C94 Article
Interview with James Elkins
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| James Elkins, Inis Mór, August 2000; photo: the editor |
Open to Criticism
What is the shape of art theory? Not a common question, but one that makes sense if you are, like James Elkins, inclined to think deeply about how we think about art. He was in conversation recently with Margaret Corcoran
James Elkins is Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a highly prolific author, with thirteen books in print at last count, and with a penchant for the quirky. His latest book - How to Use Your Eyes - is Routledge's lead this autumn with a print run of 25,000 copies. And you can get a sense of his michievousness and humour from the title of his forthcoming book, Why Art Cannot be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students.
Margaret Corcoran: In The Object Stares Back you describe the difference in approach between an art historian and an artist. The art historian is standing back to a respectable distance, being accustomed to slides and detached observation, while an artist is up close, attempting to retrace the mark referring to the subject. Your wife Margaret MacNamidhe is an art historian but also an artist - is this observation dedicated to and prompted by viewing art with her?
James Elkins: I definitely had seen that in museums, over the years, a number of times; but I probably was thinking of Margaret, because she often makes museum guards very uneasy by going right up to the canvas and tracing with her finger almost as if it were a brush. I think of that difference, between keeping your distance and going right up to the canvas, as an almost iron-clad criterion for distinguishing an art historian from an artist. There are just a few counter examples and they are strange ones - like for example the art historian Michael Fried, who, when he can (in a classroom and with a slide projection), likes to SLAP the image to show the force of seeing, or the pressure and energy of the encounter. So there are a few art historians who are more corporeally inclined, but the vast majority of them aren't and I do find it significant because it is a marker of what is ultimately, I think, a lack of confidence. It's directly dependent on the fact that most historians don't know how to create the things that they are writing about. At any rate it is much more common in Literature departments to find people who at least know how they think a poem might be constructed. But the majority of art historians in major universities were not trained as artists. I think the percentage of art historians in smaller liberal arts colleges who started as painters or sculptors is higher. It is certainly that way in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where about half of our art history faculty were artists once upon a time, but the other half have never touched a brush. I find those people tend to feel a slight discomfort when they enter a studio: they don't really know where to stand, and there is a kind of a fear - perhaps a fear that they might be asked to do something or to say something that would show that they don't, in fact, know how to do anything in a studio. I know that this is a bald opinion and a generalization on my part, but I think that a fair amount of art history can be accounted for by looking for signs of the inadequate repression of that anxiety.
MC: In the chapter of your book Our Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing, you phrase this as "Why Art Historians Should Draw."
JE: When I was researching that, I wrote to a few art historians. There are just a handful who do some serious painting and drawing. One is Leo Steinberg, whose drawings have been published in a couple of places; a few years ago there was an interview with him, which included a couple of his drawings. He's a very confident draftsman. At one point in the interview he says that he is in the habit of drawing the works he is studying. But he has never published any of those drawings or mentioned them in his writing, so the connection between scholarship and the making of images is broken. Another major art historian, who is a serious painter, is David Summers. He teaches at the University of Virginia. He is known as a Renaissance scholar, but in the last ten or fifteen years he has been working on one gigantic book which is now about to appear: an account of world art, in which the works are arranged according to themes rather than chronologically. It is a very interesting and bold venture on his part. I was at a conference with him at Williams College in Massachusetts earlier this year; there the singularity of his project really became clear. He is virtually the only prominent art historian who is trying to "put the world in a book," as the chair of the conference put it. Summers says that now that he is finished with the magnum opus he is going back to paint for a while - the writing is finished, and now it's time for the painting. He would be another example of an art historian who takes very seriously the experience of creating things but doesn't explicitly connect it to his scholarship.
MC: Experience of drawing would be familiar territory to you. At one stage, that meant that you had a studio. Then again, that you taught life-drawing (as well as mathematics and many other subjects). Perhaps most importantly, that your Masters in Fine Art from the University of Chicago in 1983 was practice-based and that your thesis concerned the theory of art education in a studio setting...
