FRONTISPIECE
Untitled
Oil on canvas
THE CRITICAL CONDITION
VOLUME 1
THE STATE OF ART CRITICISM
ED.
JESSE LEPP
NOTL
ISSUE, 1.
An Art Critic From Hell
1) Bricolage
"I'm back!" Paul Newman. The Colour Of Money.
My Impression
"it is characteristic of evil today to appropriate the most noble and elevated words for its own use. It is practically the trademark of totalitarian movements that they have monopolized all the so-called sublime and lofty concepts, while the terms they use for what they prosecute and destroy -- base, insect-like, filthy, subhuman and all the rest they treat as anathema. And the dissimulating tissue or spell I have spoken of is so tightly woven that anyone who refuses to conform, and thus truly stands for otherness, is almost always disparaged as base, while ideals have, to an almost inconceivable degree, become a screen for vileness. " Theodor Adorno. Metaphysics: Concept And Problems. Stanford, p.123
Modernism
"modernism. Deviation from the ancient and classical manner. A word invented by Swift. "Scribblers send us over their trash, in prose and verse with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms." Swift" Samuel Johnson. Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection. Pantheon Books: p. 251-252
"I think your use of the term "modern" or "moderns" is dangerously specific, privileging your interpretation more than any of the art historical evidence / critical writings of those periods" Bart Gazzola to me: Oct. 2019
"I thought you were the art critic from hell--and all I get is this ordinary bigot." Myself to Bart Gazzola: Oct. 2019
"Apologize, v.i. To lay the foundation for future offence." Ambrose Pierce. The Devil's Dictionary. Folio Society: p. 13
"Modern art, suffering from a permanent tendency to be constructive, an obsession with objectivity (brought on by the disease that has destroyed our speculative-idealizing culture), stands isolated and powerless in a society which seems bent on its own destruction." Constant Nieuwenhuys. Manifesto (1948). 100 Artist's Manifestos . . . Penguin: p. 315
"In this period of change, the role of the creative artist can only be that of the revolutionary: it is his duty to destroy the last remnants of an empty irksome aesthetic, arousing the creative instincts still slumbering in the human mind." Constant Nieuwenhuys. Manifesto (1948) 100 artist's Manifestos . . . Penguin: p. 318
"A few years before the war, in spite of some apparently formidable names, the situation in our letters had long since come to a deadlock. The famous clarte francaise, the greatest title to glory the French bourgeoisie can boast of, which three centuries of a relentless exercise had brought to sterile perfection, could no longer grapple with a state of affairs which I emphatically refuse to call modern, but whose chief characteristic was its lack of complaisance--its unaptness, owing to its strange complexity and aggressive resilience, for being neatly sliced away and offered as food to any fastidious palate." Henri Fluchere. "Surrealisme," Scrutiny Vol. 1., page 219-220.
"So, when I say The Moderns referring to a conglomerate of subjects in my mind, I am referring to a Treatise that I might title: The Moderns. Not as a Category. But they occupy a certain amount of my attention. Or, as Iddo Falk once put it, 'today History is so buffed and buff that every person with a little experience of their own denounces all of us with past experience--and no longer knows any one of them, or their names, the ones who were wrong. The pop culture idiots are enfolded along with their most passionate opponents and the whole kabob isn't worth the price of the meal." Apple Nodham. The Malfunction Of Criticism. Unpublished manuscript.
