The hardest I’ve ever laughed is at myself. There have been times when I’ve been alone, or in company, and have laughed so hard at a thought or impression of mine that I become almost unhinged: my eyes tear up, and I throw back my head and cackle to the skies. Sometimes I try to explain what I’ve found funny, but these attempts inevitably turn into broken raving–I can’t speak fast enough to match my thoughts, and there seems no way to make it make sense. The more I try to explain it, the more I realize how impossible it is. My laughter picks up again–I can’t be understood! Ha!

But what do I find so funny? Of course I can’t explain it. A thought or impression I’ve had becomes a true “inside joke,” that is, only a joke I could get, a thought that would make sense if you were me, and knew the whole history of my inner life. This “inside joke” seems to reference the most inward part of me, and reminds me, in a way, that I have a self. Of course, everyone knows they have a self. But most of our lives are directed outward, and most of our thinking about our “selves” is when we are distressed. We think about our self when we need to hammer out some emotional issue or try to fix some problem. How rare it is to actually have a completely inner-looking experience of joy?

What’s really going on when I get into a laughing fit is that I’m accessing the most obscure part of myself. We can think of a person’s s sensibility as being in layers, with the most superficial layers being the most easily communicated and the deepest layers being the most particular to the person and therefore the more obscure. But one of the great paradoxes about obscurity is that the more you can explain, draw out, or otherwise present the most undiluted part of your sensibility, the more resonant your art will be. So the artist must deal with a paradox: he or she must be facing inward (towards the self) while projecting what he or she sees outward. Art might be a little like the old trick of throwing your voice–a sound deep in the self that can be heard elsewhere.

Another way to say it is that to think like an artist is to carry on an idiosyncratic, private, and inexplicable dialogue with your imagination. But to actually be an artist, one must tangibly and deliberately bring forth this dialogue into concrete, comprehensible form. All artists must grapple with the inevitable compromises and losses that come from this transition from the inner to outer. The struggle, although really only a struggle of expression, seems to have an ethical element. There is something that doesn’t feel “right” about the feeling of reduction, of diminishment, that comes the minute we try to commit a fleeting impression to a permanent medium. And of course, there is the inevitable feeling that somehow we have edited out the very thing we hoped to convey in our very mode of expression. In all our thoughts of making good art, of creating something formally strong and recognizably beautiful, we end up fussy and restrained, when the feeling we hoped to covey was anything but.

A line in a recent New Yorker article about a staging of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury speaks to what artists wish for:

 A few posts ago, I wrote about art and science, specifically Jonah Lehrer’s book Proust was a Neuroscientist and his article “The Future of Science…is art?”  Since then, I’ve kept up with reading Lehrer’s blog, The Frontal Cortex, and the other week he wrote a post making the claim that creating art was just as difficult and serious-minded as scientific research, and therefore the discoveries made by art merit equal respect. Art is hard, Lehrer claims, because artists are “passionately interested in reality…”  That is, accuracy.

Basically, Lehrer (like many theorists who seek to blend art and science) is making the point that both artists and researchers are focused on same goal: to add to the store of human knowledge. But after reading Lehrer’s post and thinking about it a bit more, I believe art and science have even less in common than I indicated in my Art Science Phenomenon post. Art and science have different ideas of what knowledge is, and behind both art and science are contradictory assumptions about what can be known, and the value of knowing itself. Additionally, what is considered progress in art and science is nearly opposite: while science moves forward to more accurate truths by building on certain theories and shucking others, the “progress” of art (if you could call it that) involves simply inventing news ways interact with the unknown.

When I first started thinking about this, I drew a diagram depicting something like a climbing vine with offshoots to the right and left. The main trunk of the vine grows upward from some of the offshoots, while others end within themselves. This represents the progress of science–generally moving upward in knowledge by growing from solid ideas and leaving the inaccurate ones behind. Theories that do not end up being useful for the progress of science die, apart from than the afterlife crackpots might give them (I.e. stuff like this). In general, the progress of science has no room for its own folly. A discounted theory has no value, other than to show how much progress has been made (mankind used to be so foolish! We thought mice were born of grain! ha!) This model of progress is directly in conflict with art.

