Discours de remerciement – Berne 14.11.2025 (anglais)

États-Unis

Rosalind E. Krauss

Prix Balzan 2025 pour Histoire de l’art contemporain

Pour ses réalisations scientifiques exceptionnelles et son rôle fondamental dans l’établissement de l’art contemporain comme domaine de recherche.

Madame President,

Chair and Presidents of the Balzan Foundation,

Members of the General Prize Committee,

Fellow Laureates,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The gratitude I feel in accepting this honor is for its reinforcement of a trajectory that has been somewhat eccentric, for reasons I will try to evoke.

My own eccentricity toward my discipline leads my thought to the distinguished scholar Professor Leo Steinberg, whom I had met in 1970.

Steinberg’s family had fled Moscow for Berlin from which they fled to London, where Leo, speaking no English, taught himself the language by wandering through the city with Joyce’s Ulysses in his pocket. At the Slade School of Art, he had taught life-drawing where the body’s silent gesture is speechlessly eloquent. Here is a passage from Ulysses, from which the word diaphane emerges, which Leo’s writing on art frequently put to use. Diaphane is the translucent, vertical film through which we, erect human bodies, peer out to the space receding away from our standing, viewing postures.

Here is the passage. It occurs where Steven Dedalus is on the Dublin beach, staring out to sea. 

Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more: thought through my eyes. Signature of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. Snotgreen, bluesilver, rust, coloured signs… Then he was aware of them bodies, before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure… Limit of the diaphane in… If you can put your five fingers through it, it is a gate, if not a door. Shut your eyes and see.  

This looking down at the beach and up through the diaphane ruptures the historical doctrine of opticality as the historical goal of modernism. Leo coins a phrase for it: “flatbed picture plane.” He finds this triumphantly at work in Robert Rauschenberg, explicitly, in Monogram, where a stuffed Mongolian goat grazes on a supine bespattered canvas plane. The modernism that limited the avant-garde to the practice of opticality, such as Pollock’s misty skeins, exiled Leo’s daring-to-insist-on “Other Criteria,” which some of us welcomed as a way of expanding modernist doctrine to the single opposition of the body’s viewpoints. Down upon the boots, or out to sea. “Other Criteria” arise from Leo’s teaching, where the bodily detail organizes and reorients the whole meaning of the picture.

This disparity forms the opposition Freud develops in Civilization and Its Discontents. The human species, he notices, began its existence running on its four legs – like animals – smelling and sniffing its prey. The rotation of its feet allowed it to stand up, distance itself from others of its species, freeing its eyes to suppress its nose, and gaining the sense of beauty. Conventional aesthetics has psycho-analysis and history on its side; Steinberg has only his conviction in the human posture as significant.

Structuralism dispenses with this quandary: outward or downward, since every opposition is held to be the very birth of meaning.

There is no room to do justice to structuralism in a three-minute talk. I credit it as formative: from my own work on art and semiotics with rotation of the picture surface as the driver of modernism, to the diagrammatic organization of the chaos of the art of the 1970s in my essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” (think Earthworks; think Installation Art.)

To return to the structure of the optical – prevalent throughout modernism – it arises from color theory: in the Impressionists’ attempt to wrest tonality from natural events: the fog, clouds, sunlight on water. This would be challenged by the Post-Impressionists, who dismissed tonality for a confrontation of complementary colors that would produce, they thought, the very effect of light itself, making its practice abstract.  Within light itself we find the ultimate opposition between nature and culture: realism and abstraction. 

This is an impossibly telegraphed version of the practice I adopted in fashioning art-historical discourse to my own theoretical needs.

To pay my debt to structuralism, I am now at work on a book to be called Roland Barthes: Charms and Demons. The “charm,” for Barthes was any author’s idiomatic speech; the “demon” was naturalism which annihilates the charm of form.

Those are my “details.” I know Leo Steinberg would have been as delighted for me for this honor as I am for myself.