Beyond Critique

Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction

Pamela Fraser, Roger Rothman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501347184
• eBook ISBN: 9781501323454
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Critique has long been a central concept within art practice and theory. Since the emergence of Conceptual Art, artists have been expected by critics, curators, and art school faculty to focus their work on exposing and debunking ideologies of power and domination. Recently, however, the effectiveness of cultural critique has come into question. The appearance of concepts such as the "speculative, " the "reparative, " and the "constructive" suggests an emerging postcritical paradigm. Beyond Critique takes stock of the current discourse around this issue. With some calling for a renewed criticality and others rejecting the model entirely, the book's contributors explore a variety of new and recently reclaimed criteria for contemporary art and its pedagogy. Some propose turning toward affect and affirmation; others seek to reclaim such allegedly discredited concepts as intimacy, tenderness, and spirituality. With contributions from artists, critics, curators and historians, this book provides new ways of thinking about the historical role of critique while also exploring a wide range of alternative methods and aspirations. Beyond Critique will be a crucial tool for students and instructors who are seeking to think and work beyond the critical.

Part One

History and Theory

1

An Allegory of Criticism^*

David Joselit

I

subvert: 1. to destroy completely; ruin

The American Heritage Dictionary 2000: 1728

In the 1980s a new critical desideratum arose: to subvert. Works of art—especially those engaged in various modes of appropriation—were seen to unveil the mechanisms of commercial culture, and in so doing to deliver a fatal blow to the society of the spectacle.¹ When Sherrie Levine, for instance, rephotographed the reproduction of a modernist photograph, or Jeff Koons imprisoned a pristine vacuum cleaner in Plexiglas, these works were interpreted as blunt reiterations of reified social relations. In a dazzling instance of vulgar Freudianism (especially remarkable for an art world besotted with Lacan), such acts of revelation were themselves regarded as politically efficacious, just as the analysand’s free associative speech is supposed by her analyst to release her from the grip of pathology.² What I wish to remark on, however, is not the legitimacy of such judgments, but rather the distinctive nature of their form. It is worth noting that in the years between the respective heydays of modernist and postmodernist criticism in the United States, the locus of aesthetic value shifted from quality to criticality—from the “good” to the “subversive.” I take it as axiomatic that with postmodernism the art object began to absorb the critic’s function into itself, rendering the boundary between art and criticism confusingly porous, and more or less causing the latter’s obsolescence.³ An analysis of this condition begs three sets of questions. First, what exactly constitutes efficacy in an art work and how does an aesthetics of “subversion”—or is more recent lexical cousin, “criticality”—function as a politics? Second, what kind of critic is the artist? And third, what is left for the critic to do?

Craig Owens’s theory of allegory is a good place to start. Building on a variety of thinkers, and especially Walter Benjamin, Owens developed a pithy model of postmodern allegory in a two-part essay published in successive numbers of October in 1980. Early on in the text he offered a fundamental definition: “Let us say for the moment that allegory occurs whenever one text is doubled by another …” (Owens [1980] 1992: 53).⁴ Allegory, then, is the doubling—indeed, the multiplication—of “texts” within and around a work of literature or art. Such doubling (or multiplication) necessarily functions as an act of interpretation—a mode of criticism that is built into the work. Owens makes this point explicitly through a comparison: “In modern aesthetics, allegory is regularly subordinated to the symbol, which represents the supposedly indissoluble unity of form and substance which characterizes the work of art as pure presence” (Owens [1980] 1992: 62). If allegory is the rhetorical figure corresponding to postmodernism, the symbol, in which essential experience is made manifest, corresponds to American midcentury modernism. Owens’s distinction clarifies the fundamental role of the critic in assessing modernist art: it is s/he who recognizes the essential link between gesture and the unconscious among painters of the New York School, or opticality and “grace” in the canvases of their successors. Such an act of recognition is superfluous to the critical doubling of allegorical (postmodern) art, which is by definition self-conscious. Here is where the violence enfolded in the term “subversive” surges forth in the seemingly benign concept of allegory. An allegory destroys the autonomy of the text. Benjamin compares allegory to a ruin, and, as The American Heritage Dictionary affirms, to subvert is to “destroy completely; [to] ruin” (American Heritage Dictionary 2000: 1728).

The allegory of my own title denotes something simpler than the nuanced associations elaborated by Owens. For in this essay I have elected a single figure, Michael Shamberg, as the protagonist of a fable—an allegory—of criticism. Shamberg was not a major figure in art criticism; indeed, he had little to do with art at all. This very marginality vis-à-vis the art world in combination with his current power and influence in the realm of commercial culture make him a fit object of allegorization. As will become clear in the course of this text, Shamberg’s story has everything to do with the shift marked by Owens: from an art of essence to an art of appropriation rooted in allegorical extensions of the mass media. In that sense, I hope the allegory of my title will carry the complexity of Owens’s use of it after all. For what I will demonstrate is a second order of doubling or multiplication, not solely of texts, but of the publics interpellated by those texts.

