Charles Lewis Art - California

The Coming Crisis in Art Criticism

Note: We are honored to re-publish this important article by Dr. Duphus-Jones, which was copied in its entirety and without permission from the website, ArtCrit2050.com. Dr. Duphus-Jones is professor emeritus of Art History at Aioleation College, England. He is past chairman of the Council on Aesthetic Non-Conformity and the author of over 100 critical articles on modern and prehistoric art.

The Coming Crisis in Art Criticism

By Nimrod Duphus-Jones, Ph.D.

There is today a profound schism in art criticism – it centers on which of two primary viewpoints the critic takes when appraising a work of art (however defined) for the public. Some critics believe that the rise of relational aesthetics deemphasizes the viewer's disembeddedness from the increasingly centralized art world. I call this camp the ‘relational aesthetics’ group. The opposite camp thinks that the primacy of secondary over primary information eliminates internal relationships and knits the spheres of artistic production together with institutional opposition to communicational mandates. I call this group the ‘anti- relational aesthetics’ group.

            However, both sides approximately agree that the current climate of assertive criticism should describe and represent, but ultimately resist the creep of subjectivity. The agreed-upon reasoning is that subjectivity creates an intellectual seepage between the real and imagined, a place where representation itself is a defiant act of expression, identification and subjectivity. This absurd confection of approximation can be imagined as a porous membrane that profanes any collision of possible interpretations existing both within and outside of a future unknown vulnerability. Success can only be gauged by how deeply the viewer (and critic) gets a sense of the artist’s – one might almost say psychic  medium’s - explorations of the pre-linguistic addendum, or coda. In other words, stare at the aesthetic void long enough and you will question the very idea of progress, the blind alley limiting the aesthetic manifestations of nothingness that comes after ideologies fall to the devastating power of historical erasure.

An example of the first group’s position could be potentially paraphrased as stating:

1) Even when a work of art seems breathtakingly and consistently crystalline, the critic continues accumulating, emphasizing, analogizing and allegorizing a cluster of fragments from a fast-moving combination of mesmeric sincerity and impersonal conceptualism. At the same time, any kind of totalizing thorough mythologizing and aestheticizing is without apparent significance, which makes it appear significant.      

            Repetition is never merely repeating dumb reiterations in terms of formalized engagements with time; it is a surplus of the real, iterable and reiterated, in which any interpretation seems appropriate. When faced with an excess of the symbolic, an aesthete's refutation of fungibility is presumptively non-narrative, even when expressed through a variety of complementary progressive movements. The bottom line problem a priori deploys a variety of contradictory rhetorical moves, made up of infinite points until the terminal realism can be seen as a failure to synthesize its external manifestations.

2) When the critic’s view is unrelentingly logical, epistemological and elliptical, he or she runs the risk of appearing flagrantly postmodern, even parataxical. For instance, when representation is broken down into other signifiers, relational processes are extinguished. The critic finds himself entirely inactive, inert, and indifferent, full of impulses and machinations only indirectly related to the allegorical product. A culture worker's mooted word, in the middle of an immutable structural concept, excludes the exegesis of reproduction. So when critics confuse the permutational numeric signifier of intentionally synthesized and synthetic Sisyphean attachments to meaning-making, they are likely to default to their preferred method for demonstrating metaphysics while simultaneously confessing a desire to witness their own symbolic castration.

3) If one finds oneself succumbing to the mindless position in which temporality equals narrativity, rather than ciphering and significance, you can find comfort in knowing that this de trop is nothing more than detritus that eludes direct comprehension. It is accepted as dogma that any object of aesthetic contemplation represents conflicting states of the same matter. The very problem of the sublime as de-individualized knowledge lacks any objective existence perceptible via scientific systems, much as a mirror interrupts the real while always being itself.

4) Is the real sublime? What is real? What is sublime? Is a surface of unimaginable depth sublime? Is dumb materiality real? The discerning art viewer simply bridges these constructs and their respective moments, which so many critics and theorists have puzzled over, by ignoring authoritarian structures and their controversial relativism. The functional fact of form registers a surplus of too-muchness and provokes the limits of what we can know; knowledge itself is the task which the spirit accomplishes, while tweaking its significance in no perceptible order.

5) Even a small slice of isolated graphic evidence can convey a work’s physicality, its psychicality, and its metaphysicality in terms of the organic form, which is a codex of sorts, manifestly written, rewritten, and unwritten. But confusing indeterminate life with actual concrete life can reveal a rare expository moment that explodes the materiality of time and history. The experience is, of course, by necessity somewhat linear, but also circular in its interpretation, defined by theology and philosophy, moving continuously from thing to thing-ness, to un-thing-ness and back again. You can see, then, that a work of art is not dialectical in any way, but really an effusively obliging social sculptural network whose components include underspecified and inadequate frameworks ushered in by the reign of the secondary, the tertiary, and so on.

6) Only the purest institutional context can calibrate the myriad styles, methods, and aesthetic tendencies, much like a spotlight amplifies a crime scene. When an alien context goes too far, rupturing and complicating the disorientation and distance, it leads to a wholly subjective realm of signification lodged uncomfortably between perceived popular taste and the quasi-mirroring demands of mass culture. So even when works are coolly compelling and thought-kindling, one might almost expect an alternative public pedagogy to form from the many interlocking spaces of observation.

The second group might state its primary aesthetic positions as follows:

1) Whatever is continuously real to the artist merely foreshadows the deceptively bureaucratic historical continuum. In this new context the burden of thoughtful consumption creates new transhistorical connections blasted out of domesticated objects that let the viewer mentally reassemble ideas as reenactments when it has barely begun.