The progress of art best matches this image: a long fence or barrier, with activity and construction running the length of it, the point of which is to try to get over or through. The fence represents the unknown, I.e. the most enduring mysteries of existence (death, meaning of life, etc.) If art progresses, it progresses outward and not upward. Art walks the fenceline of the unknown, and each artist marks out a section of fence to try and break down. If there is any progress, it is in the growing knowledge of the unknown, revealed by each artist moving a bit further down its length as they look for a weak spot or way through. Progress might also be in the sheer variety and ingenuity of the attempts–some might try to dig under (would this be black humor?) and some try to launch themselves over (transcendentalism?) and some simply try to bore straight through (realism?). This model of progress values the attempt to understand the world, not the success of that attempt. Unlike science, there is no such thing as true dead end in art. Art succeeds by presenting a compelling way of confronting the unknown, rather than by adding to the known.P.S. Stay tuned for Artropolis Chicago 2008 coverage!.

Unlike people in most professions, a person who makes art must continually grapple with the title that comes with what they do. A teacher, cabinetmaker, or businessman can identify his or herself by profession without any real philosophical complications. Even if, say, a cabinetmaker does occasionally struggle with the meaning of what they do and why they do it, that struggle is not made manifest every time they must refer to themselves as a cabinetmaker.

 For an artist, however, identifying oneself as an artist is full of complications, both personal and public.The public end of it is pretty well known. Artists (and poets and writers) who refer to themselves as such have to deal with various public attitudes, ranging from condescending to needlessly reverent. For every person who skeptically asks how you’ll make a living, there’s someone else who is full of envy and admiration for what they imagine your life must be. Both responses can be uncomfortable, but the public or familial perception of an artist isn’t nearly as interesting as how an artist views his or herself.

Being an artist, almost above all else, requires attention to the “self.” I do not mean simply that an artist needs to be introspective, which is not always true, but that an artist must forever struggle with what it means to be a “self” out in the world. The role of the artist itself already makes this hard. On one hand, an artist needs to have a strong sense of self–an ego–to even have the confidence to make art or believe they have something worth saying. In other words, there needs to be a strong self to supply the “vision.“ On the other, an artist must renounce the self enough to be able to engage with some more universal strand of existence to avoid making work that is merely personal. And since observation is where all good art begins, an artist with too much self will limit what they can see in the world. Too strong a worldview interferes with perception, because it makes every observation match up with a preexisting view. But without any personal vision, the observer risks creating a mere record.

To frame this problem in a different way, the artist needs to simultaneously see themselves as a gifted individual with the ability to create, and as a humble conduit to a higher (universal, sublime, etc) truth. Obviously, these two conceptions of the self are in conflict. What is the role of an artist? A selfless chronicler of the beauty in the world or a bold individual who can find beauty in the banal and barren?

In numerous works, Hawthorne brings up yet another irresolvable conflict in the artist’s sense of self. Hawthorne seems to imply that an artist, to create art, must be more attentive, engaged, and connected to world than an average person. In essence, an artist must bear heightened witness to what they see. Yet this very attentiveness–a tight focus with art-making as its final goal–actually distances the artist from the very world they wish to engage. The fanatic attention to detail, the deep appreciation of quirks and foibles, the worship of the particular–none of this has much to do with the real business of living. If life is a rushing stream, the aesthetic and the beautiful are the rocky outcroppings that pull one out of its flow. So an artist, in their desperation to fully see and understand the world, becomes less a part of it in the very intensity of their attention. Hawthorne saw this paradox in its full irony and tragedy.

