Being at Ease With Difficulty
Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 12:07AM 
I will not be an apologist for the following Whitney Biennial wall text cited by Richard Lacayo:
"Many of the projects presented in the exhibition explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political and economic contexts, often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market. Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic and public space and its translation into form — primarly sculptural, but also photographic and cinematic."*
But I also notice that blogger culture lends itself to an anti-intellectualism that has a way of raising its heads in a gang, and that such a self-congratulating posse is not a good thing for arts writing.
The writing on this blog is quirky, making what are sometimes awkward twists and turns. I try to convey in ordinary language thoughts that are difficult to express, and know that I’m guilty of falling into a shorthand academicism or two. I can usually feel this as it happens - poorly used academicisms can snag thought and suspend it from a hook, leaving it to hang there without any opportunity to be in its own mobility. If I feel such a snag I reach for words that arise from the ignorance and generosity of description. What appear are no longer academicisms but opportunisms - repetitions and resonances that emerge from description and course through an essay with their own force. I am wary of these as well, but as opportunisms they are already sticking much more closely to the object at hand.
I also know there is such a thing as strong academic writing, and that what so many reject as pure jargon once had a purpose that was quite generative, plastic and spacious as an opening to thought, not as something owned by an insider group so much as words that belong to a very public but specific history. It does require some effort to know, and there is real danger in confusing this worthy effort with insider elitism.
Art belongs to a history of thought, in all its different aspects and manifestations. As awkward as curatorial writing might be at times, those writers do articulate something visible in the work on view. What I read in the Biennial catalog, then, is a strain in the voice that comes from a lack of ease with difficulty, and good arts writing requires that one be at ease with difficulty. This is a different problem than that of “insider talk” and has more to do with the very real difficulty of art and of thought.
“Interrogates,” “problematizes,” “references,” “transgressive,” “inverts” - these are the words that Richard Lacayo tells us to ban from arts writing. I know I have used them all in my short life, and that I no longer need them. At the same time, however, this call for censorship infuriates me. Althusser, and it is fair to say that these words belong to him more than any other, wrote that “words and concepts are needed to break with words and concepts, and often the old words are charged with the conduct of the rupture throughout the period of the search for new ones.”* It takes using words over and over again to appreciate their fullness and failure, to recognize what might become their eventual staleness, and to seek others that will describe well the rupture in thought that can only feel itself when snagged on the immobility of hooks. What Althusser would be waiting for is a new "problematic" to emerge, a fresh set of concepts to exceed and take the place of the old, not unlike a paradigm shift. Is there such a thing? Does a history of art criticism appear in this way, and are we missing out on something if it doesn't?
Catherine Spaeth
*Althusser, For Marx, Introduction, NY: Penguin Press, c. 1969, p, 36.
Photo: Jim Lambie (British, born 1964;Zobop! 2006;Vinyl tape on floor;Dimensions variable;Installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008.The Museum of Modern Art. Fund for the Twenty-First Century.© 2008 Jim Lambie
Reader Comments (24)
I agree that one needs to have a certain (I would call it) acceptance that the words and concepts one might confront in a piece of art writing are going to be "difficult." This is the old horse of philosophical versus belles-lettristic criticism. But the biennial gets itself in deep with that bit of wall text (and I'd throw in the catalog essays too, which another critic called, I'm sure in a gesture of gentleness, "hard working").
The problem with much of this stale criticism (call it theory speak, jargon, academic, whatever) is not that it is difficult; it's that it's stale. Althusser and others of the French continental crowd were a pleasure to read (except for Lacan) because what they wrote was, for the most part, very creative. The generations of criticism that they have spawned have aped the but have forgotten the lessons. As you suggest, we need some new language, and new concepts (a Deleuzian enterprise if there ever was one).
In the end, however, I think it's mostly a lack of self-confidence that drives people back to this kind of writing; it's the impulse of "Shit, I don't know what I really think here--Kubler, Smithson, Foucault, help me!"
Critics need to read different books and different thinkers. (Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar and Agamben certainly have their place, but the attention they are currently accorded by critics, graduate students and artists alike is far to great, and they are quickly becoming something like the 10th Street Painters). And we need to remember that criticism, at bottom, is a creative act, and we would do well to treat it as such.
It’s hard to be “at ease with difficulty” when one is reading standing up.
The “anti-intellectual” epithet is easily hurled, and to characterize Lacayo’s proposal of a ban on certain words, which was clearly made wryly, as a “call for censorship” that applies to all art writing is a bit extreme and does not take into consideration the purpose of the text in question. We are not referring here to philosophical treatises where the word “problematize” may be perfectly appropriate, but to material meant to explicate the art at hand for the general public. In that context the word is ludicrous.
To suggest that text intended for the layperson be written in terms the layperson can understand is not anti-intellectual, but simple common sense.
