The State of Art Criticism

James Elkins, Michael Newman, James Elkins, Michael Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135867591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

Art criticism is spurned by universities, but widely produced and read. It is seldom theorized and its history has hardly been investigated. The State of Art Criticism presents an international conversation among art historians and critics that considers the relation between criticism and art history and poses the question of whether criticism may become a university subject.

Contributors includeDave Hickey, James Panero, Stephen Melville, Lynne Cook, Michael Newman, Whitney Davis, Irit Rogoff, Guy Brett and Boris Groys.

1

INTRODUCTION

THE RECOVERY OF CRITICISM

Michael Schreyach

Certainly, for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves … is far harder than it was [in the past]. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality.¹

If art is again to play a more central part in our lives, it means that our lives will have to change, and that is a process which does not depend on artists and art critics alone; but there is no harm in making a small and very modest beginning.²

When I chose the epigrams for this essay, I had the sense that I wanted to write about what I take to be a general skepticism towards the idea that art criticism can do little more than establish some context for the art under consideration, and offer a few remarks about that art’s market value, popularity, its social significance (or lack thereof). I wanted to write against the idea that art criticism could—either now or in the future—offer nothing substantive, that is, nothing that would nourish and sustain a prevalent desire on the part of the public for a meaningful engagement with art. Although I was not sure how to proceed, I intuitively knew that amassing data and information about art criticism in the press—when and where it is read, how often, by whom, for what reason, what concrete impacts it makes on dealers and collectors, museums and auction houses, and so on—was not a viable option. The way of the epigram seemed most promising: it would allow me to avoid a pre-determined argument, to proceed as if by intuition or association. It is my initial choice of the two quotes that led me to consider the following, admittedly academic, episode as an important way to address my sense of the problem.

In “The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism,” Paul de Man takes the literary critic I.A. Richards to task for operating under the once common, and perhaps commonsensical, belief that signifying form (such as a poem or a painting) can lead us to the experience that produced the form—and that the task of criticism is to facilitate this passage, to articulate an “exact correspondence between the author’s [or artist’s] originary experience and its communicated expression.”³ For Richards, a normative notion of communication was fundamental for a theory of criticism, and “the arts [were] the supreme form of the communicative activity.”⁴ De Man, Richards’s critic, is skeptical of the presupposition “that language, poetic or otherwise, can say any experience, of whatever kind, even a simple perception.”⁵ De Man, like many since, thinks it cannot, and he cites the work of Richards’s student, William Empson, to demonstrate that poetic metaphor compromises formalism’s claims on a recovery of an originary experience. Why? Because metaphor produces an indefinite number of associations—a “limitless anteriority” that “deploys the initial experience into an infinity of associated [ones].”⁶ This is a fundamental ambiguity of poetry; but, as de Man reads Empson, it proceeds not just from the ambiguity of all linguistic communication. Rather, it proceeds from a more serious problem: “the deep division of Being itself,” the unbridgeable gap between the world of “spirit” and the world of “sentient substance.”⁷ The realization of this division leads to an unhappy consciousness, one that for the “new” Anglo-American criticism (de Man was writing in 1956) is “essentially divided, sorrowful, and tragic.”⁸ To their detriment, New Critics intuitively react with a “tendency to expect a reconciliation from poetry; to see in it a possibility of filling the gap.”⁹ This form of naïve criticism erroneously believes that art is capable of such reconciliation “because it provides an immediate contact with substance through its own sensible form.”¹⁰ For de Man, no such reconciliation is possible.

Surely, many would agree that the notion of an “immediate” contact with substance through form is one that was rightly jettisoned long ago, discarded as so much anachronistic, metaphysical nostalgia. De Man cautions his readers against any criticism claiming to overcome the incommensurability of sensory experience and its representation in art.¹¹ This division is crucial for de Man: “In a way, if it were not for the fact that substance is problematic and absent, there would not be art.”¹² It is difficult to judge the extent to which this philosophical insight has affected the imagination of modern criticism. For while there continue to be refined efforts, like de Man’s, to assess the incommensurability of language and being (an incommensurability nonetheless given depth and meaning by criticism), there is also a great volume of what James Elkins calls “ephemeral” criticism—that of newspapers, magazines, some journals—which intentionally confines itself to less philosophical speculations in order to provide more-or-less strategic and useful readings of artworks to a general readership.¹³ Common to both, though, is a belief that art criticism supplies access to the context and meaning of art. In this sense, Richards’s attempts to make criticism a more exact human science, one that could repay the application of principles to interpretation by the revelation of human meaning, value, and even truth, takes on a heuristic value for a society increasingly looking for answers, even as it stands in opposition to the spirit of de Man’s position. Richard’s scientific impulse, ironically, could be seen to be driven by the same positivist outlook that surreptitiously converts the richness of perception, “sensation, imagery, feeling, emotion, together with pleasure, unpleasure, and pain” into quantities that can be isolated and measured.¹⁴ The pervasiveness of such an outlook, it seems, has only undermined criticism’s initial attempts to “say” experience. The question remains: how best to proceed?