There is indeed a great deal of absurdity in the artist always seeing lines and forms rather than streetscapes, the poet taking line breaks rather than breaths, the actor tuned to the delivery over the thing said. Hawthorne makes liberal mockery of obliviousness of the artist–in all their talk of form, alliteration, and tone, they miss what’s really there. Yet at the same time, Hawthorne recognizes that the artist must step back to be an artist–like a impressionist painting, the world cannot be fully recognized close-up. The universal and the infinite must factor into their viewing.  But by stepping out of the personal and temporal, the artist necessarily becomes “out of touch” with the moment in which he is living There is something tragic in the idea that an artist who loves life enough to document and honor it with song or image must also, in some ways, renounce it in order to pay full homage. The best worshippers, at least in the world of art, are those standing back from their god.

How can an artist reconcile the ego and humility it takes to be an artist? The engagement and distance? For many artists, the never-ending ricochet between the poles of identity is too much. They simply chose to be humble or filled with ego, to resign themselves to the clarity of distance or the narrowness of engagement. We’ve all know obsessively autobiographical artists who let the ego and the moment rule and the opposite–artists who act as if they have no selves and see themselves as a mere tool, as if rather than using a medium to create art, art is using the artist as its medium. There are also enough examples of writers and artists who hold themselves outside of life to nurture their imaginations, and those that insist that they are no different than anyone else. But artists like Hawthorne never decide. In the world of self-help books and fanaticism about hammering out just “who we are,” the artist must resist the temptation to settle into any certainty about the self. Art is born of the paradox the artist must live.

P.S.  There’s some updates on this site.  Check out the Projects page for completed and upcoming projects.  Also check out my collaborator Curtis’s new page. 

 P.P.S. Hawthorne here. Did McFawn need to invoke my name to make these points about the artist’s self? For a writer discussing the “self,” McFawn seems to rely pretty heavily on my name and her conjecture about my ideas. Perhaps McFawn needs to write about the questionable selfhood of writers who presume too great an affinity with their influences.

I’m visiting Tucson this week, and one of my stops was the fairly new Sixth & Sixth Gallery in downtown Tucson. Sixth & Sixth opened two years ago and specializes in American Modernism and its contemporary heirs, specifically “non-objective art that celebrates line, texture, form and color: i.e., ‘art for art’s sake.’” The exhibition up now through April is Bohdan Osyczka: Monumental Watercolors II. Osyczka is in his late eighties, and spent most of life pursuing art part time while working as an illustrator, and it is only recently that his work has begun to find a larger audience. The show spans several decades, and Osyczka’s work range from nebulous compositions reminiscent of color-field paintings and tighter, ominous abstractions that echo Clyfford Still. The gallery’s promotional materials stress Osyczka’s methods as much as his outcomes: Osyczka built a special titling table to manipulate the flow of paint, as well as “rolling, pitching, pouring, speckling and spattering paint” to create his intended effects.

Of course, “intended” may not be the right word for a painter employing methods meant to maximize chance and happy accident. The paradox of gestural, expressive methods such as Osyczka’s is that while the end result is Modernist and concerned with formal elements, the method itself is making a conceptual claim. Art, performative painters seem to say, is as elemental and uncontrolled as the path of fire or the rolling in of a storm, and therefore the painter’s duty is to create the conditions for art (paint, gravity, etc) and watch what happens. In life, we try to control or minimize chaos, but in painting, artists like Osyczka preserve (or even encourage) chaos to find the aesthetic power within it. Exactly how that power is emphasized is dependent on the artist’s touches of willed design, and that is where the painting succeeds or fails. Osyczka’s watercolors try for a symbiotic relationship between will and chance, an admirable aim for both life and art.

While it is impossible to look at a painting and know for sure which part is the accident and which part the design, Osyczka’s works do seem to contain spontaneous passages paired with elements that comment upon them. In his best works, the comments make the painting. The strongest work in the show, 01 WN/19 (the nomenclature indicates the year and number painting of that year) consists of soft vertical swaths of color encroached upon by the sideways scrape of a geometric tool. Happy chance is evidenced in one of the lines that bleeds softly outward in the grain of the paper. What would otherwise be a defined verticality becomes a compelling detail–a spidering out of color, conjuring up both striated bacteria under a slide and the iris of an eye. This accident of the medium is commented on by a single dark oval that interrupts another vertical strata. The oval is self contained and tight while the line is open and seeping–representing the contraction and expansion of both art and nature. The potentiality of the oval–a seed, a thought, an inward look–contrasts the realization of the line–color that has spread out, flattened, and can go no further. The combination of accident and careful accent create a contrast between the exhaustion of realization and the bounds of possibility.

