Topic: GreenMonster I
Christopher Brayshaw:
Ahem! Mr. Vaughan; Ms. McKay...
sally:
You actually agree with that statement?
CJB:
I sure do. Which isn't to say that those contexts -- "art history," "cultural studies," etc. -- lack complexity or intellectual interest-value. But art criticism is a whole other animal.
L.M.:
Leni Riefenstahl truly believed that she was making pure art. So I can see a problem arising from the absolute dismissal of a context in the service of aesthetics. Most people get around this little "Leni problem" by declaring her work simply propaganda.
To his credit, Schjeldahl doesn't avoid this issue, neither does the director of a brilliant documentary linked to here:
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/26/riefenstahl.html
J@simpleposie:
Does Greenberg outright dismiss his extra-aesthetic contexts here? What does he really say?
L.M.:
I was responding to C.J.B.'s previous statement. (but, in all fairness he doesn't dismiss it either.) I'm reading that C.J.B. and Greenburg want context to be separated from art criticism, I'm not so sure I do. Or I'm not so sure it's totally possible. I'm also not accusing either of making a value judgement (...in this particular context) (HELP! I jumped into a mobius loop and I can't get out!) But that may be because I personally don't place a value on art criticism that elevates it above art history, world history, cultural studies, my fave novels etc.
Besides, art is messy and mysterious, no matter how clean and clear we think we are being.
L.M.:
I should clarify that the "Leni problem" is something I have pondered for years, I didn't drag it into this conversation to make any indictments of people's opinions. There is something in the question that has inched me towards a more coherent stance in regards to my little Leni problem. But I may be approaching the issue from the p.o.v. of an artist.
I may also be substituting "content" for "context" in the original statement (that's sort of a fun exercise) and I may even re-write it to make it rhyme. So I am totally untrustworthy.
But be that as it may, my next question would be (probably a question you posed somewhere in the last year, and I didn't pick up on it) if we cannot have the extraaesthetic contexts as part of the art critical discourse, does it follow that the extraaesthetic contexts have to be eradicated from the art?
Or another way of posing the question: if it can't be art-criticised, then I'm not art-doing?
What? No?
Fuckety fuckfuckfuck.
simpleposie? ...ya sure! I'm going to bed
J@simpleposie:
Good morning L.M. - or at least the half an hour or so that is left of it! Let me ask you another question.
How different is what Greenberg says above, from Robert Enright's remark below, "If you bring a preconceived set of conditions to art, you're not going to see it.”?
L.M.:
Good question. (and top of the morning to you)
I would say that their comments are totally different in that I sense Greenburg's conditions would exclude that which isn't what he's looking for. I'm giving Enright more credit as I think he might be willing to be surprised by what he's not looking for.
This comes back to a previous comment about the best art being something I didn't know I needed to see until I saw it.
Off to the royal winter fair now to get a big dose of brain-addled high-waspishness at the horsy shows!
J@simpleposie:
Aren't they both advocating a need for an unobstructed view of what they're looking AT rather than what they are looking FOR?
CJB:
LM is misreading me a bit. I don't want to do away with context, and I don't think that I make this claim anywhere in my published writing. I do think, however, that there is a fundamental difference between writing context and writing art criticism. Art criticism, in my mind, is evaluative. It unites and divides things by making aesthetic judgements, judgements which, because aesthetic and therefore personal and hopelessly subjective, nonetheless present themselves as objective in their reporting. I realize this is a paradox, but I think it's insurmountable. Context, so far as I can tell, is sometimes critical, and sometimes not. Sometimes it just tells me that a painting was made with aquamarine, and that aquamarine was expensive at the time. But such a statement doesn't say whether its author thinks the aquamarine painting is a good painting, a bad painting, or an indifferent painting. And this is something that I, for one, am interested to know, and also to know the decision-train ("criteria," Sally) that led the statement-maker there. Why? Well, because in late capitalist culture, all kinds of bad and indifferent art -- books, music, dance, hell, even paintings and sculptures -- gets shovelled at the public under the guise of being meaningful and important and worthy. Having "criteria," being able to make independent critical judgements about art objects' worth, is an important self-defense mechanism in a monolithic capitalist culture that would vastly prefer that its audiences just shut the fuck up and consume.
