The Great God Pan Is Dead: Thomas McEvilley

Showing posts with label Thomas McEvilley. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Robert Boyd's Book Report: Yves the Provocateur

This week I read Yves the Provocateur: Yves Klein and Twentieth-Century Art by Thomas McEvilley. McEvilley was a professor of mine when I was an undergraduate at Rice University, and I've written about him before. I wrote this post when after he died, and it is good introduction to his writing (if I say so myself). I have mentioned him in several other posts.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Friday, August 2, 2013

Outsiders

Robert Boyd

I first became aware that there was a category of art called "outsider art" in the late 80s. I was moving from Los Angeles to Seattle, read about an Adolf Wölfli exhibit at Berkeley and decided to take a detour to check it out. I was spellbound by it and by the whole idea of an artist somehow completely cut off from any other art, whether the kind of art one studies in school or traditional folk art. This feeling was deepened in 1990, when Raw published a selection of work by Henry Darger. I thought I had a clear idea about the demarcations between outsider art, folk art and mainstream art. Outsider artists were people who were almost completely cut off from access to other art--asylum patients like Wölfli or Martin Ramirez, or "hermits" like Darger. Folk artists were artists who worked out of a folk tradition, where techniques and conventions were passed orally from master to apprentice. And "mainstream" or "cultural" artists were artists who had access to art schools and museums.

But these handy categories break down the more you think about it. Forrest Bess and Charlie Stagg feel like "outsiders" of the hermit type because they chose to live and practice their art in remote locations away from the influence of mainstream art. But in both cases, they were neither real hermits (they had plenty of contact with other people, including people involved in art), nor were they in any way ignorant of current mainstream art practices of their time. And before Thornton Dial was "discovered," he had claim to be an outsider artist, but since that time he has seen a lot of other art in museums and knows that there are painters and sculptors whose work is superficially similar to his. Additionally, the romance of the outsider artist as coming from a completely different mental state, being a visionary, being insane, falls apart once you leave the Wolflis and Dargers behind.

I recently read three very different books that serve to illustrate the ambiguities of outsider art. The Last Folk Hero: A True Story of Race and Art, Power and Profit is a book-length piece of journalism from 2006 that deals with the relationship between a dealer/collector and the outsider artists he discovers and represents. The Genius (2008) is a novel about what happens when a contemporary art dealer in Chelsea accidentally discovers a trove of art by a seemingly deceased outsider artist, and Charles Dellschau (2013) is a giant art book about the German-American painter of airships.

William Arnett was an Atlanta dealer who specialized first in Mediterranean antiquities, then Asian art, then African art. But his life changed when he became aware of a couple of self-taught African American artists, Jesse Aaron and Sam Doyle.

While on a road trip to Houston with a friend, Arnett began his search for much more. His hypothesis was formulating: there is a hidden world of untrained African American artists who are making work of equal importance to any other living artist, but no one is giving them much credit. (The Last Folk Hero p. 68, Andrew Dietz, 2006)

But that wasn't all. He was a dealer, after all. His notion was essentially one of arbitrage--take an asset (a piece of art) that is extremely undervalued in its current market or environment and sell it in a market when and where its "true" value can be discerned. He wanted to take these objects out of poor people's front yards and put them in a gallery.

This is what is so delicious about this book. Is Arnett an exploiter? Is he harming the artistic value of these objects by taking them out of their folk world and turning them into capitalist assets? These and many other issues are implicitly and explicitly discussed in The Last Folk Hero. And Arnett is not the only character in the book--the artists, particularly Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, are major characters.

Thornton Dial, Blood and Meat, 1992 , Mixed Media on Canvas, 65" x 95" x 11"

Arnett searched out art all by self-taught artists all over the South. Lonnie Holley's sculptural work had been bought (and even stolen off his lawn), but when he met Arnett, he felt respected as an artist, perhaps for the first time. He was no longer a freak but a part of an art world. Arnett represented him and helped him achieve financial success and recognition. And Holley became a scout for Arnett. Thornton Dial was one of Holley's discoveries.

