In his book on rave culture, Generation E, Simon Reynolds bemoans the inadequacy of rock criticism to describe/interpret dance music: "The materials with which the techno auteur works--timbre/texture, rhythm, and space--are precisely the elements that rock criticism ignores in favor of meaning, which is extracted almost exclusively from close study of lyrics and persona. Rock critics use techniques borrowed from literary criticism or sociology to interpret rock in terms of the singer's biography/neurosis or the music's social relevance. Devoid of text, dance music and ambient are better understood through metaphors from the visual arts: 'the soundscape,' 'aural decor,' 'a soundtrack for an imaginary movie,' 'audio-sculpture.'"If only visual arts criticism were concerned with talking intelligently about "timbre/texture, rhythm, and space"! Unfortunately art critics do the same thing with art that Reynolds says rock critics do with dance music: they ignore the perceptual phenomena and start hunting for texts. If they're not up to the job of supplying verbal equivalents for visual experience (and most of them aren't), they're likely to dismiss the art as vapid eye candy. Gradually artists, too, give up, and begin to make work with "text," either imbedded in the piece so critics can "discover" it, or overtly expressed so that it can be parroted in reviews. A sign of the mass resignation of artists to curatorial/critical preferences is the December Artforum cover, which shows thumbnails of the "Best of 2001." It is telling that out of fifteen images, the cover features only one painting (by Luc Tuymans) and one sculpture/installation (by Thomas Hirschhorn) and the rest of it's basically photography. Writers feel more comfortable talking about photography because it's a storytelling medium, as well as the language of "the media." Yet some of the most interesting artworks being made are closer to electronic dance music--abstract, evocative experiences that one could spend days coming up with metaphors to describe. (Examples are some of the digital paintings discussed elsewhere this log; the logic even extends to more traditional abstract painting by Albert Oehlen, Carl Ostendarp, and Sarah Morris--all of whom have excellent shows up in Manhattan right now.) This isn't "stupid" work--if anything it's smarter because of the convolutions it goes through to defeat precise description. But that's its Catch-22; the better it succeeds in rendering the viewer speechless, the less likely it is to find an intelligent critical advocate.
dear tom, what? Carl O.
Continuing (thanks for the prompt, "Carl O.")...
It may seem odd to attribute this quality of "speechlessness" to the work of Carl Ostendarp, since the artist probably considers his hard-edged pictographic paintings to be speech in the purest, most non-metaphoric form. In fact, he'd no doubt be delighted with a review that simply read "Pretzel hovers. Teardrops fall. Lima beans migrate. (etc)" Nevertheless, the diligent reviewer is going to have to find at least another 492 words to get paid, which means resorting to metaphor. And that's hard work. The texture of the linen Ostendarp uses could be described as "pebbly" or "sandpaper-like." His flashe paint might be said to be "so flat and uninflected that if a canvas by his New Imagist forerunners Susan Rothenberg or Robert Moskowitz were hanging in the same room, all its finicky, self-indulgent nuances would be sucked away, like stellar gases into a black hole." (Tom Moody, 2002) Attention would need to be paid to color, but without the use of sentimental words like "succulent" or "glowing."
Compare this pathetic struggle to articulate with a blurb plucked at random from the Dec. 2001 Artforum, written by the English critic Kate Bush: "On June 18, 1984, at the height of Thatcherism, the quiet South Yorkshire village of Orgreave was the scene of a particularly violent confrontation in a long and painful miner's strike. This summer, [Young British Artist Jeremy] Deller...assembled a group of amateur reenactors and restaged the pitched battle between police and picketers, complete with cavalry charges, flying missiles, howling ambulances, and bloodied faces. As political performance-cum-living history painting, Deller's Battle of Orgreave constituted a new kind of artistic hybrid." Well, not that new--Graham Durward reenacted a terrorist massacre about 8 years ago--and probably dumb to watch (we'll see: Mike Figgis filmed the performance), but the point is, a review of this type of work practically writes itself. Long before a satisfactory rough draft of a first paragraph on Ostendarp has been finished, Kate Bush has filed her copy and buggered off down the pub with her mates. In the game of getting ink in today's art world, the readymade storyteller has an innate advantage.