I guess this puts me down in the Teddy Adorno camp, hey?
J@simpleposie:
Or perhaps Gadamer
L.M.:
"J@simpleposie" wrote:
Aren't they both advocating a need for an unobstructed view of what they're looking AT rather than what they are looking FOR?
This is sort of funny, because while you make distinctions (and fairly enough) with AT and FOR. I'm thinking just wait a minute, unobstructed? That makes me wonder what I'd be looking AT art FOR, (I'm so cheap, but you'll give as good as you get, j.) The view is never going to be unobstructed by the culture we participate in.
CJB, misreading and misreading fast are my favourite activities. I am having a bit of trouble following your argument, (I got stuck on aquamarine, like Yves Klein getting so stuck on that blue) I share your frustration with being fed crap. I also think there are lessons to be learned from a lot of crap, but I'm not a writer, so my criteria is generally unarticulated, on the fly, in front of a work, case by case - and even then, a brilliant work can make my unspoken criteria obsolete.
J@simpleposie:
Oh good, LM. Those brain addled wasps let you back out of the fair! I hope you didn't spend all your money - not that it matters at simpleposie where everything's free and the talk, couldn't get any cheaper.
You are right, the view is never going to be unobstructed - even the mechanics of each person's own visual apparatus is constantly righting images so we can understand them and stop bumping into things. We are designed obstructed. We blink. And the fact we're individuated makes it worse. It is very isolating - did you see what I saw?
At a very basic "change of state" kind of level of argument, Greenberg's excerpted remarks hold a silver nugget of truth.
Say you make and bottle shiraz. Say you grow it and also cabernet, grenache, mourvedre and merlot all on the same land. When you go to bottle it you think to yourself, what about the context? Should I put this shiraz in a bottle all by itself or shouldn't I include the culture I raised it in? Shouldn't I add a little of each extraneous varietal to my shiraz bottles? Well, this is often done and it is still wine. And it is often delicious - but it is no longer shiraz.
I'm neither a huge Greenberg expert nor champion, but I don't think he is wontonly, in this essay anyway calling for some strange and fearsome purity as much as he is asking, as he does, "... how can aesthetic value be kept enough in sight in such contexts?" That is, how visible is the art work
anymore by the time you map every context you feel "needs" to be brought in onto the work, mention your actual distaste for painting and the fact you are experiencing morning sickness? What does that tell anybody about your experience with the art? Don't you have to get down to it at some point? Enright says nothing different.
L.M.:
It was worth all my life savings to pet baby goats, bunnies and tiny donkeys, who, in exchange for food pellets, expressed their pure devotion and love for me.
Ok you win. Up until you mentioned it, I hadn't connected any of this to the painting hate and morning sickness review. Art writing, writing around art, but not criticism, no problem. (now, if the painter's rep doesn't like painting much either, maybe has morning sickness and wants to have a giggle of commiseration over it, there's a story I'll read!)
J@simpleposie:
We all win. Excuse me while I go out for some food pellets.
L.M.:
Damn, just had another tiny thought, and sorry but I must leap back to my extreme Leni R. case, and say that some contexts need to be mapped into the argument. Show "Olympia" or "Triumph of the Will" to an historically ignorant audience (trust me, they do exist), and most will recognize that formally those movies are stunning and powerful. Then leave out any discussion of the Hitler stuff. There's a problem with just pondering the formality of her work out of it's context. So I would maintain that the willful absence of any context in order to appreciate the aesthetic qualities alone is very difficult and may even be constructed as a deception in itself.
