The Pan Review of Books: Recent Readings

Robert Boyd


Hanging Man: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei by Barnaby Martin (Faber & Faber, 2013). This is a scattered book. Barnaby Martin is not just writing about the arrest of Ai Weiwei, but also about his life leading up to the arrest, the life of his father, the political situation in China from the the Qing dynasty to the present. The amazing thing is that he sort of succeeds. If you are, like me, woefully ignorant of China and the situation that Chinese artists and intellectuals labor under, Hanging Man is actually a good primer.

On April 11, 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested. Held incommunicado, he was abruptly released on June 22. At first he didn't want to talk about his captivity because if there was one thing he knew, it could happen again at any time. (Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo is still a political prisoner, so fame is not a perfect shield.) But he finally opened up to his friend Martin. The story had to be told not for his sake, but for the sake of the 55 other known artists, writers and activists who were rounded up at the same time and are still missing.

Ai describes his questioning and the fantastic gulf between him and his interlocutors. It is the same gulf that exists between many artists, particularly conceptual artists, and the public. The public can't see what they are doing is art and assume that there is some kind of scam happening. The police thought that perhaps it was a form of money laundering. But in the United States, the worst a conceptual artist suffers is a kind of invisibility or scorn. Explaining his work to a barely educated chain-smoking cop was a life-or-death matter for Ai.

Ai's international fame probably mitigated his improsonment. But why were all these artists and writers rounded up in the first place? It was the Arab Spring--the uprisings that over-through dictators in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. These scared China. They were afraid that a "jasmine revolution" could happen in China. Mohamed Bouazizi sets himself on fire on December 17, 2010 in Tunisia and four months later, Ai Weiwei is arrested as a result. Cause and effect.

China experts will find lots of potted history and things to disagree with here. Martin acknowledges this as best he can. He knows this brief book is not--cannot be--the whole story of any of its subjects: Chinese history, Chinese contemporary art, Chinese activism, Ai Weiwei, etc. I wish he had included an appendix of further reading suggestions.  But as an introduction to these various subjects, Hanging Man is excellent.


Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art by David W. Galenson (Harvard University Press, 2001). David Galnson, an economist at the University of Chicago, presumes to write about art history. It's as if someone took all the propaganda about interdisciplinarity seriously. Even art critics find the narrowness of art writing intolerable. As Nancy Princenthal wrote in her essay "Art Criticism Bound to Fail" (2006): "Semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Maxist 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 some heuristic precedents)." I've always favored looking at art through the lenses of the social sciences, particularly economics and sociology. But it is one thing to do this in a highly theoretical way (as do most Marxist art critics, like Benjamin Buchloh) and quite another to use the basic substrate of those fields--data. It's one of the reasons that Pierre Bourdieu's writings about art and its audiences carry so much weight--he collected the data and looked at what the data told him. That's what Don Thompson did in The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, where he found that statistically speaking that art magazines and critics had very little direct effect on the value of works of art (which was a load off my mind).

Galenson takes one of the most popular data sets available for the art world--auction results, and combines it with the birth dates of modern (impressionism to about pop and minimalism) artists, the dates they started their careers, and the dates they did works that had come up at auction. What he wanted to see was if an artists' most valuable works came at a particular time in his life. This turns out to be true, but he discovered something more interesting--that some artist's most valuable works come very early in their career while some come relatively late. If he had made of histogram of this (which is a kind of graph of the distribution), it would have looked like a bactrian camel. This is a great, somewhat surprising result. Once you have data showing you something like this, your job is to try to construct a plausible theory for why it is so. Galenson's theory is that there are some modern artists who reach their goal after long years of trying things and experimenting and honing their ideas and their skills. Cezanne would the the obvious example of this sort of artist. There are other artists who come up with an idea and execute it fully formed, like Athena emerging full grown and armored from Zeus's head. Picasso with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is an example, as are the stripe paintings of Frank Stella. These usually come early in the artist's career. Galenson calls the first group experimentalists and the second group conceptualists, and suggest that their way of looking at art is fundamentally different.

One problem with this theory is that it assumes that the importance or quality of a body of work from an artist's career is, on average, congruent with the paintings that got highest prices at auction. But he finds a couple of other data-driven ways to demonstrate this. For example, he assumes that broadly speaking, there is a consensus among art historians about which are the most important works of a given artist (obviously there will be disagreements among individual art historians). To figure out what that consensus might be, he looked at the pictures used to illustrate 33 English-language art history surveys published sine 1968. He compared those images with the auction leaders for each artist and found a high overlap, which indicated that the highest priced works also tended to be the ones considered important by art historians.

