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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 16 (2005)

Deferred Instantaneity:
Clement Greenberg’s Time Problem

Kenji KAJIYA*INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this essay is to examine American art critic Clement
Greenberg’s conception of time as articulated in his writings in order tobring new light to his idea of instantaneity. As a leading art critic in twentieth-century America, Greenberg propagated his modernist view ofmodern art through his formalist approach to interpretation, which led
to the privileging of the Abstract Expressionists and subsequent artists
including Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland
and Jules Olitski. By and large, it is his modernist view of history as
development that has drawn attention to the issue of temporality inGreenberg’s arguments. It is why his prescriptive and therefore reductive
approach to the history of modern art has been critically discussed byartists, art critics and art historians since the 1960s, when various art
practices emerged at odds with his modernist critical enterprise.1
Surprisingly, in spite of the implication of historical development in his
discussions, Greenberg’s conception of temporality in perceiving works
of art has not received the careful consideration that it deserves. If anything, Greenberg has been regarded as an exponent of instantaneity, anidea apparently incompatible with temporality.2 Certainly he points to
Copyright © 2005 Kenji Kajiya. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission
from the author.
*Ph. D. Candidate in art history, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

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instantaneity in his writings, but it is also the case that several of his texts
unequivocally imply duration. I explore how the notion of temporality
functions in Greenberg’s art writings from the mid-1940s through themid-1970s, and how it played a crucial role in fashioning his concept of
optical illusion. To do so, his major article “Collage” and other key texts
will be reinterpreted as explications of the temporal dimension of theviewer’s experience. I will then turn to Jacques Lacan’s exegesis of logical time as a tool for elucidating the structure of Greenberg’s idea of instantaneity in order to contend that it cannot be regarded simply as a mere
instant of time.
Of intense interest for artists and critics in the 1960s was the topic oftemporality. In particular, such artists and critics shared what Pamela M.
Lee aptly describes as “chronophobia,” an obsession with, as well as afear of, time.3 Because of his reputation as a formalist, Greenberg has
been discussed only in terms of his interest in spatial images. Contrary
to this presumption, the task of this essay is to bear witness to the issueof time in Greenberg’s art criticism long before it haunted the artists andcritics of the 1960s.
I

UNCOVERING GREENBERG’S TEMPORALITY

Greenberg’s theoretical framework underwent signiﬁcant transformation in the 1950s. In the previous decade, he had addressed the physical properties of works of art in praising Jackson Pollock and other
Abstract Expressionists whom he had regarded as absorbed in the problem of medium. But the 1950s saw the emergence of what Yve-Alain
Bois calls “Greenberg’s amendments,” through which Greenberg’s ideaof medium shifted from a consideration of the properties of a work tothat of the ethereal optics situated between works and viewers.4 It is in
this context that the problem of time manifested itself in Greenberg’s
discourse.
First published in 1958 as “The Pasted-Paper Revolution,” “Collage”
is an article he re-titled when it was incorporated into his later book Art
and Culture, published in 1961.5 “Collage” has been widely read as an
exemplar of his formalist approach to works of art. Whereas other of his
inﬂuential texts, such as “ ‘American-Type’ Painting” (1955) and “Modernist Painting” (1960), foregrounded his historical perspective fromwhich he considered the then-present situation of contemporary art,
“Collage” is informed by his narrowly drawn concern surrounding the9-Kenji Kajiya(p203)6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 205

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development of Cubist paintings. In this text, Greenberg attempts to
explain how the experiments of Analytic Cubism produced the invention of collage.
Starting with his analysis of the development of Cubist paintings, heintroduces the dichotomy of “literal ﬂatness” and “depicted ﬂatness,” bywhich he distinguished between the ﬂatness of the surface of support andthe ﬂatness of the ground behind the depicted objects. The developmentof the paintings is discussed as the dialectical interaction between literal
ﬂatness and depicted ﬂatness. In the early stage of Analytic Cubism,
Greenberg writes, Braque and Picasso tried to make a slight illusion
between the two kinds of ﬂatnesses in order to keep the paintings frombeing overwhelmed by the literal ﬂatness. At times they emphasized
depicted ﬂatness by painting recognizable objects such as “a tack with acast shadow” in Braque’s Violin and Pitcher (1910) and at other times
literal ﬂatness was made conspicuous by depicting ﬂat images like letters and the grain patterns of wooden surfaces as in The Match Holder(1910) by the same artist.6 Greenberg argues that one painting has a variety of ﬂatnesses—not only those of depicted and literal ﬂatnesses but
also different layers of depicted ﬂatnesses. In this respect, each motifemphasized its own ﬂatness. Greenberg writes:
Thus every part and plane of the picture keeps changing place in relative
depth with every other part and plane; and it is as if the only stable relation
left among the different parts of the picture is the ambivalent and ambiguous
one that each has with the surface.7

