Contra

Draft reflections on a first visit to an ancient city


Contra

Athens is a city of contradictions. It is at once threatening and friendly, ancient and thoroughly modern, beautiful and crumbling, the monuments impeccably kempt, and yet the streets strewn with litter, grime and starving – or dead – dogs and cats. There is a sense, today, of both a strutting confidence in its history, yet at the same time a fragility brought about by extreme financial crisis and uncertain relations with neighbours near and not-so-near; Turkey, Cyprus, and now Israel (due to the storming by Israeli marines of a Greek-flagged ship taking aid to Palestinian camps) and the rest of Europe, who seem ambivalent about helping Greece out of the financial crevace upon which it finds itself precariously perched.

The Parthenon looks down upon the new Athens like a sandstone metaphor, propped and suspended by steel rope and girders, very gradually crumbling under the weight of time and the keen feet of the tourists whose Euro are now, more than ever, so essential to the city’s economy.

The archaeological endeavour – which was finally done justice by the improvements made to its presentation prior to the 2004 Olympic Games – has uncovered the most astounding historical sites in the Western world. The technologies of the aquaduct and the drains, along with the complex and precedential social and political structures revealed by the material structures only confirm the school-learned characterisation of the ‘cradle of civilisation’.

However, the tourist experience of Athens is also one of contradiction, as the museumified experience can only render the Acropolis, the Agora, their fabrications and sculptures, pure third order simulacra. They are all simply copies of the images of television, guidebooks and cinema represeatations of “Ancient Greece”, signs which signify the equally short-circuited and now seemingly empty notion of ‘democracy’.

Reading the Surface

Abstract for a paper presented at the 1st International Conference of Fine & Performing Arts, Athens Institute of Education and Research, Athens.


Reading the Surface: The Subjective Voice in the Criticism of Stuart Morgan

Abstract

In his lecture ‘Homage to the Half Truth’, the critic Stuart Morgan argued the case for an art criticism that, although adhering to certain historical precedents with regard to objectivity, also allows for the creativity of the critic as writer (as subject and expert) to supplement and add perspective to the critical task of interpretation. Although this position would seem to go against a century of critical theory and debate, it could be argued that Morgan’s position is compatible with Clement Greenberg, in that criticism should be, above all, interesting. Morgan’s less objective position generates writing which retains a relevance to the culture within which the work’s meanings are exchanged, responding to – and celebrating – the surface as the site of manifest meaning(s), and the catalyst for the critic’s own ‘capacity for intuition, sympathy and imagination’.

This paper addresses Morgan’s criticism as an approach which offers a greater latitude to criticism in the face of the unavoidable problem of subjectivity within the present context of radical relativism.
Writers have now struggled for decades to find a way to provide a model for criticism that possesses an authority that leaves the reader in no doubt as to the (singular) meaning and value of the object. Perhaps it is now the writer who (at least, partially) disregards the battle for objectivity in preference of the celebration of the aesthetic or performative nature of the written word in relation to (the surface of) the contemporary art object, who brings a relevant and valuable perspective to criticism.


(c) 2010 James A. Brown

Telling Stories

The following is a piece which accompanied an exhibition of work by lecturers at Plymouth College of Art, in which each artist exhibited a current piece, and a piece produced either when a student, or early in their creative career.


Telling Stories

We must all be critics as we stand before the work, for to encounter is to interpret and to judge. Greenberg stated that ‘it is the first responsibility of the critic to make judgments of value’, and Lawrence Alloway expanded on this, claiming that the task of the critic is the ‘interpretation and evaluation of new, or at least recent, art’.

In describing Diderot’s reviews of the Salons, Alloway states ‘it is clear that his working method was to… react to the works with a mind well stocked with prior ideas, some of them habitual, some of them fresh’. This was the early model for criticism, but should also be our model for experiencing and thinking about our experiences of art.

In a sense, Diderot was describing his personal response to art, but it was a response informed by an absolute affinity to art’s past. Subsequently, the Modernist critics followed in his wake – Greenberg, Rosenberg, Fuller et al. Although they would claim an absence of any subjectivity from their interpretations and judgments.

In his 1991 lecture, ‘Homage to the Half-Truth’, Stuart Morgan argues the case for a model for criticism which returns to Diderot’s ‘walking-thinking-writing’. The work, he suggests, reveals only part of the story – the task of the critic is to tell the rest. But wherein does the story reside? In the work, or in the fallacic intention of the artist? Perhaps we need only look into the space between the artist, the work and ourselves.

The subjective response remains, and this time in relation to the critic’s own story, as well as to his understanding of the histories and traditions within which the artist is located and/or locates him/herself. This model suggests the opposite of Bell’s entreaty to “leave all knowledge of the outside world” at the doors of the gallery. Morgan’s repost seems to be that the only answer is to bring everything of ourselves to the work.

The works in the current exhibition seem to speak of Morgan’s more creative model, as we are presented with the artists’ earliest and most recent works – the “once upon a time…” and the “…happily ever after”. Between these poles lay the mystery of meaning. As critic, surely my role is to fill you in, provide the rest of the story, and to make it a good one.

I know these artists, and their work, and I have spoken to them at length about their practices, their motivations and their lives, so I would seem to be in a privileged position with regards to meaning, if we were to apply the older models. The stories their work reveals, then, lie somewhere between the private (theirs and mine) and the public (yours). The stories speak of lives spent making, but also, of a life spent looking.

(c) 2009 James A. Brown