2) An accurate idio-dialectic can only be one in which the signifying monkey is made of jewels and junk. However, the onticological fluidity of the symbolic order could turn into a place where mirrors face, where we are confronted by the pitiless fact of our ongoing goings-on. Only in this way can we observe repetition in temporality, an ephemeral, fluid state in which we reincorporate information internally in the most rudimentary way. For example, a concept can either be or not be when the dynamic is qualitative. However, if the thing is too big for our understanding, its appropriation of authority imagery strives for symbols, symbolic of nothing but the process of symbolism itself. Even between the perceiver and the thing perceived, what we know versus what we experience is a neat exegesis signifying a transition of subject as object that was originally empty but for a few, scattered but mesmerizing renderings signifying a site for contemplation.

3) When a work of art elicits reflections on the historical experience, the sensory stimuli emitted by the artistic apparatus encourages a kinesthetic interaction with time-based projections. What one critic labeled “spectatorial agency,” could also be seen by the ordinary viewer as the designated recipient for cognitive dialogue, whose interactivity with a centric, albeit mobile subject is a perfect metaphor for the act of consumption.

            But over-managing the reconstruction dilates the experience on many levels and still misses the point; the more opaque the surface, the more additional modifiers are applied unless specific execution instructions are provided. After all, if a work is deemed conceptual, it can be reconstructed, even in an environment or alignment beyond borders and truth-based assertions. Generally speaking, every acknowledgement of the reconstruction generates issues of monumental depth, where the results emphatically privatize the space where historical markers exist as variables on a different frequency.

4) For centuries, there was usually a domain, phenomenological and artistic, that could be reconstructed without the presence or acquiescence of the artist. Today, however, even the simplest art concept encourages deeper consideration of its utility by treating all documentation as a loosely metaphorical window to the history that has occurred before and after purely architectural commentary.

            But when temporal reference points challenge identity gaps of mid-twentieth century power structures, we must ensure that all diegetic timeframes editorialize the proceedings for today's spectator. By immersing the viewer deeply within frontal-lobe compositions that are simultaneously fracturing, reframing, and staging evidentiary fragments of media-conscious visual trash, the viewer’s ambiguity is forced into fixating on the work.

5) Both past and present are calibrated to transport us back into the mediated image archive to test the durability of critical positions that nurture many kinds of escapism. These industrial-strength positions compete with one another for dominance of form as represented by the extraordinary flood of image content that documents our ongoing human trauma. Even when the self-conscious deployment of open-ended media is dutifully observant of facts, the reverse-shot interplay disrupts our access to the empirical by unveiling incontrovertible facts that leave zero wiggle room.

            This does not mean ambivalence goes away, but is a kind of spatial history that is all the more curious when referring to plausible but irrelevant changes in art’s basic visual discontinuity. When the visual world contradicts the didactic moment, there is inevitably a sorting out of the proportionally more expansive direct engagement with the observer. But should the work in question became a pseudo-substrate for radically new information, with or without a physical correction, there is a tangible learning opportunity in this elementary contradiction. When a reconstruction is attempted as a learning aid, it is just not the same.

So the key question for a ‘consumer’ (read: reader) of art criticism, is, do art critics even deserve our attention? Don’t they leave us gawking? Not when their ideology is based on the attainment of perverse pleasure found in the explicit representations of their "victim's’’ passion as it reverberates against the inertia of telegraphic intertitles. Another perspective finds mischief in critics’ shirking the burden of factual fidelity; the transhistorical task might yield too much pleasure, even though devoid of abject images pointing to the yawning chasm.

            Within art history generally, and art criticism particularly, the easily exposed and underlying contention merely traffics in verbal abstractions, whereas the terms of production are seldom activated more explicitly than when they aesthetically correspond to the criteria for engagement. But when the temporality of the display outweighs issues in variance, minute aspects become crucial. This is a key aspect of the problem of individuality, even originality – when every work is an example unto itself. When magic and its ramifications rationalize the particular incongruous reconstruction whose evasion was a contingency, we are left confronting the remaining physical spaces as catalyst. They are all the more exhilarating and impressionable in having been left to be directly observant of a past traumatic episode. Such a strategy is not derivative in that it invites an engagement with something based on its reactivation by assumption. Even in cases where the artist has excluded the viewer from a work’s internal arrangement, there is a meta-signification that suggests a permeability in the more established terms of signification.

            Unfortunately, on both sides of the philosophical divide, there simply is no room for the deviations unleashed by sheer affect, especially when faced with a panopticon of recorded performances retrieved through indexical stagings and fictional renderings. With sufficient attentiveness to the interpretive possibilities found in performative delivery mechanisms, even a static, two-dimensional artwork like a painting has the ultimate potential to facilitate the communicability of self-conscious abandoned spaces.  Indeed, every discontinuity in technical format accentuates the aesthetic chain of command that resists futurisms.

            Perhaps the best we can expect from these old war horses is to find a cathartic space for understanding the futility of remembrance. They can meditate on cyclical analogues that might at first appear to fall under moral responsibility, but simply letting their refined powers of observation take over lets us see the underlying discrete spatiotemporal construct of inactive spectatorship. Where there is an intentionally oblique rendering of the post-traumatic dialogue between artist and spectator, the communicative potential can be effectively represented as a haunting point of departure for casual participants who find themselves becoming accomplices in a mercilessly authoritarian critical theater.

            And what about the artist in this situation? Well, the confident artist exhibits no concern with complacent viewing experiences, since they are but the reminders of historical retrieval that are neither contrived nor aleatory. By accentuating the creative aspect of process and effect, as generated by the gaps in content and medium, a multi-temporal construction potentially gives rise to a vast realm of transcultural possibilities that share the anxiety of the unremembered.