Critiquing the Critic

Art criticism, in its modern form, was arguably an invention of the 19th century. Along with industrial models of production, there came to be what the social theorist Jurgen Habermas has called “professional expertise complexes”, bodies of specialized knowledge that are reproduced in the modern academy. Habermas was suspicious of them, and was critical of their impermeability and considered their existence counter to democratic ideals of free discourse on matters of concern in the civic arena.

The academic, and even institutionalized, practices of art criticism since then have required the artist to remain a mute, inarticulate producer of cryptic, symbolic, or beautiful objects or gestures that are then subject to demystification or aesthetic, technical, or other evaluation by the “critic”. In recent years, however, the legitimacy of those strictures has come into question. As art practices fall away from traditional media, gone are many of the traditional academic criteria for judging works of art; this is obvious enough. Certainly, this does not mean that there are no criteria, just that they are more complex and ethereal, determined ever more by the multifarious practices of artists themselves. It is no longer the job of an artist simply to draw a figure, or render, or compose well, though those things may be relevant to a particular artist’s practices. Rather, artists have many jobs (and unlimited choices of media), but all can be described as creative. It is the job of the accountant to account for fiscal realities; it is the job of the attorney to make sure the rules are followed; it is the job of the artist to insert something into the culture that wouldn’t be there otherwise, and to have it mean something.

This is where the critic comes in: It is the critic’s job, in part, to discuss how well the artist succeeds, and it is the critic’s job to engage in a process of revelation and exchange that promotes the free exchange and development of new ideas. It’s complex and very, very important. If the artist fails to orchestrate all the elements of the work with some degree of coherence (even if the coherence is available only subconsciously), then the work is a failure. If the critic fails to pick up on clues to the coherence that are present and available to the perception, to a careful reading, then the critic has failed. Again, this is a simplistic and incomplete discussion, but my point is this: Fortunately, artists are no longer considered to be mute, inarticulate creatures: Part of the job is participating in the discourses involving the huge and multiform strategies of expression that constitute art. As the critic points out the artist’s failures, so the artist is free to discuss the critic’s failures. Add in the increasing interest in multidisciplinary practices, and current trends in art schools to teach art as a way of thinking, of seeing, and of making that involves critical analysis, visual and cultural literacy, and language of all sorts, and you’ve got something Habermas might have liked. Critics and theorists write. Artists speak. Artists write. Sometimes they are the same people. This makes art all the more interesting.

The unconscious is always operative in the production of important (to the artist) art. Art deals in the realm of the symbolic, and engages with aspects of emotional life and memory that are often contradictory or ambivalent; works of art are more than expository essays in another form. This is not to undermine the importance of the conceptual. Pictures are puzzles, as Jim Elkins says. As I imply above, part of the artist’s job is to orchestrate multiple references, ideas and impulses into a communicative apparatus of some description. But, as an artist and as a teacher, I know that works of art embody these contradictions, sites of stress and ambivalence, and this is part of what gives them their power. Pictures also want things, as Tom Mitchell points out. They engage with deep needs, fears, joys, outrages, and memories we may not even know we have. Pictures require us to feel and do things. It may be the job of the critic to decipher these, as the contradictions and emotional ambivalences embodied in symbolic works often reflect the contradictions in our lives. These are important topics for discussion.

Among the first thinkers to question the traditional relationship between artist and critic were feminist theorists, artists and writers, Lucy Lippard and Griselda Pollock among them. Their critique of the critic was based in an analysis of patriarchal traditions in the academy and in the marketplace. These traditions emphasized authorities that were deployed in service of social control and exclusion, as the criteria for judgment and taste, as articulated in the 18th century by the likes of Kant and Goethe, excluded, as Goethe put it, “women, children, and the savage races”. There has always been bias in the deployment of critical expertise; even in it’s supposedly most enlightened corners, the world is still a very sexist and racist place.

Having said all that, I would like to respond to David Pagel’s review of my work in the LA Times on November 24th. I do so not as a wounded animal, as it were, but rather in a spirit of collegiality, firm in the belief that a broader discourse is a good thing. Unfortunately, the LA Times is an institution that Pagel has available to him in the publication of his thoughts and ideas; I remain, in the context of that discussion, mute and inarticulate. But I have the Web, and the gallery, so it is to these fora that I will turn.

