By Steve Light
[Alan Silver, Blue Nocturne, oil on canvas, 110cm x 175cm]
For Howard Eiland and Donald Kuspit, supreme and exemplary virtuosos in jazz writing and in art writing respectively
In a review, entitled “Post White? On ‘Blues for Smoke'”, published in The Nation, of an exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Barry Schwabsky, the magazine’s art critic, writes that “music has been important to black American artists in a different way and to a different degree from what it has been for whites. This difference has allowed them, at times, a deeper understanding of the unity of the arts.”[1] But the differences he cites are at once not differences in the way he says that they are and in other respects they are phantom differences which in the manner of his positing carry with them received significations of socio-racial typing on both and on all sides of ethno-historical and ethno-racial difference. Evidently, Schwabsky hasn’t thought through the notions he presents. And the “deeper understanding” he attributes to black artists vis-a-vis the unity of the arts is an indication of a very old kind of patronizing compliment. But I will bracket all this for the moment and return to it later because Schwabsky follows these declarations by continuing on unabated and unabashed: “What white painter has ever made a declaration comparable to [the black painter, Jack] Whitten’s when he proclaims, ‘My cosmic guides are: John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Kenny Dorham, Bud Powell, Ron Carter, Fats Navarro, Dexter Gordon, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, Coleman Hawkins, Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Clifford Brown.. .?'”[2] There is a work by the contemporary American painter, Alan Silver, The Moon Over Thelonious, in which with his characteristic wry, playful, mischievous, and gracious humor–and understanding–Silver pays tribute to Monk and to Monk’s rendition of the early 20th Century Japanese composer, Rentaro Taki’s composition, Kojo no Tsuki (Moon over a Castle’s Ruins). Already in his adolescence and ever thereafter Silver has been quick to say that if his main painterly influences and inspirations during his earliest formative years were Van Gogh, Roualt, and Klee, nonetheless the primary, the foundational influence and inspiration for his work was and continues to be the world of jazz, and he could happily cite if he were asked for a list of favorites, i.e. Charlie Parker, Wardell Grey, Howard McGhee, Thelonious Monk, Dexter Gordon, Duke Ellington, Cecil Taylor, Charlie Christian, Charlie Mingus (one of Silver’s paintings is entitled, West Coasting, an homage to Mingus’ East Coasting album, while Bud Powell and John Coltrane are evoked in his paintings Dance of the Infidels and Ascension), Al Haig, Clifford Brown, Horace Silver, Fats Navarro, etc.–and Maurice Ravel too! In other words, Alan Silver, who is white, has all his life been making a declaration of exactly the same nature as the one of Whitten, a declaration Schwabsky cannot believe could possibly be uttered by a white artist.
[Alan Silver, The Moon Over Thelonious, oil on canvas, 145cm x 101cm]
[Alan Silver, Dance of the Infidels, oil on canvas, 93cm x 132cm ]
[Alan Silver, Ascension, oil on canvas, 167cm x 106cm ]
[Alan Silver, West Coasting, oil on canvas, 106cm x 182cm ]
But I cite Silver here not as an anecdotal instance, but rather because I consider his declaration and his stance, despite their intensively rooted existential and personalized bearing and resonance, to also be socio-historically and even socio-existentially typical and even if Silver were the only white artist to have ever made such a declaration. Yet, doubtless, he is not, although I would declare both that Silver is certainly among the most sparkling, sagacious, and invigorating of painters working today and that his understanding of the music and his self-understanding of the role it has played for him at once existentially and aesthetically exist in the most exemplary, admirable, and substantial of ways. Artists and writers, musicians and dancers, philosophers and poets–as well as athletes and acrobats, freedom riders and flaneurs, salutationists and situationists! –globally, across all nationalities, and across all other cleavages and coalescences, colors and contours, have and do make declarations in which music and in the present case, jazz, play a role. And this has been true for much of the history of our artistic, literary, and existential modernities since the l920s, although since the 1940s and then even more since the 1960s the universality or at least this universality-as-possibility–necessarily with certain differentiations within it–exists in increased proliferation and measure. After all it is not by accident or idiosyncratic notion that the Japanese painter, Naoko Haruta, certainly the supreme lyrical intelligence in contemporary painting, numbers among her works paintings with titles such as Begin the Beguine: ‘Ella and Bird’; Booker Little: ‘Opening Statement’; Sonny Rollins: ‘Oleo’; Charlie Parker: ‘Star Eyes; Kokoro (Heart): Homage to Cecil Taylor; Life #126: ‘April in Paris’, etc. as well as works with titles such as Life #105: ‘Chopin: Nocturne #20 in C-Sharp Minor’ and Life #38: ‘Music and Hours’, etc.
