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Home > Visual Arts > Course Content > Practice: Artmaking, Art Criticism & Art History > Art Criticism and Art History > An interview with the art writer: George Alexander

An interview with the art writer: George Alexander

Interviewer, Craig Malyon

 

George Alexander is an Australian art writer and educator, he has written numerous essays for exhibitions and contributed to a number of visual arts books. His main area of investigation is contemporary art practice and the questions that follow examine this area.

Questions:

1. In contemporary art the writer is often considered as important as the artist. Why?

2. Who would you consider as good writers on visual arts?

3. A good writer echoes the thoughts and feelings of the reader. Would this be the same when writing about art?

4. What critical or theoretical basis would you place on writing a review or the introduction of a catalogue?

5. What would be the most difficult medium to write about and why is it so difficult?

6. Could you give suggestions to students for successful strategies when writing critiques about art?

7. How have post-modern concepts influenced the process of writing about art?

8. What is the importance of historical or critical knowledge in writing about art?

1. In contemporary art the writer is often considered as important as the artist. Why?

“A major strand of contemporary art, at least since Duchamp, has been a centaur: half materials, half words.

When Marcel Duchamp put his bathroom fixture in an art gallery and called it Fountain (1914) he questioned the rules by which art was made and expanded its possibilities. The work was not about its “look”, it was about its function within a given context.

Art history is still reeling from the pitiless matter-of-factness of non-art objects finding their way into the sanctified precincts of the museum. It also took the mickey out of the old idea of artist as genius.

Before that, the public displays of Enlightenment art, down to the vocabularies of Modernism, have been an uninterrupted line. The beaux-art painting or sculpture required for viewing is a class-specific mastery that derived from a kind of medical inspection of the canvas: also known as connoisseurship.

With contemporary art we have changed from this scholarly humanist tradition of the art historian (humanistic values, Western cultural tradition), to the art writer as a kind of cultural critic, taking apart the myths of high art and historising those presupposed values.

We now ask: what’s the context and who is it for? Which leads to this crucial set of understandings:

1. How we see or read conditions what we see or read. We read selectively from an angle based on our sources. Meanings are not natural, they are constructed
2. There’s no functional relationship between the intrinsic richness of a text (read artwork) and the richness of the discussion it can support. In other words even popular forms of art, where the artistic presence is relatively weak, such as in many B-grade movies (like James Bond) generate very interesting discussion.

 

After Minimalism and Conceptualism, the frameworks for the viewing experience and the critics’ languages for mediating it, have proliferated. So the writer has taken a more prominent role.

But behind the question is the implication that theorists and critics have overwhelmed the art object with complicated verbiage. In some cases this is true, but gone are the days when artists would talk to artists and critics to critics. In the past, artists would talk to artists about whether Turkish coffee or herb tea best suits composition, or at least discuss the track record of their dealers. If they wrote at all it would be in an oracular style, part aphorism, part slogan. Over the last twenty years the standard of discussion has improved and a kind of community of terms has evolved that more people share.”

2. Who would you consider as good writers on visual arts. Why?

“Writing on the visual arts takes many forms, each with its restrictions, licences, and ethical hazards: scholarly journals, theoretical books, glossy magazines, and newspaper columns. My favourite art writing includes Peter Schjeldahl’s columns in the Village Voice (New York) and Dave Hickey’s books (Air Guitar) and the criticism of Carter Ratcliff. All have a bilingual combination of erudition and street smarts and seem to evoke the politics and poetics of art making today. They’re all poets who write terrific prose.

In Australia I enjoy the work of Adrian Martin, Edward Colless, Philip Brophy and the Gibson brothers, Ross and Jeff. I now notice these are all guys. So let me add a few Australian women critics: Margaret Morgan, Vikki Riley, Catriona Moore.

Of the newspaper critics Terence Maloon was exemplary, generating in his Sydney Morning Herald reviews a complexity of tones in a small space: praising without hype, and criticising without gratuitous radioactive comments. A serious critic able to straddle generations of artists, and as comfortable with painting as with installation, Maloon, for example, was able to fend off inter-generational polemics by bridging painterly abstraction as practised by artists like Michael Johnson or John Firth-Smith, with the conceptual use of it by Imants Tillers or John Nixon. The latter were diagnosticians of the image. This generosity of spirit helped, rather than hindered.

