What is Art Criticism?

It was not enough for Joseph Beuys to wade through the murky swamps of Zuiderzee in 1971. In what became known as his “bog actions,” he would submerge his entire body beneath the festering waters. Only by sinking below the surface, to both physical and psychological depths, could Beuys reemerge from the fertile marshes transformed. Back from my own art history pilgrimage, that took me to the University Art Association of Canada’s conference in Montreal, with a stack of freshly graded essays from my Art Criticism class, Beuys’s shaman-like ritual has acted as a sort-of “spirit guide,” teaching me about art and its criticism.

In the same way that Beuys sinks into the mysterious swamp, art criticism should aim to tread below the surface of the art world. As close and deep as Beuys, the critic should spend time, linger, immersed and, finally, transformed. Beuys’s Bog Action reminds us that there is a spiritual life behind images that can be accessed through ritual. 

From the bottom of the swamp I turn and look up. From the ground to the distant sky, continually refocusing my eyes, negotiating my way through these vast ranges and pictures—lots of pictures! It is here that criticism can explore human-spiritual relationships, and how these relationships fit into the world of images and, most importantly, what the images want to tell us.

Tools for Conviviality or I love you when we’re together. I hate you when we’re apart.

“Are you left handed?” These seemingly-innocent words rolled off my then boyfriend’s mother’s lips to devastating effect during our first meeting: a home-cooked meal at her Connecticut seaside house. She asked, no doubt, out of curiosity, but also out of the nervousness caused by presenting a somewhat-formal meal to her son’s new girlfriend—something, I later learned, that was quite foreign to her. So when she asked me if my brain favoured my left hand it was an attempt at conversation, however weak. I stopped for a moment to think about the way I threw a ball and then said “No. Right.” “Well you must be ambidextrous then,” she shot back with a lightening reflex in her signature abrupt, conversational style, “because you’re holding your fork in the opposite hand.” I was mortified. Then and there at the charming shipbuilder’s cottage of my new boyfriend’s parents, with the ocean gently lapping at the shore before us, I realized that I didn’t know how to hold a knife and fork properly. 

I managed to choke my way through the meal by sneaking peeks at how everybody else at the table gracefully pinned down their meat with their forks while elegantly sawing off small pieces with their knives, and how with measured civility they brought each bite to their mouth and slowly chewed. I copied as best I could, somehow making it through the meal to dessert. 

Now, I can tell myself that this wasn’t my fault (and, by the way, I have since learnt to use cutlery—both the continental and american styles—thanks to homemade etiquette videos on YouTube). My problem was, I wasn’t raised that way. (I also wasn’t taught to set a table.) Forks tended to double as knives in my family and, to my recollection, we never learned how the food should get from the plate (we at least had those) to the mouth. In my childhood home having food on the table was a value, not how to eat it. 

This anecdote illustrates, I hope, how tools for conviviality (i.e.. a knife and fork to share a meal) also can be tools of separation. Tools (which can be many things, from social skills to objects of utility) are all fun and games if everyone knows the rules, codes and jargon and if everybody is socially equipped to play. But these same tools can also be sources of humiliation, oppression and even murder as “Tools for Conviviality,” the Power Plant’s summer group show demonstrates. 

        “Here,” the Power Plant’s official write-up says, “contemporary art is offered as a tool with which to propose alternate tactics.” And the show’s artists—Abbas Akhavan, Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer, Claire Fontaine, Kyla Mallett, Swintak / Don Miller, Reece Terris, Oscar Tuazon, Ulla von Brandenburg, Franz West—offer work that, taken together, explore the gamut of how tools can be used socially. The tool-use axis includes every thing from goofy fun to the stuff of violent nightmares, both real and imagined, a range that makes “Tools for Conviviality” brilliant. On the utopia-dystopia continuum, curator Melanie O’Brien has staged what Bruno Latour might call a thing-politic or an object-orientated democracy, where matters of concern call the shots through makeshift assemblages, which inevitably disband and reconfigure themselves in relation to other concerns with other partial resolutions.[1] “Tools for Conviviality” shows us how rapidly quirky, fun or for-the-good-of-all ideas can become their opposite, using the same line of argumentation, the same proofs. 

