Art bollocks is everywhere you look.
Woolly ‘artspeak’ is nothing new, but who will stem the flow?
Take artist Aliza Shvarts, for example, who rose to fleeting prominence last year with a work that purported to involve ‘repeated, self-induced miscarriages’. She described her efforts thus: ‘This piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse . . . It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership.’
It isn’t clear how form or function can ‘converge’ on the body, not least because the human body is already a form with numerous functions. Can function, strictly speaking, ‘converge’ on anything at all? Can ambiguity be a ‘focus’ and ‘isolate’ something else – something that is terribly important but unclear and at no point explained? Despite such mysteries, one thing is unambiguous. Ms Shvarts believes that the extract above is itself a work of art: ‘The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above . . .’
Art commentary appears to be drowning in its own language. I’ve touched on this subject before (see ‘Artspeak’, Eye no. 62 vol. 16), and have outlined a broader political context in which such language has flourished and to which it often refers. Despite several barbed critiques – most notably Brian Ashbee’s 1999 Art Review article, ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Art Bollocks and How to Be a Critic’ – ‘artspeak’ remains a default idiom for ‘serious’ arts commentary, and those who propagate it appear beyond the reach of parody.
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Writing in Sign and Sight, the German historian Christian Demand noted the complaints made by Antoine Coypel (1661-1722), court artist and president of the Paris Academy, about the ‘vapid and bizarre jargon’ of ‘falsely applied artistic terms’ applied by the art critics of his time.
The persistence, three centuries later, of ‘vapid and bizarre jargon’ suggests systemic dysfunction rather than teething problems or temporary fashion. In his Guardian article ‘Lost in a labyrinth of theory’, Jonathan Jones has suggested that the fixation with technocratic jargon and poststructuralist chest-puffing is a ‘facsimile of thinking’ and has much to do with feelings of insecurity and an urge to be taken very seriously indeed. I’ve known a couple of arts educators who felt cruelly displaced in some imagined cultural hierarchy. Faced with the private languages of mathematics and physics – which are generally treated as serious even by people who find them incomprehensible – resentful artistic souls may find compensation in opaque and imposing rhetoric, comforted by their ability to perplex and impress. If that’s the case, bad faith will persist, and it’s hard to see how clarity and meaning could regain much currency.
But I’d like to think it needn’t be this bad. There are plenty of writers who grapple with technical or unobvious ideas, and the good ones make it as easy as possible for the reader to follow the thinking and determine whether or not it’s sound – and if not, to determine where the doubt or error is. Such-and-such a mistake happens there. This doesn’t follow from that. Or this other thing could be the case.
This preference for transparency starts a process of critical thinking, or is at least amenable to it. It also entails honesty and the risk of public correction. This is a matter of some importance, especially if the ideas in question are supposed to articulate a political worldview, as a great deal of art and cultural theory now is. Clarity invites dispute, possibly refutation, and refutation of one’s politics can, for some, be intolerable. The more art is alleged to have some socio-political import, the more likely this discomfort will be, and the more likely it is that clarity will be avoided for the reasons given above. Viewed in this light, art gibberish becomes comprehensible, at least as pathology.
Books about topics as esoteric as quantum chromodynamics can still express ideas so transparently that even I can follow them. None I have read defies comprehension quite as wilfully as Carolyn Guertin’s essay, ‘Wanderlust: The Kinesthetic Browser in Cyberfeminist Space’, much of which reads like this: ‘The shuffling and unfolding of the information of her body in sensory space is enacted across a gap or trajectory of subjecthood that is multiple and present. Subjectivity is the lens and connector through which the spatio-temporal dislocation gets focused and bridged. The gap is outside vision – felt not seen – and always existing on the threshold in between nodes. Like the monster’s subjectivities, all knots in the matrix are linked.’
At this point readers may wonder what, exactly, a ‘gap or trajectory of subjecthood’ is – and why it’s both ‘multiple’ and ‘present’. They may also wonder why this should be preferable to, or different from, one that is multiple while absent, or singular while absent. Or singular while present. Alas, nowhere in Guertin’s essay are any answers forthcoming. Perhaps she, like professor of rhetoric Judith Butler, is ‘interrogating [the] tacit presumptions [of common sense] and provoking new ways of looking at a familiar world’. But if so, it seems we must take that on trust. Those who follow Guertin’s work will see that an awful lot is asserted and countless names are dropped, but very little is comprehensible. It does, however, sound terribly impressive, as if it ought to mean something.
Imagine for a moment that you’re a first-year student, eager to impress. Are you going to be first in the class to raise your hand and ask whether your professor is mouthing utter bollocks?
Illustration from ‘Artspeak’ (Eye no. 62 vol. 16) by Paul Davis. (See ‘Looking for clues’, Rick Poynor’s profile of Paul, in Eye no. 55 vol. 14.)
January 29th, 2009 at 7:03 pm | by liam
I totally agree that artspeak is horrible, but wasn’t Aliza Shvarts an undergrad when she wrote that? If I remember right that project was her senior thesis (calling art projects theses could probably be questioned as well). In that instance, I’d probably place most of the blame on the professors who taught her it’s okay to write so poorly (and do such an awful project).