Of course, he also backs this up with non-numeric data sources--art history texts, art criticism, and original texts by artists themselves (Pissarro's letters look like they must be quite entertaining, based on the bits quoted here).

There are big problems with this approach. It removes the artist from his historical setting. For example, all the abstract expressionists are seen as experimentalists, but considering that they spent the beginnings of their careers 1) in the Depression and 2) somewhat cut off from what was happening in Europe, they had little choice but to get to where they were going through a process of gradual change. They couldn't easily look at what some slightly older artist was doing and take a leap form there. Picasso, on the other hand, could see all the experimental modernism he wanted--he could see the last Cezannes shortly after the master painted them. In a sense, he was in the position to use Cezanne's lifetime of gradual experimentalism to launch his one great conceptual advance, cubism. In short, artists respond to the circumstances they're in.

That said, it's an interesting way to think about the past 150 years of art, and the data is the data. Even if Galenson's interpretation is wrong, the data still exists for some other art historian to examine and draw conclusions from it. But that will only happen if they, like sociologists and psychologists and economists, take a couple of stats classes and learn the math.

cover by Killoffer

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, translated by Marshall Berman (Penguin Classics). "A spectre is haunting Europe--the spectre of Communism." So begin one of the most important political documents of modern history. It's ending is equally famous: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE!" But why buy a copy of The Communist Manifesto? Many copies can be found for free online.

At 43 pages, The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet, not a book. To fill out this Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, they had to include an introduction by the translator (the recently deceased Marshall Berman) and introductions to the subsequent German, Italian, English, Polish and Russian editions by Engels. So why did I spend $13 on it? Because I love the cover by Killoffer, one of the great French Comics artists who came to prominence through the legendary collective comics publishing outfit, L'Association. Not that much of his comics have been published in English--a few stories in Mome and the amazing solipsistic book Six-hundred and Seventy-six Apparitions of Killoffer. (You can see an excerpt of the latter here.) His cover for the Communist Manifesto is incredible--he uses every square centimeter--the french flaps, the front and back covers, the spine--to present a single continuous image. What did Marx say about commodity fetishism? Excuse me please while I go and admire my new possession.

The Pan Review of Books: 9.5 Theses on Art and Class

Paul Mullan


Ben Davis , 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2013. 228pp., $16.00 pb. , ISBN 978-1608462681). Cover by William Powhida. (Click here for a larger version of the cover drawing.)

In 1937, the Spanish Civil War was raging. On one side, the insurgent army of fascist General Francisco Franco received ample support from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, in the form of both expeditionary forces and massive arms supplies. On the other side was the democratically-elected Republican government in Madrid, and allied militias organized by an assortment of socialist, communist, and anarchist parties – all of which Franco wanted to utterly demolish. Western powers, including the US, Britain, and France, nominally had a policy of “non-intervention”, which meant that the Republicans received material aid from only from the Soviet Union and Mexico. Volunteers from around the world – through, for example, the International Brigades – arrived in Spain to fight for the Republican cause. The conflict was, legitimately, understood by many as the front-line in the battle against encroaching fascism and as the opening guns of a second world war in Europe.

In January of that year, representatives of the Spanish government visited the prominent Pablo Picasso, then living in Paris, and asked him to create a mural in support of the Republicans and for exhibition at the upcoming World’s Fair. Picasso was sympathetic to their struggle in his native. However, he was initially uncertain as to how the war should be represented in the planned large-scale work.

In an attempt to terrorize and demoralize the Republican population, the German Condor Legion, at Franco’s behest, carpet bombed the Basque town of Guernica in April, destroying large areas and reportedly killing or injuring thousands. This indiscriminate slaughter of civilians was one of the first instances in Europe of such air attacks (though not elsewhere). News reporters covering the conflict in Spain arrived on the scene the same day, and their dispatches spurred international outrage. Picasso now had the impetus for the final mural.

Guernica was seen in the Spanish Pavilion later that year in Paris by hundreds of thousands of World’s Fair attendees; in early 1939, it traveled to London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, where it was seen by tens of thousands more. The British tour was supported by the Artists’ International Association (AIA), local trades councils, and other organizations raising political awareness of the Republican cause and providing aid (ambulances, field kitchens, and refugee relief, for example). The London opening featured a talk, not from any conventional artworld figure, but from the leader of the left-wing Labour Party. The price of admission was a pair of boots, which were to be sent to fighters in Spain; rows of boots were left at the base of the mural by workers – many from the nearby, working-class East End – visiting the exhibition.

