Criticism is the profession of the unprofessional.
â JOSEPH SCHUMPETER, 1942
â CLEMENT GREENBERG, 1984
St John said, the truth shall make you free, and was he right. There is nothing like the truth. The truth is delicious. You can eat the truth; you can drink it and you can sleep with it. There is nothing like the truth. And sometimes, when it is about yourself, it hurts. It hurts, but it still makes you free. Alas the truth can also be a weapon, a means of punishment instead of correction.
1 From âClassicâ to Modernist Critic
Gustave Courbetâs account of a critic he befriended, who was notorious for waking up in the middle of the night, standing in his bed, screaming âI have to criticize,â remained as a warning in my mind not to adopt the professional identity wholeheartedly, or at least to doubt its motivations. And having encountered two of the most important art critics of the 1950s, Clement Greenberg in New York and Pierre Restany in Paris only once in my life, I distinctly remember my bewilderment at the peculiar airs they exuded: the Parisian all flair and fanfare, and the New Yorker all abstemious arrogance. However, in both instances I recall being puzzled by their auto-construction as presumably major public figures. Admittedly, both represented highly specialized forms of knowledge and competence of judgment that seemed to distinguish them from the spectatorial and readerly collective that contemporary artistic production supposedly addresses. The writings of the âclassic criticâ of the 1950sâas represented by Greenberg and Restany possibly for the last time in the twentieth centuryâwere literally those of the eyewitnessâ, distinguished by privileged and primary access to the studio, the work and its maker. And it was this immediacy that vouched for the credibility of the criticsâ accounts. Distancesâspatial, temporal, epistemological, methodologicalâand the degree to which these promised objectivity, warranted the truth value of the historianâs narratives of the lives (and the works) of the artists.1
To formulate the nationalist ideologeme had thus become one of the last social functions of these critics of the 1950s (as opposed to critical reflections of the 1920sâ1930s, which had been theorizing cultural practices as instruments of collective political transformation, for example). No wonder that their discerning judgments were dependent on innate or intentional disavowals of other historical phenomena, places and facts. And in order to sustain these necessary geopolitical distinctions and enforce their clamor for supremacy, each criticâand their many minor followersâconstructed a narrative whose subtext was based on their specific penchant for omissions or calculated erasures.2
One explanation of this paradox might be the fact that the young European scholars and critics of 1968 transferred to the United States to study if not already to teach with a generation of disciples of eminent mostly German and French Jewish art historians and critics who had been forced to emigrate to the United States to escape fascist prosecution. The field of Modernist art history, most certainly in Germany, had hardly been formed before having been erased and had not been reconstructed for decades after 1945. And the field and profession of the modernist critic, the legacies of writers such as Carl Einstein, Max Raphael and Paul Westheim had now been transferred to a fundamentally different, yet newly foundational American context, as their roles as public critics and historians had been re-activated and reconfigured in the United States in the work of Clement Greenberg, Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg. But another aspect, less recognized in its tremendous impact on Europeans, artists, historians and critics, was the fact that the methodological and historical models to comprehend the histories of Modernist production, as they had now been reconfigured by these American historians and critics also provided the basis upon which American artistic debates were activated and differentiated continuously since the 1940s (a phenomenon utterly absent from German, and to a considerable degree also from French critical culture until the 1960s, if not even later).4
These first movements within the field of a critical reception of Dada and Duchamp were now initiated in the United States, which in turn had a tremendous impact on the formation of American artistic post-WWII practices:
2 The Critic as Democratic Agent
Obviously, this historical and political process of radical democratization, as artistic practices since the 1960s increasingly emphasized that any cultural practice, be it visual or literary, would inevitably and increasingly have to challenge, if not to eventually eliminate all hierarchical orders differentiating the presumed novice recipients from the presumed âexpert.â In fact, the innate hierarchical division between privileged forms of knowledge that the expert claims as a placeholder for the interested engagement of a selected class-based audience had been precisely a perpetual target of all efforts the avantgardes (and some of the post-WWII neo-avantgardes). But it is doubtful that the critic, under the circumstances of a continuously expanding processes of democratization (which inevitably entailed also massive consequences of historical, subjective and aesthetic desublimation) could any longer withstand these processes and pose as a âguardian of the secretâ (as Greenberg had famously called one of Pollockâs most eminent paintings).
