Хэл Фостер: Американский искусствовед и критик

American art critic and historian
the art critic and Princeton professor

Harold Foss "Hal" Foster (born August 13, 1955) is an American art critic and historian. He was educated at Princeton University, Columbia University, and the City University of New York. He taught at Cornell University from 1991 to 1997 and has been on the faculty at Princeton since 1997. In 1998 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Foster's criticism focuses on the role of the avant garde within postmodernism. In 1983, he edited The Anti Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, a groundbreaking text in postmodernism. In Recodings (1985), he promoted a vision of postmodernism that simultaneously engaged its avant garde history and commented on contemporary society. In The Return of the Real (1996), he proposed a model of historical recurrence of the avant garde in which each cycle would improve upon the inevitable failures of previous cycles. He views his roles as critic and historian of art as complementary rather than mutually opposed.

Foster was born Aug. 13, 1955, in Seattle, Washington. His father was a partner in the law firm of Foster, Pepper & Shefelman. He attended Lakeside School in Seattle, where Microsoft founder Bill Gates was a classmate. He graduated with an A. B. in English from Princeton University in 1977 after completing a 106 page long senior thesis titled "Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill: Two Poets in a Tradition." He received a Master of Arts in English from Columbia University in 1979. In 1982, a friend from Lakeside School founded Bay Press to publish The Mink's Cry, a children's book written by Foster. In 1997 he joined the faculty of his undergraduate alma mater, Princeton University, in the Department of Art and Archaeology. He chaired the Department of Art and Archaeology from 2005 to 2009. In September 2011 he was appointed to the search committee to find a new dean for Princeton's School of Architecture. He is a faculty fellow of Wilson College. Foster received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. In 2010 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and awarded the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing by the Clark Art Institute. In 2013–14 he was appointed practitioner in residence at Camberwell College of Arts in London.

In his introduction to The Anti Aesthetic (1983), Foster described a distinction between complicity with and resistance to capitalism within postmodernism. The book included contributions by Jean Baudrillard, Douglas Crimp, Kenneth Frampton, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Edward Saïd, and Gregory Ulmer. In Recodings 1985, Foster focused on the role of the avant garde within postmodernism. He advocated a postmodernism that engages in both a continuation of its historical roots in the avant garde and contemporary social and political critique, in opposition to what he saw as a "pluralistic" impulse to abandon the avant garde in favor of more aesthetically traditional and commercially viable modes. He promoted artists he saw as exemplifying this vision, among them Dara Birnbaum, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Allan McCollum, Martha Rosler, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. Foster favored expansion of the scope of postmodernist art from galleries and museums to a broader class of public locations and from painting and sculpture to other media. He saw postmodernism's acknowledgment of differences in viewers' backgrounds and lack of deference to expertise as important contributions to the avant garde. (1974) – that the neo avant garde largely represented a repetition of the projects and achievements of the historical avant garde, and therefore it was a failure. Foster's model was based on a notion of "deferred action" inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud. He conceded the failure of the initial avant garde wave (which included such figures as Marcel Duchamp) but argued that future waves could redeem earlier ones by incorporating through historical reference those aspects that had not been comprehended the first time around. Gordon Hughes compares this theory with Jean François Lyotard's. Foster views his roles as art critic and art historian as complementary rather than mutually opposed, in accordance with his adherence to postmodernism.

DateReview articleWork(s) reviewed20002013Foster, Hal (10 October 2013). "What’s the problem with critical art?". London Review of Books. 35 (19). Retrieved 2022 10 26. Rancière, Jacques (2013). Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. Verso.