Extremely impure ends: Clement Greenberg and United States imperialism

Ever since the critical work by revisionist historians such as Serge Guilbaut and Max Kozloff in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Abstract Expressionism has often been dismissed as complicit with Cold War American Imperialism. However, this paper will contend that, rather than anything inhering in its aesthetic, what lent it to appropriation by dominant powers was the (mis)characterisation by Clement Greenberg with which it is commonly seen as synonymous. Building on research by scholars such as, amongst others, David Craven and Caroline A. Jones, this paper will explore the affinities between Greenberg’s account of Abstract Expressionism, and the dominant
ideology of US Imperialism; affinities which cannot be attributed to the style tout court.

This paper will frame these parallels in terms of the imposition of contingency as naturalness or ‘truth’ which, as innumerable radical theorists from Marx through to Butler have maintained, is the modus operandi of hegemonic ideology. This will be elaborated on two fronts: One, in terms of how, for both Greenberg’s account of Abstract Expressionism and US Imperialism, this ‘truth’ is established with an appeal to an exclusionary lineage which presents itself as complete; Two, in terms of how, for both, this ‘truth’ is expressed from a position of fallacious neutrality which is in fact anything but, it representing a very partial interpretation. In doing so, this paper hopes to sunder Greenberg’s reading of Abstract Expressionism from the art itself, and lay the groundwork for an understanding of how of the style may still be recuperable by the left.