Here Are Lions

Journal entry for 07 Jun 2010 | Link

Clembasher of the Week: John Perrault

Looking over the spectrum of talent at Artsjournal, you have Terry Teachout, Lee Rosenbaum, and Judth Dobrzynski at one end, issuing reliable, readable, astute observations upwards to five days a week. At the other end you have John Perrault and Regina Hackett, doing for art criticism what the kazoo did for classical music.

Last week John Perrault shared his thoughts with the world about Anne Truitt and Clement Greenberg. Whatever the world did to deserve this, I apologize on its behalf.

In regard to Uncle Clem, what we have against him now is that after championing Jackson Pollock and David Smith, he was wrong forever after. Jules Olitski was not a great painter; sugary is not augury. He may have been right about Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), but the jury is still out.

That excerpt encapsulates what's wrong with the whole piece: smarmy familiarity with Greenberg, the very absolutist thinking to which self-described artistic liberals are prone even as they disclaim it, standards that shift according to the author's convenience, eyelessness, and pretensions to poetry that lead to prose as sonorous and insightful as a dropped hot dog. Walter Darby Bannard once pointed out, "Those who attack Greenberg broadly first get him wrong and then flog their own misunderstanding." Perrault makes an apt poster boy for the phenomenon.

How Greenberg liked Truitt's work is still a mystery. It really cannot fit into his evolutionary art-determinism -- Picasso leading to David Smith in the same way that fish lead to amphibians and amphibians to dinosaurs. Or the way feudalism, leads to capitalism, which in turn must lead to communism.

A responsible writer would (after checking his punctuation) question himself before committing this thought to a final draft. If Greenberg's fondness for Truitt's work contradicts his "evolutionary art-determinism," if the former is stated in his writings, and if the latter is an interpretation thereof (to put it kindly), is the interpretation wrong, or are we confronted with an insoluble mystery? The only way to conclude the latter is to give interpretation the weight of fact, which tells you what you need to know about Perrault's cognitive abilities and willingness to explore his assumptions. And given that communism is disappearing from the world, is the last sentence ironic, a reference to the Marxism of Greenberg's intellectual youth, or a mistake? It's thrown out in a lazy way, so we can't know.

I study Greenberg because his writings are often a pleasure to read - crafted, astute, reasoned, and humble. Yes, humble. When he was sure, he declared with surety. But he realized that much about art could not be known, and when he was not sure, he admitted doubt, even bewilderment. I also study him because his critics, in a consistent, even monotonous manner, insist on attributing to him sins he never committed, thoughts he never had, and dictatorial powers he never enjoyed. For these critics, no partial truth is too partial to assert as truth. This infects their writings with an unreal quality, as if they were reporting disinformation from a fantasy land of their own making. (One could argue that this is the case.) They are full of entitlement, obliging us to accept their tone as assertion when the assertions themselves don't add up, and not to ask too much for evidence or demonstrable causation. Roman cartographers labeled unknown territories with the warning HIC SVNT LEONES, and certain contemporary art critics do the same for Greenberg's writings. Upon seeing this, what brave reader wouldn't want to go exploring?

Louise Bourgeois

As I've said elsewhere, Greenberg plays Satan in a conception of the art pantheon in which Duchamp is Jesus Christ, and the Gospel authors are Kosuth, Warhol, Beuys, and Bourgeois. History is more complicated than that, of course, but those four represent convenient figures. In Kosuth we learn that art is about ideas. In Warhol we discover that minor art presented as major art is major art. In Beuys it is revealed to us that art and non-art are one. And in Bourgeois we learn that art can be argued for ad misericordiam. Holland Cotter:

“The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said. “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.” She added: “The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses.” Yet it was her gift for universalizing her interior life as a complex spectrum of sensations that made her art so affecting.

Bourgeois died last week at the age of 98. This prompted an outpouring of grief on Facebook and Twitter, in which one status after another lamented the loss. Not a single one of them issued from a heterosexual man. (Full-blown obits came from all the usual writers, male and female alike, of course.) I think that Bourgeois' example gives artists, especially women among them, the permission to work from emotion and biography. And they should have that permission. They should have permission to do anything except harm the life and property of others. It's important to have such examples. Balthus gives me permission to work from elitism and selective disdain for the last five centuries. Olitski gives me permission to fingerpaint. In moments of doubt one can pull the right monograph off of the shelf and take comfort in the work. Everyone, no matter what mental space they work from, needs this on occasion.