January 29th, 2009 at 8:25 pm | by David Thompson
Liam,
That Shvarts is a student seems, to me, largely beside the point. Isn’t the issue that she, like many others, has learned to justify what she does in opaque and ludicrous terms? One might argue she’s inexpert and misusing her chosen idiom, and she is, but the terms themselves are rather tendentious and her enthusiasm for such language is hard to miss. It appears to be a kind of pseudo-validation and rhetorical shield. (It’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.) And it seems that Shvarts’ “explanation” went unchallenged before becoming newsworthy, which itself raises questions.
I’m not sure what excuses could be found for Professor Caroline Guertin, whose peers and employers don’t seem troubled by the nature of her “work,” despite it being all but indistinguishable from Dadaist jive.
January 29th, 2009 at 10:42 pm | by noel douglas
The Art world unlike Science, never in a sense, has to test it’s ideas against reality, hence the ability for critics/artists involved to say things that mean nothing but sound impressive and not get caught out, and of course this pseudo-intellectualism is what builds an artists/instituitions value in the real material sense of cultural capital and the price of their art.
Bourgeois philosophy has always oscillated between mechanical materialism and idealism, and this sort of stuff is idealism, like two sides of coin, the mechanical materialism of the Structuralism of the 50s/60s/70s gave way to the idealism of Post-Structuralism in the 70s/80s/90s, both as one sided as each other, one denying human agency and claiming we are all determined by structures, the other claiming there is no truth only ‘narratives’ and the the world is constructed through ‘texts’, of course the truth is that we are both determined by a society that pre-exists us and yet able to alter it, through conscious action.
All forms of post-modernism are like people speaking in a hall of mirrors, and I would argue that this was the intellectual product produced out of a generation of defeated, mainly French, 60s radicals who turned inward and stopped making sense, similar things happened in the late 19th century during a similarly dark period of history.
The Art world is indeed full of it, I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve seen artists pretend that quoting turgid passages by Deleuze somehow constitutes some profound insight, and yet we must always return to the point of knowledge, of which Art is a practical form of, that is to understand the world, and ourselves–the great thinkers, Marx, Darwin etc etc may have at times had to use complex or new terms, but their goal was always, as it should be to help people understand the world they live in, unfortunately the same cannot be said for Art theorists or many Artists who merely want to shore up a professional career.
Let’s hope the changing turbulent times see people starting to talk in ways that make sense again, no one should be against complex ideas, but as everyone should know if you can’t explain those complex ideas in lay terms, you probably have no idea what you are talking about!
January 29th, 2009 at 11:55 pm | by MLA
Inflating particular instances to the grand scale of universality can be a very misleading. Not all complex writing is bollox, and neither is all bollox complex. Many profound and important thinkers have proved the former, you have merely proved the latter. How very disappointing.
January 30th, 2009 at 12:40 am | by noel douglas
MLA,
is anyone arguing that all complex writing is bollocks? I don’t think so, but there is no doubt that the Art World is full of ‘complex’ writing that is!
By the way, which important and profound thinkers would you suggest prove your thesis? It would be interesting to know.
January 30th, 2009 at 8:49 am | by David Thompson
MLA,
“Not all complex writing is bollox…”
I don’t recall suggesting that all complex writing is. See, for instance, this: “There are plenty of writers who grapple with technical or unobvious ideas, and the good ones make it as easy as possible for the reader to follow the thinking and determine whether or not it’s sound – and if not, to determine where the doubt or error is.”
However, it seems to me one might make a distinction between, say, Bertrand Russell’s “Principles of Mathematics” or David Hume’s “Enquiries” and the obscurantist blather of Ms Shvarts and Professor Guertin, whose motives seem somewhat different.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:43 pm | by “A strange choice of favourites!” [Dan Collins]
[...] is it art? Other installations, from David Thompson. Posted by Dan Collins @ 7:21 am | Trackback SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: [...]
January 30th, 2009 at 3:57 pm | by Rick Poynor
Agree with this so far as it goes, but it’s an old story.
Matthew Collings, for instance, has built a writing career out of declining to write art bollocks. He’s so clear, so straightforward, so demotic, so assertively moral in his judgements that it’s almost shocking. He’s also committed to aesthetic values. And that’s one of contemporary art’s big problems. Once you demote beauty, deny the importance of the retinal, elevate the ‘idea’ to a position of untouchable pre-eminence and abandon the notion that criticism’s task is the evaluation of quality, how exactly are you going to demonstrate the importance of art? Especially now that art has been so thoroughly assimilated, institutionalised and domesticated, as a degree-awarding academic subject like any other.
But how does all this relate to design writing, which on the whole is much clearer, much more inclined to use plain English and is as a consequence – for the reasons David Thompson explains – much more exposed? By comparison with art writing, design writing can seem obvious, under-theorised and naive, especially to anyone reading from an art point of view who’s come to expect those superficially impressive trails of circumlocution as a sign of weighty content. (In truth, though, art writing is often highly sophisticated and at the same time perfectly intelligible to an educated reader – just pull down a copy of October.)
So is there a comparable form of design bollocks, David, and, if so, who’s doing it, where can we find it, and how is it a problem? Surely the main issue in design writing remains the comparative lack of the stuff, rather than a surfeit of bollocks. It will be interesting to see how the new design writing courses at SVA and LCC handle this issue. Who are their critical models and what kinds of writing do these courses seek to encourage?
January 30th, 2009 at 4:20 pm | by MLA
@ David Thompson (et al)
Your formula:
Not all complex texts are bollox.
But a complex text that is ‘obscurantist’ is bollox.
A problem:
“Inflating particular instances [e.g. these texts I cite are obscure for some] to the grand scale of universality [these texts I cite are obscure for everyone] can be a very misleading”.
It seems the fear then can be located on the side of those who are worried that something like an inauthentic art is being granted validity - that we are all being duped into applauding The Emperor’s New Clothes. But what The Emperor’s New Clothes revealed was not the banal obviousness of objective truth (that the Emperor was indeed naked), but the very dominance of social norms, adherence to protocol, and subservience to authority by everyone before the child’s disclosure “But he has nothing on!”. In many respects your concerns are located with this aspect — “But this text has no meaning!”.
But let us return to the Emperor’s narrative once again and replace the characters of the two swindlers with two master tailors who have invented a cloth that is genuinely invisible to anyone who is stupid or unfit for their position. This would create a very different narrative for this time, as we know, the coordinates may appear the same but they have been dramatically transformed. The material is real, and their is now the potential for a different set of relations to emerge. We could speculate that some in the crowd would see the suit in all its splendor, while for others it would remain imperceptible. The argument that would then ensue would reveal the parameters underlying the present situations discursive framing.
Thus the effect of our fears and desires (manifestations of a particular site and time) cannot be discounted from our analysis. Or to put it all somewhat more succinctly, every lens distorts reality, so we can never be sure ours is the right set.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:56 pm | by MC
In other words…
Boy: “The emperor has no clothes!”
Perceiver of the Obscure: “Stupid kid. He has clothes: they’re just invisible! Duh…”
January 31st, 2009 at 4:47 am | by ahab
MLA: “Or to put it all somewhat more succinctly, every lens distorts reality, so we can never be sure ours is the right set.”
A perfect example of a distorted view of reality. Since I judge your discernment to be entirely unreliable, I’ll have to get by with my personalized pair of corrective lenses. I call the left one think and the right one feel.
February 1st, 2009 at 6:27 am | by Wolfgang Pauli
Aliza Shvarts & Carolyn Guertin aren’t right. They aren’t even wrong.
February 1st, 2009 at 1:06 pm | by David Thompson
Rick,
Yes, it’s an old story. Alas, the situation doesn’t seem to have improved much, if at all. I agree with you about Collings. He’s a refreshing presence and when I disagree with him I can generally tell where it is we part company, and why, which is one of the points I hoped to make. Based on my limited exposure to design writing, it seems much less prone to the pathology mentioned above, though I haven’t read enough of it to have much of an opinion, still less an argument.
MLA,
Perhaps your* position would be more compelling if you tried to be specific. I, for one, would love to see what it is that Professor Guertin is actually, secretly saying and which is “genuinely invisible” to those of us who are, presumably, “stupid or unfit”.
* [corrected]
February 1st, 2009 at 1:10 pm | by David Thompson
Damn. “You’re” should be “your”. A preview button would be nice.
[corrected, ed.]
February 1st, 2009 at 6:55 pm | by MLA
@ David Thompson (et al)
Let us then take a look at the Aliza Shvarts text, for example. Here is the quote you selected: ‘This piece – in its textual and sculptural forms – is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body. The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse . . . It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership’.
I shall break that down, provide a rewording (marked by =) and give a reading of it (marked by •).
1). ‘This piece…is meant to call into question the relationship between form and function as they converge on the body’
= What forces are at work that maintain a forms function? In creating this work I seek to challenge the dominant understanding of our bodies as form and function
• Here Shvarts recognises that our bodies are physical manifestations (i.e. forms such as penis/vagina etc.) but questions whether that form should determine its function
———————————
2). ‘This piece – in its…sculptural forms…’
= Despite the final artworks lack of material form, there is a sculptural aspect. This can be understood as the work carried out upon my body (form), the body of others (form), the tools (form) and spaces this involved etc.
• Here Shvarts recognises their is an inherent materiality that she cannot avoid working with.
———————————
3). ‘This piece – in its textual…forms…’
= No visual records were made, which when combined with the measures of privacy in the artwork means there is no thing to view, other than this text. This is presented along the lines of a narrative/myth/public discourse (i.e. tis post is (unwittingly) participating in the artwork)).
• Here Shvarts seeks to highlight the symbolic arena — the power of words/texts/narratives/public discourse etc. at directing our material and relational actions/ E.g. When we see a hammer, it’s function is pre-inscribed in our social fabric so we rarely probe into how its form could be directed towards alternative functions. Thus, Rather than remain enslaved to the dogma of yesterday (i.e. the hammer can only be understood as a tool for driving in nails) Shvarts artwork begins to look towards the potential of tomorrow (i.e. what other possible functions can the form of a hammer have if we go beyond the function of ‘hammering’?). Or, for an example closer to our discursive home, we can see how turning the form of the wine press into the function of a printing press had dramatic implications for social/political ordering.
———————————
4). ‘The artwork exists as the verbal narrative you see above, as an installation that will take place in Green Hall, as a time-based performance, as a [sic] independent concept, as a myth and as a public discourse . . .
= This artwork (text) displaces the focus away from my body (ontology or form) placing it instead upon the lens through which this form is understood/viewed (i.e. the invisible counterpart of our material reality - such as texts/public discourse etc.).
• Here Shvarts reveals the immaterial aspect of her work. It does not exist except as piece of transmitted text. If the distribution of the work ceases so will the work. i.e. The work is the text (as we can never know for sure if the performance took place in material terms or was ‘just’ a piece of writing).
———————————
5). ‘… It creates an ambiguity that isolates the locus of ontology to an act of readership.’
= This follows a scientific methodology - that the lens through which objects are viewed distorts the object viewed. Thus (equal) attention needs to be paid on the lens as on the object of analysis if one is to attempt to understand the object in hand. When an artist does this they can play with the lens itself. By highlighting the oft forgotten power of texts I can direct your attention away from the material order and cause you to reconsider which came first the form (material) or the function (immaterial)?
• Shvarts seeks to highlight the dominance of ‘heteronormative structures’ (non-heterosexual lifestyles). Thus, this artwork displaces the focus on (sculptural) forms and onto the hidden lens that is the text (the definer of function)
———————————
This, albeit brief and course, interpretation of a part of Shvarts writing, will hopefully reveal that far from being obscurantist, that she is an artist using texts/narratives/myths/public discourse as her material. Like any master of their craft she looks to work with the material to hand, whilst like any great artist she seeks to go beyond the binds of the present. Whether she has achieved that is not my concern here, but it is enough to recognise a number of things. Here are just a few;
1. This text is not obscurantist but employs complexity as part of the artwork itself (Shvarts employs words for their specific meaning (and my rewording, in part, destoys that specific aspect (it lacks nuance) whilst simultaneously disseminating her text, opening and transforming it into another text.)
2. This makes your initial decisive/dismissive reading unstable, introducing the possibility that the other texts are also in need of further investigation/reassessment.
3. The parameters that gave rise to your reading have come to the fore and can be questioned (further).
Finally, my development of the The Emperor’s New Clothes was not employed to make implications about those who have written here. Indeed, in the second incarnation of the story, only those who were brave enough to speak the truth (as they saw it) and challenge the protocol of politeness and ridicule would argue against the clothes existence, regardless of the possibility of being labelled ‘stupid or unfit’).
The point was, in my Emperor narrative the community is divided along unbridgeable lines (for some the truth was the clothes were clearly invisible, whilst for others the clothes were clearly visible). Once a moment of undecidability has been introduced into a situation it can be challenging to find a means of working with that situation productively — that is to move beyond the impasse without obliterating the impasse. Thus we can turn to antagonistic, yet reasoned, argument to grapple with an unresolvable, political dimension.
@ Eye
Im also prone to typos and would second the call fora preview buton,
[thanks for comment – we’ll look into it, ed.]
February 1st, 2009 at 7:36 pm | by Rutebeuf
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Sibylla ti theleis; respondebat illa: apothanein thelo.
February 1st, 2009 at 7:42 pm | by David Thompson
MLA,
Heh. I should applaud your persistence. And yet… if read as you suggest - i.e. with enormous forgiveness of the tendentious, incoherent and willfully opaque - it’s still desperately strained, grandiose and anxious to impress, while imparting almost nothing. Certainly nothing new or pleasing to the senses.
In short, and contrary to Ms Shvarts’ claims, it doesn’t appear to be art. I wonder, then, what it is.
February 1st, 2009 at 9:37 pm | by MLA
@ David Thompson (et al)
Clap all you want, but please be assured I never suggested reading with ‘enormous forgiveness’ - this was the very opposite of my argument. My previous comment was an attempt to reveal (in an admittedly clunky manner) that in this instance the language used, far from being ‘grandiose and anxious’ was integral to the art. In that sense this art demands something of its viewer/reader (in much the way all great works do). Anyway, we appear to have found ourselves in an undecidable moment, in which I suspect the debate will now swing back and forth along predetermined lines. For me it is enough to have generated this impasse - to foster doubt where there was an apparent conviction.
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:51 am | by ahab
MLA: “employs complexity”
Consider my doubt in the stability of your reading fostered.
February 2nd, 2009 at 9:12 am | by David Thompson
I’m guessing “integral to the art” should be “integral to the artifice”. But, as I doubt MLA and I are likely to reach agreement on that point, I’ll simply mention that Shvarts’ attempt to foster “myth” and “public discourse” with apparent, self-inflicted biological distress has been anticipated several times, most notably by Michelle Hines.
In 1994, in a “work” titled World Record #3, Hines claimed to have gone without sleep for 528 hours, supporting her claim with fabricated images of her supposedly doing so. In 1997, Hines turned her artistry to matters excremental with Peristaltic Action, which purported to show Hines producing the world’s longest continuous turd – a daunting 26 feet in length and spanning a high school bowling alley. In fairness to Hines, she managed to avoid much of the obligatory waffle, possibly due to having the visual “proof” of her, um, output.
Whether that makes her more of a “great artist” and “master of her craft” than Shvarts, I really couldn’t say. Though I think one might at least note that of the two Hines did it first. This may in part explain why Shvarts retreated into rhetoric in search of validation.
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm | by MLA
@ David Thompson (et al)
You’ve missed the point again.
In Shvarts work there is a movement from assurance towards ambiguity;
1. Shvarts text is a representation of the artwork.
2. But we can never be sure if the events described in the text took place.
3. For the only ‘evidence’ of their enactment is Shvarts text.
4. We could question whether, with such flimsy ‘evidence’ (a text written by the artist) the events described within it ever took place.
5. When the text becomes the only available ‘evidence’, we find ourselves in a situation in which the very representation itself (the text) comes to take the place of that which it represents (the actions in the text).
6. The text is the (only available) artwork.
Whether it is ‘good’ art or not is debatable. But it does what it says on the tin.
@ noel douglas
Art is not Science by it’s very definition. So why judge it against the same criteria? One reason would be to make reasonable statements appear absurd (‘unscientific’).
‘Bourgeois philosophy has always oscillated between mechanical materialism and idealism…’
For starters, none of the French intellectuals gathered under the American name of Post-Structuralism claimed there was no truth and only narratives (Moreover you seem to have conflated post-structuralism with post-modernism when these are two distinctly different). What these philosophers (aligned in particular ways to the project of enlightenment) sought to do was enquire into our assumptive arena and see if they could provide new ways of understanding our world and enabling emancipation. In order to do this they needed to attack the dominance of the metaphysicians and for that reason they turned on truth. They presented work that highlighted truths relation to context, history, power, knowledge, and norms (to name just a few). Certainly many of their texts are challenging, but this reveals more about our education system than anything else. Indeed I would argue that their legacy has had the most profound effect on subsequent generations (from emancipatory theories of intellectual property to struggles over the domains of public and private, to the various anti-war, anti-globalisation movements and those organised in defence of ecological concerns (to name but a few)). Thus, taking on board their arguments we can see that all texts remain open to contestation, interpretation and reinterpretation. No project is ever finished but exists in a site that seeks to delimit and define it. Creatives seek to challenge conservative mechanisms.
@ ahab
When suggesting the work employed complexity I should have made clear that this was not to deliberately obscure her work. The work could only emerge out of an engagement with complex ideas (we could think of the complex as being uncommon) and that simplifying these ideas (for wider appreciation) would destroy much of their meaning. Thus the art demands something of its viewer/reader.
However, I suspect that even if an ‘accesible’ translation were possible it would still meet with the entrenched positions displayed here, in which ‘aesthetic values’, ‘scientific reality/clarity’, and your own reliance on logical consistency (“does not compute”) would miss the very arguments of power, control, dominance, and the potential of creativity to problematise these assumptive predicates. As I said before - How very disappointing.
February 2nd, 2009 at 4:35 pm | by Andy Polaine
The problem is that many art theorists and artists are terrible writers. The really good ones are not afraid to put forth an idea clearly and succinctly, the insecure ones clothe it in nonsense. Unfortunately it is mostly the latter that win the grants because the committees don’t understand a word of the application and assume it to be smarter than them.
Once artists start using theory as a springboard for work, the whole thing just disappears into a wormhole of nonsense. As a colleague of mine used to say, “make theory about art, not art about theory.”
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:01 pm | by dirigible
“Certainly many of their texts are challenging, but this reveals more about our education system than anything else.”
Great ideas can be expressed simply. Otiose nonsense takes great clouds of verbiage to sell to the inadequate.
And I’d suggest that it is the quality of editor and translator, not educator, that is usually at fault with (yawn) postmodernism.
“The work could only emerge out of an engagement with complex ideas”
There are no complex ideas, just complexes of ideas. The work (sic) has emerged from an all too common form of semiotic Munchausens-by-Proxy. It has retained only the most general invocation of Big Ideas We All Know And Agree With as a pacifier for the terribly clever, who are of course approving mirrors of the author.
“Thus the art demands something of its viewer/reader.”
It isn’t art. And it, and its apologists, demand only agreement. What do they fear?
“the potential of creativity to problematise these assumptive predicates”
What’s an assumptive predicate when it’s domiciled contemporaneously? Is it something to do with the Virgin’s ascent into heaven?
The “work” does not problematise (sic) anything. It is vapid homily, leaving the reader with no work to do in the text, never mind outside of it.
There is no art there. Markov-chain strings of Theory-ish jargon are a substitute for thought, not an indicator of it.
(To head off an obvious rhetorical move: I have an art MA, I write contemporary art criticism and my BA dissertation was on Art & Language. My objection is not to language-as-art per se but to the instrumental, incompetent and destructive pretence that artbollocks is anything other than a harmful parasite on art.)
February 2nd, 2009 at 5:12 pm | by David Thompson
MLA,
“You’ve missed the point again. In Shvarts work there is a movement from assurance towards ambiguity… we can never be sure if the events described in the text took place.”
Perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently clear. The “works” by Michelle Hines mentioned above were subsequently justified on the basis of their ambiguity – i.e. it was unclear whether they were faked or actual events. And hence the comparison with the efforts of Ms Shvarts, a decade or so later. (At various times Hines also justified these projects on grounds of parody and poking fun at celebrity, a desire for immortality, etc, so it’s hard to be sure which explanation, if any, was the original intention.)
And, gosh, how clever is that?
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm | by Rutebeuf
“Great ideas can be expressed simply. Otiose nonsense takes great clouds of verbiage to sell to the inadequate.”
The fact that ideas can be expressed simply is no rationale for doing so but a consideration of the author’s intent, as is the tacit approval for being “so clear, so straightforward, so demotic, so assertively moral”. James Joyce’s lauded epic Ulysses has been described — by both the public [the crowd] and indeed literary critics [taylors] — in the synonymously parodic as Uselesses; in other words, otiose nonsense. Again we fall back to questions of what exactly makes a master taylor? What is interesting is that you have positioned yourself as one and demand only agreement while having the gaul to ask: what do they fear?
“There are no complex ideas, just complexes of ideas. “
Read: particle physics is not complex, it is just a complex of mutually supporting ideas.
Enough for sweeping statements…
February 3rd, 2009 at 8:45 pm | by Wayne Dyer
Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.
February 5th, 2009 at 11:48 pm | by Pierre Boulle
MLA: Not only is this art. It is art the re-presents itself and the complexity of power relations that enable it to manifest. It is reasoned, just not your understanding reasoned (pointing at Thompsonius).
THOMPSONIUS: It is reasoned? With the Eye’s permission, let me expose this hoax by direct examination.
EYE: Proceed. But don’t turn this hearing into a farce.
Thompsonius crosses to the defendant’s table and favors the Artist with a knowing smile.
THOMPSONIUS: Tell the court, Artspeak — what is the second Article of Faith?
ARTIST: I admit, I dismiss this as I am concerned to attack the very grounding of your culture.
THOMPSONIUS: Of course Artspeak doesn’t attack our culture - because it does not think. (to Artist) Tell us why my opinions are the correct ones
ARTIST: Some opinions, it seems, are less critically reflexive than others.
February 9th, 2009 at 6:08 pm | by noel douglas
MLA,
“For starters, none of the French intellectuals gathered under the American name of Post-Structuralism claimed there was no truth and only narratives (Moreover you seem to have conflated post-structuralism with post-modernism when these are two distinctly different).
I know, I was having to paraphrase…but I disagree that post-structuralism and post-modernism are distinct from each other, they may not be the same, but they do overlap, and I think you would be hard pushed to find in Baudrillard, Lyotoard or Derrida (there is no outside the text), the idea that there was a knowable objective reality (again I’m paraphrasing, I realise it’s not quite this simple)…the one thing that does unite most of them is that they were a generation of disillusioned revolutionaries hence the denial of the possilbity of mass social change.
What these philosophers (aligned in particular ways to the project of enlightenment) sought to do was enquire into our assumptive arena and see if they could provide new ways of understanding our world and enabling emancipation. In order to do this they needed to attack the dominance of the metaphysicians and for that reason they turned on truth. They presented work that highlighted truths relation to context, history, power, knowledge, and norms (to name just a few). Certainly many of their texts are challenging, but this reveals more about our education system than anything else. Indeed I would argue that their legacy has had the most profound effect on subsequent generations (from emancipatory theories of intellectual property to struggles over the domains of public and private, to the various anti-war, anti-globalisation movements and those organised in defence of ecological concerns (to name but a few))”
Again I agree, there was much of value in what they wrote, but it doesn’t alter the fact that it was a reaction to a mechanical set of theories, often labelled ‘Marxist’ but were far too crude to really be so.
The key thing is that since post-war there has been a seperation of thought and action, so there has been a far greater tendency for ‘theorists’ to promote ideas that rarely meet their object.
February 9th, 2009 at 10:04 pm | by shaun belcher
Moogee my cartoon dog been biting artspeakers in arse for years
http://www.shaunbelcher.com/moogee
February 9th, 2009 at 10:06 pm | by MLA
noel douglas (6:08 pm)
Paraphrasing will always distort and so there will always be a point of contestation. For the sake of argument we can therefore agree on generalised readings. However…
You ‘disagree that post-structuralism and post-modernism are distinct from each other…’ and then proceed to contradict that statement at end of the same sentence where you suggest ‘they may not be the same, but they do overlap’.
Either they are the same (indistinct) or they are different (distinct). The overlap you suggest can be useful for paraphrasing. But whilst it is possible to recognise similarities, I would argue we pursue the differences. Why? Because these terms are ways of capturing and collating a plethora of disparate ideas into neat packages - they stand in for thinking. We should ask - whom does this package serve, what is lost in it, what are we obliged to miss?
‘and I think you would be hard pushed to find in Baudrillard, Lyotoard or Derrida (there is no outside the text), the idea that there was a knowable objective reality (again I’m paraphrasing, I realise it’s not quite this simple)’
The work of post-structuralists was political (n.b. political ≠ politics), not empirical. The idea that ‘there is no outside the text’ was an argument that developed earlier work on linguistics - that the material world comes to us through language. These theorists were problematising our assumptions (science is neutral, media is benign), shifting the sites of investigation (objective to relational), revealing other ways of understanding the world (creating new ways of thinking!!)- not negating the material reality. This was a multiplication of positions (truths) - not a new singularisation (truth).
Or, to put it somewhat differently, their ethical concerns would not allow them to dismiss the material real (of violence for example).
‘…the one thing that does unite most of them is that they were a generation of disillusioned revolutionaries hence the denial of the possilbity of mass social change’
If they were disillusioned why did they write? Far from being jaundiced they were working on understanding and challenging the forces that produced disillusion. Mass social change was/is possible via the dissemination of local inter-connected struggles. Adhering to idealism can be disempowering. Recognising limits can be empowering.
‘The key thing is that since post-war there has been a seperation of thought and action, so there has been a far greater tendency for ‘theorists’ to promote ideas that rarely meet their object.’
Here we appear to disagree upon fundamentally irreconceivable lines, for I would argue that thinking is action.
February 9th, 2009 at 11:14 pm | by noel douglas
MLA,
no thinking is only action when it is made real, if I think in my head (though this impulse may come from the material world) but do not find someway to express it, it is not made real…I’m sorry I don’t go along with the whole Althusserian idea that intellectuals are ‘acting’ by writing theory.
My point was that before the war, intellectuals were not necessarily in the academy and did, generally try and unite their theory with action in what we would call Praxis, think here Marx or Einstein.
The (mainly) French intellectuals we are talking about wrote because it was their ‘job’ and most regressed from forms of Marxism to Liberalism, Lyotard’s micronarratives is merely reheated reformism (written for the French State of course), Baudrillard becomes almost a parody, a mirror of commodity fetishism taken to ridiculous extremes…as just two examples.
There is no doubt that they all shored up, in one or another Capitalism despite their dislike for the system, and where highly authoritarian despite the ‘anything goes’ gloss, after all if you say ‘there is no truth’ from what position are you saying this? Why should I listen to you?!
Postmodernism was/is no serious challenge to the system, it sits quite happily with Neo-Liberalism, similarly what gets called ‘Post-Structuralism’ is of a piece with this, and was of course a reaction to the equally flawed theory of Stucturalism that French intellectuals loved in the 50s, so with Pomo/Post-Structuralism we get the privileging of ‘identities’, (putting an ’s’ on the end of thing is a common tic in these circles), the spilt subject, the denial of the working class, revolutionary change, the denial of materialism, consumerism over production etc etc…I realise that a lot of these thinkers are bundled together and don’t necessarily except the labels, but it doesn’t alter the fact that there are ideas were NO challenge to the system.
What I was trying to outline is that these forms of thought are historically specific, and (mostly) related to academic circles only, the idea for instance that there was one ‘truth’ was an example of the kind of mechanical materialism that dominated the 30.40, 50s world of the cold war and Stalinism on the left, which of course was wrong, but that the same time there can be said to be some things that are ‘true’, without falling into this trap. Similarly words can indeed mean many things, and can in this sense be arbitary, (Structuralism) but in a given context they don’t break into as many meanings as they could (Post-Structuralism) because the context limits the meaning, Voloshinov and Bakhtin demolished people like Saussure in the 20s, 40 years before the Post-Structuralists did, but being materialists and Marxists they did not flip the other side of that coin and let go of the material foundations of language and meaning.
There are other strands of thought that I think are far superior, for me that line goes from Marx, through Trotsky, Benjamin, Bakhtin, Surrealism, Luckas, Situationists, Berger through to people like David Harvey today…none of these theorist/activists lose grip on their object of analysis, promote complex yet understandable ideas, and avoid where possible, uneccesarily obtuse language because all are concerned with how theory can enlighten action to make progress, something that cannot be argued of the people you are defending.
The material world does not just come to us just through language, as Berger says ‘Seeing come before words, the child looks and recognizes before it can speak’…and that dialetic is always there.
Art is a form of knowledge and like Science it can be said to get a the truth of experience, this is what I would argue what makes certain Art register with people, whilst some does not and is therefore of little value and fades into history. And funnily enough this registering does not necessarily require words or theory for people to experience it as so.
February 12th, 2009 at 3:57 pm | by MLA
noel douglas (11:14 pm)
‘no thinking is only action when it is made real, if I think in my head…’
If your argument is correct then you only prove that Thinking is Action.
i.e. Your comment was directed towards challenging the thinking of others. If you have convinced them that your argument is the stronger (stronger through reason not force) then your thinking will also affect their subsequent action. How would it be possible to delineate the two?
If your argument is wrong my point needs a different attack.
or we could look at it another way
Thinking requires Time.
Action requires Space.
Thus (‘following’ Einstein’s development of spacetime theory) - Thinking is Action.
‘My point was that before the war…’
It seems you accept the demarcations dictated by an oppressive ‘system’ (you have assumed a singularity) you seek to navigate beyond (this feeds into your entire commentary (and that of others here also)). But this position merely negates the right to contest, determine and direct the very ground upon which the fight takes place. It is far too easy to dismiss assumed failures and chuck them on the rubbish heap. A much more interesting (i.e. productive/difficult/complex) approach would recycle that past, in order to navigate ways out of our present. Whilst there are problems with any theoretical proposition these problems provide new openings (the glass is half full). But this would require critical analysis - separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak. But this action (of separation) can only emerge from a present it tries to escape. It appears we are caught in loop (heads up our arse). Strait jackets work on this principle-the more one struggles (acts without thinking due to fear or anger) the tighter the restriction becomes (just look at the bind Adbusters increasingly finds itself in - providing better forms of capitalism to contest capitalism). Another method of escaping this capture would be to understand the forms of capture (to think critically/creatively). This aspect requires action not defined by space, but by time - that is thinking. Thinking is Action.
‘There are other strands of thought that I think are far superior…’
Neither you nor anyone else in this thread has provided a method for defining if a text is obtuse or not other than your own particular positions - As I have already stated ‘Inflating particular instances to the grand scale of universality can be a very misleading’.
Berger says “Seeing come before words, the child looks and recognizes before it can speak” ’
Whilst we may experience the world directly we can only communicate that sensation through language (the meaning society abstracts from materiality in order to navigate this chaotic order). The child may see/recognise before it speaks - but she can tell us nothing of her world. Her world is internal, limited and isolated until she can communicate (see for example the documentary film Land of Silence and Darkness by Werner Herzog).
February 12th, 2009 at 5:30 pm | by Occam's Razor
So what are you really saying here, MLA? Do you even know? Or do you just enjoy the verbal figure you cut as you dance around? The patronising assumption behind much of what you say is that you see everything more clearly than the rest us, trapped as we are in our limited positions so pitifully transparent to you, while you are magnificently clear-eyed and open to all possibilities.
Yet there is a glimmer of light in your final remarks: “. . . we can only communicate that sensation through language”, you say. Yes, indeed, and to communicate with other people — art enthusiasts, for instance — of varying levels of understanding and education, we will need to use language that is intelligible and doesn’t tie itself in awkward knots trying to convince us (or just itself) of its intellectual superiority. We cannot expect most readers to grasp what we are trying to say, or to care about it in the slightest, if we don’t observe this elementary rule of effective writing. It’s actually a form of courtesy — and the better constructed parts of your arguments show that you know this perfectly well.
February 12th, 2009 at 7:19 pm | by MLA
Occam’s Razor (5:30 pm)
‘So what are you really saying here…’
I am really saying what I have really said.
‘The patronising assumption behind…’
How can I been patronising? I have only presented reasoned arguments.
Nor have I ever suggested/implied that I ‘see everything more clearly’. On the contrary my argument is pointed towards the very notion of privileged positions (authorities). I have only employed reasoned argument in order to fuck things up a bit. Why would I do such a thing? Because the foundations for many of the propositions presented here rely on a liberal understanding of ‘other/s’ work rather than any critical analysis - “It is obscure because I say it is” or “It is obscure because it is not clear” or “it is obscure because it is not the same as work I think I understand”. None of the arguments presented give a reason for me to agree with them or, alternatively, a reason to trust their judgment.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
I have asked -
How do we agree what is intelligible, who decides?
What mechanisms are employed?
What is obviated, glossed over, dismissed as unecessary when such strategies are employed?
Or more directly -
Who is the ‘we’ to which you speak for?
How do you know the obscure is obscure - how do ‘you see everything more clearly than the rest us’?
Whose ‘elementary rules’ do we adhere to? ETC.
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:47 pm | by Dominic James
In the epigraph to In the Skin of A Lion Ondaatje quotes Berger’s claim that ‘never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one’…he’d obviously not seen this article.
March 4th, 2009 at 9:45 am | by Alan
to quote David Thompson
‘Cryptic yet confident assertions seem obligatory.’
April 15th, 2009 at 8:55 am | by Artspeak is indeed… BOLLOCKS!
[...] Eye Magazine Blog [...]
May 18th, 2009 at 10:45 am | by Linda
I am interested in regular artspeak blogs
May 18th, 2009 at 6:11 pm | by Augean Stables » PoMo Unpeeled: David Thompson talks with Stephen Hicks
[...] in a piece about the art world’s reliance on postmodernist rhetoric – what’s often called “art bollocks” - I pointed out that the artist Aliza Shvarts was mouthing opaque gibberish while pretending to [...]
June 5th, 2009 at 7:49 pm | by ransomnote
Rutebeuf, here’s the translation of the quote you provided:
“Then, the Sibyl who is at Cumae I, my eyes themselves have seen in a small jar to hang, and with her these boys said Sibyl … she replied …”
Since Sibyls were thought to be oracles revealing secrets or able to see what others could not, I think you may be expressing the opinion that the convoluted expressions of MLA are like the efforts of the Cumaen Sibyl seen speaking to children. The fact that you did not bother to provide the translation supports this idea - it allows you to imply that you communicate on a higher plane…along with MLA.
I could be wrong, and, since you did not provide the translation, I assume your comments were not meant to inform those of us who don’t speak Latin.
I take another view of this same quote - that Sibyls were thought to hear voices, see things that weren’t there, and behave in a generally schizophrenic manner that made it hard for them to be accepted by their contemporaries.
Perhaps this is the chief badge of honor sought by those who write essays, critics, or comments not mean to be understood by most readers - the more obscure and inaccessible the language - the more the speaker is comforted with the false belief that their ideas are simply more valuable. When the unwashed masses reject their ideas, the ‘artist’ can then strike a martyr pose.
September 8th, 2009 at 9:40 pm | by Non-Martyr
Modern Cynics (David Thompson + ) meet Critical Evaluators (MLA + ). The former attempt to dismiss the latter, with ridicule, not reason, destroying any validity their argument may have had.