Lonnie Holley with some of his work (Al.com, 2009)

The quilters at Gee's Bend were also Arnett discoveries. And Arnett didn't just represent these artists as a dealer--he was a tireless promoter of them to museums. He worked hard to get critics and museum curators and directors to see the value in this work. In doing this, he managed to alienate much of the Atlanta museum establishment, but outside Atlanta, he was very successful. Working with Thomas McEvilley, he got Thornton Dial simultaneous shows at the Museum of American Folk Art and the New Museum. Peter Marzio put on an exhibit of the Gee's Bend quilts at the MFAH, which ended up traveling the country for years subsequently.

But there was always a hint of exploitation about Arnett's relationship with these artists. For example, Dial was able to move out of his modest home in a rough neighborhood into a larger house on a huge lot, but the house was owned by Arnett. Arnett had a somewhat paternalistic relationship with many of his artists. And in a way, how could it have been otherwise? Until Arnett showed up in their lives, many of them had had almost no contact with the white bourgeois world. It wasn't like they were going to engage with a lawyer to represent them in their dealings with Arnett, even though they certainly should have.

This came to a head in 1993 when 60 Minutes did a hit piece on Arnett using Dial as the bludgeon. According to the book and by many other accounts, it was completely unfair. Arnett believes that his many enemies (he was accomplished at making enemies) in the Southern art world were informants to 60 Minutes. Certainly many participants in that world feel that Arnett pushes museum shows so heavily in order to increase the value of his own holdings--and it's hard to argue with the fact that when Thornton Dial gets a retrospective, Bill Arnett's collection become more valuable.

In any case, while there is paternalism in the way Arnett deals with his dealings with these folk artists, the fact remains that many of them would still be doing lawn art if Arnett had not doggedly searched them out and created a market for their work. Furthermore, Arnett has repeatedly risked his own money to promote and support this art. The cost of printing the two volume Souls Grown Deep, an encyclopedic compendium of African-American vernacular art, was staggering. We should bow down to Thornton Dial for is art, but we should also thank Bill Arnett for helping to make it possible for us to see it.

The book is well-written but eccentric. Andrew Dietz is neither a scholar nor a journalist (he is apparently a business consultant), and has no other writing credits that I can determine. The book itself lacks both an index and a bibliography, both of which make it hard for the reader to track down other sources for this information to independently verify it. That said, there is nothing that says you have to be a professional writer to write a good book, and what I could track down (using good old Google) more-or-less confirmed the information in the book. And it certainly is not a hagiography of Arnett, who in addition to being portrayed as a paternalistic figure with regards to the artists he represents, is also shown to be difficult, controlling and paranoid.

There are interesting issues when folk or outsider art is "discovered" by the mainstream. The Last Folk Hero deals with them well by telling a particular story (as opposed to taking a birds-eye view and discussing the issues more abstractly or theoretically). I found it fascinating and compelling.

Jesse Kellerman's The Genius deals with similar issues through the bizarre lens of crime fiction. Ethan Muller is a Chelsea gallerist who is struggling to be successful. It's funny how gallerists in pop culture are always depicted as wildly successful. The reality that running a gallery is a difficult business with a high failure rate is acknowledged here. A scion of a rich family, he is estranged from them and determined to make a success on his own. But when his father's right hand man tells Ethan about finding a treasure trove of outsider art in an apartment in a large housing complex (built by the Muller family many decades ago), he is willing to take a look. This is how he acquires the work of Victor Cracke, a man who has seemingly disappeared.

Kellerman is deliberately echoing the story of the discovery of Henry Darger's work. Darger was a tenant in a building owned by photographer Nathan Lerner, who lived in a house next door. The essential difference is that while Lerner didn't know what Darger was up to for most of his life (Darger was already a tenant when Lerner bought the building), he found out about Darger's art while Darger was still alive, when Darger was forced to move out due to health problems. (Lerner seems to have been an ideal landlord--he even lowered Darger's rent at one point.) Darger gave the work to Lerner, and Lerner didn't try to publicly display it until four years after Darger's death in 1973. Muller, on the other hand, instantly recognizes Cracke's genius, takes the artwork (despite the fact that Cracke is still alive, as far as Muller knows) and prepares to show it immediately. He almost instantly sells some of it for a huge price to wealthy client.