Post-Structural
"The sequence semiotics [to] structuralism [to] poststructuralism [to] deconstruction is unintelligible without a knowledge of its origin in Saussure and in particular of the perhaps deliberate misunderstanding of two crucial places. . . . The theorists of the 1980s attribute to Saussure that language is a closed system without reference to the rest of the world. . . . This is just misreading. Saussure does not deny that the terms of language correspond to things . . . No grammarian, however, is foolish enough to deny that we can use language to refer. It was the deconstructionists who took that step." (Ian Robinson. Holding The Centre. Edgeways: p. 50-51
"So all the critic can do is emit another text, itself irreducibly plural and an invitation to carry on the game. Are the student fees and state subsidies really aimed at this activity of perpetual play? I'd rather play a real game, with rules." Ian Robinson. Holding The Centre. Edgeways: p.60
Criticism
Apart from The Jackdaw, no voice now exists in print media identifying the built-in bias State Art represents, not least because many have grown up knowing it as the only game in town. Too many arts correspondents, critics and other commentators are wary of offending officialdom, in case privileges--free trips home and abroad, parties, prizes, books, catalogues, commissions, whispered promises of 'curatorial' patronage and other prerequisites -- are withdrawn or forgotten. David Lee. State Art And Its Commissars. (What Is Wrong With Us). Academic Imprint: 130-131
"Without any recognized criteria for judging what was there everything became, on the face of it, as important as everything else. If official verdicts concerning quality were accepted it was only because they were ex cathedra and originated from those in authority who, it could reasonable be assumed, must know what they are talking about if only because of their regulation black uniforms, fancy titles, gift for baffling periphrastics and accumulated medals and titles. . ." David Lee. State Art And its Commissars. (What Is Wrong With Us). Imprint Academic: p. 139-140
"'I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to their increase of pain.'" Emily Bronte. Wuthering Heights. Nelson Doubleday: p. 135
"There are few examples of bitter antagonism between Sir John and those who sat opposite him. But there was one exception. Richard Cartright had been a Conservative. He left MacDonald because he did not receive the portfolio that he hoped for. He became a Liberal. His antipathy to MacDonald was revealed in every speech. In the 1880s in front of the parliament buildings there was a high board-walk, with railings on each side, some four feet in width. On one occasion MacDonald and Cartright met, face to face on the board-walk. Cartright sneered as he came abreast of MacDonald, said, "I never get out of the road of scoundrels." Sir John stepped one pace to the right and replied, "I always do, Sir Richard." John Diefenbaker. (LP) I Am A Canadian. RCA: CC-1027
For Example
"As we have seen, from the object-relations point of view, hate does not emerge from any primary 'animal' aggression, id-impulses, or a 'death instinct' -- but from frustrated love and the inevitable imperfections of our formative environment. It is manifestation of the need to survive, and yet may be directed against the need to survive itself, as manifest in the libidinal ego. It can thus be both a life-seeking and an anti-human force; hence its lures and tenacity. It is worth considering this fact in a world in which there are so many arguments put forward in favour of the free expression of hate because it is a 'natural' expression of our 'real' bestiality." David Holbrook. The Masks Of Hate. Pergamon Press: p. 35
"If we follow the advocacy of Susan Sontag, we may 'prefer passion' to what Bantock calls 'moral sensibility', and this may seem like a liberating revolution. But from the point of view of psychoanalytical insights into ego-weakness and sources of ego-strength, a more valid objection to the 'violent' writer is that his work represents a form of 'pseudo-male-doing' or False Self activity, i.e. hate. The analogy is with schizoid patients who need to think bad thoughts continuously to feel that they still exist. The objection is not to 'passion', which implies deep feeling, but to a hollow posture of falsified False Self assertion, out of touch with True Self feeling (and passion) altogether, and a preference for the anti-human to the human." David Holbrook. The Masks Of Hate. Pergamon Press, p.30
"And then look at them! They do all the things that they know people do, when they are "living their own lives." They play up to their own ideas of being naughty instead of their ideas of being good. And then what? It's the same old treadmill. They are just enacting the same set of ideas, only in the widdishins direction, being naughty instead of being good, treading the old circle in the opposite direction, and going round the same old mill, even if in a reversed direction." D H Lawrence. Phoenix. Penguin: p.625
Conclusion(s)
"A man whose sense of shame has some profundity encounters his destinies and delicate decisions, too, on paths which few ever reach and of whose mere existence his closest intimates must not know: his mortal danger is concealed from their eyes, and so is his regained sureness of life. Such a concealed man who instinctively needs speech for silence and for burial in silence and who is inexhaustible in his evasion of communication, wants and sees to it that a mask of him roams in his place through the hearts and heads of his friends. And supposing that he did not want it, he would still realize some day that in spite of that a mask of him is there--and that this is well. Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives.--" Nietzsche. Beyond Good And Evil (Basic Writings Of Nietzsche). Penguin: p.241
"Nevertheless l would think that in the ability not to feel manipulated, but to feel that one has gone relentlessly to the furthest extreme, their lies the only respect which is fitting: the respect for the possibility of mind, despite everything, to raise itself however slightly above that which is. And I think it really gives more courage (if I can use that formulation) if one is not given courage, and does not feel bamboozled, but has the feeling that even the worst is something that can be thought and, because it falls within reflection, does not confront me as something completely alien and different. I imagine that such a thought is probably more comforting than solace, whereas solace itself is desolate, since it is always attended by its own untruth." Theodor Adorno. Metaphysics: Concept And Problems. Stanford: p. 125
2) Anathema
Theodor Adorno said, "base, insect-like, filthy, subhuman and all the rest they treat as anathema." But what is "anathema"? Suppose "all the rest" includes: a piece of feces, pollution, a dog--"no offence to dogs."