It is certainly not accidental that the writing of criticism in the subsequent decade of the 1960s splintered into ever more incompatible philosophical and
The extreme opposite of Steinbergâs vast expansion of criticism, based on the ever more complex accounts of art historical knowledge, would be introduced at precisely the same moment in the writings of the artist Donald Judd. The artist not only reduced and reinforced the neo-positivist parameters and ahistorical armatures he had inherited from Greenberg to the level of a toolbox doxa, designing templates to process perception that confirmed his indisputable artistic authority. At the same time, performing, or rather enforcing one more time the functions of the critic as agent of local, regional and national ideological and economic interests, Judd also fortified the paranoid boundaries of a presumably insuperable triumph of New York School painting and sculpture, its trajectory inevitably leading and culminating in his own achievements, manifestly defying and disqualifying the ever increasing differentiations emerging in the various post-WWII visual productions in Europe, Asia or the Latin American countries.
3 Redefining Criticism: New Paradigms of the 1960s
Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities in a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability. [â¦] What kind of criticism, of commentary on the arts, is desirable today? [â¦] What would criticism look like that would serve the work of art, not usurp its place? [â¦] In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotic of art. (Sontag, 1966)
Sontagâs call for an âerosâ of perception in her crucial conclusive statement, was at the time of her writing already an antiquated, romanticizing projection. The challenges posed by the procedural precision and the materiality of painterly and sculptural practices at that very moment, from Stella to Hesse, from LeWitt to Ryman had long surpassed the wishful aspiration that artistic production could still transmit the aesthetic enchantment of an unalienated sensuous subjectivity. Artistic practices since the early 1960s conceived of themselves as engaging with and engendering a materialist phenomenology of experience (and materialist implied precisely all aspects of the philosophical concept, from contemplating mere matter to the manner of mediation). It also addressed the very fact that artistic practices would now refuse the hegemonic demands of an external or transcendentally pre-existing discursive order of criticism. Increasingly engaging with different temporal and geographical orders, as much as different conventions of subjective perception, aesthetic practice aimed to simultaneously undo conventional concepts of subject formation. Not only had the previously ruling critical discourses maintained linguistic primacy and the dominance of specific communicative conventions, they sustained the social hierarchy by providing a presumably qualified speaker with interpretive privileges, so to speak. Rejecting the written criticism of the 1950s, criticism would now attempt to literally formulate a new terminology, to conjure and conceive different, de-hierarchized social and subjective constellations.
It seemed in 1969 that no one, not even a public greedy for novelty, would actually pay money or much of it for a xerox sheet referring to an event past or never directly perceived, a group of photographs documenting an ephemeral situation or condition, a project for work never to be completed, words spoken but not recorded; it seemed that these artists would therefore be forcibly freed from the tyranny of the commodity status and marketâorientation. [â¦] On the other hand, the esthetic contribution of an âidea artâ have been considerable. An informational, documentary idiom has provided a vehicle for art ideas that were encumbered and obscured by formal considerations. [â¦] Such a strategy, if it continues to develop, can only have a salutary effect on the way all art is examined and developed in the future. (Lippard, 1973, p. 263)
Radically consequent as Lippardâs project actually was, it is only with hindsight that we can comprehend the historical and theoretical deficiencies of her belated enactment of an essentially factographic definition of the future consonances and equivalences of artistic and critical practices. First of all because Lippardâs collectively operating agents of a newly accessible universal aesthetic, called Conceptual Art, in fact only designated the collective of artists as newly enabled speakers and readers. And while Lippard in fact disbanded the privileges of critical hierarchies and evaluation, and more importantly perhaps the hierarchies of genres and techniques, now relativized if not disqualified by a presumably universal photographic and linguistic textuality, the chasm between production and reception was only dramatically widened. Most tragic of all was Lippardâs utopian self-deception thatâgiven the rapidly advancing and increasing distribution of leisure timeâ, the reduction of the visual practices to readerly textuality would inevitably entail a new community of self-determining critics and readers.