Muller is opportunistic and unethical, but Kellerman's portrait of him is more nuanced. He doesn't just see Cracke as a cash cow (although it is the perfect cash cow for a gallery--work that can be sold at a high price with the gallery keeping 100% of the revenue), but also deeply loves the work. He's obsessed with it. I think this is the paradox of gallery owners (and book publishers and film producers and many other kinds of artistic impresarios). They want to make money--indeed, they want to get rich--but they also love the art. Sometimes these two impulses work in perfect harmony, sometimes they are in conflict with each other. Kellerman does a good job depicting this conflict.

There is some typical crime novel stuff--threats, a little violence, etc.--and Muller ends up researching Cracke with a retired police detective and his assistant DA daughter when it starts to look like Cracke may be linked to some horrific unsolved murders (which, when the word gets out, makes the art all the more valuable). And in the end, Muller leaves the art world behind in a way that feels like a moralistic judgment on it and seems to forget that there is a reason people love art. But let's face it, crime fiction's ultimate weakness is that the endings are usually pretty unsatisfactory. Everything that you enjoyed up to the end--the unsolved mystery, the danger--goes away as the bad guys are caught or killed and the mystery solved.

Despite that, Kellerman is able to deal with a lot of the issues dealt with in The Last Folk Hero in The Genius. I sometimes get the feeling that the art world is estranged in some ways from the world of fiction. But to me, fiction is one more way--a very good way--to think about things like this. The story of Nathan Lerner and Charles Darger is fascinating. But Kellerman can take a lot of the messy reality of that story and streamline it into a means for really examining the issues of outsider art, the art market, etc. In a sense, fiction is a hypothetical example. (Of course, it's also much more than that.) The Genius is not a great book, but it's worth reading if you're interested in some of the ethical and artistic issues surrounding outsider art.

The path of discovery of outsider artists is one of the subjects common to the first two books. Charles A.A. Dellschau, the subject of a huge color monograph and the story of his discovery as an artist in truly strange and circuitous. Dellschau was born in 1830 in Brandenburg, Prussia. He immigrated to the U.S. when he was 19, presumably coming through Galveston, the entry port for many German immigrants. He settled in Richmond, Texas, where he worked as a butcher's assistant. Sometime during the 1850s, he moved to California for four years. He returned to Texas and worked as a butcher. He married a widow, but she and his young son died in 1877. About 10 years later, he moved to Houston and lived with his stepdaughter and her husband. He worked as a clerk for the Stelzig Saddlery Company (which was in business until 2004, amazingly enough) and then retired in his late 60s. Then he started recording the events of his life in a pair of memoirs and 12 large albums of drawings (it seems he may have drawn at least 10 more albums worth of pictures, but they have been lost.) He focused on his California years, where he claimed to be a member of the Sonora Aero Club, a group of men who discovered means for building airships. He worked on these from 1908 until 1921. He died in 1923.

The albums remained in an attic in the family home for 40 years. After a fire elsewhere in the house, the family was told to clean out the attic by a fire inspector. They were then left in the gutter, where they were picked up (presumably along with other detritus from the attic) and sold to a junk shop, the OK Trading Post. It was at this point that people started to recognize them as art. Four of the books were purchased by the Menil Collection. The other eight were purchased by P.G. Navarro, a commercial artist who had an interest in airships. Navarro spent many years studying the books, trying to determine if the stories of the Sonora Aero Club could be true (he quite reasonably concluded that they couldn't, but he thought that some of Dellschau's plans for airships were plausible). The images start off fairly matter-of-fact and grow more fanciful over time. In one of the essays in the book, Thomas McEvilley writes, "Dellschau's early work may strike one as pragmatic and technical, while in the later work it seems he is either losing his mind or becoming an artist."

Charles A.A. Dellschau, From Below, June 28, 1911, 16 1/2 x 18 3/4 inches

The book has six essays in all, and they tend to be quite repetitious, looking at Dellschau from slightly different angles. The best is by Thomas McEvilley--it may have been his last essay. He has obviously studied not only the work of Delschau, but also the extensive and eccentric annotation by P.G. Navarro. He succinctly tells Dellschau's story and does his best to situate the art in a comprehensible space.

