“The tears stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? From time to time. There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain. Past happiness in any case has clean gone from my memory, assuming it was ever there. If I accomplish other natural functions it is unawares. Nothing ever troubles me. And yet I am troubled.”—Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953/1958)
I’ve never known anyone who admits to liking the artworld, that loosely connected, open set of institutions, their patrons and cadres and enthusiasts. One historically unprecedented kind of certificate of inclusion in that world that circulates among and connects the galleries and gallerists, museums and curators, art schools and teachers, collectors and their collections, critics and publicists, is the artist’s statement, wherein the artist attempts to give her audience a glimpse of her concerns, poetics, and manner of working. Having written on contemporary art for 30 years and having taught at art schools for half of that time, I have skimmed, though certainly not read, perhaps a thousand of such documents. With the rarest of exceptions, the artist’s statement centrally exhibits two features: (1) The artist offers a diagnosis of the contemporary world (e.g. ‘We live in a media-saturated world where clicks and likes are more important than content’); (2) The artist claims that her work adopts and manifests a critical attitude that gains its content and point in relation to this diagnosis (e.g. ‘My work mimics the process of attention-grabbing in order to highlight its effects while undermining the way the media colonize consciousness so as to present an alternative vision’). The artist’s statement, then, embodies a kind of taken-for-granted model of seriousness in contemporary art: diagnosis + critical attitude. The artistic practice of the artist’s statements is a poetics of the accredited theme and appropriate attitude. One wonders whether a large part of the leaden seriousness and unrelieved tediousness of so much art produced by teachers in art schools and universities stems from the artists taking this format seriously and actually making works whose point is exhausted in illustrating their statements.
What are the alternatives to such art? Consider the painter Cate White’s recent show at the Mills College Art Museum. A few dozen works are exhibited, mostly paintings, but also drawings, sculptures, a room of videos of her podcasts, and some unclassifiable constructions. One way to gain a sense of White’s extraordinary artistic achievement is to consider how the poetics exhibited here could not be well captured in the stereotypical model of an artist’s statement. The diagnosis claims to get at something central to contemporary life, and this central characteristic is embodied in our society’s practices, institutions, and/or socially-sanctioned attitudes; and then the characteristic is submitted to critique. A different poetics would focus not on central characteristics, but would instead begin by asking questions like: What aspects of life are left out of the dominant culture? What questions are taboo, and may not be asked on pain of exclusion? A range of thinkers, including Sigmund Freud, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács, and the contemporary neo-Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre have urged that cultural systems are revealed, and criticism brought to bear more pointedly by considering the margins and beyond, and not the center.
I have been thinking about White’s show daily since first seeing it six weeks and two further viewings ago. I hope to write about it at much greater length, but for a short blog post, let’s consider it in relation to three of the central characteristics of Samuel Beckett’s poetics after World War II: (a) what Beckett called a ‘syntax of weakness’, something that renounces triumphalism in art, that is, that refuses to treat the artistic medium (for Beckett language, for White paint) as already possessing a rich history of achievement from which the artist can gain some secure orientation; instead what the artist begins with ‘the dead things’ that ‘make a pretty sum’: these are (b) clichés—on pain of unintelligibility, one must start with them, there is nothing else, and besides one has nothing to say, no wisdom to offer, and no medium with which to convey it; the purgatorial path of making works out of clichés is (c) submitting them to ‘black humor’. The humor of the artist statement is invariably that of those who think well of themselves, who use light-heartedness or sarcasm to announce their ease in the world. But black humor, as André Breton characterized it in 1939, is a ‘superior revolt of the mind’ whose mortal enemies are whimsy and sentimentality.
The master cliché of White’s show is tears, those that fall like rain, the ones that I’m forced to cry, a veritable river of them, our tears of sorrow and rage and joy. Tears flow in steady streams in paintings, on sculptures, and from work to wall. The tears are nothing to cry about: they flow continuously, without spasms or sobs, and might show up as the spray from a lawn sprinkler or as water streaming from girls who’ve just been swimming.
Just as Beckett’s Molly notes about his genitals, White’s tears are nothing to write home about, the clichéd expression of a clichéd content, but worthy of noting all the same.
