Monday, 19 October 2015

On Criticism, Institutional and Otherwise

From Broadsheet (vol. 37, number 2, June 2008,  pp. 99-101). I wrote a follow-up to this piece when the Storr-Enwezor polemic turned out to be far from over.

I was partial to tragedy in my youth. That was before experience taught me that life was tragical enough without my having to write about it.
— Burgess Meredith as Ammon, in Clash of the Titans (1981)

From last September until April this year, a rather extraordinary debate played out in the pages of Artforum, beginning with a cluster of reviews, and continuing through a series of letters to the editor. The debate centred on umbrage taken by 2007 Venice Biennale director Robert Storr to several responses to his exhibition Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, that were published in a general round-up of last year’s European Grand Tour, in the magazine’s September 2007 issue. Obviously allowing time for consideration and no doubt hindered by a demanding schedule, Storr waited until Artforum’s January 2008 issue to respond, but did so in the unprecedented form of an 8,000 word letter, which was published by the magazine in full. As a matter of practice, the three writers whose criticisms Storr had singled out as particularly nefarious, Jessica Morgan, Francesco Bonami and Okwui Enwezor, were approached by the magazine for rebuttals, which owing to matters of time and conceivably column space, were held over until the following issue. In the April issue, Storr fired back, with Enwezor responding in kind. For their parts, Bonami provided only a one-line quote from Philip Roth, and there was, for whatever reason, no further word from Morgan.

Sadly, but perhaps predictably, the tone of the debate descended to the personal, with patronising lessons in curatorial practice and apparent attempts to settle old scores abounding, reducing whatever relevant points were in fact made to the level of farce. Professional relationships, it seems, have been irreparably soured. And while it is tempting to bemoan the lack of sophistication and restraint on display, and even more tempting to find some adolescent glee in witnessing the spectacle of figures of authority clashing so personally in public, much like watching two of your high school teachers slug it out in a pub fight — and to be sure, collated photocopies of the exchange make wonderful reading on public transport — the whole incident raises some interesting questions around the role of criticism in the art world of the early twenty first-century. For it doesn’t take long to realise that all of the critics involved in this particular debate are themselves curators, and thus open to be both held accountable for, and motivated in the interest of, their own professional practices.

It should be said that in the visual arts, criticism is rarely lucrative enough to constitute a profession. More often than not, critical writing is the extension, complement or rearticulation of another practice, whether curatorial, as in the above instances, or artistic, academic or editorial; a practice that is in many cases itself supported by part- or full-time employment in a related or — just as likely — entirely unrelated field. While this is especially the case in Australia, where by and large, writer’s fees are hardly sufficient recompense for the time and energy required to produce clear, considered analysis,  even by minimum wage standards, the multi-disciplinarity of contemporary critical practice is not entirely reducible to immediate financial pressures. The economics of the situation are arguably far more complex, wholly in keeping with the logic of flexibility that characterises the ‘ideal type’ of post-Fordist capitalism, that paradigmatic figure created by the rapid growth of casual and ‘immaterial’ labour, informational and affective production, and the fetishisation of spontaneity, mobility and openness as core values of a contemporary hegemonic morality. It is therefore not unusual, and in fact increasingly common, to see significant, firmly established figures in international art providing critical commentary on the work of their peers. The modernist model of the gadfly critic, an individual at sufficient remove from its object to make dispassionate and authoritative comment, seems itself more and more distant. Quaint, almost.

In that the practitioners of the new art criticism — which might be described, not entirely facetiously, as an ‘embedded criticism’ — are predominantly curators, the current tendency is not surprising, especially when viewed in light of the shifts in curatorial practice that have been under way since the late 1960s. Such shifts, particularly marked over the past two decades, are hardly news, as another well-known curator, Jens Hoffman noted in his own damning assessment of the Grand Tour, published in the September issue of Canadian Art. We have witnessed the rise of the ‘creative curator’, the ‘independent curator’, the ‘artist-curator’, and seen a fundamental desire on the part of curators to define and redefine the parameters of their own practice through endless panel discussions, symposia, conferences and entire academic courses and departments. In this context, the now-dominant model of the ‘critic-curator’, like its corollary the curator-critic, has gone, as Jennifer Allen observed recently in Frieze, largely unnoticed.

