Every year the MacArthur Awards embrace the individual efforts of the
country’s artists, scientists, economists and (still employed)
reporters, reminding them that whether they are in or out of the
mainstream, their excellence counts.
This year, three of the seven in the arts are visual: Mark Bradford for collage painting, Rackstraw Downes for oil painting, Camille Utterback for video.
That leaves Heather McHugh, who is a poet; Deborah Eisenberg, a short story writer; Edwidge Danticat, a novelist; and James Longley, a documentary filmmaker.
I can’t speak to awards in anything but the arts, aside from saying
that mathematician L. Mahadevan enthralled me in his interview on NPR. In the arts, however, there are no dancers, choreographers, musicians; nobody working in the recently reinvigorated public art realm.
With the exception of McHugh, there’s nobody fusing forms to produce hyrid realities, and nobody whose efforts shape the moment and suggest the future. McHugh is the Attila the Hun of poetry. She sweeps down from the hills to claim all lowlands for verse. She claims all speech, turning it into a wisecracking sound stream, both precise and wide open.
Aside from her, the list has an elegaic feel. Eisenberg’s stories are exquisite minuets. Danticat is a 21-century Proust, animating her past. Longley’s films have a magisterial detachment, as if they cover not the Iraq War but the Trojan one. I love Downes’ paintings. If I were on the committee, I might easily pick him, but again, his work looks backward.
The two remaining artists are mistakes. Bradford might still make a major contribution, but he’s not there yet. What does he offer that Kurt Schwitters didn’t long ago? Utterback has larger problems. Her work is labored and gee-whiz, look-at-my-special-effects.
From her Web site, describing Come to Pieces from 2001:
Imagine seeing yourself from four different angles at once.
Picasso imagined that in 1907, far more powerfully. If I want to see myself from different angles in real time, I try on clothes in a dressing room.
You’d pick Rackstraw Downes? Really?
Rackstraw Downes is a surprise. Solid work, though given his age and provenance, I don’t see how a MacArthur is going to help continue his landscapist productions.
There is a great photo in one of his catalogs of him and fellow classmates, Richard Serra and Chuck Close. This feels more like a lifetime achievement award for someone who decided to stay in academia.
Well, no. But I wouldn’t oppose it. If I were going to pick one painter for a genius award, it would be Susan Rothenberg.
It was always my impression that the MacArthur awards were not for past work done, but to encourage the development of new work by promising artists. In that respect the masters of their field should not be chosen, but rather the most promising apprentices, if you will.
Those who have made it don’t need financial and public accolades. Those who are laboring quietly to evolve their crafts and have shown great promise, do.
“…nobody working in the recently reinvigorated public art realm.”
Utterback does work in the public realm – all be it they are temporary (my preferred use of situating art in public spaces). You can take a look here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/26468628@N00/1460653854/
Without speaking to all aspects of her deservingness or lack thereof, I think you are a bit unfair to Deborah Eisenberg here, given that all of her collections since her first have a good deal more passion, especially politically, than “exquisite minuets” suggests.