JE: Yes, the MFA program at the University of Chicago, where I was a student, is committed to the conceptual, philosophic, and historical side of art production, so we artists were all made to write long theses on our work, and we all took courses that included Gombrich, Wittgenstein, and even Heidegger. I'm still not convinced that helped our art - which is one of the issues I raise in the book Why Art Cannot be Taught. Before we leave this subject, I wanted to mention a third scholar who is committed to painting, beside Steinberg and Summers, and that's Meyer Schapiro. Schapiro was a very competent draughtsman and painter and he had a number of exhibitions. Just this year there has been a book published of his drawings and paintings. But I haven't found any writing by Schapiro which connects his art and his scholarship. The links are there, ready to be drawn - for instance the work is modernist, and he was well aware of the modernist concepts he was attributing to Romanesque architecture - but he kept his experiences of painting and drawing away from his accounts of history. Working at the School of the Art Institute, instead of a major university, I've been forced to confront the gulf between art history and art practice. The MFA program at the University of Chicago introduced me to the issue, and ever since I have been trying to find ways to connect the two fields, because it seems to me that if you don't find some link, then everything that's said about the 'intimate' relation between art historians and studio art is nothing but lip service. It seems that artists and art historians are working on the same subject, but in a fundamental sense they may not be.
MC: Jim, you write on such a vast array of subjects, but particularly the sciences, and always in correlation to art. Connecting these disciplines is clearly important to you. In general though, I know that you feel less than hopeful about this correlation?
JE: I teach science and art, I have been doing so for a number of years now. But it strikes me most artists who are interested in science are mainly interested in either popularized science (for instance, ideas about relativity or chaos theory) or technology (strange machines, new computer configurations). It seems to me, to make a generalization, that the art world is almost entirely disengaged from science and the small faction that is engaged with what they call science is actually interested in the history of technology. I've also noticed that there's a kind of student who is very strong on science - they 'get' all the scientific issues, and they're amazing at reading engineering schematics, assembling machines, and interpreting technical writing - but they don't use that knowledge to make more interesting art. The two skills (science and art) don't seem to be correlated. I've been thinking about this because the book I'm writing now is about certain scientific images made during the last twenty years, and their similarity to fine art images, principally photography and post-minimalist painting. The images have intriguing similarities, but there's no connection between the different image-making cultures. I am getting more and more pessimistic about art-science links, and yet I don't want to give up on the idea, because then we'd have to admit that scientific and fine-art images are truly disconnected.
MC: You have taught now for over a decade. What kind of cultural climate do you think your students are going out into? What kind of literature is out there to help them along?
JE: Well, it certainly doesn't help students that art literature comes in so many flavors and colors. There is one corpus of art-historical writing which is read only by people who are interested in facts and in the history of certain canonical sequences - mostly Western Art, to put it broadly. "Normal Art History" is what I call it in one of the books I've written. Its journals include - again, broadly speaking - Art Bulletin, Burlington Magazine and Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. Then, there is another corpus, loosely definable as 'experimental'. It used to be called "new art history"; sometimes it's just called "theory" or "Visual Theory." It draws on film theory, narratology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. The subject matter is much more diverse than the first group: it includes a lot of third-world material, and it reaches back to archaeology and forward to the latest film... That kind of visual theory is published in serious art journals - I am thinking, say, of the journal October, and of texts like The Subjects of Art History, The Art of Art History, and Critical Terms for Art History. Its authors would include people like Jonathan Crary, Louis Marin, Whitney Davis, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Georges Didi-Huberman, and Hubert Damisch. Then there is third corpus which is Serious Art Criticism. On the one hand it is very rare, extremely threatened - very few journals try to do it well. On the other hand it is completely ignored by the first branch of art history (Normal Art History) and almost completely ignored by the second branch (Visual Theory). Serious Art Criticism is read mainly by artists and gallerists. (Here I'm thinking of critics like Roberta Smith, who writes for the New York Times, or Donald Kuspit, Thomas McEvilley, Dave Hickey, Jean-Louis Schefer, or Peter Plagens - they're different, but they're united by the fact that they're often invisible to Normal Art Historians or Visual Theorists.) Then there's a fourth kind of writing which is, as far as I can see, larger than all those other three combined. That would be commercially oriented art writing. It is in the thousands of magazines which 'serious' avant-garde artists don't read, but which fill the magazine stalls in all major cities in the West. I would include in that same group less serious journalistic mentions in newspapers and above all exhibition brochures, which are almost always a kind of puff intended to sell a few works. This fourth group, which I guess could be called 'Commercial Art Writing', is unbelievably vast in comparison to the tiny productions of art history and serious criticism. The research context here, for me, is a book I'm writing called Failure in Twentieth Century Painting, for which I have been trying hard to read as many ephemeral glossy magazines and brochures and newspaper reviews as I possibly can. There's a journal on glass, for example, called 'Glass', where Louise Bourgeois appears as a radical artist because she did some things in black. Everything else in that magazine - which is very well printed, and filled with glossy color advertisements - is material that is barely noticed in the world of serious criticism and art history.
