Words, words, words! What's with the Work Then?
by Melvyn Minnaar
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all." (Lewis Carroll)
Darn!
These days, no decent art show is presented without rules of engagement. 'Texts' holding forth on every which notion and possibility of 'the work' on view is the pride of every modern-day 'curator'. (Has anyone noticed how this originally serious, humble and specifically scholarly slot in the art hierarchy has escalated to pop position?) Breezy exhibit annotations (art as copy writing and the other way around) are complimented by touristy brochures, and augmented by catalogue essays (where names and footnotes count and sentences sometimes strangle themselves). The with-it gallery will clinch the big deal with a cute press release.
Depending on the level of controversy and PR suss (both key factors in such matters these days), the exhibition will get glib coverage on television or in the lifestyle section. On another page, someone may offer a 'review'.
Such are the modi operandi of contemporary (gallery and museum) art. And somewhere in this there are 'critics' "shaping public discourse on the visual arts".
How did it come to this?
It's not a long history: as the art industry started charting increasingly odd courses from early last century, and with suspicions rising about meaning and intend sending TD&H scuttling, the Word - or rather words, plenty of it - became the Be-All of that paradigm. Not since Kant's Kritik der reine vernunft got scribblers going, did thinkers start scribbling as industriously about art when modernism - pre, proper and post - took hold. The modern-day critic awakened to his/her heyday. Writing about art prospered. It was subject matter pleading 'explanation', soliciting speculation.
Art was losing it own voice. Others took the gap: highbrow academics (many wallowing in what Alex Ross recently called "post-structuralist, post-Marxist, post-colonialist, and post-grammatical buzzwords") and smart-ass journalists (often getting more attention for art efforts with whoopee and wit). And, of course, artists who too could talk, talk, and talk - and frequently just love to spell out.
It is in this increasingly vociferous muddle that the contemporary 'critic' has to operate. It's a role less clear, less definable than ever before when, in those early days when newspapers had reviewers for various 'disciplines', s/he set off, all prim, proper and prepared - to report, as a service to readers, on the nature and, yes, the worth and quality (remember the term?) of the presentation.
Could it be that, when those in the business talk about 'art criticism', they mean, like Humpty Dumpty, (too) many things?
There is a difference of substance and means between a committed art observer who tries to get a sensible word in on the brashly populist pages of a newspaper (do artists realise how difficult that is?) and the theorist who contemplates publishing a discerning contribution to the discourse at hand. (Can we kindly request that those who do, consider whether the prose they produce is comprehensible to readers, the grammar is kind of okay, the logic not too off-the-wall and the words they use actually exist?)
While degrees of word nimbleness may separate them - as well as from those writers of instructive gallery wall notes and press releases - they share an awkward mission. Let's trust they have their hearts in the right place.
But, dear god, how about giving art a turn to speak for itself?
