OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

[Charles Bernstein responds to recent discussions about his review "Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?" in last winter's Parkett. --SS]

Suzanne Stein has asked me to make some comments on two posts on Open Space, one by Kevin Killian and then Julian Myers’s response (to which several responses were subsequently posted). Both Killian (whom I know for many years) and Myers (whose name is new to me) focused at least in part on a review I wrote for Parkett magazine of Lytle Shaw’s Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, titled “Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?“. I wrote my review of Shaw’s book in December 2008 and it was published by Parkett this past winter.

In his post, Killian gently chides me for not giving the original source of my ironic title, which I guess I took for granted. But the sentiment has become a kind of received wisdom, removed from the specifics of Brion Gysin’s original remark:

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters’ techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint . . . lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be “the very own words” of anyone else living or dead. You’ll soon see that words don’t belong to anyone. Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody else can make them gush into action.

Killian and I would both be sympathetic to Gysin’s point—and indeed my “experiments list” (based in part on Bernadette Mayer’s) is deeply indebted to Gysin. Gysin was arguing for a poetry that challenged the conventional norms of “official verse culture”—that would use cut-ups, visual display, parataxis, and appropriated language to create a new kind of poetry. (See William Burroughs/Brion Gysin, The Third Mind.) But it was never true that the actual practice of poetry was ahead or behind the visual arts. Gertrude Stein may get less respect in the mainstream than Pablo Picasso, but the one is neither ahead nor behind the other. Frank O’Hara is as significant in his poetry as Robert Rauschenberg in his art, to take an example from my review. And poetry has one advantage in the postwar period: its publication and criticism is not dominated by market values. (Of course, for the poète chétif this is hardly an advantage at all.) Certainly, naïve conceptions of representations, narrative continuity, and expression (what I once called “ideational mimesis”) have great credibility in official verse culture, but no more so than in the stylistically strait-jacketed critical writing (and enforced copyediting) of the major art magazines. (As I’ve said before: I don’t blame the writers but the market-driven focus of the editors/publishers.) (more…)

Following on Kevin’s post, I have to ask: Just what is Charles Bernstein going on about in that Parkett article (“Is Art Criticism Fifty Years Behind Poetry?”)?

Published earlier this year, his essay responds to the dismissal of Frank O’Hara’s art criticism by Clement Greenberg, and damns by association a “monological and hyperprofessional rigidity that descends from Clement Greenberg (who dismissed O’Hara’s art writing) to Michael Fried and… extends to the October brand, the epitome of, let’s just say, High Orthodoxical art criticism.” Let’s just say. One wonders at the belatedness of Bernstein’s response – and at the fact that the debate has long moved on without him. Greenberg died in 1994, and Fried has focused on art history – and pointedly not criticism – for nearly four decades. (Recent work on Douglas Gordon, Luc Delahaye and others may mark yet another shift for the writer.)

In the meantime, and perhaps ironically, considering Bernstein’s title, Fried’s also been busy writing and publishing books of poetry:  The Next Bend In The Road (University of Chicago 2004), To The Center of the Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), and Powers (London: The Review, 1973). (A recording of him reading at Johns Hopkins is here.)

I’ll leave it to others to judge Fried’s poetry, and whether it is fifty years ahead or behind his writing on art. I can say more about Bernstein’s picture of art criticism. I barely recognize it. I wonder if Bernstein could point to a single art critic under fifty for whom Greenberg is a positive model – or to any review in the last decade that would serve as an example of the  dominant “High Orthodoxical art criticism” against which he aims to do battle. October themselves held a colloquy to mourn the end of art criticism in the hallowed manner seven years ago (George Baker, “Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism“, October 100, Spring 2002, 200-228). And there have been multiple publications and articles debating this subject recently – James Elkins frequently visits the subject, for example. None of these discussions appear to be on Bernstein’s radar.

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