Doubtless this is not to say that cleavages, colors, and contours–differences at once culturo-historical, socio-historical, and socio-existential–do not exist and that the same overcomes all difference, that universalism overcomes all particularity or singularity. But calibrating what is the same and what is different and what is different in a different way and the same in either a similar or different way is not simply the preserve and perennial project of philosophical reflection in general (historically already codified in Plato’s Parmenides as but one prominent example) but rather of all human reflection tout court. Already for several generations we can all pick up any textbook on 20th Century American literature and read the declarations of Kerouac regarding the role of jazz as inspiration and determinant–or in the case of aficionados who have read outside textbooks the declarations of Ray Bremser (“I dug Billie Holiday at 15, Wayne Shorter at 25”) or Diana Di Prima or Lenore Kandel, etc. etc. In fact all this is the stuff not just of textbook narration but in many instances of cultural vernacular, i.e. Kerouac’s bop prosody and so on. Of course Kerouac’s declarations in places and in part carried the patronizing and received distortions that Schwabsky’s notions seem, sadly, to carry, but the declarations of Bremser and Silver certainly do not. I would stipulate that while there are sociological, socio-historical, and socio-existential differences between an artist like Jack Whitten–or a poet like Nathaniel Mackey–on the one hand and a painter such as Alan Silver on the other, nonetheless their reception of and their allegiance to the musics and musicians of jazz as well as the influence and socio-aesthetic usages to which they are put and the affections and effectivities which they provide, elicit, and aesthetically adumbrate, exist on the same plane and in the same kind of socio-existential and historiosophical life-world. Indeed I would say the same of the way that across three different generations and across racial differentiation the presences and citations of those such as Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, and Amiri Baraka, figure in important ways in the intellectual-biographical formation of poets and theoreticians such as Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, and the present author. [3]
[Naoko Haruta, Life #105: ‘Chopin: Nocturne #20 in C-Sharp Minor’, acrylic on canvas, 110 cm x 170cm]
Yes, certainly, there are sociological, socio-historical, and socio-racial differences which account for why jazz is at its origins the product of African Americans, of African American musicians, of African American creation, and even more why all the principal innovators, composers, and carriers of the music from (the list is partial) Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Coleman Hawkins to Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell and subsequently to Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Andrew Hill, Charlie Mingus, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, etc. have been African- American. But jazz like all cultural creation–and all the more Western Hemispheric creation since 1492–is a product of creolization, i.e. a product of heterogenous multiplicities which are felt, drawn upon, imbued, syncretized, effected, infused, mobilized, etc. But then creolization was already taking place from the moment that one paleolithic clan or group came into contact with another clan or group and thereby in the Western Hemisphere from the moment our species arrived there perhaps already 15,000 years ago or more. If jazz is the invention principally of black Americans, is necessarily like all cultural creation, the creation of and by particularized forces and processes and, thereby, particular individuals and groups, nonetheless–and necessarily–it has had, and all the more because of its profound and propelling virtuosity and historico-epochal substantiality, universal appeal and reception. This is of course the most basic of banalities and determinations. There are no privileged receivers of this cultural form–or participants and exponents.
[ Naoko Haruta, Begin the Beguine: ‘Ella and Bird’; acrylic on canvas, 101cm x 142cm [40″ x 56″][Diptych]
[Naoko Haruta, Charlie Parker: ‘Star Eyes’, acrylic on canvas, 108cm x 98cm]
Schwabsky thinks that Jack Whitten would be privileged over Alan Silver in his reception of this music and in the artistic inspiration he gains and that “the difference is due to the centrality of music to black American culture, and to the near-universal acknowledgement of the validity of that music: its call seems never to fail of a response.”[4] These are generalities, i.e. “black American culture,” “the centrality of music” (and does Schwabsky mean music in general or jazz music in particular, i.e. as in “the music”?), etc. which are so diffuse they come undone at the first consideration. As for “call and response”, it seems misplaced, if not even a bit forced, but it is not of any consequence. But the notion of “near-universal acknowledgement of the validity of that music[jazz] [among African Americans]” is problematic or at least for the past sixty years or so given that by the 1950s jazz had ceased to be an entirely popular music and culture. Certainly it is likely that a greater percentage of black homes have jazz recordings on their shelves and that a greater percentage of black Americans might in some general sense hear about jazz in their homes and it is likely that a greater percentage of black Americans would in terms of the sociometrics of taste, predilection, admiration, and socio-existential identification produce greater levels of affirmation-recognition, but in these forms everything is at a level of generality that does not yet rise to a level of sociological efficacy and once these generalized “fact diffusions” are subjected to various socio-historical and socio-cultural stratifications–and historical temporalizations–the “centrality” in question becomes more a tentative generalization and less a culturo-social indicator and specificity. And by time one gets to the causal and identity frameworks of artists, whatever “centrality” there might be has been mediated by a host of other biographical and historico-contingent variables so that the privilege Schwabsky thinks to bestow has become more chimera than concretion.
[Naoko Haruta, Life #126: ‘April in Paris’, acrylic on canvas, 110cm x170cm ]
[Naoko Haruta, Life #96: ‘Africa #1’, acrylic on canvas, 110cm x 170cm ]
[Naoko Haruta, Life #137: ‘Venice #1’, acrylic on canvas, 110cm x 170cm [43″x67″]
[Naoko Haruta, Life #38: ‘Music and Hours’, acrylic on canvas, 110cm x 170cm ]
Now, let there be no misunderstanding. I am not relativizing the experience of being black during the five-centuries-long epoch of white supremacy, which supremacy and its horrific instantiations must surely be considered the most sustained and massive crime ever committed by humanity. But the topic here is not the differentia specifica of black and white existence either simpliciter or tout court. I am and have been speaking of the much more delimited notion of whether or not there is a definitive separation between how enthusiasm for jazz can function for artists across color lines.
