In his review of the republication of Donald Judd’s collected writings (Artforum, Summer 2005), Mel Bochner offers some interesting asides on contemporary art and artists — much of it familiar; all of it relevant.

In spite of the "pluralism" of critical practices and market forces at work today — glossed by Bochner with the phrase "the trough is big enough for all the hogs" — something is missing.

One can hear it in all the verbal hand-wringing about the state of contemporary art. Is it only nostalgia for the "good old days," or does so much that is being done now lack either passion or purpose? The old guys…may have been cranky, but at least we went at it tooth and nail, as if our lives depended on it. Something real was at stake.

And in the ’60s and ’70s Judd was at the center of it.

As a working artist facing the challenge of present-tense conditions, Judd was uniquely able to judge how others were dealing with similar problems and sources. What made his reviews exciting to read was that he wrote with the immediacy of a war correspondent. By sending home dispatches from the front lines of contemporary art, he became that most valuable of literary companions: someone worth arguing with.

It’s precisely that sense of engagement and commitment that Bochner claims is missing today and I agree.  Of course, there was also a certain measure of narcissism and self-promotion that motivated artists to write in the ’60s and early ’70s.  Judd, for example, was not only defending what he found "worthy" in the work of other artists, but contributing to an emerging climate, coming out of a response to Greenberg’s dogmatic formalism, the tyranny of Ab Ex, the banality of Pop Art, and the flaccid criticism of Thomas Hess’s Art News poets, toward a new configuration more conducive to the reception of his own work. 

Judd’s self-interest is a given — a necessary price and one worth paying if, in addition, you can count on direct and unpretentious access to an artist grappling with his thoughts as he works through an encounter with both the art of the past and with the most significant work and issues of the day.

If Judd were writing today, would he be blogging?  Perhaps.  But I’m not sure it would be the best venue for him.  His tough-minded responses could easily turn into the sort of embarrassing, pugnacious rants the unedited free-for-all our blogosphere seems to encourage.  Nor would he be inclined to engage with the ephemeral and superficial art-gossip columnists that seem to proliferate on the web.  So what’s the relevance of Judd today?

Judd’s critical practice, if we can call it that, was not separable from his work as an artist.  It was a sustained, thoughtful, passionate, and serious attempt to crash the discourse on art and bring it closer to the lived experience of seeing, assessing, and creating visual and visceral responses to the world around us.  If nothing else remained, that in itself would be reason enough to remember Judd.

In a brief but suggestive State of the Art column in the new Frieze magazine, "Can We Really Suspend the Power of Judgement?", critic Jan Verwoert raises questions about the expectations, interests, and effects in play when one writes about a work of art.  Alternately assuming the position of artist or critic, he expresses reticence about the making of clear and definitive judgments.  Commenting on A Visit to the Louvre, a recent film by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Verwoert relates that, in the voice-over, the narrator speaks "with the passion of someone who has an intimate understanding of painting, but also with the pride and competitive élan of an artist who, through a series of rigorous assessments, sets out her own position in relation to other artists by dividing them into genuine painters and impostors, allies and opponents."  We learn later that the narrator is not speaking in her own voice, but reciting the words of Cezanne.  (The text is taken from the artist’s writings.  The artists and works to which Cezanne is responding are not indicated in the Frieze essay.)

Now Verwoert observes that "[t]he power of the words lies in the passion behind the artist’s verdicts", but the critic is torn between the opposing positions of speaking with authority and conviction, on the one hand, and withholding judgment, on the other.  "The conventional ritual of praise and rejection…limits art criticism to a tiresome Oedipal game in which a paternal pat on the back or an indignant slap in the face are the only gestures available. To relinquish authority thus actually means gaining the freedom to think and speak differently."  But, in the end, Verwoert asserts that "remaining undecided is precisely what you cannot do as a critic".  "The trick", he concludes, "…is to refrain from symbolically claiming the position of power that in practice is already assigned to you. That is what scruples are about."

Verwoert’s main concern is the way contemporary art criticism runs the risk, wittingly or otherwise, of promoting the market interests of collectors and the compromises faced by museums and galleries in exhibiting and acquiring new works or art.  Much of what he says about the leverage of wealthy collectors — or, should I say, investors — is both true and important.  But what is lost in his analysis is the crucial distinction between the voice, values, and interests of the artist vis-à-vis those of the critic.  As an artist who writes about art, my concern is to avoid conflating the two in order to better understand and articulate the unique perspective offered by the artist qua artist who responds from an inevitably interested position.

