Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette recently asked if it’s fair to give an audience something it hasn’t shown any signs of wanting:
Many of us who love music share a vague idea that audiences should be open to new things, and that they should be convinced to give them a try. But is this true? I’ve observed before that classical music, particularly opera companies and orchestras, are unusual in that they repeatedly try to force things on its audience that its audience doesn’t necessarily want. Someone who comes to the movie theater to see “Avatar” is not necessarily going to be thrilled if I show him “Pan’s Labyrinth” instead, even if I’m convinced that he would really love it if only he would watch it. And yet this is what’s going on in classical music, all the time: audiences are being asked to pay lots of money in order to be taken out of their comfort zone.
(more)
I thought of Midgette while looking at Isabelle
Pauwels‘ exhibit at the Henry Gallery titled, Incredibly, unbelievably/The complete ordered field. There is so little pleasure to be had from its stuttering films, dry photographs and fragmentary collages, the idea must be that viewing them is good for the audience.
I also thought of David Pagel’s review of Diana Thater in the L.A. Times:
Making a movie about movie magic is not the same as
making some of that magic. At the Santa Monica Museum of Art, “Diana
Thater: Between Science and Magic” goes so far out of its way to
extinguish the magic that you can’t help but wonder why movie magic was
brought up in the first place.The answer is that Thater’s brand of art is opposed to all forms of
entertainment, which it sets itself apart from. (more)
I don’t think the review is one of Pagel’s best. Instead of being specific to Thater’s work, it’s a generalized complaint about art that appears to disdain anything that could be called entertainment. At Pauwels’ show, however, I could see Pagel’s point. Pauwels is Exhibit A in audience neglect. The onus is on the viewer to prove worthy of the artist’s ragtag moments.
Should pleasing an audience be an artist’s responsibility? Artists who worry about how their studio work will strike others don’t get anything done. They repeat their greatest hits, if they have any. They temporize and shilly-shally. They lose their nerve and doubt their understanding of their own visual thread.
On the other hand, Pagel’s problem with Thater and mine with Pauwels is the suspicion that the artist has confused the didactic with the challenging.
And yet, there is something there. I’m going to take a fresh look with none of the above on my mind. After that, review will follow.
Anne Midgette’s view represents the attitude that smothers serious music. It’s the opposite of know-nothing–know-everything. We already know what the pinnacle of achievement is in the form, now give it to us, perpetually. It’s the kind of stultification that gradually strangled ballet, the opera, and then moved on to jazz, and then to rock, then hip-hop. Fortunately, art has not yet become subject to the know-everything curse, though painting has.
It’s not about giving the audience something they don’t want. It’s about giving the audience something they didn’t know they wanted till you gave it to them.
Hi Eric. First, Anne Midgette is not an advocate for the same-old. The opposite, in fact, which is why her post stuck with me. Second, as you know, the interaction between presenter and audience is subtler than you suggest. Audiences select what their experience leads them to conclude they’ll like. The people who make a beeline for 19th-century American painting at the Seattle Art Museum, looking neither to the right or the left, aren’t likely to give you at Western Bridge the chance to surprise them. I appreciate Midgette because she’s willing to consider a range of possibilities instead of focusing solely on the one her taste and inclination might dictate. Third, good god man. Not still going on about painting is dead, are you? You, in Seattle, where MIchael Darling gave us “Target Practice?” Regina
Maybe because I love paying “lots of money in order to be taken out of [my] comfort zone,” I can’t grasp Ms. Midgette’s argument, which seems to set her notion of audience taste as the arbiter of what orchestras should program. My position is tasteless by comparison.
Re Painting, it’s key to include the dates in the title of Michael’s excellent show: “Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949-78”. I wouldn’t say the generation that followed carried those torches anywhere interesting. Painting is, I like to say, a really important historical art form.