The notion, then, that non-black artists cannot make a “declaration comparable to Whitten’s” because a larger percentage of the African American population “acknowledges the validity of [jazz]” is a causal non-sequitur. Such declarations do not spring from a sociological fact and are not either legitimized or delegitimized therein. Rather they arise from a concatenation of existential, biographical, and socio-historical circumstances. Moreover, the exact demographic percentages vis-a-vis considerations of the “validity of the music” and about the “centrality of the music” are not easily determinable, but they certainly are not as clearcut as Schwabsky stipulates and certainly not “nearly universal” and, what is more, they are differentiated across color and class lines as evinced by the demographics of the receiving publics of portions of the jazz avant-garde such as, for example, Cecil Taylor, Andrew Hill, Jimmy Lyons, Marion Brown, Bill Dixon, Leroy Jenkins, etc. etc. whose audiences have tended to be majority white and Asian not black. But whatever the demographic percentages might be they do not play a role in the specific cases at hand relative to the subject matter Schwabsky is trying to analyze and about which he is trying to bring forth certain dictums or notions. It would be to denigrate jazz and its musicians to say that a white painter cannot make a declaration such as the one of Jack Whitten and I think Jack Whitten and anyone on his or on Silver’s list (and their lists of favorites overlap greatly) would take umbrage at Schwabsky’s denigration of their universality at once extensive but also and crucially intensive. Would Miles Davis or Bud Powell– or Yvette Devereaux in our own day–not be able to make a declaration about the ways in which Western Classical Music–or literature or painting– play a role in their compositional and creative life comparable to a declaration that a Roswell Rudd or a Red Rodney or a Charlie Haden might be able to make? Surely and definitively all of the aforementioned could make very similar declarations about the Classical traditions both European and Afro- American. Differentiation is important when it can be demonstrated but the compartmentalizations–and hierarchy– Schwabsky wants to make and establish cannot be borne out by any kind of attentive demographic, cultural, and sociological analysis and insight.
[Alan Silver, Demisemiquavers, oil on canvas, 173cm x 114cm]
[Naoko Haruta, Life #71, acrylic on canvas, 110cm x 170cm ]
But there are further problems in Schwabsky’s essay. “Blues for Smoke” is an exhibition trying to evoke the inherence of the musical culture of the blues in contemporary art. The exhibition consists of art works by black and non-black artists. Schwabsky says that the show’s curator, Bennett Simpson, (“who is white”) “wants to invent a new meaning for the word ‘blues'”.[5] Schwabsky takes the opportunity not simply to review the show but to speak about what the show ought to have been or what it could have been. There is nothing illegitimate in speaking about what a show ought to have been or might have been, indeed every instance of aesthetic criticism (or criticism in any context) carries by definition and by necessary signifying intention normative declarations. Every criticism in art or in any realm is already a statement about the way a work or situation or person for that matter should have been or should be. The question, doubtless and always, is the manner, the means, and the meaning of what one posits and declares. Schwabsky writes: “But that’s to imagine another show that ‘Blues for Smoke’ might have been, one about music and abstraction in the work of black American artists since the l960s. It’s an important show that should be done, for several reasons. It would redress the lack of recognition of black artists in general, and black abstractionists in particular, by the mainstream (i.e. white) art world, at least until very recently. The works of [Alma]Thomas, Whitten, [Edward]Clark and [William T.]Williams are reminders that some of the best abstract painting of the 1960s and ’70s was being done by black artists [he also mentions Charles Gaines, Jeff Donaldson, and Mark Bradford], yet they are hardly known to the museum-going public (and presumably the prices of their works reflect this relative obscurity).”[6] Tangentially, I should say that there is no need at all for Schwabsky to have added, “presumably”. Simply and alas: necessarily because of….
“Lack of recognition of black artists in general”: this notion is problematic in the present case because this lack, this egregious lack, is something which Schwabsky has cited in places but I would stipulate in not enough places and is something that he has not demonstrably sought to rectify in the kind of concrete, material practice that given his position and standing could, thereby, have concrete, material efficacy. But Schwabsky is a very small part of the story. Assemble all the studies which set out to survey the history of either art or American art from 1945 to the present, and from which I will cite two recent if not random examples, Kurt Varnedoe’s Pictures of Nothing on the one hand and David Joselit’s American Art since 1945 on the other. The works in Varnedoe’s book are decidedly by white artists and predominately by American artists at that (and I should add, given what I will say later in this essay, that the cover of his book bears a painting–a white monochrome–by Robert Ryman…). Unlike Joselit’s book, Varnedoe’s book is about abstract art in general and thereby needn’t have restricted itself to “American art”. But Varnedoe certainly “Americanized” his book and his selections reflected a long established structure such that decidedly important African American abstractionists (albeit only in a portion of their work) such as Norman Lewis and Hale Woodruff vis-a-vis the first postwar generation and everyone else in subsequent generations are left out. This is true for Joselit in regard to the immediate post-war period, although in the latter part of his book he mentions four black artists, Bettye Saar, David Hammons, Dana Chandler, and Faith Ringgold, but–and this is precisely the problem and indicator–in a chapter on “identity politics”. These four black artists are discussed strictly in relation to “protest art”, which is to say that they are typed and ghettoized in a common and illegitimate reductionist discourse. They are shunted on stage for a brief appearance as if to fulfill the quota of black artists and the “topic quota”. [7]
But this remains true in 20th Century surveys too. The so-called “painters of the Harlem Renaissance” are clearly painters of American Scenes but they are never included in historical surveys of the ’30s and ’40s other than in the invariable cameo/token appearance by (generally) Aaron Douglas or Jacob Lawrence whereby the standard and historically common rule of “inclusivity”, i.e. “just one Negro at a time” is by rote fulfilled. And this rule has not yet been relegated completely to the past. In fact, these black painters are shunted by both white and black art historians into histories of “Harlem Renaissance Painting” or “African American Art”, etc.–and as if the Harlem Renaissance itself were but a partitioned cloister when it decidedly was not. I would say and I have said elsewhere that the failure to include the so-called Harlem Renaissance painters and sculptors, i.e. William Johnson, Meta Fuller, Sargent Johnson, Lois Jones, Charles Alston, Palmer Hayden, Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley, Malvin Johnson, Romare Bearden and Douglas and Lawrence, etc. etc. within surveys, studies, and exhibitions, etc. of the 30s and 40s American Scene Painting is to have excluded the very notion of an “American Scene”. This remains true till and through today.
