Art critics in a confessional mode

Here’s a review by Jen Graves that makes a fetish out of burying the lead:

My mother and father didn’t work out; my mother
remarried during a blizzard at the Old First Church in Bennington,
Vermont, where Robert Frost is buried. This place, which around this
time of year will smack you silly with beauty, is less than an hour
from our house in small-town upstate New York, and on the way is a
museum we’d often stop at, the Bennington Museum. That museum has just
one claim to fame: its unparalleled collection of paintings by Grandma
Moses. The headline of her obituary in 1961 in the New York Times read,
“Grandma Moses Is Dead at 101; Primitive Artist ‘Just Wore Out,'” and
the obituary contained the remarkable line “Grandma Moses did all of
her painting from remembrance of things past.”

The above paragraph is not a wandering path to a Grandma Moses review. The alleged subject has nothing to do with
her. And yet, there’s more:

Grandma Moses may be the
first recognized painter whose paintings I ever saw. Her story is like
my mother’s. She lived on a farm. She started painting at the age of 76
because she couldn’t stand the thought, as the Times put it, of being
idle. My mother does not paint, but now in her 60s, she is on her
second career, which is more strenuous than her first.

Still more:

Despite
all those visits to the museum, I do not recall any single painting by
Grandma Moses, but that’s not really how Grandma Moses paintings work.
You remember them in aggregate–their belief in warmth despite snow,
their belief in the delight of brightly colored sweaters, their belief
in the togetherness of tiny amiable sticklike people (she squeezed them
in last, working her compositions downward from the sky) who, as again
the Times pointed out (it really is quite an elegy for being so
offhandedly journalistic), “cast no shadows.” You remember them for
their belief, period. “You have no idea how much you can handle until
it happens,” my mother always says, promising the strength of the
American character whatever might come. Conviction is the core of
folklore, not style. Folk art is not just a matter of untrained marks,
but of untrained marks imbued with an unwavering but not entirely
plausible sense of their own worth against the odds.

Once the review
clears the hurtle of its preamble, it’s terrific. There are slender
metaphoric threads connecting the body of the text to the heavy weight of its
opening, but why must the text carry this burden? Lucy Lippard used to do
this in the 1970s.  It went out of style, but it’s back. Graves, who appears to be still upset by the breakup of her parents’ marriage,
has saddled herself with its practice.

Reviewing the same show for Glasstire,
Laura Lark also took time to tell us about herself. Lark’s lead works
(unlike Graves’) because her confidences serve as welcome mat to the
subject she will in time get around to: The Old Weird America, now at the Frye Museum, its last stop.

A few years back a heavy package arrived at my door, addressed to my
then-husband. Inside was a bronze statue of a realistically rendered
cowboy riding a bucking bronco. Perfectly hideous. Think George H. W. Bush statue at Houston Intercontinental Airport. Who would send us such a thing?

I used it as a centerpiece for dinner parties. It got a lot of laughs. After the joke wore thin, I used it as a doorstop.

We later discovered that the statue had been intended for a
wealthy and powerful member of the UT Longhorns alumni association who
had the same name as my ex-husband. The man sent a special courier to
pick it up and was none too pleased when I refused to re-package it.

Months later, my husband came home with an issue of Time
magazine, opened to a picture of George W. in the Oval Office. In it,
Bush grinned and shook hands with folks in his good ol’ boy fashion.
Behind him, on a shelf, was either the statue — our statue — or a
replica by the same artist.

No doubt Bush viewed the statue as a symbol of American
ruggedness and independence — something he desperately wants to be
identified with. I viewed that little slice of Americana as pure
kitsch.


The Old, Weird America, currently on view in the main
gallery at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston and organized by CAMH
senior curator Toby Kamps, tells a more nuanced story.

Even though Lark
sold me this time out, critics who think the audience needs to be
chatted up before it will tolerate the rigors of a review are mistaken.
Better to aim for the rarities of rigor and momentum, and let
the review carry itself.

Graves doesn’t agree, and why should she? She’s pitching in a different game. While my sort of critic wants to disappear into the art, she wants the art to disappear into her. A less biased way to say the same thing might be, she wants art to be metaphorically illuminated by her personal story. Her risks are grandiosity and self-absorption, but the nearly-impossible-to-achieve payoffs are essays that transcend their genre, in which a critic becomes an artist. I think she’s good enough to get there. Surely it’s brave to try. I’d rather lose a digit.