“Farce” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a proceeding that is ludicrously futile or insincere.” Hal Foster’s most recent collection of short essays on contemporary art and politics asks a question in its title: What Comes After Farce? More specifically, Foster asks “how to demystify a hegemonic order that dismisses its own contradictions?” (viii). This critical question is not answered conclusively but circled in 18 short essays, or “bulletins,” as Foster calls them, written between 2005 and 2020.

Foster considers the role of modern and contemporary art in what he labels “times of emer-gency” (163). His general diagnosis of the Trump presidency is clear-eyed and grim, seeing it as a Rabelaisian carnival in which we were stuck with a clown as king. President Donald Trump’s election is rationalized in terms of Sigmund Freud’s “Primal Father” (1913), a populist authority figure whom followers both submit to and envy, for despite an iron rule he himself is an outlaw (34). And, perhaps most vividly, Trump is seen by Foster as performing the role of Alfred Jarry’s 1896 monster infant Père Ubu, a creature with no conscience and a desire to “butcher the world” (41). What radical possibilities remain then, for artifice, absurdism, and speculative fiction if truth and decency are already used and abused at the highest levels of government?

At 5 to 13 pages apiece, Foster’s bulletins are short and punchy. At an online launch event hosted by The Kitchen, Foster identified this style as a reaction to the internet, to the realm of “hot takes and endless links.” For a book that addresses contemporary art through the lens of pop culture and kitsch, the form follows the content. These bulletins are organized in three sections: “Terror and Transgression,” which outlines a continuous post-9/11 state of emergency, the rise of transgression as a right-wing political strategy, and the paradoxical position this puts artists in; “Plutocracy and Display,” taking up Jean-François Lyotard’s idea that “the exhibition is a post-modern dramaturgy” (73) in which the artworks and exhibitions can slip easily from staging key questions about our time to showmanship and capitalist entertainment;Footnote ¹ and “Media and Fiction,” which considers the role of algorithmic automation, collage, and fiction in opening up space for rethinking contemporary reality all while documenting it.

With a suspicion that what artist Claire Fontaine calls the avantgarde “toolbox” (59)—containing estrangement, shock, and détournement—has been co-opted by the right, comes a peaked interest in “cheaper” aesthetics. Art built on the detritus of late capitalism—spam emails, Q-tips, and pills for penile dysfunction—are key among the works Foster examines. The power of kitsch is first examined in Bush-era “Support our Troops” bumper stickers serving to convert trauma into support for patriotic imperialism. Then, the artist Kerry James Marshall, in whom Foster finds hope, is said to paint his black figures in “mock-kitschy” (93) scenes generally associated with privileged whiteness, e.g., on a sailboat. By mocking the over-simplicity of kitsch, and drawing viewers into the layered construction of his compositions, Foster sees in Marshall’s Untitled (Underpainting) (2018) “a portal to another way of seeing and being (together)” (95). The sepia and black diptych shows a doubled, though not quite mirrored, image of a young class of students on a visit to an art gallery. The composition invites a doubled consciousness as it asks viewers to “look at the actual picture before us and to imagine the fictional painting that only the kids can see” (93). Another ray of hope for Foster is Paul Chan’s prescient Rhi Anima (2017). Here inanimate performers named “breathers” call to mind those inflatable tubular bodies that beckon to us through their contortions on roadsides across North America. Foster sees this writhing as a visualization of the “irreconcilability” (42) of our contemporary moment. In Chan’s Pentasophia (or Le bonheur de vivre dans la catastrophe du monde occidental) (2016), five breathers jerk and twist away from one another. No matter how hard they pull, they cannot split off, as each limb, like each citizen, however inclined, belongs to a shared fabric and breath.

In identifying the power of kitsch, Foster takes up Clement Greenberg’s claim that “[k]itsch keeps a dictator in closer contact with the ‘soul’ of the people” ([1939] Reference Greenberg1961:19). Greenberg’s declaration feels apt at a time when a real estate mogul turned reality TV star has just ended his term as POTUS by inciting an insurrection at the White House. Notably absent from Foster’s bibliography is Sianne Ngai’s far more recent and useful treatment of kitsch’s false simplicity and dangerous intimacy in her Reference Ngai2012 Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting.

Despite a great range of sharp reflections on art and politics, there are blind spots and contradictions in Foster’s bulletins. For instance, by defining this moment in time as singular, Foster’s analysis overlooks the inherent bind between capitalism and racism in the United States, pointing instead to Trump’s presidency as the point at which the US “has taken on a white-supremacist character” (13).Footnote ² Though Foster acknowledges, as asides, the essential role of grassroots uprisings such as Decolonize This Place, Black Lives Matter, and #metoo in putting necessary pressure on arts institutions,Footnote ³ he dismisses the critique and structural change generated by these movements by compartmentalizing them under the label of “ethical aesthetics” (37). This seems particularly tone deaf in light of the galvanizing force of Black Lives Matter in organizing against a militarized, racist police state through a pandemic.

In “Real Fictions,” the book’s final bulletin, Foster takes up Bertolt Brecht’s claim that through display reality can come to seem “built up, artificial, posed” (148). In relation to displays of reality, in the works of Harun Farocki, Trevor Paglen, and Eyal Weizman, Foster sees Brecht’s claim as true and generative. But in the section entitled “Plutocracy and Display,” this same logic is applied to the effect of display on performance itself in a more critical light. In a bulletin entitled “Grey Boxes,” Foster discusses the recent investment by museums to build out space for performance within their galleries. These aptly named “grey boxes” are meant to operate somewhere between white cube and black box theatre. Performances, such as those forthcoming by artists Reetu Sattar and Okwui Okpokwasili in MoMA’s new “Studio” space for live events, promise to raise urgent political questions. Yet, in his appraisal of such spaces Foster issues a double warning: by designing grandiose and fixed frames for an artform that is protean these institutions risk either deadening the performances they are meant to animate or reducing them to cheap spectacle (79).

What Comes After Farce? might read as overly apocalyptic were it not for the other meaning of “farce” that Foster emphasizes: comic interlude, a relatively short and finite period in a longer, larger, theatrical production. Looking ahead, past-Trump, it seems likely that farce as an instrument of political diversion is likely to remain in play, but Foster’s optimism that within this heightened moment of chaos lies an opportunity “to turn disruptive emergency into structural change” (36) is appealing. Simply because the avantgarde toolbox has been co-opted does not mean artists should not or cannot use it anymore. But, as the months since the book’s publication have shown, any paradigm changes taking place in politics and within arts institutions are thanks to those closest to the ground, those grassroots movements on the streets that Foster sidelines.