I have to say the Dictionary is only slightly helpful. Something to do with "ex-communication". And my poor elementary schooling where we used to decode the prefix "ana" and then deduce the root word, "theme" didn't quite tell me what I need to know. Just an inkling.
But thinking about it I find that an act of anathema really speaks for itself. And I have a good example of it. An art critic from hell (so he introduced himself to me without me knowing that that's what he calls himself in his writing) has told me: Nobody likes you. Nobody wants to know what you think.
Now--this is different from normal animosity. I might say, "I don't like you", "I don't like what you say about me," in other words, something that any one of us writes when we write honestly. Something common enough that you wouldn't think it penetrates the skin.
Anathema is a bigoted ratcheting up of such animosity. "You don't like me? Okay. Nobody likes you!" Adorno's insight is that there is a psychological mechanism that allows this (although "mechanism" might not be the correct word"). Let me put it this way:
I might say someone is a "pusillanimous shit." Here "shit" is still at least humourous. There is still some pathos to it.
Anathema--that "anathema" that Adorno speaks of above--makes certain that nobody gets the joke. "Pusillanimous shit" is treated as trans-substantiation and the ratcheting up continues, I am called an actual piece of shit. I should expect everybody to treat me like an actual piece of shit.
Geez.
I hope I have never treated any person as anathema in this sense. I can say that I will always welcome all personal experience, no matter how crude or unpopular. And so, whenever someone says you are a litany of unacceptable "shit" consider carefully the lofty sentiments that proceeded it. Take it as the sentimental writing it is. Full of air-quotes to show the superiority of the writer over the presumptions of others. Full of self-referential sentiments.
What follows is what Bart Gazzola believes he can safely say (my name is a 'tag' on one of his articles but not explicitly entered into the record that I can find). This is from his website, an article that begins:
"I cut my teeth (sometimes literally, on people) as an arts writer on the Prairies, where the #karaokemodernists will ‘argue’ that painting reached its apex in terms of post painterly, or hard edged, abstraction, invoking the name of Greenberg (whom they’ve never actually read) with reverence. This is as foolish – and dangerously ignorant – as trying to say that ideas like surrealism have a ‘best before’ date."
Okay. Has nothing to do with me. I don't 'argue' [sic] anything of the sort. It makes little sense as a paragraph of written English, but what do I care?
"This is a moronic idea I stepped in, recently, like dog feces, from someone (a dishonest, self aggrandizing dullard who claims to be a ‘scholar’ that polluted the reception for Emily Andrews’ fine work, like a dog messing on the floor – no offense to dogs)."
"This is a moronic idea I stepped in, recently, like dog feces, from someone (a dishonest, self aggrandizing dullard who claims to be a ‘scholar’ that polluted the reception for Emily Andrews’ fine work, like a dog messing on the floor – no offense to dogs)."
A bit of a run-on sentence there. Bart is repeating some of the same bits he wrote to me (just so there's no question--the tag notwithstanding). The idea isn't one of mine. It didn't come from me. The feces he stepped in is of his own making.
I don't think I am dishonest. I am certainly not self-aggrandizing. I haven't ever "claimed to be a scholar" without some self-depracation. As for being a dullard, I can report that I was interesting enough for Bart Gazzola to smoke more than one cigarette with me outside the gallery in question. Enough time, indeed, for him to pass me his business card and encourage me to follow up on our conversation with an email. It's when I disagreed--and not politely--with him in several emails between us that things turned went tits up.
I don't think I am dishonest. I am certainly not self-aggrandizing. I haven't ever "claimed to be a scholar" without some self-depracation. As for being a dullard, I can report that I was interesting enough for Bart Gazzola to smoke more than one cigarette with me outside the gallery in question. Enough time, indeed, for him to pass me his business card and encourage me to follow up on our conversation with an email. It's when I disagreed--and not politely--with him in several emails between us that things turned went tits up.