Books 8 and 9 of the 12 volumes

This is the thing about outsider art. Unless it can be understood as having some relationship to art, especially modern art, it can't be seen. In 1923, when Dellschau's books were stored away in the attic, they hadn't yet been viewed by someone who could see them as art. It took chance encounters by people who were already "trained" to see art for the work to be so recognized. If Nathan Lerner had not been a photographer, but was instead an accountant, he might have thrown Henry Darger's art away. If people like Picasso had not promoted Henri Rousseau's painting, it may have been forgotten. So in a way, however isolated "outsider" artists might be from the main currents of art, the act of discovering their work drags towards the middle of the river. ("Recognize" might be a better word than "discover.") James Elkins writes that modernism requires "the other.":

Part of modernism is the desire for something genuinely outside the academic European tradition, and naïve and self-taught art fill that desire perfectly. If you think of outsider art this way, it no longer makes sense simply to enjoy the art directly, “on its own terms”: the question has to become, “What sense of modernism do I have that permits me to find these examples of outsider art compelling or expressive?” In other words, one asks about one’s desires, and one watches one’s symptoms. The many different kinds of outsider art testify not to a diversity of practices that need to be conceptualized but to changing senses of modernism. ("Naïfs, Faux-naïfs, Faux-faux naïfs, Would-be Faux-naïfs:There is No Such Thing as Outsider Art," James Elkins, 2006)

We can't recognize Dellschau as an artist until the right person at the right time sees it. In 1923, in Houston, this is not art. In 1963, in Houston, it is.

Charles A.A. Dellschau, Aero Honeymoon, Front or Rear, April 12, 1909, 14 1/2 x 18 1/4 inches

The book is extremely handsome--huge and heavy, it is packed with beautiful color reproductions of Dellschau's art. When I first saw this work, it reminded me a little of Adolf Wölfli's. The decorative borders and the use of repetitious patterns seem similar. However, these both may reflect the artists being influenced by graphic design conventions of their time. (Wölfli lived from 1864 to 1930.) As obsessive as Dellschau was, his work seems much less strange than Wölfli's. Dellschau has a light touch, and there are many humorous elements to the work.

Charles A.A. Dellschau, from Erinnerungen (Recollections), von Roemeling marital bed prank scenes, 1900, 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 inches

Over time, Dellschau incorporated collages of images and texts from newspapers and magazines in his books, especially when they had a relationship with flying machines. He was very interested in what was happening with aviation in World War I, for example. He called these clippings "press blooms."

Charles A.A. Dellschau, Press Blooms (Attacking Forest Fires with Gas Bombs), August 6, 1919, 16 1/2 x 16 1/2 inches

Charles A.A. Dellschau, Maybe, December 3, 1919, 17 x 17 inches

But my favorite pieces are his plan-like drawings that almost become geometric abstractions. (You can see a lot more of his work here.)

Charles A.A. Dellschau, Mio from Above from Below, February 7, 1910, 15 3/8 x 19 inches

Whatever is problematic about the discovery/recognition of outsider artists, if the result is that I get to see big beautiful books about people like Charles A.A. Dellschau, I am for it. I find the category fascinating, especially as I examine the lives and work of artists like Forrest Bess and Charlie Stagg, who were not outsider artists but chose to isolate themselves to a certain extent from the art world in order to create better art. In a way, that is what "outsiders" show us--a different way to approach art-making.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Pan Video Parade

Robert Boyd

I found the video below, "Inside the Library of Thomas McEvilley" by Michael Kasino on Vimeo. It wasn't embeddable but it was downloadable. So I hope Mr. Kasino won't be angered that I have copied it and embedded it here. (You can see more videos by Kasino here.)

Unsurprisingly, McEvilley's apartment was overflowing with books. But I see he also does something I do--he hangs art in front of his books. The thing is, if you are an art lover and a book lover, you end up with a dilemma. Books and art both tend to take a lot of wall space. And unless you're quite wealthy, you probably have a somewhat limited quantity of wall space. So the solution for some of us is to put art in front of books.