Just recently the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art opened a grand retrospective of the work of Norman Lewis. This is a significant and important event and for those who have been partisans of Lewis and Lewis’ work a deeply gratifying moment which however is mediated by the mournful understanding that this exhibition has come decades too late, given that Lewis passed away in 1979. In a preview of upcoming exhibitions for the fall of 2015, Jason Farago in The Guardian wrote: “It’s hard to believe this is the first proper retrospective for this subtly incisive painter. This show with nearly 100 works should go a long way to reposition Lewis in the canon of American postwar innovators.”[8] It is certainly hard to believe if one doesn’t understand just how strong the compartmentalizations and hierarchies of the so-called canon have been and continue to be in so many ways. But simultaneous to this Frank Stella’s retrospective of 2015 brought forth exclamations that it was “the first retrospective since 1968!” as if there hadn’t been enough. Readers of the present essay might guess that the present author would not at all give the palm to Stella over Lewis. Reposition Lewis in the canon of postwar innovators? Quite simply he has not been positioned at all and that is the grievous error, the grievous exclusion. Lewis should have been in the forefront of the postwar painterly American canon from the start. Lewis was a much more powerful and dynamic painter than many of the luminaries of the postwar era, indeed more than most. Rothko? Newman? Still? I would say that they do not rival the resonating marvels and flights and vivifying fancies of Lewis’ work and in the case of Newman and Rothko we are speaking more of rote enactments of the less vibrant and interesting of possible-necessry options historically instantiated at the beginning of the modernist upheaval which predates Kandinsky and can be found more than in nuce in the Levy/Allais Imposters’ monochrome and other negationist forays and in the blank page of Mallarme. Lewis’ retrospective an important event? Decidedly and yet the show has not drawn notice, certainly not anywhere near the notice it deserves. Schwabsky, for example, could have written a review for The Nation prior to the opening of the show since he would clearly have had access to it and Philadelphia is but commute time from New York.
And what is more The Nation is certainly the kind of publication that one would think would understand well the importance of this show and the need to speak of it. More significantly, Artforum’s art world invitees called upon to list the 10 best shows of the year seem not to have noticed either. Hal Foster, Thelma Golden, Helen Molesworth, Magali Arriola, Tim Griffin, Jack Bankowsky, Vince Aletti, Sarah McCrory, Stephanie Moisdon, Pi Li, Chus Martinez, Lynne Cooke, etc. etc? Not one cited the Lewis show. Not even Golden? Now, Golden need not have cited the Lewis show “just because” she and he share the same ethnicity. If her aesthetic judgment does not rank Lewis then by all means she should not have cited the show. But the names and instances aside, and this is but one example, the exclusion or “lack of recognition” to use Schwabsky’s phrase, continues.[9]
And again, beyond the absence thus far of a review by Schwabsky of the Lewis show, Schwabsky’s bibliography does not lead one to think that he has been at the forefront of doing something about this. In his 1997 book, The Widening Circle, which collected together some of his essays, there are no essays on the aformentioned black painters and in an interview he carried out with the Italian painter, Demetrio Paparoni (and which is included in the volume) at the precise moment when he speaks of post-WWII abstraction and of the generation of painters born in the l930s and 40s, none of the artists he mentions are black and the painters he does mention are but the standard “canonical” names one could derive from any compendium, i.e. Marden, Heilmann, etc., painters who in my estimation have not produced stellar works [10]. In the volumes Vitamin P and Vitamin P2 which sought to survey contemporary painting in the present epoch and for which Schwabsky wrote the introductions (and several commentaries on individual artists) there was scarcely a black painter in the first volume other than Laylah Ali and Julie Mehretu and if in the second volume there were several more, the aforementioned Mark Bradford among them, they still added up to “too few”. Inclusion in these volumes was based on nominations by a large committee of invitees, but Schwabsky could easily have commented on this dearth in his introductory essays. But more recently he admits the failing himself: “For me, though, the great revelation was at the Tilton Gallery, where the artist David Hammons curated ‘Ed Clark: Big Bang,’ an aptly titled dose of explosive energy from a remarkable second-generation Abstract Expressionist born in 1926. Until recently, Clark has been almost criminally overlooked–including by me, I must admit. When I was first gobsmacked by one of his paintings, at the uneven ‘Blues for Smoke’ exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year, this African-American artist was just a vague name to me”.[1 1] The credit due to him for his admission certainly should register appreciation but, perhaps, not yet in magnitude. After all, from the moment he began his career as an art critic this issue of absence, non-inclusion, exclusion, etc. should have been seen as a problem and he could have sought to contribute to rectify this by doing the kind of homework that would have led him to those excluded–including the aforementioned Ed Clark–whereby he would not have needed David Hammons as his guide.
