Nonsequiturs Seeking Congruence in the Seemingly Incongruous

<p>I hope you found the thread title to be annoying. I meant it to be so. It's

a paraphrase of a quote from the catalog to the Whitney Biennial which are in

turn taken from an article, <a

href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120848379018525199.html?

mod=taste_primary_hs">The Lost Art of Writing About Art</a>. The full quote is

below along with another example:</p>

<p>". . . invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly

incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those

interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion."</p>

 

<p>"Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-

specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them

out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new

adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings."</p>

 

<p>"Richard Lacayo, on a Time magazine blog, likened reading the show's

introductory wall text ("Many of the projects . . . explore fluid communication

structures and systems of exchange") to "being smacked in the face with a

spitball.""</p>

<p>"... Until Duchamp, criticism was aesthetically based. The critic talked

about a painting's subject, the way the artist handled color, drawing,

composition and the like. With Readymades, the object's appearance and beauty

were no longer the issue -- indeed, they were irrelevant. What mattered was the

idea behind the work -- the point the artist was trying to make. So art

criticism moved from the realm of visual experience to that of philosophy. The

writer no longer had to base his critical observations on a close scrutiny of

the work of art. He could simply riff."</p>

<p>"... If the Whitney continues to snub this public -- its core audience --

by "explaining" art with incomprehensible drivel, it shouldn't be surprised if

people decide to return the favor and walk away."</p>

<p>Aside from laughing at the truly awful samples from the catalog, how do you

feel about the suggestion that art criticism was ever purely "aesthetically

based"?</p>

<p>-Julie</p>

<i>With Readymades, the object's appearance and beauty were no longer the issue -- indeed, they were irrelevant. What mattered was the idea behind the work -- the point the artist was trying to make. So art criticism moved from the realm of visual experience to that of philosophy.</i>

<p>

Ideas are the products of philosophy, right? What about the beauty or ugliness of ideas themselves?These qualities are of course relative and subjective.

Frankly, the article sounds like incomprehensible drivel but my criticism is "purely

subjective"!

 

Judi Howcroft<div></div>

Julie--

 

Bad or pretentious writing hopefully will not be confused with good philosophy.

 

Some art is, by its nature, more philosophical than others. I wouldn't expect a curator or

critic to write in similar terms about Monet and Duchamp. Because art is so all-

encompassing, it allows for visual beauty and cultural statements of change and lots of

other stuff to be under its auspices.

 

To me, the notion that art can "inhabit those interstitial spaces between understanding

and confusion," if I am willing to get past a big word, is one that's stimulating, worth

discussing.

 

Sometimes it's worth reading a passage three or four times in order to get its meaning.

Some concepts are just that hard and that's OK. Just because I might need a dictionary by

my side to help my comprehension doesn't mean the writing is bad. Our culture is more

and more demanding of simplicity of ideas. It's also increasingly anti-intellectual. Both are

potentially dangerous. Some things are simply not that simple.

 

Some of the stuff I read in art books and some stuff written on gallery walls is, however,

nothing but presumptuous. Not all is.

 

The assumption that "aesthetically-based" criticism is restricted only to appearance and

beauty is a limited reading of "aesthetic." To say that, "ntil Duchamp, criticism was

aesthetically based," is to leave out components of aesthetics relating to culture, emotion,

and taste, every bit as relevant to Duchamp as to Rembrandt.

 

Since many artists riff, it's sometimes appropriate for critics to do the same.

<p>Fred,</p>

<p>I have limited time to post this minute, but <a href="http://catherinesarttours.blogspot.com/2008/04/writing-on-this-blog-is-quirky-making.html">Catherine Spaeth</a> has a good, measured posting about the language of the Whitney catalog on her blog -- along with equally reasonable responses. I think you may agree with what she says. But I may be wrong... Below is one small quote from her much longer, and well-written opinion:</p>

 

<p>"Art belongs to a history of thought, in all its different aspects and manifestations. As awkward as curatorial writing might be at times, those writers do articulate something visible in the work on view. What I read in the Biennial catalog, then, is a strain in the voice that comes from a lack of ease with difficulty, and good arts writing requires that one be at ease with difficulty. This is a different problem than that of "insider talk" and has more to do with the very real difficulty of art and of thought."</p>

<p>A good response the the Wall Street Journal article (linked in my lead post) is found at <a href="http://hragvartanian.com/2008/04/18/wsj-adds-its-voice-to-the-artspeak-debate/">Hrag Vartanian</a>. Sample quote:</p>

<p>"Never mind the fact that Eurocentric male heterosexist values predominated the language of this "accessible" art criticism ... and never mind that that limited perspective essentially alienated or overlooked the majority of the art audience (women, etc.). Or how about the fact that as a genre modern art criticism was only a century or two old and still developing (Diderot's writings in the 18th C. were nothing like Gombrich's or Panofsky's in the 20th C.). It's a bizarre argument filled with nostalgia for something that I don't think ever existed. I can almost hear the writer thinking?<i>Damn barbarians, why did they have to crash the gates of Rome and throw the good ol' values to the wind?</i>"</p>

<p>-Julie</p>

Pomo-speak -- the sort of thing you get from Andy Bulhak's Postmodern Generator, which some of the above is of like species -- may be a strategy on the part of The Humanities to get some funding by sounding technical just like The Sciences. It's been a long time, at least 10 years, but perhaps you recall the Sokal affair?

 

Anyway, I prefer the supposed "Eurocentric male heterosexist (EMH)" language (everyone knows that, until 1973, women and gays spoke different languages than hetero men) mainly because I don't have to translate it word for word, phrase for phrase, into something else, as I presume women and gays must do to comprehend EMH...so I guess fair is fair.