McEvilley tells us that he has never bought a piece of art or asked an artist for a piece, but that he often gets pieces as gifts. He has a lot of pieces by James Lee Byars and William Anastasi, two artists he was personally very close to. He also has a giant stuffed tiger that he found on the street in a puddle and brought back to his apartment.

Here is an excellent quote from the video: "Antiquity, especially the bronze age... It possesses me. I wake at night thinking about it."

James Kalm walks through the big Jay DeFeo retrospective at the Whitney Museum (there's about of minute of a random brass band playing at the beginning of the video).

Monday, March 4, 2013

"I Am" Is a Vain Thought: Thomas McEvilley 1939-2013

Robert Boyd

Art critic Thomas McEvilley died Saturday, March 2. It's hard for me to put into words how much he meant to me as a teacher and a thinker. I first encountered him as an undergraduate at Rice. I took his class on film history, which consisted of him showing a series of films and talking about each one briefly. He had olympian disdain for any films that smacked of commercial intent--we saw virtually nothing that came out of the Hollywood studio system, for example. He justified this be explaining that he was teaching "the art history of film history." This statement has stuck with me ever since because it implied that there were many histories or any given artform. So I've become interested in, for example, the economic history of art and the social history of art--subjects that may overlap with art history but are not identical. Likewise, I've always thought that thinking about comics should be done from the point of view of art history--that an art history of comics is more interesting (to me, at least) than other histories.

(It literally just occurred to me as I write that that the upcoming small exhibit of original comics art from my personal collection, Comics, mirrors McEvilley's film history class. In the class, he showed a number of silent films that could reasonably be called popular entertainment but within which the art of filmmaking was being invented. But instead of then segueing into the studio film, he skipped ahead to Italian Neorealism then to Nouvelle Vague and so on. In Comics, I devote about half of the exhibit to comic strips (mostly pre-1960s), and then skip over "mainstream" comics straight to the alternative and art comics of the 1980s to the present. I think it was McEvilley who provided this model--to create a different art history of comics from the one that is usually told. And given this, it only seems right to dedicate the exhibit to his memory.)

His other class was "Art and the Mind." In contrast to the film history class, this one was information rich. The content of this class mirrored to a certain extent the content of his later books. I took the class in the mid-80s. Art & Discontent and Art & Otherness were published in 1991 and 1992. The books themselves consisted of articles and essays he wrote, often for Artforum but also in various museum catalogs. Despite their scattered origins, they hold together quite well as books. And anyone who took "Art and the Mind" will find what he says in these books quite familiar.

Art and Discontent (1991) deals primarily with the way that art acquired a religious regard after the Enlightenment took down religion itself. McEvilley contends that art was given a phony aura of divinity by certain philosophers (he references Kant in particular) and talks about Modernism's ascent towards an idea of the sublime, which for McEviley is a mistake because it takes art out out of the realm of the real, a theme he will return to over and over. (The title of this post comes from an essay in this book.)

Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (1992) features his famous review of the Museum of Modern Art's "Primitivism" in the Twentieth Century, "Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief." This review eviscerated that show--a monument of scholarship that nonetheless turned the non-western cultures that produced works that inspired the Modernists into artistic spear carriers (in more than one way) in the drama of Modernism. This is the review that Jerry Saltz claims jump-started multiculturalism. That may be claiming too much, but curators William Ruben and Kirk Varnedoe unwisely responded to Artforum, which gave McEvilley another go. It was a knockout blow. (So thorough was his victory that he outsourced his defenestration of Varnedoe's MOMA sequel, High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, to two other critics from his perch as editor of Contemporania.) This book expands on the ideas present in that review.

The Exile's Return: Toward a Redefinition of Painting for the Postmodern Era (1993) follows right on the heels of the previous two books and perhaps because of that has the most straightforward concept. Painting, for centuries the primary Western art form, ceased to be so around 1965 due to a crisis of legitimacy. But in 1980, it came back--chastened in many ways--as a newly revitalized form. Given this thesis, McEvilley is able to reprint a variety of excellent reviews and catalog essays about painters, including Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, and surprisingly in a way, certain Neo-Expressionists like Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel.