Between stultifying doubt and scientific certainty lies a pragmatic position that acknowledges the ultimate contingency of signification yet believes in the ability of art criticism to locate and develop human meaning in and through artworks. We undergo experiences, and we find value in modes of representing them—of handling them—that give those experiences depth.¹⁵ The salient feature of good writing about art is its ability to resist, if only for the duration of reading, the conversion of every phenomenon into a dematerialized sign, and to restore to the object (or process) under investigation the palpability of lived experience. Some writers of criticism, that is, have the capacity to develop a mode of description that does more than just mirror its object. They instead produce an “equivalent” of it. Writing, for these critics, assumes the burden of reproducing the effects a first encounter with a new phenomenon might have produced in them (or someone else), but which now, at a physical distance or temporal remove, threaten to be lost to history—and perhaps to any consciousness. An assertion: a central aim of art criticism is conservative: it means to preserve, even to perpetuate, the latent or manifest possibilities of understanding that threaten to disappear from historical encounters. But not in any naïve way: an appeal to preserve “original” or “authentic” experience is bound to the perspective of the writer, whose inventive task it is to convert that experience into one with value for those with other perspectives, in the present. This is a performative task, the significance of which should be judged not only by how adequately the writer attends to his or her objects, or how well the piece of writing conforms to the conventions governing the production and publication of art criticism. It should also be judged by the manner in which the writer takes hold of her medium to give readers the sense of a meaningful encounter—and the degree to which she handles the vertiginous shifts in perspective (authorial, historical, social) afforded by the indeterminacies of writing.

To attend to the materiality of writing as a means of discovery is to attend to the heterogeneity of experience, because writing itself, whether a personal or professional activity, creates—more than it conforms to—the subjects it treats. Writing may be more or less conventional (rhetorical strategies can be learned and mastered), but the techniques through which writing is accomplished exert their own force over the writer, with the result that writing—even as it is carried out by the self-conscious, reflexive writer attending to his or her own production of meaning—is never entirely tractable, entirely mastered. This is axiomatic: the medium of representation reveals more about the materiality of the medium than it does about the object it represents. The materiality of writing causes interference; but, at the same time, it is this interference which provides the conditions for the inventiveness of the writer.¹⁶

Framing

In 1963 the art historian (and sometimes critic) Edgar Wind lamented the “dehumanizing of artistic perception” by contemporary artists, who seemed to treat inventiveness not as a creative activity, a performative task, but as an end in itself, to be accomplished through rational analysis or strategic variation.¹⁷ Artistic perception, for Wind, cultivates a mode of consciousness that is characterized by what Richard Shiff, in another context, has described as “a heightened critical awareness, an all-encompassing and perhaps disabling attentiveness to things, events, ways of life.”¹⁸ Artists busy themselves with activities that might not serve any purpose in a social framework concerned with production and progress. This mythology of artistic perception is associated with another that serves as its foundation: the myth of the modern artist, that she is an individual who is capable of resisting the pressure of means-end activities, notwithstanding the inevitable conversion of the products of her activity into commodities, which nonetheless assume for the culture at large the symbolic value of being relatively free from commodity forces.¹⁹ According to Wind, focusing on mere “inventiveness” instead of cultivating creative, passionate attentiveness generates a situation in which art is increasingly “experimental” in a nearly scientific sense, and thus distant from a genuine connection to the world of human value. Wind traced some of the roots of the problem back to his own discipline, art history. Vienna school formalism, it seemed to Wind, detached art historians from passion, “reduc[ing] … artistic perception to an emotionally untainted sense of form” and thus presenting us with an art object “radical[ly] purge[d] of emotions.”²⁰ Wind criticized Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl, along with later art critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell, for losing contact with art’s “imaginative forces” in their methodical attempts to detach their studies of artistic form (which holds aesthetic interest) from their own personal prejudices and passions (governed by practical interest or desire).²¹

Nonetheless, the methods of formalism appeared to accomplish one of the central goals of the cultural sciences: to articulate the relationships that obtain between an objectively existent symbolic order (comprised of signs, either in the form of material objects, such as works of art, or of immaterial means, such as language) and a correlative subjective worldview (that particular horizon of shared social competencies and expectations in light of which those signs are manipulated and become meaningful to a group). In an effort to recover and interpret the past, various methodologies have tried to come to terms with the materiality of art (permanence) from the point of view of history (contingency).²² Formalism was such a method. Because formalists assumed that the social dimension could be known to us historically only through the development of plastic structure, they tended to avoid narratives in which local forces, tensions, or contexts caused stylistic change.²³ The formalists aimed to provide the basis for an objective historical interpretation of artistic and cultural meaning—to yield a picture of history at the level of objectified general behavior read out of form. Whitney Davis notes: “The success of formalism as critical description [of individual works of art] suggests that it might also be successful in offering history … a fully historical, an anthropologically and psychologically exact, account of … others’ perception[s] of the works [of art] they have made and viewed.”²⁴ The benefit to formalism lies in its potential merging of horizons of understanding: from the subjective point of view of a writer to the recovery of an objective “historical grammar” (and, crucially, the subjective intentions that generated it), formalism provides a passage.²⁵

But a drawback to the extremity of formalism’s refinements, Wind continues, is the reaction it provoked: “In the place of an art of disengagement, which rejoiced in its separation from ordinary life, we are now to have an art which completely involves us in real life.”²⁶ Wind was writing in the early 1960s, during a period when artists increasingly investigated their own performativity and their audience’s participation as legitimate means for art.²⁷ From our present vantage point, Wind’s point seems to have anticipated the dominance of the performative mode in art since the 1960s. Arguably, the phenomenological turn associated with Minimalism, radically extended by performance artists through the 1960s and experimental video artists in the 1970s, had been transformed, by the 1980s and early 1990s, to an all but total reliance on the audience’s potential participation, through a call for action, for the social and political efficacy of the event or art “work” under consideration. The former notion of a modernist “beholder” or “spectator,” surveying the field from a putatively objective viewpoint, was sc...