On the other hand, critics, Allen goes on to argue, are frequently called to account for their own death. Panel discussions on the ‘crisis in art criticism’ are just as prevalent at large scale art world gatherings as those on curatorial practice and the role of biennales. To go back a few years, at a symposium organised to contextualise Isobel Carlos’ On Reason and Emotion Biennale of Sydney in 2004, Terry Smith asked if biennales are “telling us more about the state of contemporary art than the writings of critics and historians”,  in grappling with issues “strenuously avoided” by an increasingly narrow and “largely promotional” art criticism. The gist of Smith’s contribution to the debate was that criticality or critical practices were no longer the purview of those who practised criticism as such, but were being articulated far more clearly in certain projects — and Smith was careful to point out precisely which projects — on the biennale circuit, a medium eminently better positioned by dint of its very form, to assess and convey the state of artistic practice in an age of globalised trade and communication networks. Against specialised criticism, an applied criticality.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that Smith’s comments were already coming too late. To return to the trajectory of the practice of curatorship, the rise of independent curators and the proliferation of international biennales were distinctly 1990s phenomena; the last five years have seen many key figures from that period take up institutional posts—more often than not to contribute to what was being heralded two years ago as the 'new institutionalism'—while the biennale form has become increasingly imbricated with that of the art fair, the commercial interests, who Smith had believed were behind art criticism’s orientation toward public relations, were now firmly established in the international exhibition system. Smith, of course, had already suspected that the biennale might be “submitting itself to the reactionary, embattled and self-destructive tendencies that currently dominate the ‘culture at large’”. But it is not unremarkable that it took a mere three years for Enwezor, artistic director of documenta 11, one of the projects whose immense critical impact Smith was attempting to account for, to ask in the article that would raise Robert Storr’s ire: “Do the mordant and even hostile responses to this year’s Venice Biennale, documenta, and Skulptur Projekte Münster on the part of professionals and audiences alike signal that the paradigm of the large-scale show — which once represented a unique grammar of exhibition practice — has hit an iceberg and is about to sink?”

It is highly likely that due to their formal novelty, in concert with the uneven development of capital, the moment that the market’s penetration of large-scale exhibitions became as clear as it was in art publishing was simply delayed, and that the specific examples that Smith explored, rather than the initiating a trend that would dominate the decade, marked instead the culmination of a certain strand of 1990s exhibition practice. Regardless though, the question remains as to what becomes of criticality if it is no longer presented or even represented by either criticism or curatorial practice. The importance of biennales in this regard and their recurrence in debates on the state of criticism have issued not from their form, as such, but from their capacity to generate so much writing, both internally through their frequently expansive and often innovative catalogues, and externally by dint of their scale and prominence. But if Enwezor is right — and naturally Storr would argue that he isn’t — where might we locate criticality, if neither art publishing nor biennales, as market driven or just plain tired as they are, are capable of sustaining it? Or does the emergence of the figure of the embedded critic, essentially a synthesis of the curator and the critical writer, suggest a new modality for criticality itself?

These questions hinge on the issue of critical autonomy, both in the modernist sense of an independence supplied by distance, and in the activist sense of intervention into a prevailing discursive framework. If nothing else, the various accusations of self-interest emerging from the Artforum debate signal a collapse of critical distance, and the confusion of what and indeed who might constitute a prevailing framework. In his initial letter to the magazine, Storr described those professional colleagues offering negative criticism as ‘barely disguised rivals’, suggesting, quite strenuously, the potential for conflict of interest in wondering publicly if Jessica Morgan’s account of his exhibition was not “a kind of audition for the job”. With this gesture, Storr significantly problematised not just Morgan’s but every embedded critic’s capacity to deliver disinterested commentary, the ideology of pure criticism, when it is directed at the practices of other curators. That Jens Hoffman’s review in Canadian Art — which either went unnoticed or has not (yet) elicited a response from Storr — actually included something of a proposal for a Venice Biennale emphasises, as Jennifer Allen has also observed, a whole new system of considerations at work for the embedded critic, their peers and their audiences. Moreover, this new set of relationships reorders traditional conceptions of who exactly the figures of authority might be, a development attested to by the various claims and counter-claims throughout the Artforum correspondence of representing the ‘safe’, the ‘mainstream’ and ‘art-world business as usual’. The only distance left, it seems, is polemical. And that can get downright nasty.

The practice of criticism though, is by nature performative, an active engagement in an ongoing process of framing, of constructing meaning. And meaning, as Irit Rogoff reminds us, is never immanent, never lying in wait for some form of analysis to expose it. Rather, it takes place across a given temporality, in a transaction informed by and informing the flow of events. Rogoff identifies a three-fold movement in the development of the critical sensibility, from a notion embodying a position of distance from which to find fault according to a consensus of values, or to examine the logic of underlying assumptions, to an emergent mode of criticality premised on proximity that she describes appropriately as “an uncertain ground of actual embeddedness”, from which to “inhabit a problem”. In Rogoff’s terminology, this is a passage, one undertaken with remarkable speed in recent culture, from criticism in the first instance, to critique in the second, to an emergent mode of criticality, which “while building on critique wants nevertheless to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames”. Certainly, this model does not exactly cohere with the various responses to Storr’s biennale, some of which were very harsh, but it does suggest that embedded criticism, as I have framed it along the lines of the critic-curator paradigm, is not irredeemably problematic and that more than simply desiring embeddedness, it extends from a position of being embedded a priori.

On this note I want to draw on the experience of working on a project, to which Lee Weng Choy has recently alluded in these pages—a small book published by Artspace (Sydney) of commissioned reviews of Zones of Contact, Charles Merewether’s 2006 Biennale of Sydney that I edited in collaboration with Natasha Bullock. In the introduction to that volume, we wrote:

The role of criticism is to provide an interruption, a questioning of the objects and events in our culture and society, to open a space for the transmission of ideas and provide a context for honest and productive discussion. At base it is a question of agency, a process of disalienation through which to actively participate in the running of everyday life.

