Presentness is Grace: How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name

There is something that I’ve noticed in blog exchanges, which is not visible in the post so much as the evolving thread, and that is candor in an emerging dialogue. I am enjoying the sense of it, which to my mind is richer than any dream of consensus. In a recent blog thread, extending over the course of several days, Edward Winkleman addressed everyone: “The collective discussion here, facilitated by the technology that permits measured thoughtful responses (as opposed to verbal debate where immediate demand for response heats things up too much) amounts to as satisfying a statement about what's what in art today as any given solo impression (doomed to present only one point of view successfully) could ever present.” and that “You're proving that art writing can perhaps be seen in a vital new way.”

On this blog, a slower conversation has been emerging, at first in response to jargon, and Nicholas Knight responded that even “ordinary language philosophy” has its own burdens, writing: “...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!” and to which I replied with the following from Stanley Cavell:

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.)

As Nicholas Knight points out, the infamous critic/art historian Michael Fried was a student of Stanley Cavell. Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg are together the bogeymen of formalist art criticism, and while people have begun to warm up to Greenberg again, I don’t see that happening in the dominant art critical discourse with regard to Fried. For example, Shamim Momim in the Whitney Biennial catalog:

Michael Fried's famous text "Art and Objecthood" (1967) is a seminal illustration of the spatio-temporal anxieties of the sixties. A denunciation of the phenomenological staging of Minimalist sculpture, Fried's frankly hostile view of the "temporal" was based on the idea that art must have purity of presence: read, timelessness. In its proper state, according to Fried, art would test only the limits of its discrete medium and, thus, retain what he called "presentness." This achievement Fried construed as a redemptive one: a moral stance that framed time as the culprit behind all of Minimalism's ills - the theatricality of the objects, the endlessness inherent in industrial production, the notion that meaning exists in the space around an object and is activated by a viewer's presence rather than held autonomously within the object itself. (Time Change, in Whitney Biennial 2008, Whitney Museum. c. 2008,p. 17)

Something has happened between the publication of Fried’s essay and the by now overdetermined dismissal of it as a 'hostile view of "the temporal" - and the red flags are up! Much of the disregard for Fried that I hear in this comes in what is regarded as the moral stance of his last line, “presentness is grace,” and its presumed claim for a certain notion of autonomy.

On the topic of art and Buddhism in the Vietnam war era, I gave a lecture to an audience that I knew would include practicing Buddhists, and described to them what I understood of Fried, who to my knowledge has absolutely nothing to do with Buddhism. It was an interesting exercise in that in order to speak to a very specific audience that had little knowledge of art history I had to jog Fried out of the habits of my own art historical writing. This is what I came up with:

From what I can tell, Michael Fried believes very strongly in convention as the necessary means by which we face one another as human beings. Forms, such as languages, are the containers that make intimate candor possible. One might say that the container can brim over in presentness, as in the deep heartfelt bow of one zen practitioner to another, or it can appear hollow, as in a disingenuous bow. In the first, the distinction between being is and being as is held in such a tense relation that the absolute (presentness) and the relative (in this bow) are indistinct the one from the other. In the second, the ego has occupied the space where presentness might have arisen, and without this presentness, being as is a bloated mimicry that hauls others in its sphere, a sphere that has now become a theatrical event. In their own respect for their tradition, this audience is now expected to be complicit with an ego that has forced a divide between self and other.

Unlike other judgments upon the success or failure of a work of art, what makes Fried's judgment interesting is that the alienating divide he describes between subject and object is felt as an extorted complicity in a social situation. In cautious and qualified accord with the ballyhoo surrounding the Whitney Biennial catalog, perhaps we should say this of arts writing as well.

By Catherine Spaeth

Catherine Spaeth

Being at Ease With Difficulty

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

Catherine Spaeth

Whitney Biennial 2008: Painting's Failure (Again)

It has become almost obligatory in a Whitney Biennial review to bemoan the lack of painting, which tells us that a certain idea of “painting” remains a standard against which to measure this art exhibition's failure. But painting is always included, differently each time.

The 2004 Biennial congratulated itself for the inclusion of painting. Chrissie Iles wrote a whole essay on it in the plush exhibition catalog, Richard Prince, Alex Hay, Robert Mangold, Mel Bochner, and David Hockney played grandfather to a younger generation of painters with the belief that such intergenerational dialog could “make sense of a world gone wrong,” suggesting a “continuing desire to reaffirm art’s ability to articulate alternative thinking, and restore a sense of meaning to a world in which the nihilistic and the restorative coexist in all too fragile balance.” In response to 9/11, the curators hauled painting back into the Whitney as the paternalistic fold of alternative thinking - a history of art, built on ruptures and continuities, for which painting - unlike any other medium - remains the authoritative model. But the paternalistic tone of authority that Modernism lay claim to was lost in the conviction that painting was now only a matter of making the next move in a game.*

In the 2006 Biennial there was an awful lot of painting, by more than twenty artists. This was in the inclusive mood of the art fair and the “alternative spaces” that sprout in its midst. There was some citing of Dave Hickey here and there, some criteria for alternative culture, and references to de Toqueville. The older generation here was represented by the drawings of prison-house punk rock legend Daniel Johnston, and the previously censored ‘70s sex paintings by Dorothy Iannone. For the most part, painting appeared as an expression of rebellion, really only still in the world as a medium because of its contingencies. The most realist were Marilyn Minter’s glamour-trash, and Rudolf Stingel’s ennui, the most sensitively beautiful the s&m watercolors of Monica Majoli. Curatorial choices were for the most part driven by the desire to express a cultural attitude.