There were some contributions in the catalog that I felt worthy, I find it interesting, for example, that failure is a challenge to parody (a notion that came from an artist (Fia Backstrom) and not Kubler-Smithson-Foucault.) And I like this exhibit, I can see the past two years in it, as I should. And with focus: They did "invert" the complicit object. I suspect that many of those who jump at the weak academicism (to write against Fried is such a cliche, when is THAT ever going to end?!), though, are avoiding/dismissing the art in the show as well, as "student work," more poorly conceived academicism. Some of it is, and some of it isn't. But this is part of sorting one's way through contemporary art - artist's have been coming out of art schools for a long time now, and Yale and Columbia are a very real issue.
(I'd like to know the names of those artists you think live on 10th Street!)
It is true, I think, that October has lost its edge and that "oppositional aesthetics," which generated that list of words, is in some kind of trouble. This is perhaps why failure shows up as a defining term for the Biennial.
It is sad that "complicity" and "relationality" have taken hold in the way that they have, as sexy concepts that one could organize a show around, for ex., and we didn't see those words here. So maybe they are passing. But I feel the effects of Johanna Drucker's writing, she is I think the one who really picked up the banner against academic art criticism held so aloft at the moment:
"That stubbornly persistent belief in radical aesthetics is the baby to be thrown out here. The tenacious core of outmoded discourse is that art exists to serve some utopian agenda of social transformation through intervention in the symbolic orders of cultural life. Its dreadful, reified rhetoric of elitist posturing passes itself off as the spirit of political heroism...The unthinking position continually replicates itself in elite institutions and esoteric, policed languages of high criticism...Getting free of the grip of habits of thought engrained in this critical legacy is essential..." (Sweet Dreams, University of Chicago 2005, pp. 49-50)
She is herself an example of falling in to the kind of academicism that one should be wary of - expecting complicity to do too much as a defining term. She is a good example of the current mood, and as someone who wishes to define something like a paradigmatic shift inside of it. It's an interesting time to be writing, indeed!
Thanks, Carol, and as I wrote, I can make no apology at all for that wall text. And, responding to Jonathan as well, I'm not sure I'm eager for new concepts to appear on the scene, they only make sense to me if they stick to what you are describing in ordinary language. That's what I mean by being at ease with difficulty. But I think of it as more than common sense in addressing a public audience, I think of it as a contribution to intellectual thought!
But, to be more clear, I do think that there is an anti-intellectual posture in pointing to jargon simply in order to laugh and condemn, without substantively continuing a dialogue, and so I am inviting that dialogue here.
Unless there’s something major I'm missing on 10th Street, it seems that Jonathan is referring to the artists around the cooperative galleries that sprang up on 10th Street during the 50s and 60s, the most famous of which was the Hansa Gallery—and the fact that they broke with the institutions and introduced once-radical concepts that have since become, themselves, institutionalized.
We are not all Charlie Rose. Sometimes when certain groups start taking themselves too seriously a little humor is called for.
I do know what "10th Street" is Carol, I was asking for the names of those artists today who remind Jonathan of 10th Street, as I find it quite a claim to make for such a baggy contemporary world. Anytime someone makes a sweeping statement like that without yielding the knowledge is going to get that question from me. I put the question in parantheses because there is a good chance he won't yield, so there was no lack of subtlety in understanding there.
Humor is a good thing, I'm glad you're funny, and I like to read it. And I'm not just writing about you, so this is not a personal thing. It was Tyler Green who first brought this to my attention ("please make it stop,") which is not funny at all. But watching the way that things were moving around from blog to blog, it was pretty clear that there was going to be some humor at a cost, and that cost matters to me. Funny as they are, your comments raise some pretty important issues and I wish to address them. Sometimes feeling problematized is funny (and that was funny, Carol), sometimes it's something else.
My humor is not so ha ha funny, and I am often envious of funny people. But I do smile to myself when I describe a switch from academicisms to opportunisms. I think, maybe, a whole lot of notions are better than a concept, and there is more room for humor there.
"What do you read my lord?"
"Words, words, words"
I see Lawrence Olivier saying this,in b & w, and he's standing up.
I've enjoyed this conversation and the related one on Art Vent..
Forgive me. Just having a little fun here.
"Many of the projects presented in the exhibition..."
(The art)
"explore fluid communication structures and systems of exchange that index larger social, political and economic contexts,"
(is a metaphor.)
"often aiming to invert the more object-oriented operations of the art market."
This is an impossible dream. They are objects as well as ideas.
"Recurring concerns involve a nuanced investigation of social, domestic and public space and its translation into form ..."
It's about life, man.
"Art is not life. Art is an illustration of life" -Kaji Aso
I fully support what I take to be your central thesis here: that a difficult subject, approached in the spirit of directness and clarity, will often generate language that chafes beneath the burden of directness and clarity. And this fact is, at its root, honest to the experience of the artwork.
The lovely irony is that "ordinary language" itself bears the burden of historical baggage! I've often been privately amused at the absurdity of explaining to someone what "ordinary language philosophy" is. All of which is meant to say that constant diligence is absolutely required, because any concept or term can be laden with baggage. And that baggage will ultimately function as the meaning itself. And at such times, the red flags should be flying around everywhere!
Whew. Keep fighting the good fight, CS!
