The Brooklyn Rail

Lately, I have been immersed in research on American mid-century modernism, but my mind keeps turning toward the present. In a lecture of 1951 Jacques Barzun warned of “the dangers of bureaucracy in matters of the mind.” His warning reverberates in New York composer Morton Feldman’s lament of a few years later about labels and categories guiding the experience of art. It reverberates in our time, too, recalling our retreat into our mental “silos.” In the late 1950s Albert Camus observed that “things are disappearing in favor of signs.” His observation brings to mind how Jackson Pollock, the man and his work, was scooped up by a contemporary media landscape and transformed into one ultimate package: a portable, saleable Personality. It brings to mind our time, too, a present in which both people and things are disappearing in favor of signs, signs transmitted electronically, which stand in their stead. “The greatest renown today consists in being admired or hated without having been read,” Camus wrote in 1957, with a prescience he could not have known. Did the French philosopher really not know about our yellow thumbs up sign and its giddy electronic glow?

What does this all mean and where does it lead? The past is not the present. But the present is suffused with the past, shaped by it, whether we choose to acknowledge history or not. History is the shaping of the past in words, images, judgments, decrees. Since the present is suffused with the past, we are, everyone of us, involved in history. To pretend there is something called “the contemporary” that does not contain the past is more than a fiction. It is an evacuation of our power to shape the past, the present, and the future.

In “Artist against Society: Some Articles of War,” the essay drawn from his Northwestern University Centennial Lecture of 1951, Barzun noted the evacuation of history and turn toward the contemporary which are characteristics of our time. These characteristics not only affect our practice as art writers, but the whole contemporary art world. Today, we stand immersed in a weakened world: a world stuffed with Google (and increasingly, AI) knowledge, but in danger of losing our own knowledge of how the past relates to the present, or even how the shifting plates of the present relate to each other. This is perhaps one reason why we are so quick to plant our flags on things, people, or works of art: to stay them, to show we are really here. Another is that the pace of publication these days, which affects writers of art criticism as well as of art history, channels us into the endless stream of the present, where we must declare our positions, or lose out. Works of art were never meant to be conquered so quickly. Nor were we humans, gifted with the capacity for reflection, meant to judge so fast.

What happens when history is squeezed out of an endless present? The rich and troubling contours of the past seep away, along with recognition of the artist’s deep and wide thinking about the present in relation to what came before and what might be. If nothing else, let’s remember this: artists working in the present think about more than the present. If the contemporary artist’s work refers to an arc of history, to colonialism, let’s say, chances are their work encompasses more than a position on colonialism. This work could evoke an evil which seeps backward and forward in time, an evil visible as well as implied, an evil which has a creepiness which can be pinned down yet spills out from any name we might give it. This work could be, would be, a work of art. Naming the artist’s position, like claiming a position for the artwork, might stay the work in the present moment. But what of the artwork’s reverberating power, a power which echoes with the past in the present for the future. Can we recognise that power if we have lost our foothold in the past?

Art criticism and art history writing each have their gatekeepers. The pressures to conform in order to publish are real enough. Artists are confronted with their own gatekeepers and restraints. Still, art leaps the fence. Art invites continuous interpretation. Meanings of the artwork shift with time, audience, or the news of the day. It pays the writer to be nimble, for art is an inexhaustible and changing resource. This is not simply the case because art will continue to be made; it is so on account of the nature of art itself.

Artists themselves might not recognize what it is that they have made, yet can recognize whether what they have made is true. Why is it, then, that we write in the tone and triumph of having the last word? Like the colonialist planting their flag on captured territory, we plant our label, idea, or theory on the artwork, fixing it fast. (It is one of history’s light ironies that one might do so all the while being keen to show that colonialism is itself an evil.) The fact is, artists and artworks look backwards and forwards, engaging the past to critique the present for the future. As for us art writers, there is only so much we can know at the moment of writing, and though it pays us to know all we can and to continue to strive to know more, the flag we plant on the artwork today is but an illusion of mastery.

Can we recognize the ways in which the present is suffused with the past? Can we write from the present as well as for the future? Can we write with knowledge as well as humility? If we can, we stand a better chance of allowing the artwork to be what it is: an ultimately unknowable object which beckons us to know it, though we never will. Art criticism and art history writing are practices, to be sure, but let’s keep in mind these are also attempts: attempts to know the artwork, to know the present and the past, to know ourselves.

Asked to give advice to other art writers, I would simply say this: Don’t put art (or people) in a box. Open the box of the artwork and seek to understand.