Criticism for Difficult Times

From David's Werner, this is Dialogues, a podcast about artists and the way they think. Hey guys, it's Halem Molesworth. For those listeners who were here last year, you might remember several shorter episodes we dropped last fall. I'm thrilled to be back on the feed again to release a few more. We'll be dropping them every week or so, and I'll be calling up friends and colleagues to catch up and get into whatever is top of mind for them. Be it happenings in the studio, classroom, the museum, or the art world at large. I hope you enjoy them, and as always, thanks for listening. Hey everybody, it's Halem Molesworth here, and I have my wonderful dear friend, Steve Locke on the line. Hi Steve. Hi Halem. Steve and I usually touch base before we do these and we think about the topic that we want to talk about and we identify a few places or nodes that we kind of know that's where we want to go. We did one of those about criticism, and there was a big article by Jason Farago in the New York Times about how there had been no new advancements in culture in the 21st century, and it's also the 40th anniversary of Hal Foster's, the anti-esthetic, and there's been a couple of pieces about that one by Halem's self, conversation with the art net critic Ben Davis, and we got everything all lined up, and then I cratered because of the war, and I didn't know whether or not it made sense to talk about criticism given everything that's going on, and Steve said, "You know no matter what we talk about, we're going to be talking about the war, even if we never mention it, which in fact neither of us really want to do." So then I said to Steve, "Well, what have we talked about the texts that get us through the hard times?" And I realized that the text that gets me through the hard time over and over again is, in fact, a piece of criticism by Uncle Walter, the late great Walter Benjamin. I think that for artists and thinkers of a certain moment, Walter Benjamin is crucial, you know, for those of us who are sort of working outside of, you know, outside of what I want to call "expected imagery," right? Those of us who were interested in something, dare I say, new, trying to do something new. Not trying to do the same old thing because for certain groups of people, we weren't allowed to do the same old thing. We weren't in that conversation, and so we had to have a different conversation, so I turned to Benjamin a lot. And I also turned to W.E.B. Du Bois a lot because I think that that understanding that someone like him had such a far-reaching view of what America is, what the American project is, what Americanness is, and how blackness is an intrinsic card of that, I always end up going back to read him when things are difficult, because I'd like to not feel alone in a struggle. And I think that Du Bois, even the problem of the 20th century, is the color line, and like, how precious is that given the current moment and given how we're trying to be able to relate to each other? Last night I reread, as I often do, in moments of crisis, Benjamin's thesis on the philosophy of history, but hearing you talk about Du Bois is the tuness that we know so well from Du Bois, but this outsider status now, because I have been reading Benjamin, gives me the sense of Benjamin, of course, he encourages us to read history against the grain, and is that outsiderness, which we take often when we feel to ourselves to be the outsider, we feel ourselves in a space of grievance, vulnerability, loss, those emotions, and yet that position is also something that Du Bois says in this quote, and Benjamin says in general, is something to be cultivated as well, that there is a special purchase of information and feeling and framing the conditions we see ourselves in, that comes from this doubleness or this outsiderness, this capacity to hold more than one position simultaneously. I think that that quality, that sort of ability to move what Du Bois says inside and outside of the veil is what he calls it, is something that black people have done as a matter of survival. We talk about code switching now, which is something that comes directly from the idea of being one way with one group of people, and being another way with another group of people, not because you're trying to fit in, but because you're trying to survive. Those sort of survival skills are one aspect of it, but the other aspect of it is it gives you a kind of criticality that I think is necessary. I, and this goes back to the criticism thing that we were talking about earlier, like people think that criticism, that equate criticism with like a movie review, they equate it with a Yelp review, like I liked it, it was good, it was bad or whatever, right? And what criticism really is, is saying like, all right, this is the position that's being put forward to me, how do I agree, how do I disagree? And where do I, where do I push up against what's been put forward? If criticism is this way of analyzing and understanding the world at which we live, through the words of other people. So like when critics look at art, they're not looking at art to talk about their personal taste or whether that they like it, they're, they're trying to talk about how some things are like other things, some things are unlike other things, some things remind me of other things. And where does this thing fall into the history of things? And then because we have a long history of things, because we're not each autotelic subjects that invent art all on our own, all by ourselves in a vacuum, because we are in a line of things, because start to talk about the qualities, not the good or the bad, not the moral aspects of them, but the qualities. What are these things like? What do these things do that these things don't do? What do these things have that these other things don't have? And do we need those things now, right? And so that has always been the stumbling point I've had with people who don't read or appreciate criticism. It's not a question of like ranking things or saying something is better than something else, like actual criticism is saying like, hey, let's contend with this thing. So how do we