Many of Osyczka’s work are similarity successful in their judicious use of gesture and reflection. A few works fall flat, simply because disparate elements, rather than comment upon one another, seem to void each other out. 99 WN/17 consists of a rippled field of teals and purples overlaid by what looks like wobbly red staff paper complete with concentrations of paint resembling musical notations. The lines seem to hover above the field behind them, though they drip outside their pattern in way that looks calculatedly free. Occasionally, the red streaks and speckles join up with the folded peaks of the backdrop, but the overall effect is not a harmonized whole but two levels that neither speak to each other nor create an intriguing contrast. In this case, Osyczcka’s methods produced something that ends up in the uncomfortable space between spontaneity and deliberation, and therefore lacks the power of either approach.
 

Monumental Watercolors II is a strong collection that shows the chance inherent in all orchestration and the orchestration behind what seems like chance. In Osyczka’s best works, the question of what was intended and what merely appeared is moot: the result is a whole apart from control or chaos, natural law or man-made resistance.  What remains is the balance and sublimity of the brief moments when both art and the world cease spinning and fall together in the velocity of the stop.

Lately, there has been several books, articles, and even critical movements that aim to break down the walls between art and science. These approaches, in general, strike me as either irrelevant or absurd. The “walls” that exist between science and art are simply the bounds of their description, and “breaking them down” serves only to make both art and science more fluidly defined. While there’s nothing wrong with that necessarily, the problem I see is that many of these thinkers seem to assume there is an inherent benefit in collapsing the differences between art and science. But if there is value in simply breaking down the walls between distant bodies of knowledge, then why stop with art and science? Why not break down the walls between surgery and sculpture? Between literary criticism and horticulture? Between manufacturing and eulogistic poetry? There’s an inherent drama in the gesture of pulling together disparate fields, and it is this drama, not the articulation of any real benefit, that seems behind the movement to join art and science.

Beyond that, the fruits of the art/science movement tend to dilute both art and science rather than meaningfully melding the two. For instance, Ellen Dissanayake’s Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, posits an evolutionary basis for art. Dissanayake claims that “artifying” helps strengthen community bonds, and this is of critical importance for the survival of a species. Dissanayake also believes the interaction between mother and child is the original source of communal aesthetic pursuits. A New York Times article describes her watching mothers and children for “hundreds of hours,” coming finally to the conclusion that “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too.” This claim, while interesting enough, is in no way dependent on the “hours of study”–it is a purely subjective reading of what goes on between a mother and child, and what art itself is.

This is the problem with “scientific” studies of art–they can’t really be scientific. Art is such an open concept that it can be adjusted to concur with any body of research. For example, given the generalness of Dissanayake’s observations, a completely contrary thesis about the origin of art could find equally legitimate proof. It would be just as easy to say, and find evidence for, the idea that the purpose of art is to isolate and disarm a group of humans unfit for the more critical functions of society–hunting, gathering, finding shelter, etc. The “artists” were the physically inferior and emotionally dissonant members of society that, in their ineptitude, threatened a groups’ survival. Rather than simply culling them, “art” was created to keep them too busy to interfere with the hunt. I could watch artists for “hundreds of hours” and find “evidence” just as solid for my claim as what Dissanayake found for hers! The point here is not that Dissananyake’s ideas are incorrect, but that they are not truly supported by research. At best, Dissanayake’s study is an interesting daydream about the origin of art. At worst, it’s a reductive speculation that passes itself off as research-based, and thus benefits from an unearned authority.

And even if Dissananyake’s study could somehow be made more legitimately scientific, I’m not sure explaining art with science is all that worthy a goal. What does art stand to gain from being given an evolutionary purpose? Will we discover that art is like the tailbone, a leftover nub of something that once had purpose? How can scientific explanations do anything but simplify and diminish art? Even art itself–with all its imagination and subtleties–is hardly up for the task of explaining itself. How can the logic-bound world of science have a better shot?