In his recent 9.5 Theses on Art and Class– a collection of essays written over the past seven or eight years, with some new, some old, and some reworked for the publication of the book – Ben Davis remarks that little depicted in the renowned Guernica is specific to the bombing itself. Particularities of the doctrine of total warfare, the political context, the global struggle against fascism, and even modern life in general (excepting the lightbulb at the top-center of the canvas) are mostly absent from the work. Instead, Picasso used archaisms, such as the oil lamp and the shattered blade of a sword, and many of his traditional motifs, such as the bull, the horse, and the corrida. From the paradigmatic instance of engaged, militant art, Davis reasonably concludes that “in the relationship of art and politics, the political movement of which an artwork is part determines its overriding power, trajectory, and meaning”.

Davis is a Marxist, as well as until recently the executive editor of Blouin Artinfo, and became a political activist in New York City when he also began writing professionally about art, in the middle of the last decade. He describes, at a time when major anti-war protest was still a presence, inviting an artist he had met recently to an upcoming organizing meeting; the artist declined, saying that his painting was a sufficient “contribution to making the world a more peaceful place”. 9.5 Theses is deeply critical of the tendencies in contemporary art, and their theoretical edifices, that claim in different ways to substitute on-the-ground political mobilization with art and its practices.

In a discussion of the 2007 book Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, edited and introduced by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, Davis argues against, for instance, collective artistic labor becoming the “template” for committed art or assuming the “dignity of a full-blown alternative politics”. He caustically points out that musicians have routinely formed bands, without that collective labor being philosophically elevated into a putative political model, and that, indeed, most creative labor outside of the insular “artworld” is already performed, in a capitalist society, by anonymous workers in teams.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla were selected to be the official US representatives for the 2011 Venice Biennale in Italy. Their contribution to the US Pavilion included the installation Track and Field, an overturned fifty-ton tank with a exercise treadmill atop one of its tracks and a real Olympic athlete jogging on the treadmill. The artists viewed their piece as “critical” of US militarism. However, the US government itself, which had approved their proposal, found that piece far more conducive to its agenda, at a time when US armed forces were still occupying Afghanistan and intervening elsewhere. One State Department official referred to the use of “smart power” and a “softer image” internationally, which Allora and Calzadilla’s installation helped enable.


Allora & Calzadilla, Track and Field, 2011. U.S. Pavilion, 54th International Art Exhibition, presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

Another chapter suggests that these two wildly disparate interpretations of Track and Field demonstrate the limitations of an “aesthetic politics” disconnected from the particularities of the actually-existing situation. By way of the theories of hegemony as put forth by Antonio Gramsci, a leader in the early Communist Party of Italy, Davis argues that “modern capitalist states rule via combining direct force with efforts to gain ideological legitimacy” and that the artwork ended up well serving the latter purpose. For in 2011, the particularities of the situation included the Obama administration’s “new” approach and rejuvenated efforts to globally shore up the ideological legitimacy of the US; this was understood by many as very different from the overtly-belligerent approach of the immediately-preceding Bush administration. Also, by that point, the antiwar movement had long since ceased to bring enormous number of people into the streets; a concrete foundation for the artists’ “critical” aims was thus lacking..

These concerns drive Davis’ perspective that art’s political meanings are determined by the real, specific political situations – not just by the abstract properties of a form, medium, or practice – and, as well, that artists should engage with real, on-the-ground political movements. While certain projects are suggested, such as agitating for increased funding for arts education in conjunction with the defense of beleaguered public school systems, 9.5 Theses mostly leaves open the question of how exactly those should happen going forward. The book is primarily about contemporary art and not historical instances of art’s engagement with such movements. The concluding chapter has only a brief on three of those instances: the Great Depression era in the US, when early modernists, such as Stuart Davis, and social realists made committed art and actively supported the labor struggles raging around them; Womanhouse, a highly-influential installation organized in Los Angeles in the early 1970s by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro and which was a popular conduit, with ten thousand attending over the span of a month, for the then-new practice of feminist consciousness-raising; and Gran Fury, a key arts-and-graphics collective in ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which was battled criminal government neglect of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This need for greater involvement with broader movements outside of the “artworld’s” confines is a perspective further buttressed by Davis’ definition of artists as middle-class and not working-class.