Claiming our attention is his discussion, which at ﬁrst addresses the historical development of Cubist paintings, transformed en route into theexplication of the viewer’s experience. Greenberg thus describes how
ﬂat planes, created by devices such as letters and the grain patterns ofwood, oscillate between each other. The relationship between literal ﬂatness and depicted ﬂatness is viewed as “ambivalent and ambiguous.”
Greenberg argues this effect, saying: “All this [planes created by various devices] expands the oscillation between surface and depth so as toencompass ﬁctive space in front of the surface as well as behind it.”8 The
relationship between the depicted planes and the plane of the surface
becomes ambiguous because the oscillations are created not only between the surface and the depicted plane in front of it, but also between
the surface and the depicted plane behind it. He then describes the transformation of these oscillations as follows:9-Kenji Kajiya(p203)6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 206

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Flatness may now monopolize everything, but it is a ﬂatness [that has]become so ambiguous and expanded as to turn into illusion itself—at leastan optical if not, properly speaking, a pictorial illusion.9

Oscillating planes themselves accordingly become an illusion, which heterms as “optical illusion.” As in the above citation, optical illusion isconceived not so much as illusion in a picture, which he calls pictorial
illusion, but rather as an illusion into which the picture is perceived as
being transformed subsequent to the process of oscillation. It is during
the process of beholding that optical illusion is activated.
Within Greenberg’s entire corpus of writing, arguments concerning
the idea of oscillation in pictorial space are not limited to “Collage.” In
1951, Greenberg expresses the oscillating process in Cézanne’s paintings as “a never-ending vibration from front to back and back to front,”10
an observation which he later revises as “a vibration, inﬁnite in its
terms”11 for a reprint in Art and Culture. Both expressions demonstrate
the inﬁnitely prolonged process of oscillation, and do so all the more emphatically because they do not mention whether or not the oscillations
eventually converge.
Greenberg also ﬁnds the process of oscillation present in Abstract
Expressionist paintings. This is not surprising when we consider how
Greenberg drew a parallel between Abstract Expressionist illusion to thatfound in Cubist works.12 Using a metaphor of respiration, Greenberg
writes: “the surface [of Abstract Expressionist paintings] manages somehow to breathe [Greenberg’s italics].”13 More speciﬁcally, paintings byBarnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still are described as “anew kind of ﬂatness, one that breathes and pulsates.”14 The operation of
the pulse is what Rosalind Krauss later refers to when she describes theactivities against formalist distinction between spatial and temporal
domains.15 Making their appearance in some of Greenberg’s major texts,
the terms remind us of how important it is to deconstruct Greenberg’s
image as an investigator of spatial problem.
In any case, Greenberg also bestows his concern on the temporaldimension of perceiving three-dimensional works.16 For example, hedescribes the process of oscillation in David Smith’s Black White Forward (1961):17
As in a Synthetic Cubist painting, the ﬂat “picture” plane is jolted into what
seem two planes of different depth, only to have its “integrity” reasserted.18

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Greenberg discusses how the jolted picture plane at ﬁrst appears to be
two different planes, but which eventually merge with itself. Comparing
the adjustment which produces the “jolted” effect to the oscillation foundin Cubist paintings, Greenberg locates the temporal experience in hisview of Smith’s sculpture. Although he reasserts the integrity of the twoplanes, he nevertheless looks at the process by which the two planes jolt
along back and forth.
Although Smith’s Black White Forward, an assembly of ﬂat steel
planes, is so frontal as to operate according to a logic similar to that ofpainting, Greenberg ﬁnds that kind of experience in non-frontal sculpture as well. Anthony Caro’s sculpture is discussed thus:
Planar and linear shapes of steel (there are no solidly enclosed volumes in
Caro’s vocabulary) gather together in what the surprised eye takes at ﬁrst formere agglomerations. Seldom is there an enclosing silhouette or internal pattern with readily apparent axes and centers of interest; these, when they
emerge, do so tangentially and ex-centrically. That the ground plan will attimes echo as well as interlock with the superstructure or elevation (as in the
superb Sculpture Two of 1962) only renders the unity of a piece that muchharder to grasp at ﬁrst. Yet just those factors that make for confusion at ﬁrst
make most for unity in the end.19