 

It is true though that Art in the University sense is recent, contemporary with the rise of the bourgeoisie, and there is always hay to be made in the humanities by crushing once again the pretentious and awkward sentiments of Victorian bourgeois.

 

And I do get down on my knees and pray each night thanking God that I don't do Art and don't have an education 8-)

The Sokal prank was provoked by the scientific community's resentment at being treated as, and spoken of using the same langauge as the Humanities (and Social Sciences). That language (of the Humanities) is entirely appropriate for talking about the Humanities. Duh.

 

Big words don't always = technical.

 

-Julie

"Big words don't always = technical."

 

They sure did to the judges of Social Text 8-)

"The Sokal prank was provoked by the scientific community's resentment at being treated as, and spoken of using the same langauge as the Humanities"

 

Julie, I hope you will eventually recognize that as a justification or rationalization after the fact. It deflects from the fact that Social Text did not recognize nonsense even when written in language "entirely appropriate for talking about the Humanities".

 

Face the fact: the people at Social Text were impressed that a scientist deigned to recognize them. Their decisions were all political. They fell on their faces sucking up. And then...

 

Duh.

For those interested:

 

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/

Julie, thank you for posting this kind of article. I find it very useful. When I sometimes write the concept of my photo work for applying to different competitions, I really try hard to express what lies behind my work. But usually I refer to aesthetics than philosophy. Maybe I am an old fashioned.

 

Our contemporary art is very popular, it has been financed very much too. So, higher explanations are need it. The philosophy which can be found in it looks to me as one giant loop. See, the header of the article at first looks as a loop.

Why we want to look for congruence in incongruous situations. I don't know, but I am aware that it is about HARD WAY of looking at things in life.

 

(Usually when I read an essay or critics, I have to re-read it because I don't want to forget anything, but rather to learn.)

Kristina--

 

I love your idea of the loop. There's a great book by Douglas Hofstadter (mathematician,

phsycist) called Godel Escher Bach that talks a lot about endless loops and infinite

regresses. I think the language of both art and philosophy can be difficult sometime

because it is not easy expressing many of the contradictions that are inherent in both

subjects. Often, what art expresses are much more difficult if not impossible to express in

words. Nevertheless, critics and philosophers do their best for various reasons. The use of

contradictory words and phrases is often a necessary verbal approach.

Thank you Fred.

Yes I know about that book. I had been reading it twice.

I think that artist has to live his own art work. He should be his own work of art, representing everything what he is - his beliefs, emotions, sensibility, mentality, character. Even if he misses some of that.

 

I wonder how Duchamps was feeling when he made "Fountain". I can see his mentality and character, but other I don't.

Kristina,

 

Thanks and I appreciate your point of view.

 

I meant to dig up some examples of single-sentence writing about art (photography in particular) that I like, but I didn't allow myself enough time, so I have only two to post -- and neither has any "big words" in it. However, both require some thought to be fully appreciated. (The two are from unrelated sources and are about different photographers.)

 

"They are rare, unconscious, but persistent: the incongruity of man and what he has constructed, the ritual of letters and signs, and a certain indefinable fright hidden in these plain and architectural shadows."

 

"There is frequently, in ****'s pictures a gaze or a light that seems to pierce through the gravity of being, through the blind weight of things given."

 

-Julie

"They are rare, unconscious, but persistent: the incongruity of man and what he has constructed, the ritual of letters and signs, and a certain indefinable fright hidden in these plain and architectural shadows."

 

This is wonderful description. I'd like to see the photos.

<p>Kristina,</p>

 

<p>That quote was written by Ben Maddow in the book, <i>The Photography of Max Yavno</i>. Click <a href="http://www.masters-of-fine-art-photography.com/02/artphotogallery/photographers/max_yavno_01.html">here</a> to go to a good sample (21 imaages) of his work. Use the little "next" button to advance through the series.</p>

 

<p>The other quote was written by Mikael van Reis in the introduction to the book <i>Flamingo</i> by Robert Frank (the Hasselblad Award 1996)</p>

<p>-Julie</p>

How interesting to reference Yavno and Maddow. I wonder what they would say regarding Sokal's "But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class."

On Robert Frank:

SICK OF GOODBY'S, 1978.

I like these concepts. (He created it after his daughter died in an airplane accident.)

 

HOLD STILL: KEEP GOING.

 

"Memory helps you--like stones in a river help you reach the shore." - R. Frank

 

Julie, do you have a photos from that collection Hold still, Keep going?

 

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue2/sixreflectionsfrank.htm

 

"Sick of Goodby?s is a picture of emotional exhaustion. The date is scrawled in reverse at the bottom, but what does it say in the top corner? You take a mirror to try to read it. ?I am...?? Still not clear. A photograph is a mirror. In it you might examine yourself for signs of emotional wear and tear; to see how life is leaving its mark. In this picture is all Frank?s weariness. Too much has gone. He said: ?I have a lot in back of me ? of what has happened in my life ? and that?s a tremendous pull backward. And in front of me I love the sea.?

<p>Kristina,</p>

<p>No, sorry. I like your quotes, though.</p>

<p>Here are a few more one-liners that I like:</p>

<p>"The trick is not to be seduced by the beautiful but to struggle <i>against</i> accomplishment and push toward something more personal."</p>

<p>"Abstraction is portable structure within the transitiveness of events."</p>

<p>"Quite beyond the telling of it, as well as the seeing of it, exceeding both our criticism and our appreciation, the camera's eye combines how we see with whatever is there to be seen."</p>

<p>"If one animal tells another animal about territory by urinating on a rock, is that linguistic or pictorial logic?"</p>

 

<p>==============================</p>

<p>Attributions in the order posted: Joel Meyerowitz; Frederick Sommer; Wright Morris; question addressed to Frederick Sommer.

<p>-Julie</p>