Eric. It’s a question of trust.You don’t love paying lots of money to see something when you have no belief that the presenters can achieve a base level of visual intelligence. I trust Western Bridge. When its exhibits are out of my comfort zone, I’ll willing to give them more than a chance. I study before I reject, and study them some more. I can think of many galleries I don’t trust and am not likely to go to unless I know in advance there is an artist I like showing there. No trust, no benefit of the doubt. Your comments suggest your are blind to contemporary painting, but that’s an issue for another day. Fondly, Regina
‘To say that painting is dead, in the faintly apocalyptic cadences of deconstruction, is not so much to contest modernism as to accept its progressive and developmental narrative, and to say in effect that since that narrative is over with, there is nothing for painting to be-as if, unless it fell under the narrative, it could not really exist.’–Arthur Danto
In this era without a name we live in, free of modernism, or any ism at all for at least a generation, artists have the unprecedented freedom to make art in anyway shape or form we choose to make it. The result of that freedom means that painting is every bit as legit a path as anything else, unless the goal is to be fashionable, which is the replacement part for the avant-garde in our era.
After 1978, and probably well before then, there was no longer a dominant narrative in art. The ending of Modernism and a Greenbergian view of eliminating things as irrelevant because they didn’t fit into that narrative swept painting almost immediately back into the discussion (neo-expressionism, neo geo, etc.).
It kind of makes me think I should really take up painting.
I think we’re confusing the medium with the message. Regina as she tends to do now and again is mistaking the surface and look of things with the art of those things. Eric F was right in stating that painting has “become subject to the know-everything curse” and I believe that was a BIG reason Michael Darling presented Target practice in the first place. But the thing that needs to be clarified in that statement is that we’re talking about painting as subject — the medium as a source of inquiry itself. Art made to today that happens to be made of paint is quite a bit different than art made today ABOUT painting itself which is sort of at a dead-end (if I’m reading Darling’s exhibition and Eric F. correctly). This certainly doesn’t invalidate the former as I’m sure Eric would agree and his exhibitions that happen to include art that happens to be made of paint prove. There are of course some contemporary exceptions that go against Eric F’s position. Regina is right when it comes to contemporary artists still adding to the dialog about painting (although I don’t think that’s the kind of painting she’s really defending here). One quick example would be Rudolf Stingel. If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I might have pointed to Franz Ackermann. Ask me 15 years ago, etc. The point being that the stakes have been progressively lessened within the medium itself, avenues of inquiry seemingly exhausted, and the number of really interesting, dialog-expanding artists fewer and fewer within the medium. Is this kinda what you meant Eric?
Now, on to Pauwels: I think here too Regina is confusing the look and feel of the thing with the art of the thing (which she seems to not have had the patience nor proper frame of reference to discern at first blush). Perhaps this is a failing on the part of the artist or the institution for not giving everything away, right away. I think, however, it has more to do with a general lack of visual literacy within our society that is seemingly compounded by an eccentric artist working in insular ways to arcane ends (all reasons why I’m totally intrigued by Pauwels). It does give me hope though when Regina states she’ll be going back to give it another chance. But to impugn Pauwels’ art on the basis of a lack of pleasure to be found in the “stuttering” images is like dissing the art of Luc Tuymans based on his less-than-masterful brush strokes. The look and feel of Pauwels’ videos are nothing new. Although on the surface her work has everything to do with the montage strategies developed nearly 100 years ago by Eisenstein, Kuleshov and others, beneath that veneer is a quite contemporary inquiry of how images work, how they are received and how they come to mean what they do. Tough to decipher? Yes. Difficult to review? You bet. Hostile toward, or neglectful of its audience? No. F-ing. Way. Perhaps on another visit, viewers like Regina will at least be able to respond to the more universally experienced and empathy-inducing underpinnings of Pauwels’ work–shared notions and questions of history, family and memory. Even if this is only a fraction of the art of Pauwel’s art, it’s reason enough to go and easy enough to understand.
And you should, Dan…painting would be much the better for it! Painting continually survives its many deaths (well-deserved, some of them) because there really is no such thing as Painting: it’s just a lot of different people doing a lot of different things with more-or-less similar materials & formats, some of which are alive and some of which are moribund. Like everything else.
Meanwhile, Eric never said painting is dead (in his post, at least)–he said it has become subject to the know-everything curse. And I think he’s right. That’s why the best painting tends to come from those who know the least.
Hi Scott. I didn’t mention the message. Not once. Nor have I reviewed the show. Not yet. The point of my piece was to acknowledge that the surface is disheartening, and I can understand why it’s hard to get past it. I plan to do that, which I thought was clear.
Scott Lawrimore’s argument boils down to, eat your vegetables even if they stink when you cook them and lie pale on the plate.