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art reviews from around new york

Can art bear witness to a massacre? This winter I wrote about artists who do, and they have me thinking about political art and whether, even for a progressive artist, a message of any kind risks conservatism in art.

Can form and content be at odds like that, and does it matter? Surely these artists hit home because their form and message alike aim for the eye and strike home to the gut. Before I say more about them, then, let me talk through the dilemma and the promise. I did so many years ago with one of this Web site’s first essays, about an artist as in command of silence as Jan Vermeer—and yet even his women seem just about to speak? What would they say about art now? Now I wrap this in with the winter’s reports on Enzo Camacho, Ami Lien, Sohrab Hura, and Marco Brambilla as a longer review and my latest upload.

Just to ask about such matters could serve as a frame for any discussion of political art. Not only political artists will feel strongly about it. So many, in every genre and medium, will speak of finding something more in what they do than a message. I would be wrong to write this off as formalism or, conversely, an overriding need for self-expression. A generation of late modern artists and postmodern critics dismissed all that came before as likely both, even as much of the public dismissed abstraction, conceptual art, and the present. We were not going to be like that, because we were not going to give up on art.

Still, it is only fair to insist that not just political art, but most art, maybe all art, has a subtext not to be dismissed. How often art that had seemed remote to me became vivid once I read more about it. I had not appreciated the depth and shimmer of oil colors in Jan van Eyck and the Northern Renaissance until art historians like Erwin Panofsky taught me their iconography, the stories they set out to tell. It was important not just, as artists themselves might suggest, because it caused me to look longer—long enough to start to see. Without it, the liquid darkness in Francisco de Goya and Disasters of War might have seemed a pale excuse for monochrome abstraction. With it, that darkness became a reason to look and a reason to paint.

Consider an artist whose politics extends well beyond her art. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the film about Nan Goldin, a three-part narrative advances along parallel tracks throughout. The very first sequence speaks of the suicide of her sister, and the story continues to ground her work in her life with all its pain and triumph. The second track takes up her major work, the slideshow The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, in all its closeness to her but also its silence. These are her friends and loved ones in the age of AIDS, and one can only guess who in a photo is dying or a survivor. One can only guess, too, which of the couples sharing a frame can overcome their physical and emotional distance.

The third track ups the ante on both those narratives, her life and her life’s work. It shows her as an activist backed by a movement. Their assault on the pharmaceutical industry advances, obliging museums to refuse tainted funding. And yet this last track will never fully engage a world outside of art institutions, and it all but gives up on art. Can political art, then, still make a difference? Did it ever?

As an undergraduate, a friend told me, he sought an answer in a hole in the ground. Joel Shapiro, the sculptor, asked his students for two works apiece, one sincere and one false, but forget that. For each, my friend dug much the same two holes in the program’s yard, three by three by three. He started with the false one, but by the time he had turned up all that soil the false had become true. He might have felt a personal obligation or a personal violation in filling them up again.

At art’s most rewarding, the artist’s ideology is part of the work, too, intended or not. Whether politics, religion, or belief in itself, it develops right along with the visual and material. I think of existence and subtext as a bit like music and lyrics, and there is no point in making songs into lesser symphonies. The subtext can be what gets the artist up in the morning, throwing paint at canvas, or to bed in the evening, contemplating every detail, and it can raise other subtexts as well, like as the artist’s disturbing passions. It is a writer’s job to tease all these out and to show that form and content are alike part of the work, the very same work, and just what that entails. What goes wrong with bad political art may be that they never really are.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Does it matter where a work of art originated? Do we need to ask about the artist, the time, or the culture, or can we just appreciate the art? And if we do not appreciate the art for itself, have we betrayed it and, just as much, ourselves? Why should art not speak for itself?

I have pursued questions like these often over the more than twenty years of this Web site, along with my role as a critic. In fact, I doubt that I can match the more philosophical attempts in the past! The questions came up again, though, not so very long ago on Facebook. When I posted a link and brief reply, a second artist was even more skeptical. Suppose I rework my further comments, as a rather longer article and my latest upload in defense of not just looking. I shall combine my address to both, in the form of a letter to an unknown artist, maybe even you.

You raised the questions as both an admirer of art and an artist, so it is doubly real for you. You have heard friends speak of what they see in the patterns that they have made. As a savvy viewer who cannot see the same, you have to wonder whether that could ever matter to you. You may wonder whether your thoughts appear fully in your work as well. If not, you may wonder whether your work has taken on a new life, apart from you, or rather failed. It is, after all, a work of your imagination.

I have argued before why art takes words. It has to take words for me as a writer, and I have to hope that my words can open art to some others as well. In my earlier piece, I looked in particular at changing attributions. The Rembrandt committee had changed its mind about a painting in the Frick that so many of us have taken for granted as his. It has even shaped our personal understanding of Rembrandt. Since then, big money has backed novel attributions to Michelangelo at (gasp) age twelve (illustrated at left here) and, more recently, Leonardo da Vinci.

I still think that attributions matter, which is why arguments about millions of dollars for a supposed Leonardo get so heated. Allow me now, though, a fuller context for much the same questions—beyond attributions. I can start with your recent experience, on the way to that of others. Now, no question that an artist’s intentions cannot tell the whole story. Hard as it is to admit, an artist may even get it wrong. I am still attached enough to Modernism, New Criticism, and the like to think so.

Yet if the “intentional fallacy” means that it never matters how, where, and when a work of art began, then it is wrong. As Nelson Goodman, a philosopher of art, has said, he will believe that a painting speaks for itself when people start to admire poetry without reading the words. If you think that ugly painting is by Leonardo, you have to look for and indeed to see things that are simply not there. You have to see Leonardo and his other works differently, too, to their detriment. And then your questions may help you think freshly about those once again, to their betterment.

Think that you could not agree less with Goodman? I could understand that, but you may agree much more than you think, so let me tell you why. To me, it is just common sense. My answer will take several parts, so bear with me, but I shall try to stay more practical at the cost of serious theory than my previous effort. It involves the work and how the work comes to affect others. Pardon me, though, if it starts with you.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.