s avant‐gardist desire, in the wake of and under the influence of Duchamp and Cage, to break down the distinction between art and life. One recalls his famous dictum that abdicates the making of art (as well as that of life) and elaborates upon how he understood his combine paintings. “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in the gap between the two.)” (Rauschenberg, quoted in Hunter 1985, 21). To act in the gap between art and life puts (combine) painting on another plane. It is now figured as the horizontal bridging of a chasm whose edges it both connects and divides. If we substitute “flatbed picture plane” for “painting” in Rauschenberg’s statement above, then we also discern the gap out of which the horizontally inclined Steinberg acted when he broke from art historical discourse, at the moment when he let the world of visual culture in.5
Rosalind Krauss’s Trajectory and the Hatred of Visual Culture
The power of Steinberg’s horizontal argument also influenced his Hunter College colleague Rosalind Krauss as she elaborated upon Steinberg’s ideas over the course of her career. Two of these studies also engaged with the work of Rauschenberg as an exemplary artist of horizontality—first in the essay “Robert Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image” (Krauss 1974) and later in her popularizing contribution to the PBS television series Art of the Western World (Wood and WNET New York 1989; see Figure 2.4). Last but not least, Krauss returns to Steinberg’s ideas about the “flatbed picture plane” in an essay titled “Horizontality” and published in the catalogue for the exhibition Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), which she co‐curated with Yve‐Alain Bois at the Pompidou Center in Paris (see n. 2 in this chapter). This ambitious project draws on the ideas of Georges Bataille to craft a “base materialist” perspective on twentieth‐century art and its history. Nevertheless, the efficacy of applying Bataille in this way is debatable; this is a matter that I have addressed and questioned elsewhere (Kaplan 2010). Krauss’s discussion of Steinberg and the figure of horizontality reads in part thus: “The horizontal cast of this kind of imagery […] Steinberg related to what he called the ‘flatbed picture plane,’ and he aligned this conception of the horizontally laden canvas with ‘culture’” (Bois and Krauss 1997, 94).
Figure 2.4 Rosalind Krauss, As a Horizontal Field, Like a Desktop. Video still (detail with caption) from the PBS television series Art of the Western World, Episode 9, “In Our Own Time,” 1989.
One notes in the first instance how Krauss (in contrast to Alloway and, to some extent, in contrast to Steinberg himself) refuses to entertain the larger implications of horizontality and the radical challenge that it poses to the proper borders of art and to the determination of aesthetic value. She begins her analysis with a reaffirmation of Steinberg’s flatbed picture plane: “For Steinberg had been addressing what he saw as a radical change in the aesthetic premises of contemporary art, a change that he called a ‘shift from nature to culture’” (Krauss 2002, 39). What Krauss fails to acknowledge, though, is that the radical change that comes with horizontality offers a stinging critique of the pyramidal premises that ground contemporary art. In other words, horizontality disenables the aesthetic distinctions upon which the concept of contemporary art relies. In this way, the shift from nature to culture also constitutes a shift from art (and its aesthetic judgment) to visual culture (and its operational practices). The inability to recognize such a consequence anticipates Krauss’s later hostility to visual culture and to visual studies (as the anti‐disciplinary practice whose specific object is visual culture). Krauss then concludes with another explication that frames her art historical limits. “And, [Steinberg] asserted, this change in direction had made available to contemporary art an entirely new range of content” (Krauss 2002, 39). While one lauds Krauss’s playful use here of the term “change in direction” to signal the move from vertical to horizontal, this shift cannot be confined to the notion of an expanded field. In other words, the move to horizontality does not merely entertain an “entirely new range of content” for contemporary art. As discussed previously, when Steinberg speaks of Rauschenberg’s “letting the world in,” one can no longer tell where art ends and where life begins. Krauss therefore represses Rauschenberg’s neo‐Dadaist and post‐Duchampian breakdown of art and life that sometimes goes under the rubric of nominalism and that sees “art,” via the gesture of the readymade, as nothing more than an effect of naming and framing, or what Duchamp and the Cage circle, including Rauschenberg, proffered as the “aesthetic of indifference” (Roth 1977). It follows, then, that, when Krauss (1977) did take up the significance of Duchamp’s work, her focus was on his fascination with the indexical sign rather than on the readymade and the question of artistic value in general.
In May 1997 or some time in that year, when Formless: A User’s Guide was published in English, Krauss travelled to her alma mater to deliver the keynote address on Alumni Day at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. During that visit, the then Columbia University professor and October journal co‐editor conducted a surprising interview with Scott Rothkopf (1997) published in the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson under the title “Krauss and the Art of Cultural Controversy.” Rothkopf asks Krauss, rather innocuously, whether she supports the idea of survey courses in art history departments “working with the concept of ‘visual culture’”; and he points to a specific interdisciplinary introductory course already instituted at Harvard. Before he can even finish his point, Krauss snaps back and pounces on her interlocutor with a reactionary form of hate speech. “I hate visual culture.” Jan Baetens (2012, 92) analyzes it astutely as an “(in)famous attack on visual studies and its specific object: visual culture.” Her opening salvo is a short and pithy “dissing” of this upstart that the art historian deems to be her discipline’s arch‐enemy. Krauss’s antagonistic declaration is followed by Rothkopf’s double take, as he seeks further clarification about such an abrupt dismissal: “You hate visual culture?” But there is no apology or nuance to be had, as Krauss’s bashing of visual culture is elaborated even further.
Let us recall that this interview took place a year after the influential “Visual Culture Questionnaire” (The Editors 1996) published in October where a number of contemporary thinkers were asked to respond to the rise of visual culture with a set of leading statements. But given the brusque and nasty things that Krauss has to say in this interview, perhaps it should have been called the “Visual Culture Inquisition.” Krauss openly admits that the Questionnaire was an assault designed to put visual culture on the defensive, or even out of business. She frames it this way: “In fact, October magazine, which I coedit and cofounded in 1976, recently did a special issue that was an attack on the visual culture project” (Rothkopf 1997). By referring to it in a disparaging manner as the “visual culture project,” Krauss projects visual culture into the future, refusing to grant it the status of an intellectual discourse or a viable practice in the present.
One can interpret Krauss’ attack in this interview as a disavowal (and othering) of visual culture and thereby as an attempt to reinstitute certain elitist art historical assumptions in the face of the visual cultural tendency toward leveling and its inter‐ or antidisciplinary aspects. After her flippant reactionary opener, Krauss launches into a self‐declared pejorative and abusive diatribe against the new project on these two counts. She asserts:
Like cultural studies,
