The Brooklyn Rail

“Every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love,” Hilton Als wrote in White Girls. Maggie Nelson’s latest book, titled after this quote, uses Als’s proposition to frame a question: “How can the attention one pays to art be an act of love, or something like it?” For nearly two decades, since 2006, Nelson has explored this question in the reviews, essays, and interviews gathered in Like Love. For her, writing in the cultural sphere, in dialogue with other thinkers and with an ever-expanding inventory of objects, is a humble and highly subjective endeavor. This latest collection resembles a scrapbook of still-fresh memories—miscellaneous, uneven, and indispensable.

Considering the subject position from which Nelson writes—“Demographically,” critic Lauren Stroh once noted, “[Nelson] is out of touch with the vast majority of the country. But she never purports to speak for anybody else”—I paid most attention to the reviews and essays in Like Love dedicated to artists and thinkers of color. I wanted to spend time, alongside the author, focusing on the practices and legacies of figures like Als, Prince, Tala Madani, Kara Walker, Fred Moten, and Nayland Blake. In these pieces, Nelson employs two linked strategies with mixed results. The first is that of connecting and shuttling between the concerns of individuals and the concerns of culture, and the second is that of voraciously collaging dissimilar points of view, allowing them to cohabit hypothetical arenas and generate heat through their contradictions.

Nelson’s first strategy is evident in the titular tribute, a gala speech that gracefully transitions from Hilton Als’s individual accomplishments to broader social issues, such as respectability politics and the cost of mainstream visibility. Similarly, Nelson’s 2016 essay, “The Grind,” a moving tribute to Prince, places mass culture and her own sexual awakening in a dance of cause-and-effect. She confesses—though, are memories confessions when expressed freely, with self-compassion in lieu of shame?—to buying a white ruffled shirt for herself after seeing Purple Rain (1984) and getting together with a fellow middle-schooler, “an incredibly small guy who wore eyeliner and lipstick.” The personal triumphs and ecstasies Nelson associates with Prince’s music add depth to her tribute, though this writing style also eventually demands an interrogation of the writer’s own biases and blind spots, or at least a brief disclaimer. Near the end of “The Grind,” Nelson pauses: “[Prince] was so many things besides a sex symbol for suburban white girls like myself, so please forgive my momentary narrowness. I am just struggling to give my thanks.”

Nelson’s second strategy, that of making meaning through accretion, inclusion, and juxtaposition, accounts for some of the most engaging meditations on art and ethical responsibility. In an essay that briefly discusses a 2017 controversy the Met faced surrounding the display of Balthus’s Thérèse Dreaming (1938)—he’d painted an adolescent model in a sexualized pose—Nelson suggests that the museum install a work by the Iranian-American artist Tala Madani, such as her animation Sex Ed by God (2017), in which a young girl grabs and inserts miniature voyeurs into her vulva, next to the offending Balthus. Nelson’s proposition simultaneously reveals her penchant for discordant juxtapositions and her preference for art that, instead of “chaperoning” public opinion, gives discourse “another turn of the screw.” In this essay, titled “The Dare of Tala Madani,” Nelson telescopes from Madani’s paintings and videos into a meta-critique of “critique” itself:

Shouldn’t there be a better word for the feeling we get when we sense that something is being taken apart and savaged but that “something” remains intentionally imprecise or obscured? … How do we describe paintings that showcase vices and follies with a spirit of hospitality as much as, or more than, condemnation?

Here, the word “hospitality” stands out, suggesting a cultural attitude of generosity towards guests, more commonly associated with hotels, restaurants, and bars than with art museums. Characteristically, Nelson reaches beyond the art world for ways to dislodge the discourse from the rut of dogmatism.

Bricolage seems a suitable container for the hospitality-based criticism Nelson alludes to—that which prioritizes generosity, openness, and plentitude over the “chaperoning” of public opinion—but it can also produce indeterminacy that undermines the author’s dialogical intentions. In “The Understory,” for instance, Nelson reads Event Horizon (2005), a mural by Kara Walker, through Saidiya Hartman’s natal metaphor of slavery but yields the bulk of her short text to quotations from Hartman’s “The Belly of the World,” the press release, the artist’s own words, and an aside about a crying baby in the building. Instead of making the case for whether Event Horizon might offer “another turn of the screw,” Nelson leaves readers with an awkward image of herself as an interloper, “the white lady with a notebook,” as she puts it, “lurking under and on the stairs.” Likewise, in lieu of “reviewing” Fred Moten’s 2017 book Black and Blur in the essay “By Sociality, To Sociality,” she writes, “What’s the point in shooting a straight arrow into a field defined by incessant motion, escape. … How preposterous and off the cake it would feel, at least for me, to drag Black and Blur into the world of appraisal or evaluation of argument. Others can do that, and do it well.” As part of a series of deferrals, she begins and quickly abandons a close reading of a characteristically slippery passage, and because she never intended to penetrate the text, her essay ultimately swerves around the book, leaving more perplexities than insights in its wake.

Throughout the collection, Nelson risks imprecision to preserve her subjects’ ability to stay in motion, even if that means they elude her grasp. Nelson begins “Coming Hungry to No Wrong Holes,” her 2020 review of Nayland Blake’s Los Angeles retrospective, by acknowledging the biracial artist’s tendency and right to “slip out of something as soon as it risks getting codified.” In line with Blake’s resistance to codification, Nelson, through her writing’s inclusions and omissions, shows that an ethos of critique, whether based on something “like love” or another guiding principle, is best embodied and enacted rather than strictly systematized. Accordingly, her conversations with artists, writers, and musicians across time and space and across difference follow no rules except the impulse of generosity. By making the problems of the cultural sphere her own, Nelson attempts to live with them without smothering them under the weight of her care. In this way, her criticism is exactly like love.