"This blowhard makes the mistake of reading ‘manifestos’ and thinking he knows everything about how ‘art’ should be: but this is to be expected from someone who jabbers about ‘the moderns’ and had never heard of Greenberg."
I don't think reading manifestos--art manifestos or Marx and Engel's--is a mistake. It's not like that's all I ever read. I am sorry to admit to Gazzola that my knowledge of Art Manifesto's is limited to a recent book I procured. I don't base my idea of art on any of them. I just happened to find a book of 100 Art Manifestos From The Futurists To The Stuckists and had just concluded reading all of the moderns contributions to it when I was invited to attend Emily Andrew's show, by my mother.
I certainly don't think I know everything about how 'art' [sic] should be. I know something about how art shouldn't be--for although it may have seemed to Bart Gazzola that I had never heard of Greenberg, looking Greenberg up, afterwards, reminded me that I had read his works after all, actually, extensively, a decade ago when I was forming an opinion on kitsch. I guess it's just that I didn't find Greenberg particularly memorable or really important. Rereading his piece on Modern and Post-Modern art so many years later only strengthens the opinion I had formed. Some good ideas, some bad ones. Nothing that can't be chewed up, digested, and forgotten about without much lost.
Surely, I can't be expected to recall a meal I made of some writer years ago whenever someone happens to bring up "Greenberg" in a conversation. Especially when conversing with someone who isn't helpful in jogging the memory. And so I can outright call Bart Gazzola a liar. Says I never heard of Greenberg and I had heard of him. Doesn't know a pin about me.
Greenberg seems very important to Bart Gazzola. He's upset with hashtag whoever because of Greenberg. When people haven't understood Greenberg. When people haven't even heard of Greenberg. And to that I give a big who gives a fuck.
"But who in their right mind reads André Derain’s ‘manifesto’ when Frida Kahlo so aptly described him as the worst of the ‘art bitches of Paris’ that nearly drove her to give up and sell vegetables in the market, instead of painting? I could send you to his site, but that might increase the visitors to three, and overload it."
I certainly don't think I know everything about how 'art' [sic] should be. I know something about how art shouldn't be--for although it may have seemed to Bart Gazzola that I had never heard of Greenberg, looking Greenberg up, afterwards, reminded me that I had read his works after all, actually, extensively, a decade ago when I was forming an opinion on kitsch. I guess it's just that I didn't find Greenberg particularly memorable or really important. Rereading his piece on Modern and Post-Modern art so many years later only strengthens the opinion I had formed. Some good ideas, some bad ones. Nothing that can't be chewed up, digested, and forgotten about without much lost.
Surely, I can't be expected to recall a meal I made of some writer years ago whenever someone happens to bring up "Greenberg" in a conversation. Especially when conversing with someone who isn't helpful in jogging the memory. And so I can outright call Bart Gazzola a liar. Says I never heard of Greenberg and I had heard of him. Doesn't know a pin about me.
Greenberg seems very important to Bart Gazzola. He's upset with hashtag whoever because of Greenberg. When people haven't understood Greenberg. When people haven't even heard of Greenberg. And to that I give a big who gives a fuck.
"But who in their right mind reads André Derain’s ‘manifesto’ when Frida Kahlo so aptly described him as the worst of the ‘art bitches of Paris’ that nearly drove her to give up and sell vegetables in the market, instead of painting? I could send you to his site, but that might increase the visitors to three, and overload it."
Which is precisely why it's convenient to have a book of Art Manifestos to hand . . . Let's see: Andre Derain's 'manifesto' [sic] . . . nothing. Google . . . okay some poorly worded descriptions. Maybe Bart Gazzola has, who can say? a criticism of 100 Artists' Manifestos From The Futurists To The Stuckists Selected by Alex Danchev--perhaps he is pointing out the limitations of such a book and the biases which inform Alex Danchev's selection. Which would be interesting. Only the writing is so completely equivocal that any assumption I make about what Bart means by it would be just folly on my part.
Once more, has nothing to do with me. I am not interested in followers, or site statistics. Even this Magazine I am working on is evolving over many, many drafts. Not expecting many readers I can just keep working on the thought as it comes to me.
What is explicitly there in Bart Gazzola, it seems to me, is that he believes that you can't read something without believing in it. He seems to me to be saying: there are some things you shouldn't read. Which is just an inverse of: there are many things that Bart Gazzola hasn't read. Why he wants to limit reading--a totally untenable position--I can venture a guess.