Thanks, Nicholas - the philosophy stuff is hard, and in blog writing I frequently find myself plucking from very complicated texts (kant, Althusser, etc.) a sentence or two about language and thought that exemplifies a singular contribution to shared understanding. And so here is Stanley Cavell on Austin:
The first step would be to grant to philosophers the rights of language and vision Austin grants to all other men: to ask of them, in his spirit, why they should say what they say where and when they say it, and to give the full story before claiming satisfaction. That Austin pretends to know the story, to have heard it all before, is no better than his usual antagonists assumption that there is no story necessary to tell, that everything is fine and unproblematic in the tradition, that philosophers may use words as they please, possessing the right or power - denied to other mortals - of knowing, without investigating, the full significance of their words and deeds. (Cavell, "Austin at Criticism," in Must We Mean What We Say, p. 111, Cambridge, c. 1976.)
Cavell, and "Must We Mean What We Say", really convinced me back in school that it would be worth it to pursue a certain kind of intellectual lifestyle, and be happy with the sacrifices accompanying that decision.
There are few philosophers who come across on the page as making a more sincere effort to actually communicate his point than Cavell. It's still not always easy, but it's genuine.
Interesting, in the grand scheme, is his close association to Michael Fried...
I have to thank Catherine. There's been a market pressure on dealers to legimate art through artspeak and on museums to boast in wall labels of how this is the best stuff ever, just as the Met uses puffery or controversial attributions without artspeak. It's wrong to conflate that difficult but real arts writing.
A good critic will try to make hard ideas accessible. What we're seeing instead is mainstream or conservative media, like Time and The WSJ, choosing where to lay the blame and indirectly defending the market against the elites. The parallel to many conservative dismissals of modern art or of supposed intellectual elitism in politicians is worth noting.
I'll mention a different kind of parallel, too, within philosophy. It's not unreasonable to feel that some of the difficult continental philosophy of recent decades has run its course and left only some bad language, just as here philosophy's hope for a different kind of specialized discourse, symbolic logic, did in large part. On the other hand, the hope for what Richard Rorty called "the linguistic turn," deriving foundations from something unerring in ordinary usage, hasn't worked out either.
My problem with the wall and catalog text is that, once you parse it, it really doesn't say much of anything. Beyond the obvious problem of requiring readers to use their postmodernism decoder ring to understand the text, the text itself is always very non-committal, and little more than conceptually descriptive. It's usually the contemporary equivalent of saying that Monet had a fairly dabby technique.
The texts rarely make any judgement on the art or commitment to a curatorial perspective beyond qualifying the art as falling within the show's boundaries.
The real sin of curatorial obfuscation is how it hides the profession's collective spinelessness.
The purpose of language is to communicate. No communication = failure.
That's not anti-intellectual, but it is definitely anti-pseudo-intellectual. I think many people have confused the two stances.
I’d like to respond to John Haber’s comment above about Continental Philosophy having run its course - you might visit Debra Fisher’s, she has discovered Derrida! She blames the deadening effects of postmodernist lingo on its Americanization. I am excited and happy for her discovery, and with Jonathan T.D. Neil above long a bit for the good old days. Many of the theorists who were writing at this time were not in the academy but they had places to publish, and it was really a very exciting and interdisciplinary moment in the history of thought - there was permission to write in a way that became shut down by an emerging professionalism and its restraints. And as Jonathan says in the last comment on the sin tax for tschotchkes thread on Artworld Salon, it could be a very exciting time for the patronage of writers who do not necessarily "fit” in the academic mold.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen The Linguistic Turn in used book stores, carried it around and then left it at the register in favor of something else. I kick myself now and will find it later.
Probably not worth adding, so apologies in advance for stretching out the trivia. But I was unfortunately lapsing into a kind of highhanded pose when I wrote that it's "not unreasonable" to say some philosophy had run its course. I was really just trying to say that, ok, one can argue that, but don't use it as an excuse to cling to something else that's part of the same time.
Hey, it was a productive time after all. I'm not filing my books away for good! Philosophy's production and appeal alike reflects not just influences but also trends, just like everything else. Think of Existentialism for someone in Greenwich Village in 1960 or Jung for Jackson Pollock. And sure, maybe there's no one of Derrida's stature right now, and maybe Rorty's passed away, Putnam is getting old, and all. But I didn't mean to imply they're not still a big part of how we think. For that matter, people still read Plato.
In fact, I'll take them all to Baudrillard's fashion in some of the arts community. So honest, I apologize for what must have sounded like condescension or at least like an unnecessarily polite concession.
BTW, enjoyed the association of those artists with turds. It hadn't occurred to me, even to make fun of, except for Long, since he of course insists on it (or at least the wall labels at the Biennial do). I guess I was just thinking of associations with things from clay modeling as a kid to Benglis on the floor, thinking that these artists had tamed all that into the kind of nicely decorative or even painted sculpture you can put on a pedestal, just in time for Roberta Smith to keep falling for shows about ceramics! OTOH, if the public notices maybe someone will get as angry as at Ofili, and we'll be done with them.
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