Pagel’s discussion of my work begins with the statement that my use of materials is “all over the place”, but he does not expound. Contemporary art is full of examples of artists who vary their media strategies, using whatever materials are appropriate to a given concept. Painters who do this seem to be offered less critical tolerance than other artists, perhaps because certain mythologies about paintings not being “things” in the same way as other objects persists, and this fact requires greater attention from the artist if it is to be overcome. Further, given an artist’s prerogative not to be bound by restrictions on her practice, I was surprised that these efforts (my sculptures and “film costumes”) were not met with a critical analysis based on their effectiveness in deploying meaning within the context of the show, but with dismissal.

Then I realized he had a good point. The installation failed as such because I did not practice due diligence in relating one set of media practices to the others in the space. I am interested in the way that things, including paintings, generate meaning in accumulation with other things. (Bill Brown’s work on “thing theory” is an important discussion of things and meaning.) I have made successful installations in the past, but those were very site-specific and had limited numbers of paintings. I recognize I must proceed with greater care.

I take the greatest issue, however, with Pagel’s characterization of my work as “all striking the same high-pitched note, as if shrieking, ’The end is near. Modern culture is an aberration, utterly fake and irredeemably alienated from nature.’”

First off, the use of quotation marks around words I never said, nor would say, is mocking and disrespectful. The use of “high-pitched” and “shrieking” brings to mind an image of hysteria, with all the gender connotations associated with the etymology of the word. The history of phallocentric, masculinist discourses are replete with images of silly, hysterical, shrill women. This is intolerable enough in its apparent misogyny, but the fact is that I am not high-pitched, and never do I shriek.

Secondly, it is astounding that a critic of Pagel’s stature and experience would fail so utterly to read the content of the work. Of course, structuralist linguistics and the feminist theorists who deal with it identified the tendency of Western cultures to organize concepts in binary opposites, and to understand the world as sets of such binary pairs; chiefly influential among these are “nature” and “culture”. Gender, the binary opposites of “masculine” and “feminine”, is the organizing metaphor of patriarchy; as such, “nature” and “culture” have developed mythological attributes that correspond to the poles of this metaphor. “Culture” is active and rational, among other manly traits. “Nature” is disorganized and passive, mysterious, and virgin, the objectified Other to “man’s” active gaze. I am not an eco-feminist, but an ecologist (that is to say, interested in ecosystems, which I define according to the derivation of the word from the Greek eco-, meaning “home”) and a feminist, and a modernist in the Enlightenment sense.

The paintings in this show are not about the impingement of evil modern culture on hapless nature, but rather they are about the way in which SYMBOLIC representations of “nature” exclude the natural processes of hybridization, incorporation, evolution, complexity and diversity—the tendency (Darwin pointed it out, of course) of things to combine and recombine, the very enmeshment of “nature” and “culture” that constitutes who we are. They are intended, actually, to bear witness to the very interconnectedness of all things that the history of landscape excludes. My pictures are intended to challenge the myth of the binary as it pertains to the mythologies of “nature” evident in Western pictorial traditions. (As a straight woman, and a mother, in this man’s world, the binary structures of our language and culture have done me no good. It has done my gay friends and racialized friends even more harm.)

I make no easily discernible value judgments on “nature” as opposed to “culture”. That would be simple-minded. My feelings are contradictory and ambivalent. Nature is scary, deadly, and infectious, red in tooth and claw. Nature offers transcendence, a sense of what some call the spiritual, beauty and comfort. Modern culture is scary, destructive and overwhelming. Modern culture gives me my warm home and vaccines for my child. It’s all part of the same condition, the same truth. It is in the process of hybridization, as with evolution, that there are possibilities for change. My images are intended to bear witness to the emotional collateral of this process as I imagine and exaggerate its embodiment; these emotions are often contradictory, as the process suggests a future that is inherently fraught with anxiety. This is partially because hybridization, mutation and recombinance suggest a loss of identity. This is profoundly threatening to the binary systems on which our symbolic lives and social relationships are based, particularly masculine supremacy in the context of gender. At the same time, my invocation of natural history displays, field guides and landscape histories describes a system of naming that reiterates the taxonomies, divisions, and even demographics that feeds our narcissism. This is comforting, and to me, a little bit funny, especially since my creatures, mutants and hybrids all, reflect characteristics of products and processes, including shopping, advertising, politics, and language, that attempt to define me.