Once again, the work seems to initially appear as “mere agglomerations”
whose “enclosing silhouette or internal pattern” can hardly be recognized. Even if there are “readily apparent axes and centers of interest,”
they emerge “tangentially and ex-centrically.” Here Greenberg emphasizes that grasping the unity of Caro’s sculpture is not done in a moment
but carries with it a kind of delay, analogous to that which he ﬁnds in
Smith’s sculpture.
Greenberg’s interest in temporality has been eclipsed by the shadowof his stature as a formalist art critic whose assigned role it is to explore
spatial problems of a given work. We see that he found duration to bepresent in a range of paintings and sculpture including Cubist collage,
Cézanne, Abstract Expressionism, David Smith and Anthony Caro. As
in the sculptures by Smith and Caro, a unity of the work might bereasserted in the end, but it should also be noted that such a unity is not
posited a priori but created as a result of the process during which weperceive the work of art. Greenberg’s attention to this process, however, has been consigned into oblivion in discussions of his critical discourse.20

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II

KENJI KAJIYATHE COMPATIBILITY OF INSTANTANEITY WITH TEMPORALITY

As we have discussed, Greenberg mentions temporal experience inlooking at art in many places for many subjects. It is also the case, however, that he often mentions the idea of instantaneity in perceiving works
of art. For example, his 1959 article “The Case for Abstract Art” discusses the notion of “at-onceness,” as we will discuss later.21 In a symposium in 1987 he stated that, “A masterpiece as well as a dog can be
grasped in the split second. An instantaneous look, and you can see how
good Titian is when he’s good.”22 Hence the question arises: if he discusses the idea of instantaneity, how does Greenberg reconcile it withhis conception of temporality? In the following pages, I will argue that
his instantaneity can be considered not as a mere instant of time but rather
as an idea that encompasses a speciﬁc kind of temporality.
Let us go back to the mid-1940s. “On Looking at Pictures” (1945) is
one of the earliest texts in which Greenberg discusses his version of
instantaneity.23 It is a book review of Lionello Venturi’s Painting andPainters: How to Look at a Picture (1945).24 Greenberg criticizes Venturi’s argument about the process of viewing a picture. According to
Venturi, we only have a vague impression of a picture at the ﬁrst glance
but after an analysis of all its components we may understand the meaning of them and the picture as a whole. Greenberg considers Venturi’s
argument to be “highly misleading if not completely wrong.”25 He
writes:The process of looking at a picture is inﬁnitely more complex in scheme thanthat [Venturi’s statement]; it cannot be analyzed into discrete, sequential
moments but only, if at all, into logical moments (though logic as such hasvery little to do with the experience of art). Doesn’t one ﬁnd so many times
that the “full meaning” of a picture—i.e., its aesthetic fact—is, at any given
visit to it, most fully revealed at the ﬁrst fresh glance? And that this “meaning” fades progressively as continued examination destroys the unity ofimpression?26

Greenberg criticizes an evolutionary implication in Venturi’s model ofunderstanding. We must note that it does not follow that Greenberg
insists that one can understand the full meaning of a picture in a momentof time, because he argues that what one initially assumes as the fullmeaning of a picture “fades progressively” as one’s examination of thework continues. His addition of quotation marks to the phrase “full9-Kenji Kajiya(p203)6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 209

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meaning” also implies that Greenberg thinks that one cannot comprehend the full meaning of a picture in a moment. Put otherwise, he was
doubtful not only about the gradual apprehension of a picture but also
about the instantaneous understanding of its full meaning.
Still, Greenberg remains attracted to some aspect of instantaneity inspite of his doubts. Evidence of his concern can be seen in the following:With many paintings and pieces of sculpture it is as if you had to catch themby surprise in order to grasp them as wholes—their maximum being packed
into the instantaneous shock of sight. Whereas if you plant yourself too ﬁrmly before looking at a picture and then gaze at it too long you are likely to
end by having it merely gaze blankly back at you [italics mine].27