As Lee pointed out in his talk ‘Biennale Demand’, reproduced in the last issue of Broadsheet; “Biennales and other such exhibitions are exemplary instances of the society of the spectacle.” Our publication was framed very much along the lines of such a recognition—not exactly as a platform from which to intervene in the unilateral flow of information, but more as a space for dialogue additional and to a large degree alternative to those already being provided by the biennale itself. If some of the considerations we assembled lacked a sense of professional ecology, as Lee pointed out in a review that appeared shortly after the book’s publication, then at least their positioning was informed by an understanding of the role of criticism as an active historical agent in the construction of the public sphere, and of the necessity for the creation of multiple platforms for engagement.

This is neither to attempt to justify nor offer an apology for any of the sometimes harsh judgments our volume may have offered (as well as those that were provoked in response); I have no desire to revisit a polemic that, to all intents and purposes, never really took place (and which, in light of the increasingly ad hominem missives appearing in Artforum, is all the better for not having taken place). Rather, I want to stress that the two conceptions of critical autonomy offered above should not be confused; that the erroneousness of modernity’s isolation of aesthetic developments from other spheres of human experience, and of its corollary notion of isolated positions from which to assess such developments, not reduce the very real necessity for creating platforms other than those provided by prevailing frameworks, a necessity felt not just in art but in all aspects of collective life. It is with such a consideration that the two poles of biennale discourse sketched by Lee in his caricature, the affirmative in which “the space between thinking and selling collapses” and the dismissive whose “collapse is between knowledge and despair”, might be negotiated.

The uncertain ground of embedded criticism, a modality that is not simply desirable but actual for art professionals today, is one of reflexivity and accountability, a criticality built on self-criticality aware of its role and responsibility in the construction and ultimately, the struggle over meaning. It is this dialectical understanding of criticality that in the 1990s enabled the strategic use of biennales and increasingly in the past decade, other artistic institutions — and by this I mean not only museums and galleries, but universities, publications and so on — as critical platforms, in spite of their myriad problematics.

But is this the only location for critical practice? Is there not the potential for the rearticulation of political and cultural power to translate into the language of power? After all, if Hoffman could call Art Unlimited at Art Basel the European summer’s “most interesting large-scale display of contemporary art”, then the critical potential of large-scale exhibitions is up for serious reassessment, especially as we head into an unprecedented season of biennales and triennials across the Asia-Pacific. Moreover, we have to ask what the trajectory of this critical potential with regard to biennale-form, as with that of art publishing before it, means for the ‘new institutions’ and their constituents.

In closing, I want to take the liberty of quoting at length from the final document issued by the Copenhagen Free University, a self-organised public institution that opened in the private space of the home of artists Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen in early 2001. Finding itself more and more integrated into the machinery of a cultural economy it had been established to circumvent, and having experimented with the platforms provided by biennales and bricks-and-mortar institutions alike, the Copenhagen Free University took the course of de-institutionalising, electing to abolish itself altogether and cease all activity conducted in its name at the end of 2007. Their closing statement is presented both as a radical alternative to the decidedly privileged debate being played out in Artforum, and to emphasise temporality and sociality as necessary complements to the ideals of reflexivity, accountability and professional ecology of embedded criticality, if it is to avoid becoming one more sophisticated apology for spectacular consumption:

One thing is the fact that a self-instituted university is messing around with the institutional power relations. But on a structural level the question is what conceptions of knowledge are actually pervading the self-institution? Knowledge for us has always been something that is evaporating, slipping between our fingers. It is not something that we treat as a truth or a possession but something living, a relation between people. Truth is always the truth of the masters; the proprietary knowledge is always the knowledge that separates people into those who possess and those who don’t. Knowledge for us is always situated and interweaved with desire. The kitchen, the bed, the living room made up our anything-but- sterile laboratories. Dreams, unhappiness, rage were all over the architecture. Knowledge is at the same time about empowerment, making people able to understand and act closer to existence and despite the distortion of the spectacle. The research projects we initiated worked as invitations to share rather than drives to accumulate. There have been no singular end products; of importance were all the various experiences and conclusions that people carried into their own lives and networks after taking part in the activities at the CFU. This is why we haven’t published papers or dissertations to wrap up the research projects that we have worked with. We found that the research and the knowledge spun at the CFU did not need a closure. But the institution did.  The Copenhagen Free University has never wanted to become a fixed identity and as a part of the concept of self-institutionalisation we have always found it important to take power and play with power but also to abolish power. This is why the Copenhagen Free University closed down at the end of 2007. Looking back at the six years of existence of the CFU we end our activities with a clear conviction and declare: We Have Won!

If Guy Debord is invoked in all sorts of contexts these days, institutional and otherwise, with varying degrees of understanding — and by mentioning the spectacle how can we not invoke him? — then it is worth at least doing him the service of quoting him word for word. “In the language of contradiction”, he wrote at the apogee of his theoretical lucidity, proposing a critical language that embodied its own critique, “the critique of culture is a unified critique, in that it dominates the whole of culture—its knowledge as well as its poetry—and in that it no longer separates itself from the critique of the social totality”.

Part II of this essay is here.









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