'The Art of Being an Artist Writing about Art' - Adam Geczy
Below is a list in no particular order of some eminent artists. Apart from all being men, guess what they have in common: Eugene Delacroix, Emile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Wassily Kandinsky, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, Barnett Newman, Robert Morris, Robert Motherwell? From the title of this essay, it is easy to surmise that they all wrote as well as made art. Extemporised as it is, the list is still selective, as they are all artists associated with, or with some claim to, the ability of visual images or objects to communicate on their own terms, asserting the independence of form to give primacy to the deeper effect and affect of abstraction. What motivated them to do so? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that writing about art is tantamount to an act of good listening. It makes the writer more receptive. If the writer happens to be an artist as well, the cultivation of receptivity, the ability to perceive, descry and process phenomena, can only be an advatage when it comes to making his or her art.
An artist to write about art can be perceived as giving the game away, like a magician betraying the secret of the trick. This is, of course, provocation on my part since the history of art consists of complex and various ties to the written word. Why write more about it? Because myths are tenacious and some need constant nudging, or rupture. Poets may be allowed to be critics, but for artists to be critics is still to risk being painted as a literalist, or worse.
Although Delacroix’s published journals had almost as much influence after his death as his painting, and certain essays by Morris remain seminal to their time, it is curious to reflect on the extent to which the work of these artists contributed so strongly to the myth of art’s fundamental difference from written language. Newman and Judd wrote a considerable amount of criticism. We might also remember Tom Wolfe’s observation in The Painted Word of the irony that the most purportedly visual of all artistic movements, Abstract Expressionism, required a copious amount of verbal validation for it to be seen as so visually pure.
When we turn to Conceptual artists and beyond, the relationship between the written word and visual art is of course much tighter and less fraught: Mary Kelly, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner are more or less synonymous with the use of text. One might still, however, argue that the way they use text within an artistic context is different from their essays and verbal validations. The use of text in an emblematic and theatrical way assumes a very different rhetorical character from when language is used to explain and evaluate an art object. In the first instance, words are integral to art, in the second they are at its service. It is a venerable hierarchy that serves at best to ensure that the experience of the art object is most authentic as an immediate experience within the viewer. The viewer comes equipped, or burdened, with a welter of assumptions which may include those prompted by the critic. But what remains paramount is the event of processing the experience—from looking to interacting—provided by the work of art.
Yet, anyone who thinks that art criticism is an act of parasitism, mistakenly, presumes that the work of art is somehow hermetic and independent as opposed to being a coordinate amongst a large number of intellectual, emotional and sensory exchanges. For art criticism is not just a form of reportage, it is a vital forum for celebration and complaint about what has recently been. Art critics at their best are searching commentators on the conditions of society, life and beauty, and take seriously their role as mediators and evaluators of artistic relevance. Some celebrated novelists such as John Updike are also seasoned critics, and with Peter Schjeldahl, who is also a poet, art criticism reaches a new level. His eccentricities, his precision and bravura syntax are performances unto themselves.
'Buried Alive' Adam Geczy
My purpose here is not to defend the importance of criticism, nor the intimate relationship between art and language. Enough has been said on this already. Nor will I bother defending the ‘critic as artist’ according to Wilde’s famous paradox. My purpose is to look briefly at the artist as critic, since my artistic practice over the last twenty or so years has always been close to the practice of writing about art. It is has never been in the capacity of the sole practice as a critic, which is a very different enterprise.
I have always seen my role as an art writer as having three fundamental functions. The first is to air concerns about issues and to ensure the maintenance of a healthy climate of dissent. Just as we are overloaded with far too much art whose purpose is to lull us into an idiotic stupor, so there is an excess of descriptive uncritical writing that shares more with marketing pitches than with considered evaluation. Art magazines have long had a dual function to promote artists and galleries (especially those with a healthy advertising account with them) while at the same time to gauge the tenor of the present. The two benchmarks are probably Artforum and Art and America, which are purchased as much for their advertisements—to see who’s showing where and when—as for their articles. A poor and distant relative in Australia is Art Collector which, although selling a handsome amount of copy, is in my opinion the very nadir of art writing. A contradiction is lived out in magazines such as this. Contemporary artists must have something edgy about them, although the publications that promote them are unapologetically lame in their critical integrity.
A problem that I have marked out in the last few years in numerous essays (most of them written in the last few years in Broadsheet), is that few writers come to their subjects with a philosophical position. Good artists must have a position inasmuch as they stand for a particular sensibility, specialize in certain media and engage in one, or a handful of, subject areas. By contrast, a writer can afford to be more passive. He or she can easily just describe the work and rehash the a few basic ideas set out in the exhibition catalogue. If one writes as an artist, one is inevitably cast into a series of beliefs which you have upheld, in the work you have made, and the work of others you have gravitated toward. One’s critical position derives from this. This is why I have found myself gravitating back to the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno, of late, who was sensitive to the balance that art required between a rational world view, ethical rigor, while maintaining respect for beauty (or challenging, refined ugliness or dischord, which can also be beautiful), and the tangible potential for the complexities in artistic abstractions to exert change, political, psychological and otherwise.
A second is to lend support to art and artists whom I respect. My accumulated mass of writing is like an archive of artists and works with whom I have engaged as a form of advocacy, minor as it may be. It would be disingenuous of me not to admit that, in retrospect, I have had occasional misgivings about whom and what I have lent my support to, but these mistakes are also honest reflections of an evolving set of aesthetic allegiances.
Third and most importantly, criticism can be studied appreciation. We might recall the famous experiment in the era of Minimalism that found that the average amount of time a viewer devoted to a work of art is around three seconds. Our constant diet of different forms of photographic and electronic media we have turned into highly acute receptors of visual and aural phenomena. We can be forgiven for bringing our skills and expectations of instant decryption when looking at works of art. True enough, many works of art anticipate this kind of glib spontaneity. But it can also be said that as many better works of art, while eliciting an immediate response, harbour a much deeper message which may include some criticism of the eagerness of audiences to take so much for granted.
And then, there are still other works of art that simply take more time. If there is a morality to writing about art it is the need to look in a way that attempts empathy, that is, the requirement that one try to step into another’s frame of reference. Some works elicit this easily, in others the message of spirit is harder to divine, and many more just have a blank core. The interpretation and evaluation of works of art, then, demands that one spends more than three seconds looking and thinking about it.
In short, writing about art enables a kind of studied appreciation that forces me to spend more time on works that my lazy consciousness would otherwise not deliver. It allows for an apprenticeship to artists and their works that one would not normally undertake. Just as the process of making a work of art slowly divulges to the artist what he or she is doing, it is in the process writing that meanings well to the surface. I used to say about art and writing that, for me, never the twain shall meet. But after around twenty years this is perhaps how they do: the acts of apprenticeship to an artist or an idea in writing afford me a more refined, critical responsiveness in my practice as an artist.
Adam Geczy is an artist and writer who is Lecturer in Sculpture, Performance and Installation at Sydney College of the Arts
Image: 'Buried Alive’ 2007, 2 video channels, chair, flourescent tubes. Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia.