Railing Opinion
In our culture there are two often very distinct forms of art writing. There is art criticism, which is journalistic writing, as found in newspapers such as Artforum and the Rail. And there is academic writing, such as you find in the Art Bulletin and books about art.
Art criticism and art history are not two entirely different kinds of endeavor for they are both critical undertakings. They both seek to evaluate the critical worth of items their practitioners—and others—present as artworks.
I think the statement muddles two issues: one is about today (publishing and maybe writing) and the other is about forever (the relationship between art historical and art critical writing and thought).
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.
Period labels are useful for classification, and so essential for orienting ourselves when facing art. To identify an artwork as “baroque” or “modernist” is a useful, if very tentative way of identifying its place in history.
If all our experience and learning, both sensory and conceptual, has brought us (the world) to its present situation, then will learning still more along the same lines lead to a remedy? Or should we learn in a different way, as if occupying a different self?
Postmodernism wasn’t an artistic movement, style, or logic. It was a marketing campaign. To paraphrase the philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, “we have never been postmodern.” We have, however, been modern; and to our peril, we still are.
Attempting to foretell the next art world trend is a thankless task. I was recently reminded of this as I watched a 1986 appearance by Suzi Gablik on Richard Love’s American Art Forum TV show where she predicted that “militarism, consumerism, and class divisions” characteristic of then-regnant postmodernism would soon be countered by the emerging Aquarian vision of a “more holistic paradigm.” Gablik’s prediction was inspired by Marylin Ferguson’s bestseller The Aquarian Conspiracy, which promoted a hippiesque, interdisciplinary alliance to bring about profound and lasting social change.
The phenomenon which interests me is modern art. It is the great art of our time. I think it is a much larger affair than we want to acknowledge. It constitutes a new form of art and a new way of thinking about art and the world. Today, it is a tradition of two hundred years and counting. I believe it has not run its course; though, I acknowledge, the majority of contemporary artists lack the ability, for the moment, to think about it and seem unable to practice it. The result is that we get a lot of very bad art out there.
What is postmodernism? That’s a tricky question, because there isn’t really one answer. Postmodernism is defined by what it is not—modernism. Beyond that, it can mean just about anything to just about anyone.
What is worldbuilding a reflection on and what is it a symptom of? Is worldbuilding an act of avoidance? A way of engaging with the methods left to artists by Dada and Surrealism without evoking their histories? And maybe most urgently, how then can we develop language for when worldbuilding produces unnecessary escapism, and when it critically is used to better understand the world we are left with?
So much is going on now, everywhere, including a large assembly in Paris to celebrate the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Surrealist Manifesto. Since I cannot roll myself to that, I would like right now to reflect on the massive importance of the multitudinous areas reached by Surrealism in its full-blown being.
A is for ancestral connection, the sooner the better
Our roots are not fixed in the past but pulse through dreams and echoes, guiding us across time. In worldbuilding, we look to our ancestors for signs—fragments of forgotten wisdom hidden in the fabric of the present.
I find myself approaching the destruction of Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture in Houston as a contemporary ruin. Since the work’s desecration, Sikander’s Witness (2023) is now an unintended monument through ruin—a space to consider what is severed and what, in this moment, seems to be impossible to mend.
In third grade, I was bused with the rest of my Catholic schoolmates to march in the Pro-Life Rally in Washington, DC. We woke up at 3 a.m., packed pre-made sandwiches in coolers, and headed south to save babies. I bring it up because I would like to share some thoughts on the July beheading of Shahzia Sikander’s powerful, feminist work Witness (2023) that happened while it was on view at the University of Houston.
It feels appropriate to have an exhibition at this scale come off as more of a question—something less declarative. The interventions of the artists fight to keep their edge in a place where everything is drawn into comparison. The space is so expressive. The Campus wants to be a scene, or a milieu; or wants to be, at the very least, visible and uncontained.
I said that I would write about the work. Within the 78,000-square-foot building of the former Ockawamick School, over eighty artists are represented, so this is a little hard to do.
All illusions of the call of the pastoral aside, the (now decades long) escalation of artists decamping from New York City for the Hudson Valley is more of a desperate search for solace, paradoxically, from urban marginalization and market pressures than a sentimental relation to the land. It makes complete sense that institutions would take their hint and follow suit.
I was impressed and a bit daunted by the inaugural exhibition at The Campus—works by over eighty artists, nearly all of them represented by the six Manhattan galleries that banded together to purchase the venue, an abandoned high school in Claverack, New York.