It is almost as though in the 2008 Whitney Biennial the art historical “grandfather effect” has taken hold, with the pendulum swinging back in the other direction. And notice how tidily the elders line up, it’s a structuralist’s toy:

John Baldessari - conceptual art
Robert Bechtle - photorealism
Mary Heilmann - pop abstract expressionism
Olivier Mosset - the monochrome

It is not the case, therefore, that painting isn’t important to this exhibition - it is quite important. A more interesting question is what might be occurring in claims for painting as a relevant medium for our time? Ellen Harvey, Karen Kilimnik and Joe Harvey are the painters on board.

One of the things that strikes me about this show is the stated embrace of failure. In her own voice, Ellen Harvey says through the headset that her painting installation Museum of Failure: Collection of Possible Subjects and Invisible Self-Portraits (2007) “is a monument to failure, the ghost of the piece that might have been...hand made representation is automatically a failure - let’s start off by failing as extravagantly as possible.” Photography appears in two ways - first as the hole in a carnival prop, through which one puts one’s head, and second in the carefully rendered self-portraits, taken from photographs that have obliterated their subject by a flash in the mirror. It is the naive and false despair of the beginning art student, struck by inadequacy in the face of nature and photography. Why the feigned appeal to such misunderstandings and false anxieties? Harvey's failure is just another parody of a diehard narrative that keeps re-appearing because we can congratulate ourselves for knowing it. Photography and the death of painting: Standing between the trompe l’oeil wall of obliterated self-portraits and the discomfort of a bank of fluorescent light, perhaps we are to feel obliterated by the flash as well? The overwrought machinery of it fails me, and I respond to this as rhetoric, as just another move in the game to legitimize the ambition to simply keep on painting. And this is what Ellen Harvey excels at, it is all about finding that one little hook in order to maintain sheer continuity in fear of its end. Painting is only the prop.

Likewise, Karen Kilimnik’s “bad paintings” of peacocks and horses, nearly serve more as the prop for the chandeliered room that contains them (not pictured here) than as paintings on their own. Like Kilimnik, numerous artists have toyed with the context of exhibition but without taking so much obvious pleasure in playing the role of a false aristocracy. In Kilimnik’s playacting dollhouse, viewing her paintings, luscious as they occasionally may be, is only possible - we are told - because of the social conventions of the class they serve. Whatever space for the unconscious there might be has been wallpapered over by culture’s demands to fit the role. It’s the stuff that good little girls are made of, and we are put in the uncomfortable position of wanting to submit.

Differently, each of these three younger painters confound the categories that their elders so neatly embody, and what they share is their call upon space beyond the traditional limits of painting. Harvey devises proposals that allow her to continue tediously filling up space as though she were an anonymous tradesman, her earlier landscapes as "beauty" displacing graffiti, for ex., and Kilimnik's miniatures invite us to a "let's pretend" world that feeds on status and glamour in the spirit of denial. Harvey and Kilimnik express little trust in inherited conventions, even as they compulsively perform them, milking the endgame for whatever it's worth.

Joe Bradley’s flimsy monochrome assemblages put their weight elsewhere. His paintings nearly march into space in a manner closer to sculpture than to painting. This call upon space knowingly owes some inheritance to Russian Constructivism, Stella’s early shaped canvases and Minimalist theatricality. His reference to the ludic pleasure of childhood succeeds in holding a rather bizarre tension between abstraction and representation, not adequately represented by the press photograph, which registers figuration a little too quickly. We are equally submitted to the cultural code by it's very gendered terms, primary colors, and infantilizing form and scale, but the false burdens of elitism and representational malaise so rhetorically presented by Harvey and Kilimnik fall away here. By turns humbly joyful and overpowering, there is something of a figural logo militarism that parades about the room, so that abstract sensual pleasure and impending corporate anonymity and subjection appear at once. This was unexpected, and didn't feel like just another overwrought move in the game we all know.

By Catherine Spaeth

* Chrissie Iles, "Altered States," Whitney Biennial 2004, Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, Debra Singer, c. 2004, Whitney museum of Art, pp. 56-69.

Photo Credits: Ellen Harvey, Museum of Failure: Collection of Impossible Subjects & Invisible Self-Portraits, 2007 (installation view, Luxe Gallery, New York, 2007). Rear-illuminated hand-engraved plexiglass and aluminum frame, fluorescent lights, wall paint, and oil on canvas, twelve parts, in secondhand frames, 96 x 120 in. (243.9 x 304.8 cm). Collection of the artist; courtesy Luxe Gallery, New York;Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvas, 36 x 66 in. (91.4 x 167.6 cm). Private collection;Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 2007. Sprayed liner on canvas, 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm).;Karen Kilimnik, the castle great staircase, Scotland, 2007. Water soluble oil color on canvas, 14 x 11 in. (35.6 x 27.9 cm). Collection of The Stephanie and Peter Brant Foundation;Joe Bradley, Installation view, Joe Bradley, Peres Projects, Berlin, 2007; from left: Cavalry, 2007; Itz, 2007; Night Runner with Strike, 2007; The Thing, 2007. All photos courtesy of the Whitney Museum of Art.

Catherine Spaeth