ConsecutiveMatters (a.k.a. jonathantdneil.com)

I’ve got a short piece up at Artworld Salon about Glenn Beck’s getting in on the ‘Educational Turn’, and Pablo Helguera posted a considered and not unopinionated reply.

I’ve decided to simplify the theme here at consecutivematters.com.  Some things may work, others may not, and the look may continue to change over the course of the next few weeks.

“The Pedagogical Impulse” is now up on the Articles page and in the March issue of ArtReview.

A new piece on China and CCAA prize in criticism up over at Artworld Salon dot com

New material and links to published writing now updated on various pages (at right), and a new conversation going on at Art World Salon.

Also, ArtReview’s Power 100 issue has just gone live here.

A first look at Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation’s White on White: The Pilot (just like being there).  This is the first installment of ES & RC’s project White on White: A Film Noir.  In my opinion, it all looks very, very promising.  Have a read.

Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation, 'Yuri's Office' (2009); courtesy Winkleman Gallery

David Cohen convened the first of the spring’s Review Panels at the National Academy Museum on January 30th, and among the shows the panelists took to task was Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs at Gagosian (21st St.), 7 Days / 7 Nights.  An odd thing happened when the panelists–joining David were Elizabeth Schambelan, Ken Johnson and (my friend, the brilliant) Joan Waltemath–began talking about Sugimoto’s work: not a single panelist mentioned the one factor that organizes this series of Sugimoto’s photographs, and that is the horizon.  (In fact, only Joan actually mentioned the content of the images at all, noting the importance of the local weather conditions to the effectiveness of the photographs.)  Perhaps it is too obvious, but it seems to me that one cannot adequately get at what is interesting, or even important, about Sugimoto’s seascapes, without at least broaching the topic of the horizon–whether as a line or as limit of perception (both real and metaphorical) or as primordial condition of orientation.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, 'Ionian Sea Santa Cesarea' (1990)

It’s not that Sugimoto’s seascapes are necessarily “about” the horizon (though they are this in many ways); rather, in the images, the horizon at once announces itself as the element that offers the internal formal logic of the pictures (Sugimoto photographs his seas such that the horizon always appears in the same place, bisecting the horizontal dimension of the image), while at the same time, that logic is consistently undermined, or challenged, sometimes by the starkness of the formal device itself (in pictures where the sea and sky are easily distinguished, the recession is flattened and the picture reads like a geometric abstraction) but often by the weather or lighting conditions that obscure the horizon’s very legibility.

In short, what Sugimoto’s photographs of seascapes do is to assert and to negate the horizon at the same time; speaking phenomenologically, we could say that these pictures orient and disorient at the same time.  It is this sense of disorientation that Michael Fried, in his recent book, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before  (Yale, 2008), pushes to such a point that it underwrites the “ontological fiction,” so important to Fried’s thinking on absorption and theatricality, that the observer does not exist.  Here disorientation becomes a kind of a-orientation, a condition of being-in-the-world that has no need of one’s being-there, of a perspective that belongs to no one (and it is exactly in this sense that Sugimoto’s photographs are not exercises in perspective, even though they hinge on the horizon line, upon which all perspectival constructions must be built).

I think there is something to this reading of Sugimoto’s seascapes, but I am not willing to give up the other side of the coin here; which is to say, in negating the horizon, Sugimoto’s photographs reassert or perserve it all the same.  Whether that horizon is “for us” or “for itself” is a subsequent concern.  And staying with this pairing of negation and preservation is exactly what leads me to Fred Sandback’s work.  Or rather, it is Sandback’s work that lead me, I think, to a better understanding of Sugimoto’s seascapes.

Fred Sandback, 'Untitled' (1972)

It is pure conicidence that David Zwirner mounted an exhibition of Sandback’s work while the Sugimoto was on.  But these are the kinds of chance encounters the can be essential to thinking things anew.  Walking through the Sandback installation, one cannot but be struck by how the geometric layouts that one reads where the strings connect to the floor or ceiling become all but illegible when viewing the pieces straight on.  More technically, one would describe this as the conflict or the incongruity between the works’ plan an elevation, as Edward Vasquez did when he gave a walkthrough of the exhibition back at the very end of January.  Vasquez went on to conjecture, rightly I think, that what Sandback was doing in much of his work was engaging with the language of linear perspective, the mapping or translating of three-dimensional space through the use of a two-dimensional line, which, of course, Sandback renders three-dimensional once again.

And if engaging with the language or vocabulary of  linear perspective is what Sandback is doing, then the horizon once again becomes paramount.  And yet the horizon in Sandback’s work is essentially nonexistent; or rather, Sandback’s work, as Sugimoto’s seascapes do, negates the horizon at every turn.  Not one piece of thread seems to take up residence or establish a horizon line for the viewer.  The one that comes closest, a corner piece of white and red thread, is more concerned with constructing the illusion of the piece’s connection to the walls–an act of experiential disorientation rather than perspecitival orientation.  But again, in denying the horizon, one becomes that much more aware of it.  In its absence, the horizon is preserved.

Please join me, Robert Ayers and Peter Duhon this Friday, 7pm, at the SVA for a talk about the state of criticism today.

That the writing should provide insight into the work or show that viewers can go and see on their own–i.e. that it must give them something to”acknowledge” or “recognize”  or–more to the point–”verify” from their own experience of the work or show.

We might call this the “verificationist fallacy” for short.  It is committed by the critic who is expected to provide something like a guide to the art work under discussion, a focus on just what it is that one will see when experiencing the work for one’s self.  There are a number of problems with this approach, the least of which is the presumed likelihood that the readers of criticism will inevitably be first-person-viewers of the art.  It goes without saying that the critic of contemporary art has the advantage of occupying this position; her authority as a critic derives, in part, from the reader’s trust that what she has to say about a work of art comes from some first-hand experience of it–though, I will argue, this does not hold in every case; as they say, it is sufficient, but not necessary.  Nevertheless, it is exactly that trust which obviates the necessity of writing as if the reader will, at some point in the future, share that same position.

Additionally, the geographical reach of the contemporary art world in particular creates an environment in which discourse increasingly comes to stand in for the work (which, of course, raises issues that exceed those germane to the verificationist fallacy on its own).  One cannot hope to “verify” a critic’s words when the work under discussion is on view half-way around the world; nor, given the volume of current production, can one hope to see everything for one’s self.  So a form of criticism that succumbs to serving as a “guide” to the work of art is, at bottom, a provincial criticism, one that trades in the authority of critical insight for that of physical proximity.

The problem with the verificationist fallacy is brought into sharper relief when we translate this stress on physical proximity into one on temporal proximity, which brings us to the (equally specious) division between history and criticism.  All writing categorized as art historical does away with the verificationist fallacy pretty much by definition: history being a discursive entity to begin with–i.e. one does not experience history first-hand (no matter how much one might feel it “in the making,” so to speak) except in its telling (and subsequent retellings).  Criticism is no different, and thus it need not, indeed it should not, find itself pressured to find its “completion” dependent upon the reader’s ability to go out and see just what it is that the critic was talking about in the first place.

Artworld Salon: Ossian Ward put up a great post on Hirst’s upcoming direct-to-market auction.