       What does this tell us? For one, things are unstable. Thus, social structures must continually respond to change, and individuals must constantly interpret and respond to their environments with their tools. It also says something about human nature: that the same people capable of niceties, kindness and love can be backstabbers, liars, and murderers. We would push a friend into a mud puddle if no one was looking in order to get what we want or, worse, just because. It is only a matter of situation (timing, social statues, political mood, rules of etiquette) that a tool aids conviviality and not oppression. 

Many recent anthropological studies have shed light on the nature of human violence. For example, archeological digs have revealed alarming numbers of human bones with cracks caused by heavy blows, as well as a consistent history of mass massacre from the beginning of the human species. 

      Violence isn’t the exception. We walk a very thin and grim line when we talk about utopia. (But isn’t that one of the big lessons learnt from the 20th century?) What kind of better future can we dream about, if not a utopia or a good-for-all society? My answer, if it can be called that (it’s more a thought to think on), is the alternate title of this composition, which summarizes how I feel about my love life in particular and about human nature in general: I love you when we’re together. I hate you when we’re apart. If we take this sentiment as given, can we still dream and how? And what adjustments and provisional tools need to be considered? * **

[1] Bruno Latour “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things Public” Introduction to Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy catalogue of the show at ZKM, MIT Press, 2005.

*I also had a good look at Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, which informed my response although I didn’t cite directly from it. 

**We are especially excited about this show for the Swintak / Don Miller connection as Sagan will be participating in this year’s Don Blanche artists’ residency and presenting “Scavenger’s Colour Field” on Labour Day weekend.

Is This Modernism?

Raymond Williams

When Raymond Williams gave the lecture ‘When Was Modernism?’ in 1987 he suggested that the modern art canon, which has come to signify Modernism in its entirety, is based on principles of exclusion. He described how this selective honouring has fostered a very specific trajectory in art, stunting the development of any marginalized alternative. Not only did he call for the reworking of the boundaries delineating the ‘when’ of modernity, he also urged for a mining of the historical vaults to reexamine the ‘what’ of what exactly was left out. [1] So in the spirit of taking up Williams’s provocative question, and at the risk of sounding eccentric—or even worse indignant—I would like to propose that Modernism has not ended. And to answer the title question of this essay: yes, this, here and now, is Modernism. What we have lived is not postmodern, and it actually never was. Instead it is late, like the late of late capitalism (which I’ll touch on briefly in this essay and at greater lengths in upcoming blog posts). Perhaps it is slowly dying, but Modernism is not dead. And just as eccentric, indignant, far-fetched, or whatever you want to call it, I would like to extend Modernism’s inauguration, beyond the action works of Jackson Pollock, past Picasso’s Demoiselles, more remote than the Salon des Refuses of 1863 and further still to the late 1700s, situating its beginning, as T.J. Clark does in Farewell to an Idea, to the throes of the French Revolution. [2]

History is slow and expansive and intrinsically tied to the reigning power structures of the time. In the 1700s this leviathan was the King, and the God that he represented. Before the birth of liberty, freedom—and capital exchange, it was God’s sublime power that secured the natural order. Since the beheading of the King, it follows that it is democracy, the will of “the people,” that has taken that place. Art, as an inherently transcendental force, is political by nature; it either it stands to reify power, or it stands in opposition. Williams cites 1848 as a dividing point for modern art, [3] while David Harvey calls this year its beginning. [4]* After 1848, the reality and interdependency between capitalism and democracy could no longer be ignored; they were exposed in the streets through the daily grind of industry workers who lived against the backdrop of opulent shopping arcades and they were expounded in plain terms by Marx and Engels. Yet the unraveling of this system of power had begun long before this decisive year. In “Painting in the Year 2” Clark meticulously recounts the political moods and events surrounding the unveiling and parading of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat in 1793. He demonstrates how this painting sought to capture the complicated political situation of the French Revolution in its entirety, yet with no God to secure transcendence, David felt compelled to leave the upper portion of the canvas as an abstraction. Clark makes a convincing case for David’s nonrepresentational searching as a way around the impossibility of depicting the masses. Instead the blank upper canvas calls fourth “the people,” a concept that reigned in the messy (and often brutally violent) mob of the masses. “The people” became the skeleton key for a maze of ideas, viewpoints and vying groups who all wanted a stake in the still undecided power of this entirely new order. [5]

David’s empty upper corner is conceived as a fertile plot, tilled, but unplanted; it is a dedicated place for an unknown future power to lay down its roots. Ultimately, this painting is the very fancy footwork of a court painter with no king left to paint for and a multitude whose direction still lay in-waiting. It is with the French Revolution and the magical concept of  “the people” and democracy, that The Death of Marat rings in a wholly new world order—one which we have not yet left.