A few years ago I received a book by the poet Laura (Riding) Jackson as a gift. My friend gave the book to me with this exclamation: “Laura (Riding) Jackson is a wonderful poet! She renounced poetry!” My first thought was that a poet renouncing poetry was like a rock band’s “final” live concert–a grandstanding gesture meant to hype up interest. Beyond that, (Riding) Jackson’s modified name made me suspicious–if she was bold enough to renounce poetry, why does she insist on clutching an old name in parenthesis?

But when I actually read Jackson’s preface to her Selected Poems (where she renounces all of poetry, including the poems that follow), I realized her reasons for giving up poetry had implications for all art. Jackson’s believes that there is an inherent gulf between the aim of art and its craft, describing it as a “discrepancy, deep reaching, between what I call the creed of poetry and the craft of poetry–which I might otherwise describe as its religious and its ritualistic aspects–that I perceived the impossibility of anyone functioning with consistency in the character of poet.” The essential tension between the creed and craft of poetry is between “humanly perfect word-use” and “artistically perfect word-use,” the former being a spiritual achievement for humanity overall and the later being a sensual “nicety, pleasing to human pride.” In Jackson’s view, poetry professes to be a truer kind of speech, but forced beauty of its craft obstructs that which it claims to reveal.

Jackson, like many artists and writers, is an idealist. Her sights are fixed on no less than a spiritual overhaul of language, and in her essay this ideal is described how all lofty ideals are–vaguely. She refers to “the margin…[where] truth begins and poetry ends,” “reflecting the human-conciousness-at-large” and “the something after.” In short: the unsaid. But no matter how opaque and absurd Jackson’s goals for language might sound, both her renunciation of poetry and her committed striving for the ideal illustrate two important ideas for artists.

Jackson was a good poet, and her success may have been due to her growing suspicion of poetry. A healthy distrust of art is beneficial for artists for a few reasons. First, believing in the inherent value of all art can easily lead to a complacency about one’s own work: the belief that if what you make is called art (or poetry) than it must have at least some value. Secondly, an unchecked belief in art can actually limit art. If you believe wholeheartedly in art, you are also believing in art as it is now or has been, and would be inclined to preserve it. But if you are unsure about the value of art, you might try to undo, challenge, and push what art is. Duchamp’s ready-mades are an example of an artist making new art out of a renunciation of what art was. The better artists become, the more reasons they have to renounce art–those who try to overcome art’s limitations are those that know them best.

Jackson’s attitude about the ideal in art could also be useful for artists.  She may have called it ‘perfected speech” or “general human ideal in speaking” but the central idea was that Jackson saw poetry, and art, as methods by which to attain an ideal and not an ideal in itself. There was no such thing as good poetry in Jackson‘s view, because good poetry would be straining so hard to go beyond itself that it would be hardly recognizable as poetry. For Jackson, the medium of art is irrevocably opposed to the higher purpose of art. This may be fanatic, but reaching for something beyond art while making art can both motivate artists and liberate them from too much stress on craft.

In the New York Times the other day, Roberta Smith wrote an article titled What We Talk About When We Talk About Art about the obtuse and pretentious language in art criticism today. Smith takes issue with three words: privilege, reference (both used as verbs) and the term practice used to describe what artists do. Smith seems particularly uncomfortable with the word “practice,” claiming that it characterizes art-making as a white-color activity, that it implies that artists need license to practice (of which she disagrees) and, most interestingly, that “practice” indicates that art is ultimately a problem-solving activity. Here’s how Smith puts it:

Second is the implication that an artist, like a doctor, lawyer or dentist, is trained to fix some external problem… Art rarely succeeds when it sets out to fix anything beyond the artist’s own subjective needs.