Do not misunderstand: in the general sense this neglect on Schwabsky’s part would not be something
I would mention were it not for the fact that he raises the question in his article. And that he raises it does place him ahead of many in this regard. But then the show “about black artists” which Schwabsky advocates would be one more cloistered setting, one more ghettoization, although such a show should readily be carried out because otherwise these painters will continue to exist primarily outside the contemporary regime of visibility. Would Schwabsky do it? The question that could or should come to mind is why hasn’t he already done it? Yes, more shows giving prominence to black artists and particularly black abstractionists is something that would be a very good thing, but what is really needed is precisely the inclusion of black artists within the regimes of generalized and specific visibility and within the regimes of historico-aesthetic delineation and codification, i.e. Lois Jones, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson, etc. etc. within the tabulations, trajectories, studies, and exhibitions of “American Scene Painting”; Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, Alma Thomas, etc. within the trajectories of abstraction, and black artists of the 80s, 90s, and onward into the present within surveys and anthologies and otherwise compendiums in terms of publications and in terms of exhibitions.
But in this context of inclusion/exclusion, of the nature of regimes of visibility, of institutional standing, of the structures and processes of regime, canon, and hierarchy constitution, and of the constitutive role of art functionaries, Schwabsky is prone to what can only be seen as a form of disingenuousness. In his introduction to the second of the Vitamin P volumes he writes: “”What Vitamin P supplied.. .was an overview that never claimed to be a canon. It was never asserted that these were the hundred or so most interesting younger painters working today, merely that they were painters whom some people knowledgeable[sic] about the field considered interesting”[12]. But everything about the book, its prestigious art publisher, its place within a series of such volumes covering other genres in art, its size, its production values, its promotion explicit and implicit, contravenes what Schwabsky has just said. There was never any need to make an “assertion”, the very being-there-of-the-book was an art and commercial institutional declaration and advertisement. But why would Schwabsky want to deny what is at once obvious and banal? In any event Schwabsky continues: “…the book had an immediate impact that was surprising even to those of us who had been involved in making it.” [13] He points out that in his many visits to art schools he discovered that “nearly ever art student…had a copy”[14]. Schwabsky doesn’t understand or feigns not to understand that such compendiums are produced precisely with the hope of having “impact”. And, again, they do not need to claim canonization as function because their constituent and most basic function, effectively, is, precisely, expressly, to stipulate value and worth and thereby placement solidly within the reigning regime of visibility, hierarchy, and canon and within the reigning institutional frameworks of critical and commercial success or its availability. More: the very “selection” process he speaks about–“people knowledgeable[sic] about the field” –is already a pre-constituted, a prefabricated process, since all the painters had already been “selected” by the mechanisms of the gallery system and the art institutional mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion.
Now, this is not a controversial stipulation on my part. It is once again one of the most basic banalities of regime of visibility and regime hierarchy constitution in this or any field and it is an understanding in the common possession of any and all persons whether within or without the art-world or within or without any and all intellectual frameworks. But Schwabsky seems to think that regimes of visibility and hierarchy are readily without problem: “…maybe museums should be the public’s filter again…survey all the galleries and select the best work.”[15]. But this begs every question. By what process, by what mode, by what practice, by what criteria have galleries selected artists for inclusion and by what process and by what criteria do museum curators select artists and by what criteria could this process at the gallery level and then at the museum level (and at every other level and within every institutional framework and setting) be presumed to give us “the best”–and all the more in the realm of art-making in the conceptualist/installationist and “the contemporary” regimes where it is not even that there is less identifiable criteria than there are in any of the other arts, i.e. literature, music, etc. but absolutely no criteria at all other than as but one of several similar modes, i.e. the circularities of curator A choosing artist Z because curator B had chosen her or him and curator B because of curator C and curator C because of curator A! ? But then this curatorial circularity is but one circularity in a series of circularities whereby “contemporary artists” imbibe their work with a strategic and beckoning “sign” in relation to prevailing art theoretical “reason” and the “signs” this “reason” and its practitioners posit as “qualities of advance”, aesthetic or otherwise, i.e. “the contemporary”, etc–the contemporary in these ideologies always being commensurate with the “advanced guard” and its nominated “criticality” [sic] and all the latter’s synonymic petrifications in their ever and always rote invocations while simultaneously art theoreticians fashion these “signs of advance” precisely on the basis of the very strategic “signaling” and beckoning posited and posed by artists. Round and round it goes within each and all of the circularities throughout the entire realm. And then of course and again at the foundation of all this is the gallery system itself and its “criteria”, its mechanisms, etcetera. All these are aspects and questions Schwabsky does not consider at all. But how could he when he can write the following: “We are not gatekeepers. Artists often ask me if I can help them find a dealer. I tell them that just as I don’t let the dealers tell me what to write about, I don’t want to tell the dealers who they should be exhibiting”[16].
First of all, every time Schwabsky writes about a gallery or museum show he is writing about what has been placed before him, what has already been selected for him [to write about] by….a dealer, by a system of selection and making-visible–and even in relation to museum shows given that museum curatorial “choice” rests almost entirely on the gallery system and its “choices”. This is not inconsequential and even if Schwabsky still can “choose” amongst dealers, i.e. galleries, the fact is that for all that art functionaries are quick to decry “the market”, they never constitute the gallery system as an object of analysis and “criticism”, they never analyze what this system is and what and how it does what it does not just as an economic institution but as an institution of “aesthetic judgments and choices”, etc. etc. Moreover, Schwabsky doesn’t need to contact a dealer on behalf of an artist. Every time a critic writes positively about an artist, every time a critic chooses an artist to write about, the artist in question is placed more prominently within the regime of visibility and, thereby, the artist is more apt to be chosen by others–dealers, gallery directors, curators, other critics–for further prominence in the regime of visibility, hierarchy, and canon. And, again and again, this is the most banal of all facts not just in relation to the art world’s regime of visibility but in relation to any and all regimes of visibility–and, to repeat, everyone knows this most basic of basic banalities. But the question then is why would someone who by the very conditions of his role, his practice, his institutional function, stands and serves precisely at the entry gate–and by virtue of all conditionalities willingly or unwillingly– wish to deny this existential fact?