There are many differences between the artist and the critic.  One of these has to do with the challenge presented by the work one confronts in a gallery, museum, classroom, or studio.  While the critic may be presented with puzzles, obscurities, apparent inadequacies in the work, the artist sees these and more.  The work is, in some sense, always seen in relation to the artist’s own practice, and very often in the same medium.

What is it about this work that intrigues me?  Why is it a painting rather than a wall drawing or a photograph?  How was it done?  These are elementary questions, I admit.  And they’re not unique to the artist.  What is unique is the personal way in which I find myself responding to those questions.  While clearly oversimplifying matters, I have to say that at a very basic level my concern is how the work I encounter directly affects what I do and how I think about the work I’ve made.  What are my affinities with this artist?  What interests do we share?  Are there things here I can use?  What’s wrong with the piece?  What would I have done differently, and why?  No matter how inspired and impressed I am with a work, there’s almost always something that’s not quite right about it.  Too much empty space.  Too didactic.  Too derivative.  Not enough paint.  The color is too harsh in places.  There’s not enough attention given to the support, or the way it’s mounted on the wall, floor, or pedestal.  It’s constructed in too cavalier and haphazard a manner.  There’s not enough concern for the integrity of the work as an object.  It engages important issues, but in too heavy-handed a way.  While one work is too explicit and painfully sincere, the next is too opaque, convoluted, or austere.

Now, of course, the art critic will often respond with precisely the same language.  The difference is in the way the words are felt and what’s at stake.  For while the critic attempts to open the reader up to the work, to enliven one’s perceptions, to reveal the work’s possible meanings and significance (or lack thereof), the artist is compelled to accept or reject the work as part of an ongoing negotiation of his or her own identity as an artist and everything that represents.

There are, of course, numerous exceptions and not everyone’s experience is the same.  But I can say with a fair degree of confidence, on the basis of conversations over many years with other artists in galleries, studios, classrooms, and bars, that artists see themselves and their work, first and foremost, in the context of other artists and other works of art.  This has little to do with markets, donors, collectors, or curators.  They’re all outsiders from the artist’s perspective.  The only ones who really matter, in a life or death sense, are other artists.  That’s why they tend to be divided into "genuine painters and impostors, allies and opponents".

Here, as simply one example taken at random, are revealing and passionately partisan remarks made by Camille Pissarro to his son Lucien about "the schemer" Gauguin:

Paris, April 20, 1881

I am sending you…a review which contains an article on Gauguin by [Albert] Aurier.  You will observe how tenuous is the logic of this litterateur.  According to him, what in the last instance can be dispensed with in a work of art is drawing or painting; only ideas are essential, and those can be indicated by a few symbols.  Now I will grant that art is as he says, except that "the few symbols" have to be drawn, after all; moreover, it is also necessary to express ideas in terms of color, hence you have to have sensation in order to have ideas…. This gentleman seems to think we are imbeciles!

The Japanese practiced this art as did the Chinese, and their symbols are wonderfully natural, but then they were not Catholics, and Gauguin is a Catholic. I do not criticize Gauguin [in his Jacob and the Angel] for having painted a rose background, nor do I object to the two struggling fighters and the Breton peasants in the foreground; what I dislike is that he copped these elements from the Japanese, the Byzantine painters, and others.  I criticize him for not applying his synthesis to our modern philosophy, which is absolutely social, anti-authoritarian, and anti-mystical.  That is where the problem becomes serious.  This is a step backwards; Gauguin is not a seer, he is a schemer who has sensed that the bourgeoisie is moving to the right, recoiling before the great idea of solidarity which sprouts among the people — an instinctive idea, but fecund, the only idea that is permissible!  The symbolists also take this line!  What do you think?  And they must be fought like a disease!

[From Artists on Art, Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, eds., New York: Pantheon, 1972, 317f.]

Donald Kuspit’s The End of Art is a sustained defense of aesthetic experience, not from the standpoint of the aesthete, but from point of view of one committed to furthering "personal autonomy and critical freedom" through art in a world overwhelmed by the commercial, the trivial, and the ephemeral.