contend with it? How is it like other experiences? How is it unlike other experiences? And why do we need this experience right now? And I agree. And I think the other function of criticism for me is that it is a way of articulating what is at stake in someone's project. I was trained by Hal Foster. He was my dissertation advisor. I think Hal is a great critic, and I think he really showed me what criticism could do. One of the things I learned from Hal was that works of art, whether they want to or not, embody forms of subjectivity. They put a certain model of subjectivity on the table. We are engaged in something that is larger than just talking about the object. The object is itself doing work, and it's our job as critics and viewers to figure out what that work is and what that work sometimes may just be very straightforward. We are going to fill the museum with images that it hasn't had before, or it's doing something else, or it's querying the relations of power, challenging the framework of the museum. Right? We could go on and on enumerating the different types of things that we've learned that objects do through the act of the critical writing around them. Yeah. Last night, when I reread the Benjamin, you know, there's a classic moment in the thesis on the philosophy of history where he talks about the angel of history, the angel novellas, this figure that he sees in a painting by Paul Clay. And he says that the, you know, a clay painting named Angeles Novas shows us an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixately contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. So already, there is Benjamin acting the critic, looking at a picture and saying, "Oh, okay, there's a picture of an angel, but what is it really a picture of?" Right. And what is this thing doing? And he says, "Oh, it's really, this is a picture of history." So he says, "This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face turned toward the past where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay awake in the dead and make whole what has been smashed, but a storm is blowing from paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future of the world. The angel can no longer close them, this storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. Extraordinary. So here we have history being pushed backwards into the future. You can't see the future. We can't see the future. We're just standing here looking at the past and where we want to see the horror. Right. If you want to see events that line up, Benjamin is like, "Eh, this is just a garbage heap. This is wreckage upon wreckage upon wreckage." The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skydeware. This storm is what we call progress. And that's it. Then he's out. And that's a reading of a Paul Clay painting. It's offering us a model of what it means to be a historical subject, what it means to be in the present. What it means to be in the present is to have your back to the future, your face towards the path. So what version of the past can we tell ourselves through the objects that we make? I also think that he's looking at a Paul Clay painting from 1920. And he's writing in '44. So the notion that the meaning of that Paul Clay image lives back in 1920 is gone. It's gone. Yeah. Because Benjamin has thought about in terms of his conditions and the moment in which we are living. And that's how we encounter art. We encounter art in our own subjectivity in our own moment. And so the meanings that one can derive from a network, that's why artworks stay contemporary. That's why they stay alive, because their meanings can fluctuate given the audiences that encounter them. The way that the needs of Paul Clay in making that work in 1920 are completely different than the needs of Walter Benjamin fleeing for his life in 1940. Right. And so criticism has to change. And that to me is the difference between criticism and just people talking shit about other people's work. I'm not super interested in other people's hot takes or pithy little two sentence reviews of what hated it or tick-tock reviews of people's artwork. Right. That's about me showing how witty and funny and clever I am. It has nothing to do with the work. But when you really start to engage with what the work is and what the work is like, imagine your Walter Benjamin, how many pictures of angels have you seen over the course of your lifetime? Right. And then you encounter this one and you have to measure the experience you're having against all the other experiences. That's what the critic does. When I hear you talk about criticism and what it does, the other thing that I think is so interesting right about this difference between the clay painting and what it means in 1920 and the clay painting and what it means in 1940 for Benjamin, right, is that one function of criticism and it seems to me this is part of Benjamin's image of the angel is that the critic is in a perpetual present and they are negotiating the past. Through the past is the week ago or 20 years ago, it's our inability to confront the future. So that one of the things criticism does is reanimate the past. The past is not solid and done and dusted and all figured out. The past history is always up for grabs in the hands of a critic. That's what seems so important and it's not just your opinion in the moment, but it's actually what does the thing do, what information, what historical information is in these objects that is then activated by the conversation with the critic. I think that the idea of the angel not being able to know the future, right, there's something really kind of beautiful about that, right, because not even the supernatural beings, not even something that is like one step above human, but one step below the divine, even that doesn't have access to the future, right. So there's something about that kind of idea that even if we weren't what we are, if we were something somehow something better than what we were, we would know more and that's not the case, it's just not the case and there's something really beautiful about it. And then that he knows that because you know, the passage I just read about that