32
PARTISAN REVIEW
review it in the sort of way that one might expect to see a book
reviewed? Does structuralism have that kind of application to the
ordinary type of book review?
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I think you 're right: the question of whether
The
New York Review of Books
wants to print favorable reviews of books
of structuralism or not is different from the question that was raised
by several speakers: why the ordinary-let's use the word ordinary–
critic and reviewer has not been influenced by structuralism and
doesn 't reflect its influence in his own writing. You can't blame the
problems of structuralism on
The New York Review of Books.
This
is paranoia.
ROSALIND KRAUSS: William, the thing is that we've said over and over
and over again, whether we've deplored it as some people have in the
various sessions or welcomed it as others have, that post–
structuralism is not interested in the two tasks that reviewers still
seem to think are their tasks, namely the evaluation of a work of art
and its interpretation. It's just not interested in that, doesn 't want to
do that; that's not its job.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN: That's a good reason why it's had no effect! That's
just something in the nature of it-that's not censorship either.
ROSALIND KRAUSS: There are two separate issues. I certainly agree with
Peter that there has been an interesting exclusion of the various
processes of understanding structuraiism in the wider critical press .
That 's entirely a side issue from the other issue of why it hasn't had
any effect on the actual practice of X, Y, and Z critic. What I'm
saying is that if X, Y, and Z critic took seriously the kind of
disintegration of the organic wholeness of the work, the thing that
one would evaluate and interpret, they would just have
to
close up
their tents and go away. I recently wrote an essay on the subject of
grids . That is, mainly paintings but also sculptures that are based on
the grid. Now obviously from Mondrian
to,
say, Agnes Martin or
Kenneth Noland, the grid has been an incredibly persistent and
ubiquitous visual form in twentieth century art. The reviewer, I
mean that mentality whose job is to judge, evaluate, interpret the
work of art, would obviously address this material in a very different
way from the way that I chose to do. I assume that my choice was
informed by structuralism, because the set of questions that I asked
had nothing to do with whether a work was good or bad or what the
work meant but rather to say that it seemed to me that the grid
structure was something that had to do with repression , that one of
the things that one experiences in the work of artists who take up the
form of the grid, and Mondrian seems to me to be a perfect example