We have already seen, however briefly, when glancing at Juddâs writings, that the status and functions of criticism were very much on the mind of artists of that generation as well (Robert Morrisâs writings, by comparison, would qualify rather as those of one of the most eminent theoreticians of the sculptural production of that decade). That the criticâs claims to provide literal and literary agency to a structure emerging from and operative within the field of the visual, had come under historical pressure if not outright doubt would also be signaled by a triadic derision by three artistic giants, performed in short
Johnsâ The Critic Smiles (1959), Richard Hamiltonâs The Critic Laughs (1969), and most importantly, Marcel Duchampâs lecture The Creative Act, ironically delivered at the annual conference of professionalized critical interpreters College Association in 1957, his radically emancipatory bill of readers and spectatorsâ rights, which decisively transfers the traditional functions of the critic to spectatorial emancipation and self-constitution.
There are two seemingly mismatched fragments, just as I remember them: the domed shape of the head, bald, rigid, unforgiving, and the flaccid quality of the mouth, slightly ajar in the physiologically impossible gesture of both relaxing and grinning, As always, I am held by the arrogance of the mouthâfleshy, toothy, aggressiveâand its pronouncements, which though voiced in a hesitant, stumbling drawl are, as always, implacably final. (Krauss, 1993, p. 248)
4 Ends of the Critics
The extent to which the functions of the critic engaged that generation of artists becomes even more obvious when we discover that Johnsâ initial alert to the criticsâ problematic performances as blind speakers would not only be repeated by Johns in two subsequent works, but that his tribulation would find a dialogic response across the Atlantic in a work by Richard Hamilton in 1968. After having received a set of enlarged artificial teeth made from sugar at a funfair from his son, Hamilton mounted the candy dentures on an authentic electric toothbrush, designed by Dieter Rams and produced by Braunâthen along with almost all of their productsâa magnet of attraction for Hamilton and others to ponder the magic power of post-WWII design in West Germany. Repeating Johnsâ uncanny play of substitutions, transforming the object to be cleaned into a disabled cleaning device, Hamilton radicalizes Johnsâ title from The Critic Smiles to his own The Critic Laughs. If Johns had associated the critic with blindness, Hamiltonâs false dentures diagnose the criticâs inability to laugh, to respond to a joke, and by implication his inability to respond to any artistic intervention that is restructuring the unconscious in order to experience a moment of sudden relief from the continuous and collective conditions of repression.
Just like Johns, Hamilton would even follow up with a second work contemplating the ever more precarious, if not ludicrous conditions of critical commentary. In 1971â1972, after a prolonged and apparently almost insurmountable
Just like Johns and Hamilton, the practices of Pop Art and emerging Minimalism had insisted on their innate self-evident communicability. Even more, their iconographic choices and their formal and morphological structures had claimed universal accessibility. These claims to suture collective perception and enact unmediated legibility, had already been voiced once before as an emancipatory project with a variety of fatalities and some rare successes in the 1920s. But now, neither falsely popularizing, nor indoctrinating under the conditions of the collective erasure of the subject, the criticâs claims to serve as the privileged and legitimate mediator between the studio and the page, between the artist and the collective of competent readers had also acquired a newly manifest futility.
That the socio-historically constructed role and the functions of the critic had been drastically reduced if not effaced altogether, was apparently inevitable. This erasure, however, seems to have been caused by fundamentally different, yet equally compelling historical, economical and ideological-political forces. First of all, the newly ruling order of universal equivalences resulting from the globalization of cultural practices, compellingly disqualifies any claim for hierarchical evaluations of any kind. Comparative qualifications and criteria can no longer be drawn on any consensus formed by particular classes, individual subjects and their interests, local traditions or nation state cultures. The second set of causes is no less powerful in its determinations, even though it originates in an utterly different spectrum of universalizing and relativizing forces. It is the fact that the final industrial commercialization of artistic production (retroactively even embracing and equalizing all the conflicting positions of the avantgardes of the pre-WWII period and the post-WWII neo-avantgardes)
If we rally assume that we are now living in a time without critics, a time from which critics are not only absent, but when they are objectively no longer desirable or needed, what are the criteria of a time without criticism? First of all, I could repeat my old adage first stated over ten years ago, that a system of investment and of financialization of the art market does in fact not only no longer need critical input, but quite explicitly disqualifies it. Criticism is only a hindrance, or a farce once the patterns of cultural consumption have reached a status in which stock market and art market have become assimilated to such an extent that only market expertise, prognosis of profit maximization and growth potential are the central questions of professional comment.