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In his book on rave culture, Generation E, Simon Reynolds bemoans the inadequacy of rock criticism to describe/interpret dance music: "The materials with which the techno auteur works--timbre/texture, rhythm, and space--are precisely the elements that rock criticism ignores in favor of meaning, which is extracted almost exclusively from close study of lyrics and persona. Rock critics use techniques borrowed from literary criticism or sociology to interpret rock in terms of the singer's biography/neurosis or the music's social relevance. Devoid of text, dance music and ambient are better understood through metaphors from the visual arts: 'the soundscape,' 'aural decor,' 'a soundtrack for an imaginary movie,' 'audio-sculpture.'"
If only visual arts criticism were concerned with talking intelligently about "timbre/texture, rhythm, and space"! Unfortunately art critics do the same thing with art that Reynolds says rock critics do with dance music: they ignore the perceptual phenomena and start hunting for texts. If they're not up to the job of supplying verbal equivalents for visual experience (and most of them aren't), they're likely to dismiss the art as vapid eye candy. Gradually artists, too, give up, and begin to make work with "text," either imbedded in the piece so critics can "discover" it, or overtly expressed so that it can be parroted in reviews. A sign of the mass resignation of artists to curatorial/critical preferences is the December Artforum cover, which shows thumbnails of the "Best of 2001." It is telling that out of fifteen images, the cover features only one painting (by Luc Tuymans) and one sculpture/installation (by Thomas Hirschhorn) and the rest of it's basically photography.
Writers feel more comfortable talking about photography because it's a storytelling medium, as well as the language of "the media." Yet some of the most interesting artworks being made are closer to electronic dance music--abstract, evocative experiences that one could spend days coming up with metaphors to describe. (Examples are some of the digital paintings discussed elsewhere this log; the logic even extends to more traditional abstract painting by Albert Oehlen, Carl Ostendarp, and Sarah Morris--all of whom have excellent shows up in Manhattan right now.) This isn't "stupid" work--if anything it's smarter because of the convolutions it goes through to defeat precise description. But that's its Catch-22; the better it succeeds in rendering the viewer speechless, the less likely it is to find an intelligent critical advocate.
- tom moody 12-09-2001 9:27 pm
dear tom, what? Carl O.
- anonymous (guest) 1-01-2002 9:23 pm
Continuing (thanks for the prompt, "Carl O.")...
It may seem odd to attribute this quality of "speechlessness" to the work of Carl Ostendarp, since the artist probably considers his hard-edged pictographic paintings to be speech in the purest, most non-metaphoric form. In fact, he'd no doubt be delighted with a review that simply read "Pretzel hovers. Teardrops fall. Lima beans migrate. (etc)" Nevertheless, the diligent reviewer is going to have to find at least another 492 words to get paid, which means resorting to metaphor. And that's hard work. The texture of the linen Ostendarp uses could be described as "pebbly" or "sandpaper-like." His flashe paint might be said to be "so flat and uninflected that if a canvas by his New Imagist forerunners Susan Rothenberg or Robert Moskowitz were hanging in the same room, all its finicky, self-indulgent nuances would be sucked away, like stellar gases into a black hole." (Tom Moody, 2002) Attention would need to be paid to color, but without the use of sentimental words like "succulent" or "glowing."
Compare this pathetic struggle to articulate with a blurb plucked at random from the Dec. 2001 Artforum, written by the English critic Kate Bush: "On June 18, 1984, at the height of Thatcherism, the quiet South Yorkshire village of Orgreave was the scene of a particularly violent confrontation in a long and painful miner's strike. This summer, [Young British Artist Jeremy] Deller...assembled a group of amateur reenactors and restaged the pitched battle between police and picketers, complete with cavalry charges, flying missiles, howling ambulances, and bloodied faces. As political performance-cum-living history painting, Deller's Battle of Orgreave constituted a new kind of artistic hybrid." Well, not that new--Graham Durward reenacted a terrorist massacre about 8 years ago--and probably dumb to watch (we'll see: Mike Figgis filmed the performance), but the point is, a review of this type of work practically writes itself. Long before a satisfactory rough draft of a first paragraph on Ostendarp has been finished, Kate Bush has filed her copy and buggered off down the pub with her mates. In the game of getting ink in today's art world, the readymade storyteller has an innate advantage.
- tom moody 1-02-2002 8:12 am