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Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993. - book reviews

Art Journal, Fall, 1996 by Tom McDonough

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 377 pp.; 8 color ills., 30 b/w. $80.00; $29.95 paper

Art issues. (a magazine published in Los Angeles by Gary Kornblau's Foundation for Advanced Critical Studies) has over the past few years made a valuable attempt to expand the critical purview of American art production beyond New York. Since 1993 the magazine has also published books on art and aesthetics by West Coast writers in a further bid to draw attention to this region's culture, but with varying success.

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The most recent and ambitious of these volumes is Last Chance for Eden, an anthology of Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight's weekly art columns. Normally this sort of thing is a vanity publication, but at 420 pages this book clearly purports to be a more substantial statement. Unfortunately, the collection holds together more as an exhaustive sampling of what this critic has seen in fifteen years than as the statement of a coherent theme.

The problem may lie as much in Knight's geographic location as in his own shortcomings as a critic. Even a mediocre critic in New York is witness to art history in the making, while one in Los Angeles sees only a random sampling of what happens to pass through (museum shows on tour, various New York and European artists with already-established reputations). When it comes to the more promising area of local talent, as in several essays on such West Coast artists as Mike Kelley (pp. 95-103) or Edward Ruscha (pp. 184-92), Knight conveys very little sense of a distinctive regional culture. Finally, any continuity or development in critical perspective over these fifteen years remains impossible to judge because of the inexplicable organization of the book, with reviews of artists arranged alphabetically by last name in one section and thematic articles arranged chronologically in the next.

An earlier publication from Art Issues Press, Dave Hickey's Invisible Dragon, takes the more effective form of four essays on a related theme. This format has the virtue of forcing the author (a 1994 recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewitt Mather Award for distinction in art criticism) to make a consistent point. Here Hickey's argument is about beauty. He sees art's ability to communicate with the beholder as lying in its quality as a beautiful, empathetic object--a not uninteresting idea in itself. After a generation of criticism concerned with the politics of looking (originating in the mid-seventies feminist critique of male spectatorship), it certainly is time to focus on the complexities of the erotics of looking, the unique (and at times disruptive) pleasures the art object affords. Unfortunately, Hickey seems unaware of the stakes involved in making this argument. Instead of taking issue with those who would denigrate this pleasure in the name of political expediency, he spends too much of his time concocting an antimodernist diatribe. Conflating a modernist critical position with modern art as such, he sees the assertion of the picture plane as an effort to expel the beholder and as a wholesale refusal of beauty (which for him seems inherently linked to the beautiful human form).

Ultimately this antimodernism becomes a conservative's hymn to the open market. The final essay of the book is an attack on what Hickey calls "the therapeutic institution" (p. 53)--all those public museums that in his eyes seek to turn art into a social good. It is a clever idea but really little more than a paper tiger. Moreover it leads him to a remarkably ugly, ad hominem attack on the late Alfred Barr, founding director of New York's Museum of Modern Art (the very model of modernism's therapeutic institution), who is equated with Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, for wishing to subsume art's rhetorical power to his rigid control (pp. 54-55). This shameful passage is in shockingly bad taste, marring a book that--even if not entirely convincing--argues for a fundamental shift in our approach to works of art.

From the other side of the United States, the artist-critic Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has published Beyond Piety, a new collection of critical essays on art, fashion, and architecture. Despite being a mainstay of the New York critical establishment, several of Gilbert-Rolfe's essays remind the reader that he is also an instructor at the Art Center in Pasadena, California. His pieces on Robert Irwin in the 1960s (pp. 115-27), on John Baldessari (pp. 238-48), or on a Los Angeles bar designed by Frank Gehry (pp. 249-51) are superb essays on the conditions of contemporary art production in Southern California. All of his highly ambitious writing, at its best when analyzing abstract painting, is theoretically informed.

The value of this book is that Gilbert-Rolfe constructs sustained arguments with which one can then disagree, as opposed to Knight's shorter articles with their sound-bite simplifications. Beyond Piety is not, however, unflawed: at times the author wants to stake too much on relatively obscure artists (see the pieces on James Hayward, pp. 95-114; and Christian Haub, pp. 226-34) when he would do better to discuss more important figures, as in his first book of collected criticism, Immanence and Contradiction: Recent Essays on the Artistic Device. Unlike Knight's and Hickey's writings, his is often quite dry. Difficult ideas may require complex articulations, but this does not justify a syntax so convoluted and sentences so lengthy that the reader often loses the point.

Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993. - book reviews

Art Journal, Fall, 1996 by Tom McDonough

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