The Feminine

What might “feminine” art-writing look like?

The straw man fallacy as a problem of art criticism

A “straw man” argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent’s position. To “attack a straw man” is to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the “straw man”), and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original position. (—Wikipedia, for lack of a more concise definition)

It is an all-too-common strategy found in art criticism: the subversion of an art historical “telos” by (mis)representing then disrupting the linear model that has thereby been established in order to move the discourse in another direction. While the outcome can be positive, the method is suspect. There are numerous examples of the seemingly willful misinterpretation of works of art or the blatantly reductive explication of an (already reductive) art historical narrative intended to propel an argument in the other direction or substantiate claims one might be tempted to make about certain (other) artists’ works.

I want to catalogue some of these fallacies here because they are a common aspect of a certain type of critical discourse, with which I am engaged and with which I am often frustrated for its inability to reconcile itself to the lived reality of artists’ practices. These fallacies are perhaps a by-product of the academic imperative to create categories and movements, and to articulate periods of history (which, I dare say, can come to resemble a kind of free-floating “brand identity.”) One might just as easily acknowledge these enterprises to be fraught from the get-go, belonging to a self-replicating system that is on some level profoundly ill-equipped to honestly and directly address works of art. If not, why has the discipline of art history changed so little during a period (say…the twentieth century) when art itself has changed so dramatically.

Some common fallacies—which have been transformed into “received ideas”—that I see regularly in the art press:

- The idea that Conceptual Art was somehow anti-material because of its critique of the object/art as commodity (see: the profoundly materially based practice of Lawrence Weiner, so called “founder of Conceptual Art”)

- The idea that artists associated with Abstract Expressionism intentionally reinforced a certain heroic, patriarchal, and transcendent individualism (moreso than other art movements before or after? look at the art market today!)

- The idea that the “theatrical” critique of Minimal Art (à la Michael Fried) and any discussion of the notion of its “presence” or “immanence” are mutually exclusive (why must so many essays on Minimal Art begin with a refutation of Michael Fried?)

More and more, I am feeling that the entire enterprise of writing about art needs to be reinterrogated. In the 70s, and 80s, coinciding with the translation into English of many key texts, much art-writing was taken up with the emerging literary and linguistic fields of structuralism and semiotics and, later, deconstructivism. Perhaps we could envision a new moment where the discourse surrounding art looks to the writings of artists themselves for new forms and a way out of the current critical impasse. (See Paul McCarthy on Dan Graham elsewhere on this blog or Dan Graham on anything.) Just a thought.

Claes Oldenburg on Words

It doesn’t really start with a drawing, but with words.

— Claes Oldenburg

Rainer Maria Rilke

Why then, have to be human?
Oh not because happiness exists,
Not out of curiosity …
But because being here means so much;
because everything here,
vanishing so quickly, seems to need us,
and strangely keeps calling to us … To have been
here, once, completely, even if only once,
to have been at one with the earth –
this is beyond undoing.
– Rainer Maria Rilke

courtesy whiskey river

Tristan Tzara

Tristan Tzara

A Note On Negro Poetry (1918)

“I don’t even want to know that there were men before me” (Descartes), but some essential & simple laws, pathetic & muffled fermentation of a solid earth.

To fix on the point where the forces have accumulated, from whence the formulated sense springs, the invisible radiance of substance, the natural relation, but hidden and just, naively, without explanation.

To round off and regulate into shapes, into constructs, the images according to their weight, color and matter; or to map the arrangements of the values, the material and lasting densities, subordinating nothing to them. Classification of the comic operas sanctioned by the aesthetic of accessories. (O, my drawer number ABSOLUTE.)

I abhor to enter a house where the balconies, the “ornaments”, are carefully stuck to the wall. Yet the sun, the stars continue to vibrate and hum freely in space, but I loathe to identify the explanatory hypotheses (asphyxiant probable) with the principle of life, activity, certainty.

The crocodile hatches the future life, rain falls for the vegetal silence, one isn’t a creator by analogy. The beauty of the satellites – the teaching of light – will satisfy us, for we are God only for the country of our knowledge, in the laws according to which we live experience on this earth, on both sides of our equator, inside our borders. Perfect example of the infinite we can control: the sphere.