A Marxist definition of class is not based upon income (as to do so would have strange effects). For instance, a middle-class person who is not a member of a union can easily make less in wages than a working-class person who is in a union; a member of the petit-bourgeoisie, i.e. a small business owner, can have employees but still be poor. Davis is not claiming that artists are making a good living from their art; ample evidence he cites indicates their real, onerous conditions. One widely-circulated estimate in the early 2000s (from Dan Thomson’s The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art) was that, out of 80,000 or so visual artists in New York City and London combined, there are 75 superstars with incomes above one million and 300 “merely” successful artists with incomes above 100,000. Making a living from their art is only a “dream” (the term in Davis’ little pamphlet from which the book gets its title) for the significant majority of everybody else, who require other jobs or supplemental income; these other jobs will make them (in most cases) working class.

What, then, drives Davis’ particular definition of artists’ class position?

First, there is the question of the labor process. Middle-class labor is performed with greater creativity and autonomy; working-class labor with lesser. Davis notes of the first type: “artists function as their own … franchises, and are expected to have their own … signatures or styles”. Moreover, “uniqueness and independence of mind are selling points when it come to art”. Of the second type, with which most of us are quite familiar, he notes that the working-class “must take direction”, via regimentation, “corporate mandates”, and other mechanisms. Workers are also “ever more disposable”; they must “sell their labor power as an abstract thing in order to earn a wage”.

Second, there is the question of the final product of the labor process. The working-class, obviously, is strictly exchanging its labor power for a wage and has no control or claim over the final product of that work, which is sold by a boss for profit. However, artists, paradigmatic of the middle-class, have a much greater degree of control over the final product of their work. Davis points to the examples of longstanding “struggles over intellectual property” law, as well as “contemporary debates over whether artists deserve ‘resale royalties’ for works sold on the secondary market”.

Of this distinction between middle-class and working-class creative labor, Davis draws a useful analogy: “The difference between a visual artist and a commercial artist is not unlike the difference between someone who owns their own food stand and a cook who works at a restaurant. Both make food. One has more say over what, how and when it is made and to whom it is sold”.

9.5 Theses posits a working-class artistic ideal, which “represent[s] a form of labor that is opposed to the demands of work, as freely determined expression, whether private or political. Viewed from this angle, art is deprofessionalized and in this sense is actually more ‘free’ than the middle-class ideal of personal-expression-as-career”. The significant majority of artists have minimal, or zero, material encounters with the markets or other institutions. In many cases, there are no transactions; nothing is sold; and work is never exhibited in a museum, gallery, or alternative space. Artists are already – whatever their “dream” may be – effectively making art solely as a free creative act and for their personal satisfaction. This real position, even though Davis has classified artists qua artists as middle-class, is already very close to the working-class artistic ideal he articulates. There isn’t a great leap from the former to the latter, and this leaves Davis’ class analysis feeling rather strained.

That said, the call for artists to relate more closely to actually-existing political mobilizations, and the critiques of those who propose to substitute such mobilizations with art and its practices, are a strength of the book. As Davis states: “There are no formal or aesthetic solutions to the political and economic dilemmas that art faces – only political and economic solutions”.

Why Doesn't MOMA Have a Department of Comics?

Robert Boyd



I just read Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps, the lushly-produced catalog for the Art Speigelman retrospective that has been traveling around the world for almost two years (the last stop is at the Jewish Museum in New York from November 8, 2013, to March 30, 2014). It's a lovely catalog--I highly recommend it. Right now, we seem to be at a high water mark for comics in museums. Three weeks after the Daniel Clowes exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago closes, Co-Mix opens in New York. So three cheers for comics, right? Well, two cheers. After all, how much comics are in any museum's permanent collection? How many curators specialize in this type of art? Does any major museum have a specific collection or department of comics?

These questions came to me in response to the essay written by Robert Storr that is included in Co-Mix. The essay, "Making Maus," is in two parts--one originally written in 1991, then a long postscript added in 2012. The first part was written for a small exhibit focused on Maus at MoMA, Making Maus. The subsequent part addresses comics as an art, but also discusses comics in relation to MoMA.