Doubtless, being a “gatekeeper” can be considered a role that is not exactly savory. But if you are the art critic of an important publication, The Nation, and if you are the editor of international reviews for an art review, Artforum, which stands at the pinnacle of influence within the art-world both in terms of its advertisements and in terms of its critical contents however much these “critical contents” can be subjected to criticism (and Schwabsky also writes a column for the well-known art world journal, Hyperallergic) you cannot deny your proximity to the gate in question.–and in this case it is not a gate at the margins of the institution. Every decision Schwabsky makes in terms of a solicitation for Artforum of a review vis-a-vis this or that gallery show or in terms of a selection of already submitted reviews is an action that sets the turnstile in motion all the more, very much the more, for the artist in question.
Here again is Schwabsky: “One of my favorite contemporary painters, Joseph Marioni. . .who upholds modernist criteria in the face of an art world that considers these as outmoded, once told me that painters ought to secede from the art world. But I identify with the art world.. .but my art world would include him as a major contemporary figure.” [17] There are, of course, various forms of identification, and identification need not be entirely mutually exclusive with being able to evaluate the constituent and constituting structures and processes of one’s own world and presumably a “critic” ought to be interested in evaluating–and “critically” if possible…–the structures and processes of his/her own world, but Schwabsky seems to have opted directly for mutual exclusivity–and refusal. More: in an interview/discussion with Paco Barragan, Schwabsky denies that his work as a critic is to the benefit of any artist. Barragan asks: “Well, since you mentioned the question of value and rating, my last question about art critics and art criticism, would be: how important can a critic be in an artist’s career? I mean, for example, if a respected critic like you writes a good review about a certain painter, what can that mean for his career? You know as well as I that quite a lot of collectors only need to hear a name two times to run and buy it if it has been ‘sanctified’ by acknowledged voices…”. Schwabsky replies: “I’ve never noticed any such effect.”[18] It is difficult to maintain equanimity and magnanimity in the face of this kind of willfully illicit refusal. But putting that aside, Schwabsky doesn’t seem to realize that he would give nothing away at all if he were to admit the evident fact that such effects take place all the time. No one could or would criticize Schwabsky because he would here be subject to an ontological law, i.e. if he writes about something, this “writing about” will produce effects in the world. One can criticize Schwabsky in relation to what he writes or what he chooses to write about and, thereby, for the specific effects thereby set into motion, but not for the mere fact of general effectivity as such. But, since Schwabsky does make the denial in question, he ends up in a more consequential denial, a denial to attempt to think about how a regime of visibility, how hierarchies, how canons are formed in any realm, and specifically in the realm of art and precisely in the realm of contemporary art. And how a regime of visibility is constituted is something in which all critics play a part so that a failure to think about the specificities of this constitution and about one’s own role in it is a professional, intellectual, and ethical abdication.
Yet, in his most recent review in The Nation in regard to shows in New York and in Los Angeles featuring Korean painters of the Tansaekhwa movement, a group of painters generally born in the 1930s and in some cases in the late 1920s committed to monochromatic and quasi-monochromatic modes and forms, Schwabsky seems to broach the question of how a regime of visibility is constituted. I say “seems” because here too he shies away from a direct meditation on his own condition and on the role played by critics and other art world functionaries. He writes, “I don’t think I’ve seen the international art market swarm this quickly around a genre since the boom in Soviet unofficial art in the late 1980s. Why are these Korean painters suddenly appearing (or reappearing) on the New York scene? To reply ‘It’s the market’ isn’t really an answer; instead it’s a way of avoiding the question of how and why the market abruptly became interested in artists whom it had ignored for so long”. [18] Schwabsky is correct to say “the market” doesn’t explain the phenomenon it simply embodies it, but then Schwabsky forgets that “the market” has as its primary function “to swarm”. That is what it does–is. But in isolating his question to a single case Schwabsky puts out of view the proper avenues of investigation.
To begin with, in the final analysis it is never possible in many realms and instances to fully explain why X rather than Y becomes popular, visible, etc. etc. Why this song rather than that? Why this book rather than that? Why this film rather than that? Yet the foundational questions here vis-a-vis aesthetic quality and aesthetic judgment and its possible/impossible universalizations and about to what degree hierarchies and entry into regimes of visibility reflect or do not reflect a meritocratic order are not broached at all by Schwabsky, but then neither are these questions broached by contemporary art theoretical and contemporary art curatorial reason. And of course “the market” is not a realm separate from critics, curators, and all the other art functionaries, but encompasses them and is propelled by their actions too. But all these questions are ever the more salient and ever the more in play in relation to our present epoch where-in modern art has arrived (already by the 1950s and in some respects well before depending upon the angle of analysis but certainly at the most extensive periodization by the early 1970s) at its total formal, contextual, and historical saturation and of which the instantiated reign of the conceptualist/installationist regime is but one indication. However, I can here only adumbrate the questions and avenues of response. But given that one can never truly explain the operation of “the market” or of valuational and aesthetic judgment and hierarchy selection in relation to individual cases, of the why this not that in foundational and comprehensive terms–outside the acknowledgment that in some realms more than others consensus does seem in tune with quality, substantiality, and greatness , i.e. Chopin and Charlie Parker, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Nat King Cole and Bud Powell (but music and singing stand above the other arts in relation to the possibilities of recognition and success being related to merit), nonetheless one can very well and fruitfully, both in terms of methodological procedure and outcome examine the question of the sociological, institutional, ideological, and ideational mechanisms operating within and upon regime and hierarchy constitution. And this Schwabsky does not do either and even and precisely when on a very rare occasion, i.e. the one at hand vis-a-vis the Korean monochromatists, he puts forth a functioning variable or two, although he leaves out a key variable in relation precisely to himself.
