KAREN WILKIN
At the Galleries
It
was the season of the panel discussion in the New York art world. I've
lost count of how many were organized, on themes ranging from the
new abstraction to the feminine in painting - not anything to do with
gender, it turns out. I suspect that all this talk is a function of the de–
pressed state of the art market, which makes both successful and marginal
artists feel anxious. Coming together more or less formally helps to alle–
viate some of the anxiety, but there's another aspect to these public dis–
cussions. Most of the participants are not critics or theorists but artists,
apparently eager to define the issues they find most compelling in making
art. Yet more often, they seem driven by a wish to control how their
work is perceived, declaring themselves to be simultaneously makers, in–
terpreters, curators, and critics of their own work, rather than trusting it
to come across in its own terms. It's curious, although, I suppose, hardly
new. When Whistler sued Ruskin over that famous
hostile
review - the
one about throwing a pot of paint in the public's face - the angry artist
declared that since the critic was incapable of making a painting himself,
he was not entitled
to
an opinion; only an artist could judge art. Many
current practitioners subscribe to an even more extreme version of this
idea: only the creator of a work of art knows how it should be seen and
understood. This is frequently allied with the belief that a work of art
cannot speak, disturb, or seduce without an explicatory text. (Mind you,
a great deal of the art that springs from these assumptions
doesn't
come
across without text, but that's another matter.)
Such notions were pervasive at one of the better symposia, organized
by the Triangle Artists' Workshop in March. Dedicated to "questions of
standards, values, and criteria," it aligned three artist-critics, one artist–
organizer, two unhyphenated artists, and a "writer-critic" from a truly
amazing variety of points of view. Everything from anarchic Neo–
Dadaism to militant feminism to good old-fashioned connoisseurship had
its champion. There was little common ground, but less acrimony and
counter-thrusting than might have been expected, and the event was
counted a success. An overflow audience paid close attention
to
the
proceedings and afterwards seemed enthusiastic about everything, as
though each listener heard only what he wanted to hear, the point of
view that reassured him. (Only one person I talked to said, "It was like
