A notable example, The Anti-Aesthetic, his first edited volume, mapped the uncharted terrain of postmodern thought, and has since become required reading for students of postmodernism in any discipline. Editorial work – some of which we discuss in this interview – has a prominent role in his cultural analysis.
In addition to his art historical writing ( Compulsive Beauty (1993), Design and Crime (2002), Prosthetic Gods (2004), The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), Bad New Days (forthcoming, 2015)), Foster is a regular contributor to Artforum, The London Review of Books, and October, where he has been an editor since 1991.
With this slight distance I attempt to treat critical theory not only as a conceptual tool but as a symbolic, even symptomatic form.’ As he says in The Return of the Real (1996), ‘when it comes to critical theory, I have the interest of a second-generation initiate, not the zeal of a first generation convert. While his sympathies are decidedly Marxist, and key passages from Freud, Bataille, and Lacan are recurring touchstones, critical theory is always for him both methodology and object of history. Nevertheless, there is no dogma in Foster’s approach. Psychoanalysis looms large in his writing. His art historical writing covers the bifurcated twentieth century, focusing acutely on pre-war avant-garde practice and its recuperation in the decades after World War II. Intellectually formed in the heady theory days of late 70s New York, Foster has spent his career exploring the power, promise, and limits of critique. Foster was one of the key critics in the 1980s debate over postmodern art, for example, a debate that turned on redeployments of historical art practice, principally appropriation, and made fierce by art’s role in the culture wars and the inflating art market. His formidable powers of analysis and explication are deployed, more often than not, in the service of disruption and destabilisation, and his work is as polarising as it is revelatory. His influence is considerable, reaching well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of modern and contemporary art into architecture, literature, and critical theory – all arenas in which Foster is an authority. HAL FOSTER’S WORK FOLLOWS in the tradition of the modernist art critic-historian, a public intellectual whose reflection on, and synthesis of, contemporary culture is informed by a deep commitment to history and its writing.
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