MC: Where does one begin the search for this literature?
JE: One of the easiest ways to find it is to go out of a major museum to the nearest news-stand. The magazines you'll find there aren't the ones across the street in the museum store. These distinctions between Normal Art History, Visual Theory, Serious Art Criticism, and Commercial Art Writing are tenuous and certainly open to revision - but I find them immensely useful: otherwise it's tempting to say there's simply a continuum, or - worse - that there's no important differences between, say, October and Univers des Arts. The very serious and sometimes unhelpfully conservative Normal Art History exists in approximately fifty journals, at a rough count (university libraries subscribe to them, so they can be counted). What I was calling Visual Theory accounts for another two dozen journals. Serious Art Criticism can be found in major art magazines and newspapers, from the New York Times to Parkett, from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to Flash Art. And then there's the fourth category, people who write fluff. That last category is fascinating, because some of the people who work in it are very well known (just for the sake of naming someone, I'd mention Peter Schjeldahl, who has recently become the critic for the New Yorker magazine) - but they let themselves write in such a way that their judgments have no purchase on a wider sense of history, or even on what might make art criticism an important activity. They do not feel the need to tie their judgments to art beyond the immediate context of the work they're reviewing, and they are often content to weave a web of allusions and theoretical speculations that cannot be read as judgments - and that is an extremely odd situation in terms of the longer history of criticism, which was always both historically grounded and strongly judgmental. Much of current art criticism, including the texts in exhibition catalogues, is ephemeral for at least three reasons: it isn't seriously read; it isn't collected by libraries; and it fails to make sense of the purpose and genealogy of criticism or art. And for all those reasons it's fascinating to me: that fourth category, judged by sheer weight, is the twentieth century's production of art writing.
MC: What kind of difficulties do you come up against when you are researching something of this character?
JE: This book that I am writing - Failure in Twentieth Century Painting - has two parts. The first part, which is the thing that's really holding the book up, making it very hard to write, is a collection of the major theories of twentieth-century art. If I asked you to name the principal theories of twentieth-century painting, what would you say? You'd probably name Clement Greenberg and High Modernism, and certainly everyone knows how that works: you go from Cézanne and Picasso and essentially you leap to Pollock and try to ignore the fact that the Surrealists ever lived. You worry yourself a little about Duchamp, but maybe not too much, and then when it comes to the early sixties of Pop art you opt out, except that you still defend the odd artist. Incidentally - this is not a very well known fact - Greenberg at the very end of his life was still championing artists who he thought were carrying the torch of avant-garde modernism. He wrote about an American group called the New New Painters. These people essentially do gluey acrylic polymer pictures that sometimes don't even have supports - they're pure painting in a sense. Anyway, you can be very exact about Clement Greenberg and High Modernist taste. Then you might want to name Postmodernism as a second model of the shape of the century. That story, of course, works out differently: you may start again with Picasso, but it's a different Picasso, and then you're on to photography, gender studies and especially Surrealism. Postmodernism isn't quite as clearly delineated as High Modernism; a scholar like Krauss, for example, has written about Abstract Expressionism and Cubism, but the century would be unimaginable, in her terms, without things that happened in the Surrealist decades.
MC: In your own terminology, you make a refreshing distinction concerning Postmodernism. This might be a good time to incorporate that distinction - that of 'Proper' and 'Improper' Postmodernism...
JE: Improper Postmodernism would be a Postmodernism which claims that Postmodernism behaves like other periods. Modernism died, and Postmodernism started in year X. Now if you are someone like Thierry de Duve, the Belgian art historian, then you believe that the year X was the year of Duchamp's urinal; if you are Arthur Danto you believe it's the year of the Brillo boxes. Thomas McEvilley also puts it in the sixties. These are Improper Postmodernists, in the sense that they believe that you can actually find a turning-point. Proper Postmodernists are those like Krauss who believe that the best way to describe Postmodernism is as an anti-rational operation that exists within Modernism from the very beginning. That's why people like Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois begin their account - I'm thinking of the book Formless: A User's Guide - with Manet's Olympia. There is an idea about Olympia that it was mostly shocking because of formalist innovations, and that idea is consistent with a certain (reductive) reception of Greenberg's High Modernism. Then there is another way of looking at Olympia which claims that it is mostly shocking because of social implications, having to do with prostitution.