Now some people may claim with perfect 20/20 hindsight that they would recognize the fascist aesthetic without this context, and to that I'd say bullshit since her art and the historical events around her work are intertwined, and holy shit, if she didn't invent it single handed, it certainly crystallized in her work.
Of course I'm not advocating that every piece of art pass a political test, in fact I see a big problem when we give shoddy work a pass because we like the politics (that happens all the time) In fact it's a characteristic of work that CJB might describe as being sold to us as 'worthy' yet failing on an aesthetic level. (or something I call: "shut the fuck up, your little painting/installation/video/sculpture/performance hasn't solved the problem of world hunger, and it's not that interesting to look at, either")
Now I'm starting to wonder if I'm arguing that context is unnecessary for an aesthetic failure, but totally necessary in the case of an aesthetic success.
Probably not, I'm just blithering now, and trying on a new rule that I can break in 15 minutes.
J@simpleposie:
You are an incorrigible misreader L.M.. Nevertheless, I'll direct you to the second footnote at the very end of Greenberg's essay, the essay which happens to be the willfully absent context for the excerpt we've been discussing all this time.
L.M.:
HA HA!
J@simpleposie:
I'm still wondering what Sally has to say...
CJB:
Disclosure: some of these ideas are tryouts for an essay I'm currently writing on Geoffrey Farmer's work.
My problem with "context" (by which I mean writing whose primary purpose is to situate a work or works of art in relationship to another discourse, whether political, anthropological, sociological, etc.) is that these discourses assimilate the work's aesthetic effect to preexisting categories within the external discourse. Or the artwork is described as a symptom of something the external discourse has already figured out. This is a real problem, because it inherently values the language, concepts, etc. of the context-language over the effect created by the work itself. Which, in my understanding of how art works, is ass-backwards, because it assimilates the radical, subjective, and unspecifiable - in - advance effect of engaging with the work to a preexisting set of ideas and categories. Back-of-the-bus! It always amuses me when people construct my position as some kind of radical conservatism or call for "purity." I don't want purity, I want the freedom to report thoughts and feelings I didn't even know I had before stepping in front of an artwork, without being told that my involuntary and deeply subjective response doesn't count, unless all the rough edges are sanded off and it's fully assimilated to some preexisting way of looking at, and thinking about, things. To my mind, folks who are trying to minimize or do away with thinking about aesthetics are the real conservatives these days. Aesthetic experience is a radical threat to fixed ways of thinking, to business-as-usual, to consensus-building (so typical in most Canadian thinking about visual art!), to "academy language," to comfort and security!
J@simpleposie:
I love the phrase "ass backwards". But my hunch is these "real conservatives" of which you speak, aren't that evolved yet - they haven't adopted time saving measures like rubber stamps on forms that say - fill this out ass-backwards!
L.M.:
My apologies, if I have constructed a position for you, CJB. It's not my intent (or a particular skill that I possess). And certainly not my intent to accuse you of any impulses towards purity, ( Leni R. is my little fascist and mine only. I occasionally bring her out to share with my friends, but she always has to be put away quickly)
J@simpleposie:
OK L.M.
What have you and Leni done to Sally?
CJB:
"L.M." wrote:
My apologies, if I have constructed a position for you, CJB. It's not my intent (or a particular skill that I possess). And certainly not my intent to accuse you of any impulses towards purity, (Leni R. is my little fascist and mine only. I occasionally bring her out to share with my friends, but she always has to be put away quickly)
Never thought anything of the kind, LM. I'm not mad at you, and only mock-mad at SMcK, who actually did accuse me of advancing purity's nefarious aims in public, thereby illuminating - at least to my mind - a "Double Negative" size gap between our respective "subject positions." But I guess I really believe that there are no losers in an intellectual dispute carried on in a serious way, which is why I'm happy to keep on disputing with her -- if she'd ever reappear, that is! -- but not with Bad Central Canadian Art Typist RMV.
Incidentally, your petting zoo line really was one for the ages.
Best,
CJB
monsoonland, People's Republic of Cascadia