As for the compositions being static here, they certainly are. They are meant to refer to various histories and traditions in display and representation, including—and this information is in the press release and in the titles of the works—natural history dioramas, department store shelf and window display, and the history of landscape. I use these tropes because they have meaning, not just about the histories they represent, but about wishes and desires, including visual pleasure, narrative fantasy (in the psychoanalytic sense), the transcendence of time and death, and the exploration of identity promised by the collecting of things. Pagel writes, “The small paintings of single birds have all the drama of field-guide illustrations.” The piece is titled “Field Guide”! I did not want drama, at least not the visual kind that Pagel seems to wish I’d provided. I wanted them to resemble field-guide illustrations specifically to invoke the history of taxonomy and its implications for our (mis)understanding of our relationship with the rest of the world and the things in it we wish to dominate and possess even as we desire to recognize and connect.

He says, “…The medium-sized ones have the presence of generic portraits”. The faces, with their mutton-chop whiskers, were modeled on portraits of 19th-century captains of industry and other members of the ruling elite of the time, such as those that hang in public libraries, university buildings, and older corporate headquarters. In other words, they are modeled on generic portraits, again for the purpose of lending a specific set of meanings based on these references. Each single monkey represents an iconic white male. Each still-life object defines an allegorical narrative intended to satirize some aspect of current domestic policy. U.S. environmental policy is a monkey enjoying a fat cigar dangerously close to a gasoline can; disaster ensues. U.S. agricultural policy is a mustard-colored monkey jealously guarding his fast-food meal; our tax dollars subsidize really gross factory farming of exactly the foods that are contributing to the obesity epidemic. The “Red-Necked Red State Ring-Tail” brandishes his firearm as he engages in a nasty territorial display. This version of the phallic white male has great symbolic currency all over the heartland. It is much less visible in the blue islands of urban sophistication, but this particular allegory reflects a real phenomenon. The symbolic values, some of which derive their currency from binary metaphors, which I’m trying to satirize are arguably responsible for some of the mess we’re in now. Cooler heads don’t prevail when jingoistic identity is at stake, and environmental degradation is much more likely when “nature” is “other”. Really, is that so wrong of me? Maybe my satire is a bit heavy-handed, but in my defense, that’s characteristic of a lot of satire.

The large paintings look like natural history museum dioramas because they are supposed to. See above.

Pagel writes, “Hogin’s sculptures and costumes suggest that she feels similarly confined by her paintings”. This is useful. While it is not true any more than my interest in my job or my family suggests I feel confined by my studio practice, the sculptural objects are manifestations of interests I have in visual forms besides painting, but I can see how they fail to connect with the paintings because the installation lacked completeness and specificity. I love paintings, but I am interested in other forms, too. What is confining is a critical suggestion that diverse interests indicate a problem. The sculptural objects may not be as refined and complete in their concept and execution, but they represent a risk in my practice and an attempt to evolve. I still like them and feel they have value in my work, and will peruse them with Pagel’s critique in mind, and for that I am grateful.

It’s all one big colorful mash-up of all I am as a modern human, in this place, at this time, reveling in and revolted by what surrounds me, at turns outraged and thrilled by the way our desires manifest in the world.

Pagel closes by suggesting that “breaking out of the still life format by allowing narrative, drama and more fantasy into her pictures might solve the problem better than leaving painting behind for sculptural objects”. I would like to close by suggesting in turn that this exhortation is most distinctly not the job of the critic. The problem for him seems to be that he is bored by some of my subject matter but likes my technical facility well enough to want his interests (fantasies, dramas and narratives) expressed in my style. (Might I suggest a commission? Failing that, perhaps he should get his own studio!) I am pleased he thinks I am a good painter; I work very hard at it, but I am not interested in the type of fantasy that is implied here, and though I am interested in narrative and drama, and I am in no way leaving painting behind, but attempting new forms. My problem with his review of my work is not that it was critical, but that it’s harshness was gratuitous and disrespectful, perhaps a little sexist, even, and a little dishonest when he uses my intentional references as disparagements as though they were mistakes. I really wished he’d taken the time to be more than half-right about the subject matter. He is certainly capable of it. Collegiality demands no less, and I would look forward to future discussion.

Laurie Hogin
11/29/06