MC: You reviewed Krauss's book Bachelors along with books by Hans Belting and Thomas Crow for the online publication College Art Association reviews (www.caareviews.org). It was a favourable review, which I'm sure was timely, in the light of her recent illness. How would you sum up Formless?
JE: What Krauss and Bois do in that book - and it's in a very, very convoluted and dense beginning chapter which might be opaque for a lot of readers - is say that Olympia was a quintessentially postmodern moment, in the sense that I'm calling Proper Postmodernism, because what Olympia did was actually shut down art discourse of any sort, whether it had to do with formal issues or social questions. For Krauss and Bois, Olympia lacked an identifiable relation to what had come before. It was an irrational, irrationalist moment - and therefore it was postmodern in an interesting way.
MC: What other theories have arisen for you?
JE: Right, so what theories would you come up with after High Modernism and some versions of Postmodernism? I have in my working draft at the moment a couple of extra theories, most of which happen outside academia and some of which happen in these third and fourth kinds of writing, the Serious Art Criticism and the Commercial Art Writing. One of them is that art should have a moral purpose. The kind of people usually associated with that are conservatives of various stripes, like Hilton Kramer. At its most reductive the moral-art theory claims that an artwork has to actually do good. I find that in some parts of Asia this is still a pre-eminent way of judging art. I'm thinking of making 'moral art criticism' a third theory, following High Modernism and the various Postmodernisms. A fourth theory of the shape of twentieth-century painting would then be skill. Unfortunately it is never, ever broached in Serious Art Criticism or Visual Theory, because it is taken for granted that Modernism and Postmodernism have moved us beyond the point where skill has any recognizable causal relation to interesting art. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the general public believes that the shape of the twentieth century should be defined by the heights and depths of skill in art. The world of the international avant-garde regards that as an asked-and-answered question: skill just isn't on our radar screens, but it is central for most of the world. To find writers who worry about skill, you have to move into that huge fourth estate of art writing, which I was calling Commercial Art Writing. For better or worse, it's ubiquitous: most day-to-day newspaper accounts of art draw on this root-level, public understanding of skill. I find it also among the visitors who come to the museum where I work in Chicago. They rush through to the Monet Grainstacks, because they know that Monet painted skillfully.
MC: By corollary to all this, can we speak of the notion of there being no theory?
JE: Yes, there is definitely a theory that there is no theory - there is no shape of twentieth-century painting. That theory, I think, is latent in any number of art critics of the kind I described earlier, and exemplified - perhaps a bit unfairly - by naming Peter Schjeldahl. But ask yourself this question next time you open a newspaper and read a review by a well-known art critic: Do I know what this person thinks of the wider domain of modern art? Do I know how this person grounds his or her writing in past generations of critics? Would this person want to defend the idea that the twentieth century introduced a practical infinity of styles, and that pluralism and relativism render all global theories inappropriate? Is there such a person? - someone who genuinely believes that all kinds of art are potentially equal because they are incomparable with one another? And in which case, why is that person a critic?
MC: Has anything in this research surprised you?
JE: What has amazed me, in doing this research, is first of all how hard it is to find out how many theories there are. It shouldn't be that difficult to find out how many theories there are, it should be really easy. And second, how few Serious Art Critics, my third type of writer, have ever gone on the record saying what they think the central moments and ideas of the twentieth century were.
MC: Is it too soon to say?
JE: Well, that's the thing, that's one of the excuses that the critics use. But an ambitious critic, someone like Joseph Masheck, is going to sooner or later produce a body of work that forces the issue. Scattered judgments, inspired by particular occasions, take what force they have from a wider context. Eventually history appears on the horizon of that kind of writing - either that, or judgments continue to be made as if they did not have to react to the pressure exerted by previous historical judgements. Good art criticism is treacherous. Criticism that lasts has occasionally been written by people who write with blinkers on, you might say, whose writing is focused on their time and place, but in my experience the vast majority of interesting critics - and I am thinking about Diderot and Baudelaire and all the other major critics down the line - were well aware, acutely aware of what for them was the universe of painting or sculpture or architecture and where it was going at any given moment. So it's baffled me, how hard it is to round up a number of importantly different, cogent, historically responsible theories of the shape of twentieth-century painting. It was our century, but we still don't own it. This interview took place in Galway, August 20, 2000.
Margaret Corcoran is an artist based in Dublin; her next show will be in the Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin, in March 2001.
