Critical realist: Katy Siegel on Sidney Tillim - Critical Essay

Other equally original essays on the subject tended to be less polemical in tone, intertwining photography, photomechanical reproductive processes, postmodernism, and nineteenth-century academic painting. One of the most revealing pieces, a 1985 essay that remains unpublished, examines the print collection exhibited as a senior thesis by a precocious student of his at Bennington--Matthew Marks. When he praises the wide range of Marks's taste, from the pastoral to the geometric, he could be describing himself, his own "very special enterprise" of detente between the abstract and the figurative, his equal love for the academic, the low, and the overlooked. But he also backs up to describe the relationship between collecting and history:

   Marks is a connoisseur, not a critic or a historian ... and whereas
   for the historian quality is a given, for the collector quality is a
   discovery, a perpetual exercise in an informed perception that is as
   educated as it is, so to speak, ravished by the excellence it
   appropriates and, not incidentally, by the history that it sometimes
   rediscovers and preserves.

Not only does Tillim identify with the view of historical objects judged freshly from the contemporary moment rather than taken as givens, but (as a collector himself) he appreciates an argument made through attention to objects rather than words, an implicit criticism of the intellectual disengaged from things in the world.

Unimpressed with poststructuralist writing, Tillim nonetheless found a freedom in the postmodernist art world, which validated not only his omnivorous taste but his lifelong predilection for unusual juxtapositions. The most striking of these was "Ideology and Difference: Reflections on Olitski and Koons," published in Arts in 1989, which makes common cause between these two poster boys for, respectively, modernism and postmodernism (a linkage that Olitski, Tillim's longtime friend, didn't particularly appreciate). He finds both artists luxuriating in vulgarity and iridescent decoration, as well as displaying an intensely personal taste that disrupts the blandness of art under pressure from decades of bourgeois appropriateness. Tillim typically caps a serious critical observation with a funny and Freudian aside: "In America at least, one is generally exposed to 'bad' art, to bad commercial art, to kitsch, first, to the allegedly better kind of art later.... Hell, I once owned a Baby Brownie [camera] and used to cruise department stores because commodities, which I could not afford, were safer to contemplate than cleavage."

Clement Greenberg, a sometime friend who represented both authoritarian disapproval and independence of mind, chastised Tillim for his "perversity" in rejecting the mainstream, whether of history, fashion, or taste. This perversity cost him the art-world power that comes with an easily summarized critical program in tune with the times. But even more than his role as a supporter of figurative art (an ideological position he came to regret and reject), it was his denial of the very notion of a mainstream that set him apart from other critics. From Greenberg he got the idea of continuity with the past; unlike Greenberg and his successors, Tillim couldn't, wouldn't believe that only one thing--modernist art--continued the great art of the past. As he put it, "[E]xaggeration of belief in one aspect of art" had produced a situation where "extremism had become a form of sentimentality." Sketching the historical continuities of art issuing from the collapse of academic painting in the nineteenth century, he located those histories in many places: photography, figuration, illustration, abstraction, Earth art, ceramics, and design.