His use of “as if ” reveals that Greenberg believes that one does not haveto comprehend works of art in a moment of time in reality but that one
feels an imperative to do so because a maximum amount of meaning ispacked into and within an instantaneous shock of sight. It means thateven if one does not understand all the meanings of works of art in a moment of time, they are actually imprinted onto one’s eyes, to be retroactively reactivated. What is at stake in Greenberg’s conception of looking
at works of art is this combination of their instantaneous impression on
the viewer’s eyes and her/his gradual understanding of its meaning.
If this is the case, then how does the slowness of understanding differ
from that of Venturi’s model of understanding which also requires a certain amount of time to come to fruition? Useful at this juncture is a discussion of Greenberg’s reference to logical moments, which he contrasts
with “discrete, sequential moments” that Venturi presupposes in his formulation of looking at a picture.
As for logical moments, Greenberg only writes: “The process of looking at a picture is inﬁnitely more complex in scheme than that [Venturi’s
statement]; it cannot be analyzed into discrete, sequential moments but
only, if at all, into logical moments (though logic as such has very little
to do with the experience of art).”28 Rosalind Krauss regards Greenberg’s
idea of logical moments as atemporal and therefore ideal conﬁgurationsof the viewer’s look.29 According to her, Greenberg’s idea of logicalmoments parallels that which constitutes the diagrams Erle Loran uses
in Cézanne’s Compositions (1943),30 the book Greenberg would praise
three months later after he ﬁrst mentions logical moments.31 As Krauss
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logical, while Greenberg’s conception of logical moments leaves room
for reexamination, because he writes that Loran’s diagrams “are a matter of intuition and experience rather than of conscious thought.”32 Thatmeans Greenberg does not consider Loran’s diagram to be the productof speculation but rather that of experience. If Greenberg’s idea is parallel to Loran’s as Krauss argues, Greenberg seems to have regarded logical moments as pertaining to actual experience in some way. I write “insome way” because he nonetheless writes that “logic itself has little to
do with the experience of art.” In other words, Greenberg’s logicalmoments originate in the actual experience of art, yet they are concurrently qualiﬁed by logic which has little to do with that experience. Thisapparent double bind of the term “logical moments” is unraveled when
we consider it as the two-phase process of looking at a picture. Logicalmoments are experiential because they arise from the actual experienceof art, which, in Greenberg’s case, is provided in a moment, and at thesame time not experiential in that they are not created on the spot but
rather reconstructed after the event. For Greenberg, logical moments arethose into which one unfolds by logic something that one perceives as
happening in actual experience.
To clarify Greenberg’s use of logical moments, I now direct attention
to another discussion about logical moments of a judgment articulated
by French psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan in his essay“Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” published in1945 in the 1940/1944 volume of Cahiers d’art.33 Although the subjectof this article, which focuses on aspects of temporality in logic, seems
to have little relevance to Greenberg’s discussion of the process of looking, Lacanian analysis can be usefully employed as an invaluable meansof explicating Greenberg’s model. For present in Lacan’s writings is a
speciﬁc kind of temporality as it exists in a particular judgment, which
in turn, operates in the latter.
Lacan’s argument on time is made in relation to his own interpretation of a logical problem involving three prisoners.34 The problem is
explained as follows: three prisoners have an opportunity for one of them
to be released. The warden places one disc from a set of three white discs
and two black discs on each prisoner’s back. Each prisoner can only see
the discs on the other two’s backs and not their own. The ﬁrst prisoner
to walk to the door and tell the warden which color disc he has on hisback will be released. When the warden uses three white discs to put
them on the backs of the prisoners, what happens? The result is that after9-Kenji Kajiya(p203)6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 211

