village voice > art > Seeing Out Loud by Jerry Saltz

This month is my seven-year anniversary at the Voice, so I thought I'd use Frieze magazine's recent queries to me about the "de-skilling of art criticism" and "our post-critical era" as a way to write about what I think I'm trying to do here. First, I fretted I was the kind of "de-skilled" critic Frieze was referring to. I have no degrees. I started out as an artist, stopped painting, and became a long-distance truck driver. My CB handle was "the Jewish Cowboy": Shalom, partner. I didn't begin writing criticism until I was almost 40. All I knew was I loved art and had to be in the art world. The truth is, I wasn't sure what Frieze meant by "de-skilled." It sounded vaguely bad. But to me de-skilled means unlearning other people's ideas of skill. All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy. I don't look for skill in art; I look for originality, surprise, obsession, energy, experimentation, something visionary, and a willingness to embarrass oneself in public. Skill has nothing to do with technical proficiency; it has to do with being flexible and creative. I'm interested in people who rethink skill, who redefine or reimagine it: an engineer, say, who builds rockets from rocks.

The best critics look for the same things in contemporary criticism that they look for in contemporary art. But they also have an eye. Having an eye in criticism is as important as having an ear in music. It means discerning the original from the derivative, the inspired from the smart, the remarkable from the common, and not looking at art in narrow, academic, or "objective" ways. It means engaging uncertainty and contingency, suspending disbelief, and trying to create a place for doubt, unpredictability, curiosity, and openness.

Dishearteningly, many critics have ideas but no eye. They rarely work outside their comfort zone, are always trying to reign art in, turn it into a seminar or a clique, or write cerebral, unreadable texts on mediocre work. There's nothing wrong with writing about weak art as long as you acknowledge the work's shortcomings. Seeing as much art as you can is how you learn to see. Listening very carefully to how you see, gauging the levels of perception, perplexity, conjecture, emotional and intellectual response, and psychic effect, is how you learn to see better.

Art is a way of thinking, a way of knowing yourself. Opinions are tools for listening in on your thinking and expanding consciousness. Many writers treat the juiciest part of criticism, judgment, as if it were tainted or beneath them. The most interesting critics make their opinions known. Yet in most reviews there's no way to know what the writer thinks, or you have to scour the second-to-last paragraph for one negative adjective to detect a hint of disinclination. This is no-risk non-criticism. Being "post-critical" isn't possible. Everyone is judging all the time. Critics who tell you they're not judging or that they're being objective are either lying or delusional. Being critical of art is a way of showing it respect. Being subjective is being human.

Yet people regularly say, "You shouldn't write on things you don't like." This breaks my heart. No one says this to theater critics, film reviewers, restaurant critics, or sports writers. No one says, "Just say all the food was good." Nowadays, many see criticism mainly as a sales tool or a rah-rah device. Too many critics enthuse over everything they see or merely write descriptively. This sells everyone short and is creating a real disconnect. People report not liking 80 percent of the shows they see, yet 80 percent of reviews are positive or just descriptive.

Obviously, critics can't just hysterically love or hate things, or assert that certain types of art or media are inherently bad (e.g., no one has actually believed that painting is dead since the Nixon administration, yet writers regularly beat this dead horse). Critics must connect their opinions to a larger set of circumstances; present cogent arguments; show how work does or doesn't seem relevant, is or isn't derivative; explain why an artist is or isn't growing. As with Melville's ideas about art, criticism should have: "Humility—yet pride and scorn/Instinct and study; love and hate/Audacity and reverence." Good criticism should be vulnerable, chancy, candid, and nervy. It should give permission, have attitude, maybe a touch of rebellion, never be sanctimonious or dull, and be written in a distinctive, readable way. Good critics should be willing to go on intuition and be unafraid to write from parts of themselves they don't really know they have.

If criticism is in trouble, as many say, it's because too many critics write in a dreary hip metaphysical jargon that no one understands except other dreary hip metaphysicians who speak this dead language. They praise everything they see, or only describe. These critics are like the pet owner who sews up the cat to stop it from fouling the sofa: They keep the couch clean but kill the cat.

Mystic Cryptic Revelations

Young painters should look at the work of Charles Burchfield (1893–1967), the mystic, cryptic painter of transcendental landscapes, trees with telekinetic halos, and haunted houses emanating ectoplasmic auras. Burchfield, who like Hopper painted as if cubism never happened, is van Gogh by way of Caspar David Friedrich, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, calendar art, and Sunday painting. Consciously or not, recent painters like Peter Doig, Verne Dawson, Gregory Amenoff, Kurt Lightner, and Ellen Altfest are channeling bits of Burchfield's visionary vibe.

One reason more young artists aren't familiar with this great American may have to do with Burchfield being yet another painter who is left out of the Museum of Modern Art's narrow-minded, mad march through modernism. Although he had three retrospectives at the Whitney, one at MOMA (way back in 1930), and one at the Met, Burchfield continues to be an odd man out of modern-art history.

In this patchy but occasionally stirring survey of 33 works on paper, you can track Burchfield in landscapes that have a Blakean spookiness. Like Hartley, Burchfield brings a mad I-see-everything- at-once spirituality to his work. Landscape With Rain, from 1917, looks both like a God's-eye view of a valley and God's half-closed eye. The 1917 Sun Setting in a Bank of Smoke is a modern-day Star of Bethlehem scene with five glowing extraterrestrial orbs hovering near an old house and another blazing above. Several late works, notably the electric-orange Butterfly Tree, from 1960, and a drawing from 1964–65 of a metaphysical tree that looks like an alien hairdo and a coxcomb, suggest that Burchfield wasn't only good early on but was one of the better American painters of the early '60s, as well.

Dangerous Minds: An Art Dealer in Motion

For the last 15 years gallerist Andrea Rosen has offered a studious, restive, exuberant outlook about art. But also philosophic. Ask her something and she'll give you a "history of" answer. Lately, she seems to be expanding her vision to good effect. "Looking at Words," which features more than 300 works on paper hung salon-style, is her latest foray into exhibition-as-investigation. All the works have words in them, although, interestingly, you look through the letters and the words at the images themselves. Physicality trumps reading. Confronting this much material in one room is daunting. But it's worth it, if only to glean the mind of an art dealer in motion.

jsaltz@villagevoice.com

More by Jerry Saltz

Optic Nerve
Karel Funk turns inward

Charnel Knowledge
Carroll Dunham's wounded beasts get medieval on their own asses

Artist Schmartist
Snide show: Cary Leibowitz leaves his lipstick traces

No Man's Land
Rachel Harrison's current show ambivalently memorializes sculpture—and men

Street Cred
Let a thousand galleries (and paintings) bloom south of Chelsea