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Some Ways of Writing About Art in the Twenty-First Century

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Some Ways of Writing About Art in the Twenty-First Century Some Ways of Writing about Art Art criticism is really a kind of speculative fiction—The World Accord- ing to Rosalind Krauss, or Dave Hickey’s Fantastic Planet, or The in the Twenty-First Century Moons of Lynne Tillman. Flora and fauna, weights and measures—not to mention who lives there and what they enjoy—vary wildly from one Jarrett Earnest writer’s body of work to the next. Contrasting Krauss’s with Hickey’s writing on Ed Ruscha—an artist they both admire—is like slipping between alternate universes. That both of their very different arguments are anchored in the artwork, materially and historically, illustrates the inherent multiplicity of form, the ability to generate manifold meanings that makes something “art” in the first place. These disparate takes coexist in a multiverse we call art criticism. Every value judgment and The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it. That is not the least distinction in “quality”—the usual expectations of criticism—mani- of the tasks in store for the critical spirit. fests a particular worldview, formed by highly contingent emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic predispositions, making it all the more sur- —Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891) prising how little attention is paid to understanding critics’ perspec- tives. I always want to know, Who is this person and what do they want from art? Which is another way of asking, What do they want from life? This collection aims to show that these thirty critics, theorists, historians, and thinkers are each unique in their approach and under- lying motivations, while all engaging in essentially the same activity— finding words for visual art. It’s worth pointing out that this unifying gesture will horrify many of them. (Participants in a 2001 October roundtable on criticism that included Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss made a special point of beating the “belletristic” criticism of Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl like a piñata, declaring it devoid of “critical rigor.” And that’s but one of many antagonisms.) Frank O’Hara’s line, supposedly quoting Franz Kline, that “to be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in” sums up my approach to the history and the future of criticism. I aim to move away from tedious cries of “crisis” and tiresome brawls over “good” or “bad” to instead understand what is striking about any given critic’s work—the nuances of how they approach writing and the way these styles and tactics become meaningful across a body of work and, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this collection, over the course of a life. 6 7 Jarrett Earnest Some Ways of Writing about Art The cultural context for every polemic or appreciation is always in the understanding of “discourse” itself. motion, shifting kaleidoscopically through time. Objects don’t change, Similarly, in Challenging Art, Amy Newman conducted individual but social and historical forces do, continually. Art and criticism are interviews with the original participants of Artforum, including Philip both highly relational, and one ambition of this book is to sketch how Leider, John Coplans, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, Barbara Rose, each critic sees the particular formations of their work. My hope is that Max Kozloff, Annette Michelson, Sidney Tillim, Robert Pincus-Witten, putting these often contradictory perspectives together will let them and Peter Plagens. She then chopped the transcripts up, shaping inflect each other, creating a holographic sense of a past that shapes each flamboyant proclamation into a perfectly faceted jewel within the our present and future discussions. Thus my deliberately anachronistic larger setting of the book. Her own voice is removed, but you sense her use of the word “means” in the book’s title, What it Means to Write presence and intelligence in the structure and montage, like that of a About Art—meaning itself is the slippery byproduct of human intention filmmaker. The resulting polyphony conveys the human, all too human and attention. dynamics that drive culture and constitute intellectual history. Two books have been vital to shaping the one you’re now holding: Linda Montano’s Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (2000) and Amy Newman’s Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 (2000). * * * Montano is herself an artist, and Performance Artists Talking was a decade-long “talking performance.” She interviewed a hundred artists After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009, I moved about how “Sex,” “Food,” “Money/Fame,” and “Ritual/Death” related to New York City, intent on having an adventure and figuring out how to their work. What struck me most was her willingness to push the to write in the process. As an artist myself, I felt I knew how to talk conversation into uncomfortable places. For instance, the book opens about art and that doing interviews would be a kind of back door into confrontationally with Vito Acconci. Montano begins, “I would like to becoming a writer. Through my late teacher, the poet and critic Bill ask you about sex because your work reflects that theme, even though Berkson (who is also interviewed here), I met Phong Bui, publisher of you indicated that you didn’t want to be identified that way. Can we the monthly arts newspaper The Brooklyn Rail, which features four talk about it just the same?” Acconci pushes back, the way anyone or five long interviews in every issue. As I read through its eclectic might. They continue talking, largely about how language constructs assortment of “artists’ artists,” I began to see it as an alternative oral and constricts both art and identity, using their exchange in real time history of the last few decades of art in New York. (In 2017, I was lucky as a case study. Montano sticks with him, step for step, until eventually enough to coedit sixty of these into the volume Tell Me Something Acconci is comfortable enough to loop back: “Now that we’ve gotten Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail, also published by David an atmosphere of talking, we can go back to that first question. As a Zwirner Books.) The Rail gave me a free hand to interview whomever child, sex had the same kind of mystification that religion had . ” I wanted and to experiment with different forms—including an often In contrast to the generic questions I knew from journalistic inter- incomprehensible “epistolary glossary” with Richard Tuttle that views, Montano showed me what it would be like to highlight tussling spread over three issues and a prolonged analysis of Nina Simone’s intersubjectivity. Foregrounding the interviewer, who brings his or her devastating performance of “Feelings” (1976) in a discussion of own weird desires, curiosities, and eccentricities into the exchange, Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece (1505) with Lisa Yuskavage. could illuminate an artist’s work in more complex ways, expanding In the Rail I published idiosyncratic conversations with artists including 8 9 Jarrett Earnest Some Ways of Writing about Art Nayland Blake, Christo, Robert Gober, Barbara Hammer, Roni Horn, together as a book (about half being published previously, often in Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Luc Tuymans, Dana altered form, with the rest appearing here for the first time). Taken Schutz, Jack Whitten, and Martha Wilson, among many others. This together, they argue for approaching and evaluating criticism as itself openness helped me find my own voice in ways that would have been essentially creative—that writing criticism is a craft that contributes impossible at a mainstream magazine. That voice, in turn, helped clarify palpably to our shared world. In each conversation, the goal is to my larger project as a writer in the art world. provide enough space to experience that complexity, showing that When preparing to conduct an interview, I gather everything critics have more in common with artists themselves than with the that’s been written on or by the subject—all the reviews, interviews, reactionary hacks of popular imagination. This vital dialogue between catalogues, and books—and read them sequentially, in chronological artists and critics is a major way art stays relevant and connected to order. Through this process, you see that the language around some- its culture. one’s work gets set very quickly and continues to be recycled for In the most foundational sense, this book insists that art criticism decades. Reading the complete body of critical writing on a specific isn’t any one thing, even while presenting all the critics foremost as artist is like tracing the rings of a tree—a cross section of growth in time. writers. Throughout the process of writing, every critic develops their You begin to sense the underlying shape of their thought, and how the own idiosyncratic framework for understanding what a work of art is, artist is in a dynamic exchange with their critics, attempting to steer how they relate to an artist and an audience, and what their specific conversations in certain directions in response to what is being written. goals are. They create their own, often unstated rules. Roberta Smith, I also focus on the art itself, attending as closely as possible to how it for example, sees herself on the readers’ side and doesn’t write about looks and the way it was made. Often, I’m trying to identify the things an artists she’s friends with. Lucy Lippard, on the other hand, considers artist strategically avoids speaking about, which their work nonetheless herself an artists’ advocate, and the people she champions are often suggests. Artists are always trying to understand new aspects of what enmeshed in her personal life. Neither of these positions is right or they’ve done—being paradoxically and essentially both inside and wrong, better or worse; each represents a negotiation between individ- outside of it—and these conversations become forms of collaboration, ual talent and cultural necessity.
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