Robert Hughes’s erudition and style are stunning. But underneath there is all the tonality of a rant, making it difficult at times to distinguish between the heft of moral judgement and pique. Especially when it comes to art after Warhol. There is in his prose-persona a touch of the testy pukka sahib. Apparently some aspects of America, especially the Lower East Side of Manhattan, can make Australians behave 500% Roman Catholic Archbishop.”

3. A good writer echoes the thoughts and feelings of the reader. Would this be the same when writing about art?

“I’m not sure that’s the clearest description of what happens in the transaction between writer and reader. A good writer often disturbs the expectations of the reader, otherwise the function of art would be simply to make us more like our neighbours. Rather like the merchandising of best sellers and Hollywood movies. (Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after. Except for that divorce thing. Or that age thing!)

Poetry, for example, is a sort of trick, whereby an awareness of the textures of signs puts us in mind of the textures of things: their feel, their pith. Likewise art writing tries to salvage that specific texture of the artwork through accurate description, and then through a series of handholds for the imagination of the reader who may not have seen the work, then through the array of interpretative contexts that best suits the occasion. So, like any good writer, words debate the images, which compel an opening upon perception. Perception that gets inside you and makes you be and know and grow, and maybe, if you're lucky, intensifies your sensuality too.”

4. What critical or theoretical basis would you place on writing a review or the introduction of a catalogue?

“I don’t think it helps to have a theoretical formula in place. This is what creates problems for a lot of theory-laden writing in the first place: using the poor little artwork for philosophical lift-off or academic showboating. I like to try a larceny of methods. A trans-theoretical position that involves creative assimilation, not reductive imitation.

Grab whatever is at hand to enhance the critical intelligence. It may be psychoanalysis to explain why we find something is freaky or disgusting (without knowing why we do); it may be social criticism to reveal historical pressures. Whatever discipline is brought to bear on the work should not be a fixed knowledge applied mechanically, but sensitivity to the occasion. And it is a bit like being a method actor enlarged by the parts that he or she plays.

With every work you try to capture its shifting politics and sociologies. I'm not against asking tough-minded historical materialist questions: it is crucial. But much artwork is a fragile bridge across the gap between blindness and insight. And with society turning all experience into a form of consumption, is it still possible to be moved?

Art knew about the unconscious before Freud, the class struggle before Marx, and semiotics before Semiotics. Art making is applied semiotics, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism. It is not déjà vu doctrine.

The writer, dealing with contemporary art, which can look like an anything, has to have the improvisational readiness to chance the fortune of the moment. Furthermore, you learn your theory, and then ditch it, because as Guy Davenport pointed out, “Imagination is like a drunk who loses his watch and has to get drunk to find it again.””

5. What would be the most difficult medium to write about and why is it so difficult?

“The most difficult medium is the one you know least about. But a common challenge these days seems to arise from installation art, which has become something of a bugaboo or joke these days in the mainstream press. And it’s sometimes true that installation comes across as either like a circus (competing with big sexy visual feasts of cinema, etc) or a seminar (a headachy world of classroom-like demonstrations).

Installation is not a noun; it is a critique of art as nouns. There is no theory, no manifesto, no party, no club. Installation joins forces with the critique of commodity culture embodied in unsaleable works; Conceptual Art, Process Art, Earth Art, Minimalist Art, Performance Art, either from the 1970s, or their scattered reprise in the 1990s. It dismantles the tidy groups of spatial experiences we associate with museums, those neat rows of eye-level art, by forcing us to enter other spaces and take in other information. Installation transforms the four square stable place used by architects into an existential or actualised space produced by a viewer.

Installation is the experimental prose poem of the visual arts, an unforeseeable hybrid offspring of all the misalliances that make up contemporary experience. Disjunctive but nonetheless emotionally compelling, installations can be tiny, intimate, discriminating habitats or uncorked environments of violent theatricality. Installation is art finding new ways to go on despite frightening historical discontinuities.