He doesn’t realize that when he says that the question, “why Tansaekhwa is suddenly ‘hot’?” should be replaced with a better question, i.e. “why it took so long for the Western art world to notice?” that these are the same questions. Furthermore, he thinks to answer the question by pointing to what he considers to be the intrinsic quality of the art works, in this case according to him, “indiscernibility”.[19] But this begs the question once again because he uncritically imagines that there is a causation between intrinsic “quality” and what enters the regime of visibility (if it is good it becomes visible and if it is visible it must be good). But this is never possible as law and only intermittently and capriciously possible given the ontological status of aesthetic judgment and its possible/impossible universalizations. And consensus whether in Kantian or any other form always constitutes a circularity even there where intrinsic quality seems invincible. And “indiscernability” while a malleable notion in relation to art works and one that can obtain as an attribute positive or negative and into the bargain one within which we could gather the most disparate examples from the Mona Lisa to Lavender Mist nonetheless in the context of monochromatism becomes the most unfortunate of notional choices because it can scarcely underline anything other than a circularity and thereby doubles the circulus in probando rather than contributing to any possible exit. But then the ideational circularity in which Schwabsky enmeshes himself here becomes more and more prevalent given the condition of art in the epoch of the total saturation of all its possible-necessaries, all its possible forms, and specifically and thereby in relation to the specificities of “form”, “aesthetics”, and “qualities” in the conceptualist-installationist and contemporary regimes where it is generally signal, strategem, ideologeme, congerie, contrivance, ploy, etc. etc. which constitute the art-“making” in general.
What is the specificity of art as “art in general” within the historical arrival, actualization, realization, and enactment of the saturation of all possible-neccessary options at every possible limit point–morphological, topographical, relational, etc. etc.–originally adumbrated and advanced in the l880-1930 period and now congealed in the ideologemes of “contemporary art”? One aspect which is central in adumbrating a more comprehensive answer (necessarily bracketed here) to the question would be this: one could substitute for all the works in most contemporary art shows or biennale, etc. etc. works randomly selected amidst and amongst works rejected or works elsewhere while simultaneously keeping in place all accompanying critical commentary and discursive support material, titles, and labels and no one would notice the difference though one could very well say that this is a little more because of the even greater substitutability and indifferentiation of the discursive commentaries and “theorizations” than the works themselves. I do not say this as a polemic.
Rather I say it as a descriptive/ analytical enunciation of one condition of contemporary art and the contemporary art regime and, again, especially and above all its discursive and curatorial accompaniments. In other words, I do not speak just of this or that particular show or this or that particular discourse when I speak of total interchangeability without effect or affect. One could take all the year-end surveys of the best and worst exhibitions of the year in relation to contemporary art and if there were a printing error whereby the commentary for the best and worst and the indications for best and worst were inverted, no one would notice the difference. But might this not be true also of the art regime in the initial period of the modernist and avant-garde trajectories given the aporias of aesthetic judgment and of modernist and avant-garde form/negation? The determinant in a reply either negative or positive obtains here in relation to how one considers and evaluates the metabolic transformation undergone by visual art in relation to the congealment of the installationist/conceptualist/performance regime and the limit point arrival of the attenuation of possibilities within the historical dynamic of logico-morphological surpassing, de-structuration, and de-composition. But it is essential to add and in relation to the arrival point of saturation and, thereby, the contemporary regime, that every epoch, every generation, produces its own idioms and participates there-in at once constituting and constituted and always in relation to a historical trajectory and a generational trajectory. Contemporary art is sincere and its practitioners create in all sincerity, passion, and ideational seriousness. The phenomena of substitutability and indifferentiation are conditions of contemporary art. But contemporary art’s historical necessity as such stands outside this just as the question of aesthetic judgment of contemporary art stands outside the question of its sincerity and passion.