Smith’s issue with the word practice is less interesting than the bold claim it leads her to about the purpose of art. She seems to believe that art is most successful when it doesn’t try to tackle any problem outside the artist’s psyche or aesthetic aims. Sunil Gangadharan at Art and Perception wrote an insightful response that makes the point that art often draws attention to global problems, perhaps encouraging “the viewer to think about (and in the ideal case, acting to alleviate) a problem hitherto unknown or underrepresented”–thereby tackling an “outside” problem. Certainly this would be the goal of most political art.

 I have never thought of art as a problem-solving activity, outside of the inherent problem-solving in bringing an intention to realization. Art may gesture towards problems in the world, but I agree that the best art does not aim to “fix” anything. The purpose of art will always be debated, but my natural response is that art, rather than solving problems, is a means to a greater valuing of the world, problems and all. The best art is a sophisticated and distinctive appreciation of the world, and the best art criticism is a sophisticated and distinctive appreciation of art.

Without art, what we would appreciate in the world would be limited. We would no doubt appreciate food, water, shelter, family, and any personal relationships that benefited us. But our pleasures would likely be restricted to only what contributed to our survival and immediate happiness, and our way of ordering the world would probably consist of a simple dichotomy: good and bad. Good things help us survive or feel good, and bad things impede our survival and hurt. Art, however, gives us the ability–and the permission–to appreciate the unclassifiable details of the world. For instance, without art, we might find the natural world beautiful, or we might be drawn to a hard-to-read feature in someone else, like a sardonic yet shy smile. The appreciation of such things perhaps existed before art, but it is art that encourages us to dwell in and value these perceptions. 

Art is also a supreme comfort because it gives credence, by its very attention, to the various moods and modes of being. Joy, triumph, contentment all seem real to us because these are the things we want to feel as real, and suffering is real because of the vividness of pain. But the more subtle states of being–bittersweet melancholy, self-amusement, mischievousness–these states and every other, art argues, are just as real and just as capable of being valued. 

When I find art or literature moving, I feel as if the art is elaborating on something I once felt briefly. For instance, Hawthorne’s “My Visit to Niagara” explores the numbness and intimidation and loss of self we sometimes feel in the presence of natural phenomena. I felt, when reading “Niagara” that I also had this experience in the presence of nature (my visit to the Andes in Peru was one example). But like so many sensations throughout the course of life, I let myself be swept along to the next experience without pausing on the significance and singularity of that moment. Good art slows the world down and shows us the dimensionality in even the most transient of experiences. Art is perpendicular to life: if a lifetime is a horizontal and forward-moving, art is vertical–showing us the heights and depths in moments from which we are compelled to move on. Art may not fix the problems of the world, but it shows us the fullness of what’s at stake.

Note: Lately, I’ve gotten fascinated with stock imagery. The obsession began when I planned to write a post about art and science. I went looking for a generic picture of test tubes filled with colored liquid, and stumbled upon the world of stock photography. Do you know there’s a stock photograph for everything from birth to death, success to meth use, dogs to pills? There are a million stock images of pills for some reason–pills spilling from bottles, pills coming at you and fading away in the background, pills, pills, pills. The following is Part One of a two part series about responding to these images I find so bizarrely resonant.

Life begins in pink Petri dish, negligently exposed to the air. To the right, seven pre-sorted zygotes await screening. You in the uncapped dish, however, now have a rare, cancer-absorbing mold growing around you. The mold becomes the primary concern of the lab workers. They feed it, check it, swab it and allow you to exist on the chance that you too nurture the mold.

  Of course you are told you were conceived like everyone else: when a mommy and daddy tablet dissolved in God’s gut.

  When you are born, the doctor checks your “quin” factor (that’s industry speak for quintessential). You are deemed fit and able to represent all babies.

“Hey diddle diddle

The pestle and mortar

The fork sprung over Neptune

The knife drew back

 Quite jealous

 And the placebo jilted the spoon.”

You pretend you are about to launch a paper airplane during homework hour. A woman, pretending to be your mother, feigns concern. You look up, make a show of beseeching a higher power for guidance and the higher power advises, in the spirit of fun, to go ahead and throw it–”there is no higher law, anyhow.” The higher power carries the joke over to legitimate beseechers. The book acting as your textbook is opened to a page where an image plays at existence. A real plant pretends to be a fake plant to “widen its range.” In the background, a scrim hangs to hide the unpretending universe beyond.