What’s good about installation art? Installation connects with the empowering forces of indigenous cultures (folks who have been making vernacular versions of installation all along), or makes us aware of our crippling forms of absent power (like dharma or voodoo). At the same time it plugs into current metaphors of techno-immersion (like ambient music or omnidirectional acoustic space; interactivity, virtual reality).

Women artists have been drawn to the half-charted world of installation in significant numbers. The big blown-up macho space of heroic sculpture is sidestepped, in a countervailing feminist strategy, for an inclusive, immanent space responding to the inhabited environment. While each artist’s efforts in this area are as intimate and revealing as handwriting.

6. Could you give suggestions to students for successful strategies when writing critiques about art?

As every teacher knows, enlightened discussion in the classroom is never misdirected so long as no one forgets that art does not only exist to be argued about, but to be perceived and assimilated. Some works require as much silence as talk. So: Description, Interpretation, Evaluation are the traditional methods for coming to grips with the work of art.

1. description involves finding out all you can of what the thing is: technically, materially.
2. interpretation involves what you think is the meaning of the work. Bearing in mind that these are always multiple: personal, public, realist, mystical, pragmatic...whatever it takes to half guess, half understand what is at stake: for the artist, for the gallery, for the audience, or in terms of art history.
3. evaluation is what you think of as the pay-off. Your judgement about whether you thought it worked or not (rather than just if you liked it or hated it). It’s been my experience that a student who only cares about whether something is “good” or “bad” is likely to think it’s the only evaluation you need to make. A hammer works for pounding nails, an axe for chopping trees: they each have a different function.”

7. How have post-modern concepts influenced the process of writing about art?

“The arrival of semiotics, psychoanalysis and deconstruction in the early 1970s coincided with the arrival of postmodernism. It meant a new way of demystifying our habits of reading and a questioning of the institutional rules of the game, which had been dominated by Anglo-Saxon positivism and empiricism and class-bound connoisseurship. There was a regrouping of scholars and all the old disciplines began to run at highly eccentric angles to each other.

Many found the language clenched, charmless and cerebral. Others formed into discursive tribes blown out by the way this late-modernist analysis set up a series of instabilities of perspective and judgement. Foucault, Lacan, Barthes suggested the precariousness of all language, meaning, knowledge. What had been taken for granted in the British school system was taken to pieces in the new, semi-institutionalised courses on offer. What sources are we bringing ready made to the artwork? What are the psychic mechanisms behind its signs? Why am I moved in this way? Why did I find that movie “sick” and “dumb” or intense and pleasurable?

At first, when all this stuff was new it was (is) exciting and open. Second-generation critiques get a bit long on ideology and short on pleasure. It is as though there is a “master-disk” fashioned somewhere in Birmingham or Paris, churning the stuff out. It's in the nature of the educational environment to get more systematic, no matter what you teach, setting up jungle gyms and Skinner boxes for students to pass through.

At its best people found a kind of wild poetry in some of it. At its worst it created anxiety among those who find both art and theory disagreeably odd, or enormous anxiety over reconciling analytic traditions.

In this jargon-ridden context art is in danger of seeming "untidy", a kind of carelessness that may unsuit you for academic tenure. In some art schools, students felt paralysed and couldn't make their next piece unless they had read L'échange symbolique et la mort. Among curators, artists whose work offered no immediate hold on language tended to be dropped over the precipice of theory.

In some ways Robert Hughes is right. We've got a whole lot smarter but no wiser. Eliot said we had the experience but missed the meaning. Today, many have had the meaning and missed the experience.”

8. What is the importance of historical or critical knowledge in writing about art?

“As implied above, any artwork presupposes considerable experiences in reading other artworks. Some are easier to make sense of than others, but the easiest bring into play all the perception, all the historical know-how and discrimination at our command. It’s as true of Vermeer as it is of Christo. There are uncomplicated ways of beginning, but no simple place to begin. As Ezra Pound remarked it doesn’t matter which leg of a table you make first. Start with your own enthusiasms and pleasures and strengths. Go from there.”