When works of art become consummately commercial — when commodity identity overtakes and subsumes aesthetic identity, so that an expensive work is uncritically accorded aesthetic significance, not to say spiritual value — they become everyday artifacts, thus reversing the ‘esthetic osmosis’ that Duchamp thought was the essence of ‘the creative act’. Aesthetic osmosis makes works of art evocative and engaging and even creates them, for it transforms ‘inert matter’ into a phenomenon the spectator is willing to call a work of art — a ‘phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically’, that is, to take seriously. [14]

Kuspit’s text is a call to seriousness as he brings to our attention the serious condition into which art has fallen. He joins with others in declaring the end of art.  But he must believe it’s an end in appearance, not in fact — a failure of contemporary imagination and commitment.  Kuspit is making what no doubt seems to him a last ditch attempt to recover from the remains of modernism an understanding and approach to art that enables "the aesthetic transformation of everyday experience of reality" [28], that resists "the resentment and repudiation of beauty" [31] — a dialectical beauty which never loses touch with the ugly inherent in all substantial beauty and on which it depends — that never loses its connection to "artistic contemplation" as "a way of caring for one’s psyche". [37]

When one looks at Otto Dix’s horrific images of trench warfare, his aesthetic transmutation of death and destruction into a weirdly beautiful scene gives us a certain perspective on it that is more critically effective — more consciousness raising, as it were — than any journalistic rendering of it. It is also more soul-saving, for it has a cathartic effect that no war photograph can have. The photograph may move us, but it will not rescue us from the unpleasant feelings it arouses in us, which is what Dix’s aesthetically brilliant images do in the very act of evoking such feelings.  The photograph shows us the devastating scene, but Dix’s images not only show its devastation, but involve us with it, in a complex dialectic of identification and disidentification — shocked attachment and resolute detachment — similar to the dialectic of subject matter and form.  In short, aesthetic autonomy is a prelude to personal autonomy, even a basic part of it.  Human beings are not fully human without aesthetic experience. [37f]

I trust this very brief glimpse at Kuspit’s argument gives a sense for what he thinks may be lost during this age of "post-art".  In the central chapters he gives an historical account of the rise of nihilism and entropy in the art of the 20th century, as well as the "turn inward" as a refuge from the debilitating effects and anomie of modern society. Kuspit presents a bleak, but realistic, assessment of the situation we find ourselves in today.  The "crisis in criticism" discussed in our previous posts is symptomatic of a crisis in contemporary art as a whole.  The prospects of survival on Kuspit’s view and from the position of one who has been at the center of, and active in, the artworld for most of his adult life, are not good.  But he accepts, albeit implicitly, a Pascalian wager, recognizing that while the likelihood of preserving art’s power to deal with what often seems a tragic and meaningless existence may be vanishingly small, the only hope is to assume the possibility of some measure of success and to do what you can to achieve it.

The question is to what extent one accepts Kuspit’s analysis and shares his values.  What does he capture that’s "essential" and where does he go wrong?

In response to Dan, JL, and George’s comments to the previous post, I think it’s both unfair and unwise to dismiss Kuspit’s analysis as “narcissistic posturing”. Kuspit distinguishes the historical, contemporary, ideological, and critical aspects of art to sharpen our focus on the way one’s experience can be either enhanced or limited by active engagement, on the one hand, or reductive categorization on the other. He’s using the notion of the “historical” not to dismiss it, but rather to question the way it intervenes in one’s encounter with art, shortcircuiting the psychodynamic process that Kuspit believes is at the center of our experience of modern art. We can disagree with his position and characterization of this experience, but not without giving it a close and careful reading.

I don’t think Kuspit is dismissing the historical and the value of consistent, coherent, and necessarily selective accounts of artistic works, movements, and styles embedded in a larger framework of social and material forces. His point is that a fruitful engagement with the work of art depends on our keeping it “in play” and not fully determined. To be affected by it, we must remain open to the unexpected. That entails finding ways to take “out of play”, to whatever extent possible, prior assumptions about the work and its cultural and historical significance, not because they are inherently illegitimate, but to keep them from “conditioning” and, thus, limiting our response. It’s those preconceptions that he refers to as “ideological”, and that he associates with the historical, that diminish a certain kind of productive and critical encounter with art, the value of which is to “further personal autonomy and critical freedom, strengthening the ego against the social superego as well as the instincts, both of which stifle individuality with conformity”. [From The End of Art, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 14.]

So it’s not a question of eliminating history all together, but rather one of relegating the “historical” and the “contemporary” (or “critical”) to those moments in our engagement with art where they can do the most good.

Now it may be that too sharp a distinction between the “historical” and the “contemporary” obscures the ways in which our knowledge of the work might help to open it up for us. (This may be relevant to George’s concerns about “the present”.) Perhaps this is true only for works that rely on a strong conceptual component. I’m thinking here, for example, of Daniel Buren’s early work which, on first encounter many years ago, was utterly opaque to me until I did a bit of research and learned more about his concern for drawing attention to the “rules of the game” — the practices of display and “consumption” of art. Kuspit might place such works as Buren’s in another category entirely — cognitive rather than affective. And, of course, that raises other issues…