To round off and regulate into shapes, into constructs, the images according to their weight, color and matter; or to map the arrangements of the values, the material and lasting densities through personal decision and the unswerving firmness of sensibility, comprehension adequate to the matter transformed, close to the veins and rubbing against them in the pain for the present, definite joy. One creates an organism when the elements are ready for life. Poetry lives first of all for the functions of dance, religion, music and work.

— Translated by Pierre Joris

courtesy UBUweb

Language and materiality

I have always been interested in the materiality of language and the possibility for addressing that in different forms of writing—poetry (the obvious one) but also various kinds of critical and theoretical writing. It consistently surprises me that some who make a living writing care very little for the look and feel and sound of the words they use (not to mention the socio-cultural framework through which they signifiy), as if the words are just an expedient and convenient mode of transport for their ideas to lodge themselves in the minds of readers. While such writers may insist on looking at other things as material constructs—like art, for example—they may have a blind spot when it comes to their own writing.

I haven’t come to any crashing insights regarding this issue but I do enjoy thinking about what new forms of writing a full consideration of its materiality might yield, especially in light of digital media. And I enjoy thinking about the words I’m using to write right now.

Laurens van der Post

Each of us is aware of far more than we can ever express. Yet those who can persuade themselves to be guided thus in their pursuit of the totality of truth, find themselves rewarded not so much by a surrender of any significant part of the essential mystery, as by its transformation into something accessible as living wonder

—Laurens van der Post

Vito Acconci, Read This Word (1969)

READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD
NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE
WORD AGAIN LOOK AT THREE WORDS HERE LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW LOOK AT
THREE WORDS NOW TOO TAKE IN FIVE WORDS AGAIN TAKE IN FIVE WORDS SO TAKE
IN FIVE WORDS DO IT NOW SEE THESE WORDS AT A GLANCE SEE THESE WORDS AT
THIS GLANCE AT THIS GLANCE HOLD THIS LINE IN VIEW HOLD THIS LINE IN
ANOTHER VIEW AND IN A THIRD VIEW SPOT SEVEN LINES AT ONCE THEN TWICE
THEN THRICE THEN A FOURTH TIME A FIFTH A SIXTH A SEVENTH AN EIGHTH

courtesy Parkett 78 2006

*type is intended to read in eight lines, fully justified.

Mark Strand

Our Masterpiece Is the Private Life
I

Is there something down by the water keeping itself from us,
Some shy event, some secret of the light that falls upon the deep,
Some source of sorrow that does not wish to be discovered yet?

Why should we care? Doesn’t desire cast its
… rainbows over the coarse porcelain
Of the world’s skin and with its measures fill the
… air? Why look for more?

II

And now, while the advocates of awfulness and sorrow
Push their dripping barge up and down the beach, let’s eat
Our brill, and sip this beautiful white Beaune.

True, the light is artificial, and we are not well-dressed.
So what. We like it here. We like the bullocks in the field next door,
We like the sound of wind passing over grass. The way you speak,

In that low voice, our late night disclosures … why live
For anything else? Our masterpiece is the private life.

III

Standing on the quay between the Roving Swan and the Star Immaculate,
Breathing the night air as the moment of pleasure taken
In pleasure vanishing seems to grow, its self-soiling

Beauty, which can only be what it was, sustaining itself
A little longer in its going, I think of our own smooth passage
Through the graded partitions, the crises that bleed

Into the ordinary, leaving us a little more tired each time,
A little more distant from the experiences, which, in the old days,
Held us captive for hours. The drive along the winding road

Back to the house, the sea pounding against the cliffs,
The glass of whiskey on the table, the open book, the questions,
All the day’s rewards waiting at the doors of sleep …
- Mark Strand Blizzard of One

courtesy whiskey river

Gifts are best described…as anarchist property.

Lewis Hyde, The Gift

I am currently exploring the implications of this as a politico-economic model, hoping that the current recession can give way to new (actually very old) models of exchange, especially in relationship to art.