But these questions aside, smack dab in the middle of the aforementioned substitutabilities and indifferentiations one could place all monochromatic endeavors not just in the present regime but going all the way back to Rodchenko. Certainly the black monochrome of the Jules Levy/Alphonse Allais’ Imposters initiative was, I would stipulate, the indication of an already instantiated historical consciousness of modernist negation and this instance cannot be reduced to satire alone. And Mallarme’s blank page and orthographic dismantlings and disruptions were clear indications of an already available and historiosophical and aestheticosophical consciousness of “de-structuring”, “de-constitution” and “de-construction” as projects and projections which also traced out clear paths of continuing dismantlings, de-structions and de-structurations, negations, reductions, etc. –the skein in nuce of further historico-aesthetic possible-necessaries. The Mallarmean blank page beyond its poeticosophical function is also and in certain ways monochrome and ready-made all at once (a blank piece of paper is an industrial product) but it is not strictly a poetic monochrome since the analogy in poetry to a painterly monochrome would be a page with the same word or phrase repeated upon it and nothing else. But already with Rodchenko the monochrome becomes among the most banal of all aesthetic and artistic options. Rodchenko and his trajectories can be admired, but with his three monochromes he didn’t end painting, but he certainly ended the monochrome and he certainly ended all possible notions of a “surpassing of painting”. Painting lived on not because the moment of its realization was missed but because of its irresistible ontological status as desired and needed realm and practice. Doubtless, Schwabsky is a partisan of the monochromatic as his partisanship of Marioni and of the Tansaekhwa artists demonstrates and someone like Robert Ryman is the absolute shibboleth of adherence and belonging in the contemporary art regime since there is absolute unanimity in praise and adulation among art functionaries about him. And Marioni seems in this category too. One study of Ryman speaks of his “pragmatism”. Certainly Ryman was able to “corner the market…”[20] In his 2011 volume, Four Honest Outlaws, Michael Fried writes: “Not that prestigious New York galleries with spectacular spaces no longer show new painting, but almost all of the painting regularly on view is so devoid of quality or seriousness or even interest as to stun belief (this has been true since the 1980s…); today’s art-world hype in support of figures like John Currin and Lisa Yukavage suggests a crisis of sensibility so profound it can scarcely be exaggerated.”[21] You could apply this judgment, but amended so as to remove its imperiousness and haughtiness, to an array of painters within the current regime of visibility and all its strata, and certainly to a number of the painters in the Vitamin P and Vitamin P2 compendiums (but in every epoch there are artists of success whose work one could judge mediocre and certainly the reigning judgments of gallerists and curators in our contemporary moment cannot be said to be stellar judgments) but I think Fried is mistaken in his judgment and valorization of Joseph Marioni as one of the preeminent painters of our time just as I think he overvalues the other painters he names, i.e. Ryman, Richter, Marden, in a standard automatic utterance of an uncritically accepted and irrationally founded contemporary canon.
But Fried is even more mistaken when he claims that Marioni has not been celebrated near enough. Marioni is ensconced in the higher reaches of the regime of visibility and reward. He is not in the highest reaches as are Richter, Marden, Ryman, and Agnes Martin, etc. but he is still within the top 1%. But then the mistakes in question are not surprising in a book presenting four stars of contemporary art as if they were “outlaws” and in relation to a critic who, as put forth in his other recent book, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, values above all the contemporary art photography regime and its canonized stars beginning with Jeff Wall, a regime which more than any other in contemporary art can be characterized, intensively and extensively on the basis of substitutability–and also and crucially in terms of inflation in all the senses of the word–albeit for different reasons than those pertaining to the installationist/conceptualist regime.
The photograph, happily, constitutes the absolute realization of a generalized availability of creation qua quality to all, to anyone with a camera. Take “the best” five or ten photographs from anyone’s photo album–or if you must Facebook page, etc.–and affix them in a gallery or museum already bearing the critical superlatives of any art theoretician meant for a regime star’s works, and I would stipulate that we would merely have one more entrant to the regime without remainder or reminder and no matter in this regard that Jeff Wall, like any singer, mutatis mutandis, who has depended on multiple overdubbing, would have to simply “lip-synch” were he called upon to “perform”, given that his “photographs” are compendiums and constructions. Everyone and anyone, all, can produce photos of interest and even aesthetic resonance and verve–indeed, absorbing(!) interest, resonance, and verve–and in fact it could easily be said that the “works” of the reigning stars are the less interesting given that invariably the most immediate aspect of these works tends to be their “signalling”, their beckoning of “the contemporary”. The canon in the contemporary art photographic regime is the most contingently and irrationally constituted of all contemporary regimes and it collapses all the more quickly beneath the inflations of its theoretico-critical accompaniments whether fashioned by theoreticians or by the artists themselves (and I don’t even speak of the “inflations” of the genre of “photograph as painting”).
And this goes decidedly for Fried’s pantheon which in as much as his choices, beyond the favored Wall, include Thomas Struth, Beat Streuil, Candida Hofer, Thomas Demand, Luc Delahaye, Philip-Lorca Dilorcia, Andreas Gursky, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Rineke Dijkstra, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, exhibits the noteworthy and entirely problematic attribute of being limited to predominantly German artists with Sugimoto being the only non-Western artist. Moreover and precisely in this vein, Fried’s obliviousness to the actual features and contours of the art regime of visibility and hierarchy, and, thereby, to the privilege and good fortune of Marioni–and I bracket here the fact that how such a regime includes and excludes and how such a regime stands in relation to validity does not enter Fried’s analytic or self-reflection–is but one more instance where-in contemporary art critical reason has difficulty constituting for itself the parameters and premises of the very world it thinks to analyze.
And in accordance with this Rosalind Krauss, in her book, Under Blue Cup, published almost at the same time as Fried’s book, uses the equally historiosophically empty nominative, i.e. “guerilla”, for the artists she extols. [22] Sadly, it has escaped Fried and Krauss that the present historical impossibility of their being an “outlaw” or “guerilla” artistic instantiation rests not just in relation to the artists they valorize, but in relation to any and all art and artists going back at a minimum seventy years ago. In fact, the notion of “outlaw” art or artists, transgressive art or artists, etc.was already in most respects an historical and historiosophical anachronism by the 1930s upon the completion of the modernist overturning culminating in Dada. Of course and again, there remains the eternal and timeless rhythm of generational coming-to-be always in some kind of contrasting relation to a previou