It was my hope in 1991 that, as the first MoMA exhibition of comics as art rather than as an inspiration for art, Making Maus might initiate a process of reevaluation that would eventually lead to MoMA's full recognition of this quintessentially modern medium. This would, I hoped, result in the creation of its own department much as was done for film, another genre whose identity is determined by the contradictions of its simultaneous existence as a means of artistic expression and of mass entertainment, its divided territory as a site of independent, artisanal invention and corporate, industrial production. Consistent with that goal I tried to interest colleagues in the Department of Drawings in the curatorial process that, largely driven by Spiegelman's fervor, finally led to the Masters of American Comics exhibition jointly mounted by the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2005--but to no avail. Bu 2005 I was out of MoMA and unable to pursue any further campaign for such recognition. But I persist in believing there is a place for comics in any museum of modern or contemporary art, and the evidence that they have become among the most fertile fields for young artists continues to grow. Someday soon the citadels of culture will be forced to open their gates and let "the barbarians" in--only to discover how sophisticated they are. Then that happens at MoMA, I will be proud to say that I was in the advance party that prepared the way.

I was staggered to read this--Robert Storr tried to start a Department of Comics at MoMA. MoMA has seven departments: Architecture & Design, Drawings, Film, Media & Performance Art, Painting & Sculpture, Photography and Prints & Illustrated Books. How exciting it would be if "comics" had been added to the list! And Storr, far from being a rebel or outsider, is as much an insider in the art world as one can imagine.

But MoMA isn't the only museum in America that could take up the gauntlet. In my fantasies, I imagine that Gary Tinterow reads The Great God Pan Is Dead in slow moments at the office at the MFAH. The MFAH, much more broadly focused than MoMA, has 15 departments, including a film department. So Mr. Tinterow, if you are reading, what do you think of Mr. Storr's proposal? I know the museum is in an expansionary mode right now. Here is an art form primed and ready for major recognition by large institutions devoted to art. Why not be first? And if you are worried about your budget, I can guarantee that a curatorial department devoted to comics as art would be the least expensive department you would have.

Well, we all have fantasies.

"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.)

Recently Read Art Books

by Robert Boyd

Here are a few art books I've read this year. Most of them are several years old--I tend to prowl the shelves of used-book stores like Kaboom. 


The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq. A very interesting novel about a contemporary artist, Jed Martin. The novel starts with Martin destroying his latest painting, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst Divide the Art Market. It was to be the last painting of a series depicting people in the context of their professions. This scene is followed by a flashback that describes Martin's upbringing, education, and progress as an artist. What I liked very much was that Martin was thoroughly modern. I know a lot of older painters who look down their noses at non-traditional mediums. But people of Martin's generation see photography (and computer programs like Photoshop) as being as legitimate as painting and fundamentally interchangeable with painting. So Jed goes from being a pure photographer to being a photographer who digitally manipulates his images to being a painter. (Later he does video with the aid of custom-designed software.) In his mind, he is adjusting his mediums in response to changes in subject matter, which have different requirements.

But the novel surprises you suddenly when Michel Houellebecq himself becomes a character--and a major one. I won't write more about it lest I spoil the plot. The focus is Martin and his parallel life's journey and artistic journey. I'd like to know what artists make of him. So often when an artist is depicted in a film or a book, the depiction rings false. But in The Map and the Territory, I was convinced.


Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story by Amanda Vaill. I read Calvin Tompkins' Living Well Is the Best Revenge, which was written while Gerald and Sara Murphy were still alive. It's good, but Everybody Was So Young is better--it carries them past their golden decade in France to the more difficult 30s and 40s until their deaths. (That golden decade was fictionalized in Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald--the protagonists, Dick and Nicole Diver, are loosely based on the Murphys.) Murphy was a serious amateur painter whose work is now rightly considered among the best American painting of the 20th century. But his painting was not the couple's primary gift to culture--it was being the hosts for some of the greatest writers and artists of the 20th century. When I imagine how an artist gets to be great, I first think of the artists themselves, and then about the gate-keepers and promoters--the gallery owners, the editors, the curators, the impresarios, etc. But the Murphys were not gatekeepers, and yet they contributed much by virtue of their enthusiasms and friendships to literature, to painting, and to ballet. By covering their post-"Lost Generation" years, Vaill lets us see the tragedies of their lives alongside the golden peak.