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having contemplated for a given length of time, all three prisoners walkto the door at the same instant. Lacan argues that each of the prisoners
reaches a solution by thinking as follows: “I saw the other two have whitediscs. I thought that if I have a black disc, one of the two would be able
to infer the following: ‘If I have a black disc, the other would ﬁnd he has
a white and leave immediately but since he does not, I have not a black
but a white.’ Since the other two do not leave, I ﬁnd I have a white.”To describe the process that each prisoner goes through, Lacan introduces a time element, which he divides into three moments: the instantof the glance, the time for comprehending, and the moment of concluding. The instant of the glance takes place when the prisoner notices what
is given in the situation where each prisoner sees two white discs. The
time for comprehending occurs when that prisoner makes a line of reasoning. The moment of concluding is when that same prisoner realizes
that he can conclude if he interprets the other’s standing still as a hesitation.35
What makes the last phase signiﬁcant is that the prisoner must quickly end his process of reasoning in order to head for the door, for if theothers go before him, he cannot use the hesitation of the others as an element in his line of reasoning. Thus, in the moment of concluding, theprisoner’s act does not make an additional reasoning but ends the line ofreasoning by the construction of the judgment. The judgment is madeaccording to what Lacan calls “anticipated certainty,” in which the prisoner leaps ahead to a conclusion whose rationale can only be veriﬁed
after the judgment is made.36
Although scholars have focused on the function of the moment of concluding, especially the way in which this last moment makes the time
for comprehending retroactively meaningful,37 the instant of the glancealso deserves special consideration in its relationship to the second
moment. Lacan writes:
The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but
this instant can include all the time needed for comprehending.38

Here Lacan regards the ﬁrst instant of the glance as comprising the time
for comprehending. We can see how his notion of the instant of theglance shares the same structure as Greenberg’s idea of instantaneity
which is not completed by itself. In both cases, it is the subsequent time
for understanding that gives signiﬁcance to, or rather activates, the ﬁrst
moment of glance. Taking into account recent studies on Lacan’s idea

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of three logical moments which are discussed in relation to Sigmund
Freud’s notion of afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit),39 we can interpretthe deferred understanding of the ﬁrst glance as an effect of afterwardsness, which consequently allows the ﬁrst glance to be reactivated later
during the time for comprehending.
It is important here to note how Greenberg himself argues this effectof afterwardsness in relation to his version of instantaneity. In one of his
aesthetic writings in the mid-1970s, he discusses how crucially aesthetic
experience depends on “the interplay of expectation and satisfaction (ordys-satisfaction).”40 According to him, aesthetic expectation is not what
one holds before s/he sees works of art but is created solely within theiractual experience and inﬂuenced by nothing outside it.41 Greenberg
argues that although it is much easier to point to the interplay in the temporal, than visual, arts, it nevertheless happens in the latter. This includes
pictorial art “whose full effect can be gotten—and has to be gotten—
from a split-second glance,”42 which recalls the Venturi book review
written some thirty years earlier. Greenberg thus argues:
Here [in pictorial art] the interplay is compressed into microscopic time—
and who knows but that it may violate the dimension of time, or rather ourconsciousness of the dimension of time. In visual art, as it seems to me, satisfaction (and maybe dys-satisfaction too) can generate expectation retroactively, or, if not that, coincide with it in the same apparent instant [italicsmine].43

He considers the interplay of expectation and satisfaction, which should
require duration by deﬁnition, to be compressed into a moment of timein such a way as to undermine our consciousness of the temporal dimension. Losing a normal sense of time, one can reinterpret her/his early expectation in terms of her/his later satisfaction. It is in this sense that thelatter can make the former retroactively meaningful. Retroactive temporality is an idea which has operated throughout Greenberg’s years of
discussion on aesthetic experience.44
III

FRIED’S TWIST AND AFTER

Aside from the complexity of Greenberg’s notion of time, how can we
postulate the reasons why it has been unnoticed? Here the important role
Michael Fried played in disseminating the idea of instantaneity demands
our attention. As a leading disciple of Greenberg,45 Fried wrote his sem-

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inal article “Art and Objecthood” (1967) where he praises modernist
paintings and sculpture for convincing the viewer of the value of theirworks instantaneously, in contrast to minimal artworks, which are criticized for requiring the viewer to feel the duration.46 It is with reference
to his article that many scholars have discussed “presentness,” the instantaneity which Fried claims is perceived in modernist paintings and sculpture.47
Fried does not specify the source of his argument on instantaneity inthe article, but it is clearly from the writings of Greenberg. For Fried later
refers to Greenberg’s notion of “at-onceness” in discussing the temporal mode of instantaneousness of Édouard Manet’s painting. Citing
Greenberg’s article “The Case for Abstract Art” (1959), Fried writes ina footnote:
For Greenberg, the quality of “at-onceness” is a mark of all successful paintings: [The following is Fried’s quote of Greenberg’s “The Case for AbstractArt.”] “[I]deally the whole of a picture should be taken in at a glance; its unity
should be immediately evident, and the supreme quality of a picture, the highest measure of its power to move and control the visual imagination, should
reside in its unity. And this is something to be grasped only in an indivisible
instant of time” (p. 80).48

