The Case for a Rupture

Abstract

The chapter opens with an account of the cancellation of Hans Haacke’s 1971 scheduled solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, on the grounds that two of the works, Shapolsky and Goldman, were not art but journalism. Haacke has gone on to have a distinguished international career, and continued successfully to use the approach that was censored at the Guggenheim. Using these works and events as a springboard, the questions are posed: What is journalism? And what sort of journalism is art? The argument of the book is that while journalism is extensively studied as an object by other disciplines such as sociology and communications, the scholarship of journalism as a research practice in its own right is half a century or more behind the reflexive practice of leading practitioners. The case studies used to make the argument are Haacke’s art and two books by independent journalist I.F. Stone: The Hidden History of the Korean War 1950–1951 and The Trial of Socrates. The chapter considers in detail debates about whether journalism can be considered a discipline or is merely a craft. It references perspectives by Barbie Zelizer, James Carey, Stuart Adam, Gaye Tuchman and others to argue that journalism must be considered a discipline because it uses truth-seeking practices that are located in space and time and therefore amenable to ontological and epistemological interrogation. The chapter concludes by outlining the structure of the book and identifying the key thinkers whose conceptual frameworks will be explored with respect to the work of Haacke and Stone. Those thinkers are David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre on spatiotemporality, Michel-Rolph Trouillot on historiography and temporality, Pierre Bourdieu on field theory, and the Russian Constructivist Sergei Tretiakov on journalism as art.