Kerry James Marshall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, egg tempera on paper, 20 × 17 cm. Courtesy: © Kerry James Marshall and David Zwirner, London
An irregular series of notes, thoughts and reflections.Less a full text than two things I’ve been thinking about. Enjoy etc.
Parsimonious reading
I like Conrad Hamilton’s discussion of parsimonious reading, found in a recent review of two books by Alberto Toscano. In discussing a number of 20th century thinkers, Hamilton identifies an unfortunate but familiar pattern where an influential figure is reduced to a particular concept, idea and tendency, which erases the nuances and full scope of their work: ‘affix to them a signature concept, as well as one – or, at most, two – ‘essential’ works.’
Lukács becomes ‘reification’ and little else. For Gramsci, ‘hegemony’ and The Prison Notebooks are inescapable, as popularity becomes claustrophobic like a cell. The complications of Althusser’s Marxism are a kind of caricature that is ‘entirely dogmatic and declaratory.’ This is the essential thrust of the argument: ‘Sacrifices or not, it seems that – as long as these thinkers are encountered primarily via course syllabi, and as long as complex authors are read parsimoniously – this status quo will persist.’
To read parsimoniously is like sipping a single beer for an entire night. It’s a mean-spirited frugality. Reading in this manner is economical to the extreme – we read just enough to be the know, to both make and get a reference, and continue on as if this doesn’t leave so much behind. The implication of Hamilton’s critique is demanding, perhaps a call to exhaust ourselves and the works of our subject, as he describes again and again reading the entirety of a particular writer’s work; every book, understood through their life and against a backdrop of critical commentary. Not simply to ‘get’ a concept, but to become intoxicated in a life of words and thinking. This, of course, is exactly what the course syllabi cannot do, restrained as it is by the practicalities of the school calendar and the ever-shrinking time anyone is afforded to write, research and dwell with another’s words.
Anti-critical disposition
A recent op-ed by John-Baptiste Oduor picks up Sarah Lewis’s argument that Black artists are being ‘over-exhibited and under-theorized’.
As a historic lack of representation within the art world, among major commercial galleries and high profile museums, is increasingly being addressed, Oduor observes how this is ‘expressed often through mentions of how ‘important’ it is that a particular artist is (finally) being acknowledged’ or through vague claims of ‘political significance’, which inhibits the ability to actually engage with the images. The resulting ‘anti-critical disposition’ often ‘unhelpfully lump together artists whose practices have very little in common.’
What can criticism offer as a counter? Oduor continues the piece with a focused discussion of numerous artists, including Kerry James Marshall and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and a consideration of the shifting relationship between figurative painting and wider image culture, suggesting that ‘perhaps the tendency to attach a moral and political value to Black figurative art stems from the fact that a detached relationship to images has become harder to inspire.’
But as so much of this question is not just about the specifics of an artist but their reception, I am reminded of Morgan Quaintance’s essay ‘Centre. Margin. Other’, published by Art Monthly in February 2022. In response to the Life Between Islands exhibition at Tate Modern, Quaintance argues that the ‘long-serving postcolonial centre/margin dichotomy has, in the context of the UK art world, outlived its illustrative usefulness; it now obscures rar more than it reveals about power relations in the sector.’ Where institutions position themselves as the ‘heroes’ which ‘rediscover’ artists, this erases a wider power dynamic that is unfolding across the sector. Crucial to Quaintance’s polemic is the observation that ‘contemporary drives towards diversity and inclusion are taking place against the backdrop of the loss of independent spaces and networks.’ And shifts in art funding create a situation where ‘the entities of previous institutional indifference (the ‘centre’) become the custodians of the means of (‘marginal’) cultural production, [and this] is seen not as a retrogressive step, but as a success.’