angel comes after the aphorism that contains the great line, which always helps me, which is, you know, the condition of the oppressed teaches us at the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception, right, but the the rule, I want to share this with you because I think that this is like the this gets to the crux of what I'm sort of talking about. Why I feel like Susan Buckmore is in Benjamin or so important in this moment. This is from an interview between Buckmore's and Grant Kester and Buckmore says, you asked me why the aesthetic is important today and what is at stake and it's definition. It was that phrase again, like what's at stake, right? That takes us back centrally to the question of politics. The aesthetic to me is fundamentally cognitive experience. It's how the body senses reality and I mean this in a rather animalistic, even biological sense. I notice absolutely improper to say so, but this bodily experience is not always already culturally mediated. To say so flies in the face of all receive wisdom in the academy today that I cannot deny my own experience. Ever since I can remember by critical sense was nourished by bodily sensations, tense muscles, clammy feet, shoes too tight, breath too tight, holding back one knee to laugh or to scream, not feeling good in my skin was my way of criticizing the definition my culture was giving to the situation. General meanings are sense bodily as being wrong, just plain wrong. How else are people capable of social protest? I got to tell you when I read that, I felt like you know what? You know what? Let's go. Let's go because it's not all figured out in advance, it's not all hegemony, it's not all like you can't do anything about it, power is so absolute and you can't find a way around it and all that sort of shit and I was like, you know what? It's on. It's on. It's my job to find a way. That's my job. If I'm going to be an artist, I have to find a way. And that I got to tell you, I have to say Buck Morrison and Dubois sort of touchdowns for me with things that really, really tough because they give me what I need to keep going forward. One of the things I hear in what you read of Susan Buck Morrison and it's into boys too, which is to try very, very hard to not let the received ideas of the world cloud your sense of things. Right? So Dubois has got this double consciousness, so there's two things that are rubbing up against each other there that disallow, you know, hegemonic thinking, conventional thinking. But more is too, right? In that quote, what she's saying is, I know there's a doxah in the academy about how I'm supposed to write and how I'm supposed to feel and how I'm supposed to think, I'm going to tell you that I've had some embodied experiences that go against that doxah. And I've decided as a thinker, a critic or writer and artist, I've decided to honor that moment of dissonance and instead of see it as lesser than or worse than, but see it as a place to go and examine and be curious about and figure out why is there dissonance here? What does that dissonance mean and what is it doing? Because it's not enough that my body is giving me a message, that's not enough. Exactly. It's giving me a message, so now, what does the message mean? How do I interpret this message, right? It's not enough that white people run everything. It's not enough, right? If white people run everything, then where can I act? Just because they have power doesn't mean I have not, right? I'm standing upright, that's what Du Bois is saying to me. Like you haven't been ripped apart by the dichotomy of being black in America. You haven't been ripped apart already? All right, now it's game on, now it's all on, right? And that kind of thinking, it is, because you know, the world will crush you into little pieces. We'll just smash you into little pieces if you don't have any sort of support, but like you're alone in the world most of your life, right? So having like a sort of critical eye, understanding that your position as somebody told me, it asked me like something about like, they weren't my point of view as a member of the marginalized community, right? And I said, I'm marginal, like I'm in the center, like you want me to be on the margins, but I'm in the center. I don't think about myself the way that you think about me, right? And that's what Du Bois gives you, like no, but what if I'm the center, if I'm the, and I'm not talking like main character syndrome or anything like that, right? And we're talking about that. Like what if what if my perception is normal? Right. What if we start with like this, this like 60 year old gay black man, my perception is normal. My passions are normal. My desire is normal. But if I start from there, then everything else will follow. So I'm really glad that we, that we got together and talked about the WAB Du Bois and Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck Morris. You were right. No matter what we would talk about, we would always be talking about the war. And so in this moment of such overwhelming violence and tragedy, I'm just really grateful that we have these texts that we share with each other and revisit. And that in revisiting them, we can both confirm and question what we believe in and what we're doing out here. It's the key to understanding each other is a shared vocabulary. We have a shared, and it's not just a shared critical vocabulary, Helen, it's a shared emotional vocabulary through critical text. Right. I think it's very, very lonely to be alive right now without a shared sense of value with people. I feel very, very fortunate to be put in the orbit of other people who think not like me, but have the same sorts of references that we can talk through it. We can express ourselves through how we understand critical culture. Steve, I'm so grateful for you. Thank you so much for showing up today. Oh, of course, by the way. I'll call you again. All right. Dialogues is produced by David's Werner. If you like this episode, please follow, rate, and review us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It really does help the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you join us here next time.