Greenberg’s argument in Fried’s quotation holds that the whole picture
and its value should be apprehended in a moment of time. Since Fried
regards Manet as the ﬁrst modernist artist,49 it is likely that Fried has thenotion of “at-onceness” in his mind when he discusses modernist paintings and sculpture in America.
It is of vital importance to understand that little attention has beendrawn to what Greenberg writes after Fried’s quotation, because the latter has decontextualized much of Greenberg’s argument. Even a cursory examination of the rest of the passage reveals the partial nature ofFried’s quotation:
The “at-onceness” which a picture or a piece of sculpture enforces on you is
not, however, single or isolated. It can be repeated in a succession of instants,
in each one remaining an “at-onceness,” an instant all by itself. For the cultivated eye, the picture repeats its instantaneous unity like a mouth repeating
a single word.50

Greenberg here contends that the notion of “at-onceness” does not referto just a single or isolated experience of a work of art. Through the continued repetition of “at-onceness,” the viewer experiences the work of9-Kenji Kajiya(p203)6/9 05.7.12 6:47 PM ページ 214

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art. In other words, the apprehension of the unity of the work and its
value is instantaneous, but this instantaneity is iterated over and over, sothat the total experience of art develops in the course of time.
It must be added, however, that Fried himself in looking back in 1998
to the situation when he wrote “Art and Objecthood,” maintains that his
presentness is not a mere instant of time either. He provides the evidence
for this contention as an epigraph from Perry Miller’s book on American
theologian Jonathan Edwards,51 stating that “we every moment see thesame proof of a God as we should have seen if we had seen Him create
the world at ﬁrst.”52 That is how Fried writes: “My point, I would say
today, was that at every moment the claim on the viewer of the modernist painting or sculpture is renewed totally, as if nothing less than thatis the condition of its expressiveness [Fried’s italics].”53 Fried insists that
he also has suffered from, rather than promoted, the simpliﬁcation of theidea of instantaneity, which was perhaps motivated by its exaggerated
contrast with minimalist temporality. It is not so much Fried’s argument
itself as the repercussions it had on the contemporary art ﬁeld that has
obscured Greenberg’s subtle implication of instantaneity.
CONCLUSION
On the basis of what we have considered above, I again emphasize thesigniﬁcance of the theme of time in the aesthetic of Clement Greenberg’s
art criticism by a discussion of two types of his arguments on this subject: temporality and instantaneity. The close look at his article “Collage”
shows us Greenberg’s belief in the beholder’s eventual comprehensionof the unity of a work of art over the course of time. Oscillations in a pictorial space not only create optical illusion but also involve a distinctly
temporal process of beholding. This kind of temporality in the experience of art is also found in the works of Cézanne, the Abstract Expressionists, Smith and Caro. At ﬁrst sight, Greenberg’s temporality
appears to be at odds with his idea of instantaneity, but they are reasonably compatible because Greenberg’s instantaneity is not a single moment of time but instead encompasses the time for understanding. The
twofold nature of Greenberg’s time is reinterpreted as an effect of afterwardsness, via Jacques Lacan’s argument that the ﬁrst moment of theglance could be retroactively reactivated during the time for understanding. In the last section, I discussed how Michael Fried gave a twist
to Greenberg’s contention of time. Its two-phase structure converged

