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Complexity and Tidy Packages
One can appreciate the complexity of a notion and work within that complexity, or one can try to simplify it to fit into a tidy package. Both ways have their merits but, usually, only the former advances the notion in ways that can be called something other than trivial. Why then pursue the “tidy package"? There are many motivations but I think most of them focus on the immediacy of certain rewards: tidy packages are portable, allowing application in a wide variety of situations; they usually don’t require intense engagement; and they are frequently all that is required to advance socially and professionally (not only do tidy packages foster advances because they are sufficient to quench most people’s thirst for knowledge and truth, but also because deeper engagements are usually not welcomed).
A while back I was at a gallery with a well-known collector who considers himself quite sharp. He stopped in front of one of Sol LeWitt’s numbered pictograms. He leaned into the work. He squinted and tightened his lips, as if he was in thought. After a while he turned to me with something like insight in his eyes, and he spoke of the mathematical and conceptual power of the sets of numbers arranged in boxes. I told him I didn’t see it and he looked at me with contempt. What serious mathematics could there be in those drawings, really? I don’t know anyone, other than “art people,” who goes to LeWitt’s work in order to get structural or mathematical insight. It is math-lite, in the same way that some art works are politics-lite and and so on.
Remarkably (remarkably considering what one sees and reads) few people would admit to be interested in tidy packages.
A while back I was at a gallery with a well-known collector who considers himself quite sharp. He stopped in front of one of Sol LeWitt’s numbered pictograms. He leaned into the work. He squinted and tightened his lips, as if he was in thought. After a while he turned to me with something like insight in his eyes, and he spoke of the mathematical and conceptual power of the sets of numbers arranged in boxes. I told him I didn’t see it and he looked at me with contempt. What serious mathematics could there be in those drawings, really? I don’t know anyone, other than “art people,” who goes to LeWitt’s work in order to get structural or mathematical insight. It is math-lite, in the same way that some art works are politics-lite and and so on.
Remarkably (remarkably considering what one sees and reads) few people would admit to be interested in tidy packages.
Labels: Caution
posted by EMC at
10:43 AM
1 Comments:
EMC, i see the seduction for 'tidy packages' in two areas in which i spend considerable time: museum education and art criticism. museum educators are constantly striving to 'simplify' art, to take its 'sting out,' to boil it down to the particularities of an artist's biography or some 'philosophy' that is supposed to explain the work of art. i remember a well-known curator saying that the worst thing about museum wall labels is that people actually read them. and i couldn't agree more. in the effort to make art 'fun' and 'enjoyable' for sixth grade tour groups, art gets domesticated, becomes part of a city's 'chamber of commerce' aesthetic. artistic practice, then, plays to that audience; produces work that is 'detectable' in this way.
now, the art critics would sniff at the museum educators convinced that their opaque, jargon-filled language 'defamiliarizes' art, makes it incapable of being 'enjoyed' by a sixth grader, as a form of the 'critical' resistance. but what occurs is that this sixth grader is merely replaced by the grad student. what ends up happening, is that as they pursue their critical projects (usually as endowed chairs in academia), they end up, despite themselves, wrapping them up in tidy packages--no doubt more complex than the museum educators', but a tidy package nonetheless. this is the legacy of clement greenberg, who produced his own tidy little package, 'art and culture,' which he then spent the next thirty years handing out. it's the tenure-track aesthetic and poetics, which infects both artistic and critical practice.
the challenge, i suppose, for both the museum educator and the art critic is the same: engage the work of art without 'explaining it.' explore its nuances without smoothing them over.
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