For some reason, there is a big time gap before McEvilley's next art book, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (1999). And perhaps for that reason, it is a much denser book which essentially walks the reader through a history of Western thought (with big dollops of Buddhist thought added) before talking about sculpture. His main subject is a Greek philosophy called Pyrrhonism which was based on radical doubt. McEvilley saw sculpture as more easily embodying this kind of doubt (which he saw as necessary for ending the Kantian/Hegelian project of Modernism) than painting. Indeed, he suggests that painting, by wishing to become "objects" instead of illusions, wants to be sculpture. So you go 68 pages into Sculpture in the Age of Doubt before he talks about any specific sculptures. Interestingly, while he discusses the work of well-known international artists like Marcel Broodthears, Jannis Kounellis, Anish Kapoor, etc., he touches on artists with a local connection (that is, Texas/Houston) like Michael Tracy and Mel Chin. Even though his ties to Houston got less and less over time (he was hired as a young PhD in 1969 by the Menils to teach at Rice--by the time I took his classes in the 80s, he was commuting from New York City), he still knew many in the artistic community and supported their work. As late as 2004, he wrote an essay for a show of work by Houston painter Richard Stout.

Now it may seem strange that a critic so devoted to overthrowing the hitherto timeless verities of the Modernist project would write books about such traditional artforms as painting and sculpture. Sculpture had come to be so broadly defines that it could be almost anything, but what about art that was dematerialized, that existed as a process or a ritual, rather than a thing? That was the subject of the next one on the series, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism, published in 2005 after another seemingly long wait. (At least, it felt long to me.) Again Pyrrhon is a philosophical touchstone, especially for his direct influence on Duchamp, who McEvilley sees as the father of "anti-art." Opposed to Pyrrhon is Kant. For McEvilley, Kant's big problem is that he separated art off from other human endeavors in his Critique of Judgment. The aesthetic is separated off from the cognitive (Critique of Pure Reason) and the ethical (Critique of Practical Reason). (I will take McEvilley's word for it because after reading Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals in college, I decided I had read enough Kant.) McEvilley seeks to reclaim the cognitive and ethical for art, and places conceptual art within the cognitive sphere and performance art within the ethical sphere (to simplify his much more subtle arguments). The rest of the book is a discussion of specific artists and works.

Now at this point, you might be asking yourself, what about theory and shit? McEvilley wrote a lot about philosophy, but it was all really old philosophy. He rarely mentions Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault, Kristeva or any of those mostly French big brains whose work underpins so much art criticism and theory of the last thirty years. I mean, McEvilley is a monster of erudition--he seems to have read everything. So why not refer to the really current theory in his work?

I think it's because he thought it was old hat. He knew so much about Greek and Indian philosophy (he read them in Greek and Sanskrit, about which more later) that when he saw contemporary Post-Structuralist philosophy, he saw echoes of other thought expressed thousands of years ago. For the reader, this meant that McEvilley's work was blessedly free of super-difficult post-structuralist jargon. That is not to say that it was easy reading, but it didn't have that unnecessary extra layer of cant--the kind of writing that has come to be known as "international art English." McEvilley's prose was, in contrast, pretty straight-forward.

McEvilley returned in 2010 with Art, Love, Friendship: Marina Abramovic and Ulay Together & Apart, a book that seemed design to cash in on the sudden unexpected popularity of Marina Abramovic, but in some ways is his most personal book because it deals with his friendship with Ulay and Abramovic and their relationship with each other, through art. The centerpiece is a long account of Abramovic and Ulay's Great Wall performance, where they walked the length of the Great Wall of China starting at opposite ends until they met at the middle. McEvilley accompanied them for part of the way. This was their last piece together--the meeting would, ironically, be a farewell. And there is a sense in McEvilley's account of that familiar awkward feeling of being a friend of a couple that is breaking up.