But as someone who does not seek that particular permission, I've never had strong feelings about her work, and much of the hagiography sounds flat. Her long and productive career is a blessing we might wish upon anyone, artist or not. But ultimately we have to evaluate her work. It has the advantage of lacking irony, and as such never fails to look like the product of sincere creative efforts. (I wish more artists would emulate that quality of her work.) But individual pieces look like flightless birds, curious but not majestic. She didn't identify with surrealists, but her work romps through Sigmund Freud's garden of amusements, providing it with frisson even as it gets weighed down, like that of most of the other surrealists, by the heavy freight of symbolism. Cotter is correct insofar as the last sentence quoted above is parsable: her work is affecting because of the rendering of her biography and emotions as universal references. But with the partial exception of her marbles, it has little life outside of those references. Hence the Bourgeois Test.

In a group exhibition of contemporary art, if a work by Louise Bourgeois is the best thing in the show, the show is in trouble. The ubiquity of her work among contemporary art collections makes this a test that one can perform regularly, and it returns reliable positives because her work, while it can be quirky enough to be interesting, tends to rely on trappings that resemble, and only resemble, serious artistic engagement. They involve serious personal engagement, heartfelt and searching, but that's a different matter. Nevertheless, even interesting quirkiness and a semblance of seriousness tend to make her work look better than the great run of dreck in the prematurely established canon of contemporary masters. It represents a triumph of sincerity over self-criticism, but it is, at least, sincere.

Kosuth and Warhol on one hand and Beuys and Bourgeois on the other represent two different misbegotten enterprises. The latter drew the bow, aimed for the target, and missed. The former shot the archers next to them. The spawn of the former could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't miss them. I don't feel that way about Beuys and Bourgeois. They remind me of a line from Strunk and White:

"Spontaneous me," sang Whitman, and, in his innocence, let loose the hordes of uninspired scribblers who would one day confuse spontaneity with genius.

Bourgeois is likewise blameless for the hordes of uninspired artists who thereafter confused sincerity with genius. I hold them to account, though, and everyone who argues similarly on behalf of Shirin Neshat, Kara Walker (arguably the offspring of Bourgeois and Warhol), and other purveyors of contemporary art predicated on a wrestling match between the artist and her biography. Instead I would ask people to direct their praise at Magdalena Abakanowicz while we still have her, because she is mining a similar vein with more efficacy.

The Quotable Bannard

A stray from the archive has just been added: a list of quotes edited by Robert Genn from the archive, online comments, and elsewhere. Don't miss this.

The struggle to be original hates conformity, but the struggle to be better disregards it, or takes advantage of it to build workable conventions.

An ivory tower is a fine place as long as the door is open.

If art depended on content, then one painting of an apple would be as good as the next one.

Reader Mail

On the new site:

Your new Journal format is marvelous. In particular, I love the blurring of boundaries: the art writing, the new painting (gorgeous, luscious stuff - and probably even better in real life where the surface texture is more apparent) and of course the bolting spinach (a perfect mini-essay in its own right). These are all creative responses to the world around you - I love the way they resonate with each other. If you keep on at this rate I shall positively look forward to Monday morning!

I thank you. This was exactly my hope with the new format.

Your new color scheme needs music. To me it sounds like something off of "Burning for Buddy," which was used for this. I am not, by the way, suggesting you actually add music. I hate websites with music. But this is what I hear when I look at your site.

I consider that a fine achievement.

It's wonderful, Franklin. Your journal is almost the only bloglike thing I'm still reading, except for Andrew Sullivan. I'll take a lot of inspiration from what you're doing.

I'm honored.

I wrote about how the art world was looking more and more like a children's science museum last year, I think it was. Interactionism isn't nearly as insulting or condescending as it needs to be.

"Impressionism" was meant as an insult too, you'll recall. Now it's as gentle as a Provence breeze. One can only do so much.

I think all this business about postmodernism being "dead" is just a matter of nomenclature. Postmodernists don't like to admit that they're recycling the same old junk over and over, so they sit around trying to think up catchy new names for it. The one I'm most familiar with (and have identified as such) is "contemporary." But any of the others serves the same purpose. As far as Krauss is concerned, in her foul heart she knows that modernism is better than postmodernism, so she tries to glamorize the crap she promotes by calling it "modernism."

I think that's entirely possible. I hope that it's contrition, though. I guess we'll have to give the book a read.

I didn't so much withdraw from the art world as reject it, for being unsatisfactory, unworthy of serious consideration and, to a large extent, fraudulent. I most certainly didn't withdraw from art. As you note, there are other options or possibilities. The more I stand back from the official scene, the sadder and more ludicrous it appears. Admittedly, it all depends on what one is actually after. But the scene does provide a certain flattering illusion, or a useful pretext, to a substantial number of people, who can thus mill around naked and on crutches as if this were entirely normal.

Quoted for truth.

It strikes me that your spinach patch might be a little too shady.

Peter Barrett is advising the opposite - brassicas need cooler weather and we've had a warm spring. He suggests planting squash, beans, and tomatoes instead. We have zucchini, whose flowers will complement the nasturtiums nicely, and an exotic pea from the Portland Chinese Garden that can rise up between them.