The wall leans away from you. The hallway widens around you, both containing you and avoiding contamination–like the loose, uncommitted grip of someone holding an injured and possibly diseased bird. The chair back rears back, wishing it were in a position to refuse you. A door opens not to invite you in, but to swing out of your range. Only a text overlay risks contact.

What people willfully forget is that the natural state of the universe is not “unique” or “individual” or “diverse.” It is uniform like injected plastic molding, it is bland like reams of paper, it is repetitive like pills pooling before being sorted and funneled into bottles by a robotic arm. The Milky Way, the Big Bang–these resemble velveteen production and high-volume welding more than they do art. Ultimately, the universe after humankind will be like the universe before humankind: consummately industrial. We did not invent industry, we simply caught on to the larger scheme.

A mournful chattel, pills

 a sad and lonely lot

absent disease and absent humanity

themselves is all they got

 “What’s all this I hear about mental anguish and suffering?!” the higher power demands. “I don’t buy it. Bring me evidence!” An image of a man, head in hands, is the first available sample. “Poor sap…” the higher power coos. “How many more like him?” They tell him. “Are you serious? Talk about a public relations disaster! Send this guy a few free joy-samples to shut him up. Then get marketing up here!”

Woman: ?! (tempers a question with a demand and a demand with a question)

 Man:… (trails off even before beginning)

Woman: : (introduces a list to solicit a list)

 Man: , , , (provides a silent list of grievances)

Woman: “ ” (echoes his silence as an indictment of it)

At a thread over at Artblog.net, Catfish made some comments about Clement Greenburg that got me thinking about art, criticism and appreciation. Here’s some of what he said:

But shooting down bad art isn’t important in the long run. What works in the showdown between bad and good is writing that casts light on the good. Clem was the only one left who could do that and all he would say was that Olitski was the best living painter (end of statement), and that tidbit almost exclusively in conversation or lecture. He did make generalized contributions, but he refused to show the art public the thoughts that went with his great eye, even about just the one artist that he found to be the best. That seemed to contradict his otherwise extremely generous nature.

Well he is gone. If someone wants to help criticism save itself, what is needed is 1), a great eye, and 2), the capacity to put it to work on the good stuff.

Catfish’s comments on Greenburg imply that there are few writers today who can write about the good stuff. Critical fashion is certainly one reason for this. But beyond that, there is an inherent difficulty in writing about really good art or literature. Critics who can write directly and clearly about what makes great art great are few because it takes both an ability to be sincerely awed by art and ability to translate that awe into words. A breakdown of why its hard to write about the good stuff:

1. How something fails is far easier to describe than how something succeeds. The way art fails is both universal and easily described–its derivative, the intentions are too obvious or limited, there are problems with the craft, etc. Failure is easy to write about because so much art fails in similar ways. But when something is good, its succeeds in way that no other art has succeeded. Part of what makes great art great is how profoundly unique its aims. Unlike failed art, there is no universal language to describe good art.

2. Great art exists as an irrefutable whole. Good criticism, however, is detailed, specific, and takes a work piece by piece. Great art projects itself vividly outward, rather than offering up its inner workings. (Failed art is disemboweled, by contrast. Its inner workings hang out in the open, broadcasting their dysfunction). It takes an incredible imagination to access a great work and describe how each of its features works to create its greatness.

For all its difficulty, articulating why something is good is incredibly important for both criticism and art itself. One of the problems with great art is that while its beauty strikes us in a visceral way, the fact that its greatness is hard to articulate can make it seem less real. Great critics give substance and reality to the effects of great art. The best criticism is a philosophically revealing, passionate and eloquently written appreciation of the work it describes. It sometimes seems that appreciation is seen as less rigorous than either criticism of bad art or theoretical explorations. The contrary is true. There is nothing more rigorous than to try to give reason for the shock of sublime recognition great art evokes in us.