Marina Abramovic, Thomas McEvilly and Ulay from Art, Love, Friendship

These books are collectively a great work of art criticism and theory that for me form a basis or jumping off point for thinking about art. There are aspects or tendencies of McEvilley's thought I disagree with, but usually when I think about contemporary art, I'm bouncing it off him in my mind. It's like I'm having a discussion with him (and I can hear his unique voice--you can, too in this excellent video from 2000). But the crazy thing is that these books were kind of a side project for him. His main project--his life's work, really--was a comparative study of Greek and Indian philosophy called The Shape of Ancient Thought. (I've never read it and probably never will, but the video I linked to outlines it very well.)

Jerry Saltz writes wittily about auditing McEvilley's classes at the School of Visual Arts, poet Charles Bernstein wrote an excellent obituary, and Rainey Knudson writes about taking "Art and the Mind" at Rice in a post that stirred up many memories for me. I suspect there will be other tributes in the days to come. But the best tribute to McEvilley would be to read his books. It's been 20-odd years since I read Art & Discontent--I think it's about time to read it again. (Update: The New York Times published an obituary by Holland Cotter on March 30. Cotter also gives McEvilley credit for jumpstarting the conversation on multi-culturalism in art.)

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Making Money

Robert Boyd

Marina Abromović and Ulay, Rest Energy, performance, 1980

"[Marina] Abromovic is from the generation of artists who matured in the 1970s--the artists who didn't want to sell anything. They had contempt for the market which many of them, now saddled with mortgages and dependents, have come to regret. But Abromovic has pretty much stuck with the immaterialist values of that idealistic age." (Thomas McEvilley, "Marina Abromović: Speaking Silences, Carrying Water" in The Triumph of Anti-Art, 2005)

I think Abromovic has done all right for herself in the end, hasn't she?

Marina Abromović, Seven Easy Pieces, performance, 2005

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Thomas McEvilley on Installation Art

Much installation art of the 1980s--such as the work of Mel Chin or Fred Wilson or Cady Noland--was heavily code in ways that invite, or command, the viewer to decode them. The works are often extremely complex, and may refer in detailed ways to social and political situations. These works are, in other words, meant to be "read" as texts. They may appear inscrutable at first sight (and often, proudly, do), but in fact they are inwardly anxious to give account of themselves. (Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism)

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Is There a Crisis in Art Criticism?

Yes.

This has been another episode of "Concise Answers to Obvious Questions."

But to avoid being a total asshole, I'll elaborate. For criticism to have a purpose, it must help readers identify and understand significant art. Practically speaking, critics should collectively be part of the larger group of people who decide what is good art. This is not an act of Olympian judgment (necessarily). It's just that for a given artist or a given work, the opinions of other artists, of curators, of gallery owners, and of collectors somehow coalesce into a vague consensus. Critics should be part of that consensus-making apparatus. A big part. But at this moment in history, critics are pretty much irrelevant to the process. (By the way, when I write "consensus," I mean that a situation in which broad disagreements can exist--even opposing camps. In such cases, there is nonetheless an agreement that a certain artist is worth having an opinion about. Most artists don't ever get that far.)

The view on the irrelevance of art criticism is expressed by two non-critics pretty forcefully--the economist Don Thompson in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark and sociologist Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World. A good book where critics address the crisis of criticism is Critical Mess, edited by Raphael Rubinstein.

Rubenstein wrote an essay on the failures of criticism in 2003. Around the same time, James Elkins published a similar short book (excerpted here). Rubenstein also includes an edited speech by Thomas McEvilley from 1994 that seems to anticipate many of the issues discussed, including the big one, the issue of judgment. Rubenstein basically portrays the argument (and it is an argument with basically two sides) as one between whether critics should offer judgment on art or not. McEvilley, a thorough-going postmodernist, basically says no--that's not the main purpose anymore, even though, of course, some judgment can hardly be avoided. Others disagree. The book hardly settles the issue, and many of the positions are quite nuanced (Arthur Danto and McEvilley especially).