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into the mere concept of instantaneity largely through the repercussionof “Art and Objecthood” rather than due to his article itself.
Greenberg’s critical writings remained inﬂuential in the art world of
the 1960s. Although more artists came to oppose his formalist interpretations, Greenberg’s interest in temporality intersected with the artists’obsession with time. This article is an effort on my part to explore theextent to which Greenberg’s ideas and issues were involved with the art
practices of the 1960s. Some of Greenberg’s ideas became obsolete,
while others survived by their subsequent appropriation by later artists
and critics in a manner that might be characterized as furtive. If the theoretical values of Greenberg’s discourse remain worthy of re-evaluation,
it would best be done obliquely; that is, in such a way that would best
elucidate their deconstruction by the generations of artists and critics to
come.
NOTES
1
Max Kozloff, “A Letter to the Editor,” Art International 7, no. 6 (25 June 1963):
88–92; Barbara M. Reise, “Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View,” StudioInternational 175, no. 900 (May 1968): 254–57; no. 901 (June 1968): 314–16; Donald
Judd, “Complaints: Part 1 [1969],” Complete Writings: 1959–1975 (Halifax: Press of
the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University, 1975),
197–99; Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” Other Criteria: Confrontations with
Twentieth–Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–91; Donald B.
Kuspit, Clement Greenberg: Art Critic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979);
T.J. Clark, “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art [1982],” in Pollock and After: The
Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 71–86;
Michael Fried, “How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark [1982],” in Pollock
and After, 87–101; Timothy J. Clark., “Arguments about Modernism: A Reply to
Michael Fried [1983],” in Pollock and After, 102–9; Robert Storr, “No Joy in Mudville:
Greenberg’s Modernism Then and Now,” in Modern Art and Popular Culture: Readings
in High and Low, ed. Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik (New York: Harry N. Abrams,
1991), 160–90; Rosalind E. Krauss, chap. 6 of The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 243–329; Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no.
45/46 (automne/hiver 1993) [Clement Greenberg issue]; and Thierry de Duve, Clement
Greenberg between the Lines (Paris: Dis Voir, 1996).
2
de Duve, “Performance Here and Now: Minimal Art, a Plea for a New Genre of
Theatre,” Open Letter, 5th Series, no. 5–6 (summer-fall 1983): 249; and Yve-Alain Bois,“Introduction: The Use Value of ‘Formless,’ ” in Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless:
A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 24–25. By “instantaneity,” I mean avery short period of time, whereas “temporality” has two meanings embedded: the natureof time (as opposed to spatiality) and duration (as opposed to instantaneity).
3
Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 2004).
4
Bois, “Les amendements de Greenberg,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’art moderne, no. 45/46 (automne/hiver 1993): 52–60.

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Clement Greenberg, “The Pasted-Paper Revolution [1958],” in The Collected
Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969, ed. John
O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 61–66; and Greenberg,“Collage,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 70–83.
6These paintings are reproduced in Henry R. Hope, Georges Braque (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 42, 48.
7
Greenberg, “Collage,” 76.
8
Ibid. 77.
9
Ibid. 77.
10
Greenberg, “Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art [1951],” in The Collected Essays
and Criticism, vol. 3, Afﬁrmations and Refusals, 1950–1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 86.
11Greenberg, “Cézanne,” in Art and Culture, 52.
12Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank
Stella [1965],” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 263n18; and William Rubin, “Jackson Pollock and the Modern
Tradition, Part 3,” Artforum 5, no. 8 (April 1967): 18–19.
13
Greenberg, “Contribution to a symposium,” in Art and Culture, 125.
14
Greenberg, “ ‘American-Type’ Painting,” in Art and Culture, 226.
15
Krauss, “Pulse,” in Bois and Krauss, Formless, 161–65.
16
Optical illusion is not restricted to painting. Greenberg refers to the presence of optical illusion in sculpture in “Roundness Isn’t All: Review of The Art of Sculpture by
Herbert Read [1956],” in Afﬁrmations and Refusals, 270–73.
17Although Greenberg refers to this work as Untitled (1965), I use Black White
Forward (1961) according to Rosalind E. Krauss’s identiﬁcation in her book The
Sculpture of David Smith: A Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Garland Publishing,1977). See catalogue entry 507.
18
Greenberg, “David Smith: Comments on His Latest Works [1966],” in Modernism
with a Vengeance, 226.
19
Greenberg, “Contemporary Sculpture: Anthony Caro [1965],” in Modernism witha Vengeance, 206.
20
In addition to Greenberg’s articles discussed in the text, the idea of temporality canbe found in his early writings. For example, in “Avant-Garde and Kitsch [1939],” Greenberg opposes “the processes of art,” assigned to what Picasso paints, to “its effects,” corresponding to Ilya Repin’s concern. His discussion on “the processes of art” includes
the germination of temporality, although it does not thematize the oscillation of planes.
See Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture, 15.
21
Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art [1959],” in Modernism with a Vengeance,
75–84.
22
Greenberg, “A Public Debate with Clement Greenberg [1987],” in Thierry de Duve,
Clement Greenberg between the Lines (Paris: Dis Voir, 1996), 123.
23
Greenberg, “On Looking at Pictures: Review of Painting and Painters: How to Lookat a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall by Lionello Venturi [1945],” in The Collected
Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1986), 34–35.
24
Lionello Venturi, Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture (New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945).
25
Greenberg, “On Looking at Pictures,” 34.
26
Ibid. 34.
27
Ibid. 34.