American Art Since 1900 edited by Annette DiMeo Carlozzi and Kelly Baum. Don't be mislead by this title. The American art in this book is all chosen from the collection of the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. Like most small or medium-sized museums (and like some large ones), the Blanton's collection has its idiosyncrasies. In this case, the big idiosyncrasy is that a majority of the post-war American art in their collection was donated by a single collector, novelist James Michener. Michener was a major collector who bought 297 works between 1959 to 1975 which he subsequently donated to the Blanton. He had a pretty good eye and advanced tastes--quite surprising given that Michener is the quintessential middle-brow novelist. The Blanton really lucked out. He only bought paintings, though, which leaves out a lot of important work, especially in the 60s. And he mostly avoided Pop art (one Robert Indiana painting). But he bought lots of abstract art by key artists: Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, Brice Marden, etc. By basing so much of their collection on Michener, it means that the Blanton has no Warhol, no Rauschenberg, no Johns, and many others of that generation. (At least I assume they didn't have work by these artists--if they did, they would have included it. This show dates from 2006, so theyt may have filled in their collection subsequently.) The other idiosyncrasy is that there is a lot of art by Texas artists here. This is not art that would normally be included in a survey exhibit of 20th century American art. That said, I'm glad for the inclusion--especially Jerry Bywaters' Oil Field Girls. Each work gets its own essay, and there are longer essays in the back by such writers as David Hickey and Raphael Rubenstein. There is also an amazing essay by Robert Kushner about Michener's collecting habits, where he critiques what Michener bought year by year.


No. 1: First Works by 362 Artists by Matthew Rosenzweig and Francesca Richer. This book has an intriguing concept. They asked artists the question, what do you consider your first work of art? 362 answered. Some gave them the oldest work from their childhood. A few gave them the first work they made after they had formed the ambition of being an artist (often a work from adolescence). Most gave them the first work that they considered a mature work--work that was no longer the work of a student, or the work of a young derivative artist. With 362 artists, working an a very wide variety of media, and from several generations, you get an interesting view of art today, as well as a sense of how artists of different generation and different countries view the process of artistic maturation.

Texas Art Books

Robert Boyd



You may have seen the above book in bookstores and thought, I'd like to have that on my coffee table--or as my coffee table (its dimensions are 17" x 10"). But you may have balked at the price tag--$150. This month's rent or a big art book? Hmm, tough choice! If you can't afford it now, I have some advice for you--wait five or ten years, and you might be able to buy Texas Artists Today for $5. Why do I think this? Because that's how much I paid yesterday for this book at the Museum of Fine Arts bookstore:





Texas: 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is not quite as huge as Texas Artists Today, but it is no pamphlet. It has 277 full color pages in an over-sized package. For five dollars, it was an unbelievable bargain--not because it's big (hardly a virtue in the world of books), but because the art and text inside are really good.

Texas was published in 2000, so it is 10 years out of date. Furthermore, while Texas Artists Today featured only living artists, Texas included quite a few artists who were already dead when the catalog was published--including Forrest Bess and Joseph Glasco--and many who died in the subsequent decade--John Biggers, Jim Love, Dorothy Hood, Luis Jimenez, etc. Still, I'd say most of the artists in Texas are still alive and producing, and there is an overlap between the two books, including The Art Guys, David Aylsworth, Bill Davenport, Sharon Engelstein, Rachel Hecker, Paul Kittelson, Sharon Kopriva, Bert Long, Aaron Parazette, Salle Werner Vaughn and probably a few others that I'm missing.

Other differences? Texas Artists Today reproduces much more work by each of the artists, so you get a better idea of the range of work each produces. (And the photos are gorgeous and large.) Texas typically has just one or two photographs per artist. Score one for Texas Artists Today. On the other hand, Texas is a more professional book. There is a hint of vanity project with Texas Artists Today. It's one thing to list everyone who worked on a book (preferably in small type in the acknowledgments); it's another thing to take a photo of the editorial/design team and reproduce it huge on page 6. That's not the only weird vanity-ish move. At the beginning of each artist's section, there is a "collage" of photo images of the art and the artist. The photos were taken by Jenny Antill and the design of the collage was by Tatiana Massey. I know this because this credit is repeated under every single "collage" in the book, all 62 of them.

I worked in publishing a long time. I wish I had been a consulting editor on this project. I would have told them that plastering the names (and photos!) of the people who worked on the book all over it is highly unprofessional, very bush-league behavior. One discreet listing is proper. But they didn't ask me. They are promising a second volume, so maybe they will tone down the patting-ourselves-on-the-back moves a bit.

That said, it's a nice book full of great photos. If you have $150 burning a hole in your pocket right now, go pick it up. Otherwise, don't forget that you can get Texas over at The MFAH for $5--which may be what Texas Artists Today will go for in 10 years. Who knows?