Not that much has changed in the realm of power’s transcendental contract with “the people” in the 200-plus year leap, from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the 21st. Modernism in art has developed from its newborn-self, as Marat, to the rebellious stages of Olympia’s implicating gaze, Boccioni’s The City Rises and the collages of the German dadaists. The arrogant heyday of its middle age manifested in New York in the 1950s through the abstract expressionists. And, like any good mid-life crisis, it has suffered from an identity confusion ever since, mis-recognizing its own fading self for a new youth. Instead of ‘late,’ it has been called ‘post.’ The mid-century impulse to declare the end of Modernism—as something that has come and gone—has everything to do with the Kantian categorial separation of art from life. With Clement Greenberg as its canonical advocate, Modernism became a misrepresented monument to itself. It was toted as unwavering in its self awareness, exclusive, and most detrimental, it was marked as apolitical. Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” is in no small part responsible for the greatly exaggerated reports of modernism’s death. [6]

 Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of the many merits of Greenberg (which will likely come up in future blog posts). However, what was missing in “Modernist Painting,” with its narrow blinders, was a more Hegelian dynamic between embodiment and idealism. And this, especially, is why we need to look back to the era of the first modern revolution: it was also the era of Hegel. 

We need search no further than to our own universities and their assumption of an over arching logic to see evidence of modernism’s vitality. Art theorist Craig Owens, identified what he calls “the allegorical impulse” as a unifying tendency in postmodern art, yet he traces its lineage back to the modernist, rectifying its neglected past. [7] Therefore, not a break, but a development, like the switching of ‘king’ for ‘democracy.’ Modernism will die when the rights of man die, when capitalism and rationality meet their fatal end, when the entire system of order is restructured. It is on its way down, but it is not dead. The ‘what’ that the popular narrative of modernism left out is the political. This is the salient force that art cannot go on without. In order to make any political or artistic progress in the face of globalization and our present state of ideological impasse, we need to take a cue from Raymond Williams and look backwards. However seemingly counter intuitive, we need to reexamine history and contextualize the many trajectories that have been left behind in order to find the political roots that we might move forward by. 

¹ Raymond Williams, “When Was Modernism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1085-8.

² T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15.

³ Williams, “When Was Modernism,” 1087.

⁴ David Harvey, “Modernity and Modernism,” in The Condition of Postmodernity. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1990) 20.10-38.

• Also of note, or rather, meant by Harvey’s note, 1848 is also the year that The Communist Manifesto was published.

⁵ T.J. Clark, “Painting in the Year 2,” in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 15-53.

⁶ Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 773-9.

⁷ Craig Owens, “ The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” in Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. by Charles Harrison and Paul Woods. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1025-32.

Dead art is alive,
but not the kind of alive that you think.
Dead art makes me smile,
with a smirk.
What is Dead Art?
That which is unalive!
Art makes me feel
a little uncomfortable, a little nervous, a little apprehensive,
when it's good.
But what is not good?
Bad poetry about art.

Jackie Winsor, Green Piece 1976-77.

We were fresh out of an art criticism program, but somehow we felt a

little stale. Not the fuzzy-mould stale, but the kind where you can
turn it into croutons or french toast. This resulted in misplaced

efforts, like pitching art history essays to contemporary art
magazines. I guess we shouldn’t have been surprised when the editors replied, 
“our publication prefers to focus on things a little more current”. 
But did that stop us? No. If anything it spurred us on. We
found ourselves sneaking into university libraries (with our now
expired student cards) and going to museums, while our peers questioned
“aren’t museums no longer relevant?”

Amy and Sagan = Dead Art Now