Most importantly, we have to recognize that the universal acceptance of all practices, of all kinds from all sites and periods of production is not necessarily a sign of an emancipated global community. What currently appears as a revolutionary distribution of universal cultural access and assets and its ever expanding infinity of potential objects of desire, obviously is not the offspring and harvest of a truly liberated global collectivity. Rather, it operates as the phantasmagoria to still find meaningful structures of formal, material and social organization of subjective and objective experience in just about any formally defined aesthetic object of any time. Its compelling motivation is to dissimulate the actually governing conditions of an extreme totalization of digitally administrated technocratic regimes. It does not matter how politically ambitious the aims of artistic practices might be if the sphere of a public social and political culture is increasingly subjected to oppressive and censorious control.
If the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world, plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this reaction come about? All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone: the spectator brings the work of art in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. (Duchamp, 1959, pp. 77â78)
Notes
As the great art historian Leo Steinberg remarked early on, to emphasize the distinctions between art historians and critics was the rule at that time (and ever after, most likely): âIn those days, the mid-1950s, practicing art critics were mostly artists or men of letters. Few art historians took the contemporary scene seriously enough to give it the time of day. To divert oneâs attention from Papal Rome to Tenth Street, New York, would have struck them as frivolousâand I respected their probityâ (Steinberg, 1975, p. VII).
Examples would be the fact that the first generation of critics from the 1950s utterly failed to recognize even a minimum of Duchampâs and Dadaismâs epistemological and aesthetic impact, the failure to confront the primordial restructuring of painting by the Soviet avantgardes, and most strikingly perhaps, the utter failure to recognize the centrality of photography in the visual cultures of the twentieth century. Two of the most paradoxical but consequential key hinges within that American context, initially utterly contained within the confines of Greenbergâs power, were Robert Motherwell and William Rubin. Motherwell, a bona fide, even if slightly younger member of Greenbergâs certified painters of the New York School, broke ranks with its ethos and aesthetics by editing the most comprehensive history of Dada activities at an astonishingly early moment in 1951. Motherwellâs book The Dada Painters and Poets (1951), initiated the American rediscovery of Dada on all levels, including Dadaâs reception by artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and bringing about the first major exhibitions at Sidney Janis, for example. Rubin, a bit more than ten years laterâwhile remaining a staunch follower of Greenbergâs theories and aestheticsâfollowed Motherwellâs lead by organizing the first comprehensive grand scale exhibition account of that history in his Dada and Surrealism Revisited, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. Comprehensive as it was at that moment, it was from a later perspective of course also scandalously deficient in its complete omission of any of the actual political and vast photographic dimensions of Dada and Surrealism.
Among the many examples of the seemingly never-ending European engagement with Greenbergâs writings at the end of the twentieth century, and even the first decade of the following one, see among others: Bois (1996), Buchloh (1994), Clark (1982), Duve and Greenberg (2010), Guilbaut (1983), Harrison (1984), and Lüdeking (1994).
One example of a serious breakthrough in critical European visual culture would be Umberto Ecoâs Opera Aperta, which was published in 1962. Another, no less crucial, however later in their explicit engagement with phenomena of visual artistic practices, would be the writings of Roland Barthes.
When critical legacies were almost pathologically internalized, another major factor emerged that forces us to dispute the viability of the current, let alone a future of the practice of the critic: not everybody succeeded as compellingly to transit from Greenbergâs hegemonic model of critical writing and thinking as did Rosalind Krauss. For example, Charles Harrisonâs never ending labor of (un-)love for Greenberg in London was possibly even more inextricably entangled due to an imaginary Anglo-American formalist tradition leading from Roger Fryâs Bloomsbury to Greenbergâs Tenth Street. Harrison defended and extended Greenbergâs legacies even after two generations of artists (Pop and Minimalism), had amply proven that the terms and the concepts, let alone the historical records and accounts of Greenbergâs formalism had been utterly deficient from the start. See Harrison (1984).
Anatomy of Criticism had of course been the title of Northop Fryeâs notorious late Formalist study of literary criticism in 1957. Almost exactly the time of both the Duchampian and the Johnsian polemical farewells to the profession of the critic.
References
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