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Ibid. 34.
Krauss, Optical Unconscious, 98–107.
30
Erle Loran, Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of his Form, with Diagrams andPhotographs of his Motifs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943).
31
Greenberg, “Review of Cézanne’s Composition by Earle [sic] Loran [1945],” inArrogant Purpose, 46–49.
32
Ibid. 47.
33
Jacques Lacan, “Le temps logique et l’assertion de certitude anticipée: Un nouveau
sophisme,” Cahiers d’art 16–19 (1940/1944 [1945]): 32–42. It was reprinted in Écrits(Paris: Seuil, 1966), 197–213 and translated into English as “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” trans. Bruce Fink and Marc Silver, Newsletter of the
Freudian Field 2, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 4–22. Lacan’s argument on logical time is deployed
to unravel Greenberg’s intricate conception of logical moments. Although it is widely
known that Abstract Expressionist artists and their fellow art critics enthusiastically read
Cahiers d’art, and Greenberg himself mentions the French magazine one month after
his Venturi review, I choose not to discuss the direct inﬂuence that the article might haveexerted on Greenberg. It is difﬁcult, if not impossible, to ascertain any actual inﬂuencesof Lacan on Greenberg because there are no manuscripts or notes relating to this article
in the publicly available Greenberg ﬁles, including “Clement Greenberg Papers, 1937–
1984,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. and“Clement Greenberg Papers, 1928–1994,” Getty Research Institute, Research Library,
Los Angeles. For the historical context of Lacan’s article, see Erik Porge, Se compter
trois: Le temps logique de Lacan (Toulouse: Érès, 1989), 21–24.
34
This logical problem is a variation of the Muddy Children Puzzle. For the latter, see
Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, Yoram Moses, and Moshe Y. Vardi, Reasoning about
Knowledge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).
35
Ed Pluth and Dominiek Hoens, “What if the Other Is Stupid?: Badiou and Lacan on‘Logical Time,’ ” 183. This is a response to Alain Badiou’s discussion of Lacan’s article in his Théorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
36
Ibid. 184.
37
David Blomme and Dominiek Hoens, “Anticipation and Subjectivity: A Commentary on an Early Text by Lacan,” Computing Anticipatory Systems: CASYS’99—Third
International Conference, ed. D. M. Dubois (Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute ofPhysics, 2000), 119–20; and Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, andthe Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 75–76.
38
Lacan, “Logical Time,” 12.
39
Bruce Fink, “Logical Time and the Precipitation of Subjectivity,” in Reading
Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, ed. Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, andMaire Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 357; and John
Forrester, The Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 202–3. See Jean Laplanche, “Notes on Afterwardsness,” in Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999), 260–65, for the problem of “deferred action” as a translation of Nachträglichkeit used in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
40
Greenberg, “The Factor of Surprise [1975],” Homemade Esthetics: Observations on
Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 31.
41
Ibid. 31.
42
Ibid. 31.
43
Ibid. 31.
44
Fried also argues how the idea of Nachträglichkeit operates in his work not only on
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paintings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also on the art of the 1950s and1960s. See Jill Beaulieu, Mary Roberts and Toni Ross, “Interview with Michael Fried,”in Refracting Vision: Essays on the Writings of Michael Fried (Sydney: Power Publications, 2000), 380–84.
45
Although Fried had begun to distance himself from Greenberg’s modernist framework by 1966, it is also the case that Fried’s argument relies heavily on Greenberg’s.
See Michael Fried’s comment in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Hal Foster,
no. 1 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), 56.
46
Fried, “Art and Objecthood [1967],” in Art and Objecthood, 166–67.
47
Irving Sandler, American Art of the 1960s (New York: Harper & Row, Icon Editions,1988), 254; Frances Coplitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor, Mich.:
UMI Research Press, 1990), 91–99. Colpitt discusses Greenberg’s opticality in terms ofspatiality in her article “Systems of Opinion: Abstract Painting since 1959,” in Abstract
Art in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Colpitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), 164–65.
48
Fried, Manet’s Modernism or, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 568n71.
49
Fried, “Three American Painters,” 214.
50
Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” 81.
51
Perry Miller, Jonathan Edwards (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1949).
52
Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 148.
53
Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood, 47.