Not surprisingly, what is interesting in a book like this is not the main argument, but all the little side arguments and observations. I've complained of my own tendency to be a "booster." Rubenstein in his introduction writes that this is a common attitude--given the relatively indifferent or hostile environment in which art (especially contemporary art) exists, art critics around the country feel obliged to be boosters--to talk art up. Rubenstein imagines an earlier, less pandering age. But, he writes:

It seems that the booster critic is central to modern art. Making the rounds in Chelsea not long ago I ran into Irving Sandler, who has been a tireless critic and chronicler of the New York art world for fifty years. [...] Sandler said something that surprised me: that in the '50s criticism in New York's Abstract-Expressionist milieu was almost wholly positive because critics like him felt they had to argue the case for what the artists were doing, to promote the cause of modern art in the face of a philistine or conservative audience. The image of the evangelical '50s critic was at odds with my picture of a more honest, judgmental critical practice, back when artists and critics were slugging it out at the Cedar Bar.

Elsewhere, contributors write about how intellectuals and academics (art historians, for example) don't take art criticism seriously--and Rubenstein's anecdote suggests one reason why.

Mentioned several times in the book is a round-table discussion put on by October (the journal founded by renegade, theory-steeped Artforum critics). One of the big arguments was against the notion of "bellelettristic" writing--essentially the fight between the theorists and the poets. Nancy Princenthal writes:

The problem with the contrast between defensible, systematic analysis and unapologetically writerly subjectivity is [...] a specious opposition. On one hand, there is no self-evident reason to make the linkages between art and theory that have been argued over the past twenty years, productive and often fascinating though they have been. Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Marxist economic theory, structural anthropology--these are all fascinating fields, but they have no more compelling claims as explanatory systems for art criticism than do theology, mathematics, or the physics of color (to name a few heuristic precedents).

On the other hand [...] good fiction and poetry can be every bit as lean, incisive and informative about actual experience in the real world, as any cultural or political theory.

Princenthal is writing about this roundtable, but her descriptions of the arguments allow her to make her own points. She discusses Marxist criticism and institutional critique, the province of one of a the roundtable participants, Benjamin Buchloh. As interesting as this kind of criticism can be (and Buchloh is definitely an interesting critic), there are multiple problems with it.

And since, as everybody knows, the great majority of art critics makes very little money writing art criticism, there is the danger that a kind of sanctimony can creep into the practice. Disinterestedness is actually, in some ways, a handicap. [...] At the same time, money is not the only register of power. In response to Buchloh [, Robert] Storr eventually responded, 'I find it curious that those currently engaged in critical activities (such as "institutional critique") seem to think everything is fair game except the academy. It is a dubious exception.'

Is it any wonder that many people resent the blithe Marxism of academics? This is not to say that Marxism isn't an interesting analytical tool, but I think there is a problem when almost all economic analysis of art or art institutions comes from that place. At this stage in my reading life, I would rather read The $12 Million Dollar Stuffed Shark--a non-Marxist economic analysis--than another puritanical critique of art as commerce.

Princenthal is not the greatest writer, but she is a good thinker about critical writing and is capable of great pith. For example, "In critical writing, clarity is close to an ethical imperative. It enfranchises readers." This is one reason I have always preferred McEvilley over all the other theory slingers.

Carter Ratcliff's essay starkly defines the conflict as being between poets and theorists, and comes down firmly on the poet's side. He even gives us a little history. ARTNews had historically been the home of poet-critics--Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, etc. Artforum was formed in response to ARTNews, and it was where the theorists wrote. While the Artforum guys excoriate Clement Greenberg, Ratcliff accuses them of wanting to be Greenberg in the sense that thier work would have "rigor." But he criticisizes them for their potted theory, which for the most part takes bits and pieces from earlier writers (Walter Benjamin, for example), and decontextualizes them in service of this new rigorous theoretical criticism. In short, Ratcliff inverts the judgment argument, saying that it is not the poets and belleletrists who are imposing Olympian judgments, it is the theorists with their pretensions of quasi-scientific analysis. Ratliff knows that when he makes a judgment, it is inherently conditional. "Artworks are fictive, so is any account of the true nature of art. The best criticism feels at home with this uncertainty, or at one with it, and wants to illuminate it."

There is much more in this book worth reading, and all sides represent themselves pretty well. The essays are (surprisingly) readable, as if they each took Nancy Princenthal's admonition to heart. Personally, I found the book useful. It will probably have an effect on my own writing--not the least of which is to make me more self-conscious.