The Queer Politics of Eclecticism: View Magazine (1940-1947)

November 8, 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Mānoa Campus, Burns Hall 2118

Thumbing through an issue of the mid-twentieth-century arts journal View, no editorial position or organizing logic is immediately apparent. The contents do not appear to cohere around style, genre, medium, discipline, region, national origin, cultural demographics—the taxonomical frameworks, in short, structuring the modern art-world during the magazine’s heyday. The era’s foremost critic, Clement Greenberg, hammered out his doctrine of modernism—keywords “purity,” “autonomy,” “abstraction”—against the counter-example of all that View represented. Within this critical crucible, View magazine formed a divergent theory of modernism. Its editorial eclecticism dramatized modernism’s capacious potential and celebrated its generative diversity. Looking back at View from this historical distance reveals both the existence and the precarity of alternative cultural discourses, alternative artistic values, and alternative creative practices at a moment when the words “modern” and “art” were coming together and being institutionalized in the United States for the first time.


Event Sponsor
Internaitonal Cultural Studies Program, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Morsaline Mojid, (808) 745-7575, culture@hawaii.edu, Enter Title Here (PDF)

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