Better if he just goes and peddles that sort of nonsense somewhere else and to someone else.
"To try to limit creation – and painting – is inherently the act of a closed mind (regrettably, not closed enough, as such pedants feel the need to ‘share’, like the effluvia from an overflowing toilet…)."
Once more, has nothing to do with me. I am not interested in followers, or site statistics. Even this Magazine I am working on is evolving over many, many drafts. Not expecting many readers I can just keep working on the thought as it comes to me.
What is explicitly there in Bart Gazzola, it seems to me, is that he believes that you can't read something without believing in it. He seems to me to be saying: there are some things you shouldn't read. Which is just an inverse of: there are many things that Bart Gazzola hasn't read. Why he wants to limit reading--a totally untenable position--I can venture a guess.
Better if he just goes and peddles that sort of nonsense somewhere else and to someone else.
"To try to limit creation – and painting – is inherently the act of a closed mind (regrettably, not closed enough, as such pedants feel the need to ‘share’, like the effluvia from an overflowing toilet…)."
Nope. Never tried to limit creation and painting. Not a pedant. Don't like it when anyone tries to denounce and limit someone else. Not even when it's a rather dishonest, self-aggrandizing portrait of me. Could come from the Left or the Right, it's all the same to me. And don't think this is sharing--but I do like to keep somewhat tidy records.
His slanders done he goes on with his task at hand, a review of an art show he likes. Good. Let him keep to what he knows intimately.
It's nice to be reminding not only be name but by example--precept and example you might say--not to be a blowhard, a know-it-all, deluded, etc. Let him keep up the good work--I don't want to affect that at all. I don't know anything about Bart Gazzola except what he writes. But I discovered a long time ago: if it's not me that is being characterized in a hit-piece it must be someone else, probably the one writing it. His bullying--now that he's published it with a tag--cyber-bullying, shows what he is and says nothing about my way of life. Perhaps, after all, it is his performance to act out the way he sees fit.
When someone says they are more powerful than you, better funded than you with a better website than you, more readers than you and more followers than you fine. When they lie about you in order to destroy your reputation (of course that may be my interpretation of his performance) and then publish it--take that lie and knock their silly brains about with it, is my advice.
A slanderer is not a critic of any bearing. And I'm trying hard to remain critical and not be slanderous. I hope that what may convince the masses not to read the other side of the story also encourages the individual--who can read both sides perfectly well--to make up their own mind. And if there's a "Yes, but" to my "This is so, isn't it?" then I'd be much obliged.
3) Post Script
. . . what if Bart Gazzola published his slander in the popular 'new-paper' The Sound. Impossible--surely the editor had better sense when he read the piece . . . I mean, I've talked to him . . . even if he doesn't remember me . . . he seemed to me to be not unreasonable . . . unless Bart convinced him that I actually was the thing he describes, did he even ask, Hey, who is this guy you're slandering? . . . I'll stop short of speculation . . . It can't be.
It's nice to be reminding not only be name but by example--precept and example you might say--not to be a blowhard, a know-it-all, deluded, etc. Let him keep up the good work--I don't want to affect that at all. I don't know anything about Bart Gazzola except what he writes. But I discovered a long time ago: if it's not me that is being characterized in a hit-piece it must be someone else, probably the one writing it. His bullying--now that he's published it with a tag--cyber-bullying, shows what he is and says nothing about my way of life. Perhaps, after all, it is his performance to act out the way he sees fit.
When someone says they are more powerful than you, better funded than you with a better website than you, more readers than you and more followers than you fine. When they lie about you in order to destroy your reputation (of course that may be my interpretation of his performance) and then publish it--take that lie and knock their silly brains about with it, is my advice.
A slanderer is not a critic of any bearing. And I'm trying hard to remain critical and not be slanderous. I hope that what may convince the masses not to read the other side of the story also encourages the individual--who can read both sides perfectly well--to make up their own mind. And if there's a "Yes, but" to my "This is so, isn't it?" then I'd be much obliged.
3) Post Script
. . . what if Bart Gazzola published his slander in the popular 'new-paper' The Sound. Impossible--surely the editor had better sense when he read the piece . . . I mean, I've talked to him . . . even if he doesn't remember me . . . he seemed to me to be not unreasonable . . . unless Bart convinced him that I actually was the thing he describes, did he even ask, Hey, who is this guy you're slandering? . . . I'll stop short of speculation . . . It can't be.
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