January 23, 2007

The Long Look and the Set of Concepts.

Mia Fineman sized up Robert Hughes in Slate recently:

But all critics have their blind spots: particular styles or tendencies that they categorically dismiss, unable or unwilling to engage with the work on its own terms. Hughes' is conceptual art, particularly the ludic, cerebral variety that began with Duchamp and has been carried on by generations of artists, from Joseph Beuys and John Baldessari through Tracy Emin and Maurizio Cattelan. For Hughes, most conceptual art is too intellectualized, too disembodied; it lacks the substance and sensual immediacy that defines truly great art. "Art requires the long look," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of essays, Nothing If Not Critical. "It is a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world." While this is true of most art up through the 19th century, the new century ushered in a new way of thinking about art as a set of concepts, a mode of interaction, a manner of seeing and apprehending the world that may?or may not?be tied to a discrete physical object. To reject this approach entirely is to cut oneself off from much of what's interesting and compelling in the art of the last 100 years. And it's here, in his refusal to engage with this core tenet of contemporary art, that Hughes still exudes a faint whiff of provincialism.
(Emphasis mine.)

Ludic, a wonderful word.

I tend to think that the best critics are the writers with a distinct voice, like a good storyteller, a kindred artist. Robert Hughes' Shock of the New was a delight for me when I was an undergrad. That story of art does comes up short after the late postwar years and Mia Fineman has a good enough reason why this is so. But I would tell the story a little differently.

I see the modern and postmodern as something once one and indistinguishable, incipient in the genesis of the western world up until the 18th or 19th century when the dilation of the 20th century began. The western world's ability to appreciate the individual (the west's prime criterion, freedom) comes with a price: the inability to see how antinomies are as one, how apparently unlike things are ultimately connected. Thus the bloom spilt into two streams: one that strove to touch G-d through material means and the other strove to touch everyday life with conceptual means. The former dominated the first half of the 20th century bloom and the latter the second. The second half was a great run: Pop, minimalism, Conceptualism, Crit Theory, and all the variations tumbled and dribbled afterward for more than fifty years now. It was an ice cold thundering stream that has since evolved into a stinky slouching oozing and interesting delta.

And that's more than ok, that's great and wonderful.

Mia Fineman has her own blind spot as well. The irony is that like Robert Hughes, we too are at the end of our rope, our own era is too long in the tooth... so it might be smart to learn how to make... more rope. (Funny that we don't usually think that irony would turn on us, its' master?) And this is good news. Great and wonderful news. We get to figure out how these two strands can be (re)braided anew. A world where Hughes/Fineman are like Space/Time, Day/Night, Up/Down, Male/Female, purposeful play...

How lucky we are!

Posted by Dennis at January 23, 2007 2:38 AM

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