II

At different points in his career Michael Shamberg worked as a writer, video activist, and Hollywood producer, earning himself a significant place in the history of video, television, and film. In these capacities he was among the first to recognize the thoroughgoing commercialization of public space brought about by television’s explosion at midcentury. He called this phenomenon “Media-America,” and in his 1971 book Guerrilla Television, he identified an array of visual practices of the 1960s and ’70s, ranging from psychedelia to video art, which were aimed at democratizing or revolutionizing the electronic nation. The allegory suggested by his career pivots on the difficulties of sustaining such criticism. Most professional art critics produce little more than sophisticated press releases. Such writings are valuable to art history as documents, which may be read symptomatically in the brilliant ways that figures like T. J. Clark have done. I am less interested in this diagnostic use of criticism than in those moments when critical writing becomes prescriptive—when it invents new kinds of objects rather than simply interpreting those it finds readymade. Shamberg’s story is exemplary in this regard because he tried in a variety of ways to construct new networks for criticism. These efforts fall roughly into four stages, which I will describe briefly.

Phase 1: Industrial Journalism. After graduating from college in 1966 and writing for a newspaper called Chicago’s American, where he covered the Democratic Convention in 1968, Shamberg worked for about a year for Time and Life. It is well known that these publications require a highly Taylorized form of writing where individual authorship is less important than a “house voice.” As Shamberg remarked in an interview of 1971, “I quit because I felt irrelevant, not co-opted” (Levin 1971: 373).⁵ This distinction is significant because it indicates Shamberg’s career-long recognition that constructing an audience is as important as constructing an argument. At least one of his assignments for Time did prove relevant. In the issue of May 30, 1969, Shamberg published an unsigned review of the video exhibition TV as a Creative Medium at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. In his opening paragraph, Shamberg perhaps unwittingly summarizes his program for the next decade:

The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. It has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco parentis is that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television generation struck there too, but the rebellion was half in fun: an art exhibition at Manhattan’s Howard Wise Gallery entitled “TV as a Creative Medium.”

Shamberg 1969: 74

Included in TV as a Creative Medium was Wipe Cycle (1969), a work by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, which particularly impressed Shamberg. Wipe Cycle consisted of a bank of nine monitors and a closed-circuit video camera, which recorded live images of viewers as they approached the work. These fragments of footage were played on eight-and sixteen-second delays, jumping from monitor to monitor and intercut with broadcast TV and prerecorded segments. Periodically all of the screens would be wiped clean. Gillette’s description of the work links it explicitly to an ethics of televisual communication: “The intent of this [image] overloading … is to escape the automatic ‘information’ experience of commercial television without totally divesting it of the usual content” (Gillette and Schneider 1969: unpaginated). In other words, Wipe Cycle was meant to break apart the monolithic “information” of network TV through a spectator’s unexpected encounter with her or his own act of viewing. As I will argue, such a shift in the balance of power between the producers and the consumers of media images would remain central to Shamberg’s program.

Phase 2: Raindance Corporation. Shamberg was so impressed by Gillette and Schneider that he joined with them to form the Raindance Corporation, a video collective intended to function as an alternative think tank—a progressive version of the RAND Corporation. The activities of Raindance proceeded on two tracks—video-making and publishing—but all of its work emerged from the group’s fascination with the kind of media ecology theorized by such figures as Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Gregory Bateson. Raindance believed that television could be democratized by redressing the imbalance of power between video producers and video consumers. To this purpose, its members executed a number of informal videotapes in which ordinary people on the street were given the time and space to communicate. The group attempted to institutionalize its alternative vision of media communication in an unrealized Center of Decentralized Television that would have been housed at the Jewish Museum where the watershed exhibition Software took place in 1970. Between 1970 and 1974 Raindance was affiliated with a fascinating journal, Radical Software, whose founding editors were Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny (now Segura). This publication included a frothy mix of Zen, cable activism, video theory, and applied cybernetics. While some have poked fun at this delirious collision of politics, media, and ecology, it is sobering to acknowledge how closely it prefigures the ecstatic prognostications that surround the Internet in our own time. In fact, from a political perspective, Radical Software’s analysis of the failings and potentials of television was both more prescient and more radical than any recent product of the digerati I am aware of.

Shamberg’s book, Guerrilla Televisi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• Introduction: Beyond Critique
• Part 1 History and Theory
• 1 An Allegory of Criticism
• 2 Fluxus and the Art of Affirmation
• 3 Defining Criticality as an Historical Object of the 1970s and 1980s
• 4 The people were smart and hungry”: Criticality, Egalitarianism, and the Pictures Generation
• 5 Shiny Things
• Part 2 Practice
• 6 Still in the Cage: Thoughts on “Two Undiscovered Amerindians,” 20 Years Later
• 7 Parasitism and Contemporary Art
• 8 Time, Autonomy, and Criticality in Socially Engaged Art
• 9 Radical Proximity
• 10 Post-Critical Painting
• 11 Intimate Bureaucracies: A [Sweetened and Condensed] Manifesto
• Part 3 Instruction
• 12 On Performing the Critical
• 13 Consideration (As an Antidote to Critique)
• 14 Re-Thinking Art Education (Revisited), or How I Learned to Love Art Schools Again
• 15 Pragmatics of Studio Critique
• 16 Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Gift, Circulation, and Community Building in the Studio Art Crit
• Index
• Copyright