When I first thought of having a blog, I imagined it would contain writings across a range of topics and fields, including criticism of the visual arts, criticism of the performative arts, books reviews, and philosophical musings. At one point I realized that I nursed a desire for a section on bad things: bad books and bad art. In writing art criticism I had found it impossible to write a ‘scathing’ review, because I had little to say about a bad show. So I imagined short pieces, laced with wicked witticisms of the ‘Wagner is the Puccini of music’ sort, comprising a self-therapeutic lexicon of artistic invective. In a review of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the philosopher Arthur Danto had called for a ‘Baedeker of Badness’, a guide to what shows one should spend effort in avoiding. So the project had a non-personal justification in, if nothing else, answering Danto’s call.
Once I started writing for this blog, I quickly abandoned the project of a Baedeker of Badness. I made a couple of brief attempts to write for it, when I came across some outstandingly preposterous writings from a Bay Area pseudo-art critic and a local pseudo-artist, but I discovered that writings of such badness are as if not writings at all: they dissolve into a deserved nothingness under a few seconds of scrutiny. I did manage for publication a review of an outstandingly awful book on contemporary art, Glenn Adamson’s and Julia Bryan-Wilson’s Art in the Making; but I felt unclean for days afterward.
I recount the fate of the Baedeker in relation to my upcoming review of a significant work in the literature on the painter Gerhard Richter, the new book by Benjamin Buchloh. Anyone familiar with the literature on Richter knows that Buchloh is widely viewed as the single most influential writing on that painter, with Buchloh having written many essays on Richter from the early 1970s through the present. Additionally, there are a number of published interviews of Richter by Buchloh that are among Richter’s most illuminating. So no serious attempt to understand Richter’s puzzling oeuvre can avoid considering Buchloh’s accounts of it, and the recent massive book is surely the summation Buchloh’s half-century of thinking about Richter.
But there’s the problem of the writing. I decided to say something about Buchloh’s style in advance, so that I can ignore it in my summaries and analyses of the book. The style is godawful, of a kind familiar to readers of contemporary art history, a brew of academic tics, unrelieved prolixity, obscure statements that seem like they might be claims, and locutions that leave the reader wondering whether Buchloh and his editors (if there were any) have full command of standard English.
It would try any reader’s patience to the utmost for me to so much as cite, much less analyze and criticize, Buchloh’s prose. Let one example stand for many: Buchloh’s use of the phrase ‘if not’. Most of us are blessed with some familiarity of Bob Dylan’s song ‘If Not For You’, wherein ‘if not for you’ readily conveys the sense of a counter-factual, of how the world would be diminished without the existence and presence of the addressee. But what does Buchloh mean with his continual use of ‘if not’? Here are 11 (ELEVEN) instances from just the first two chapters of Buchloh’s book:
1. “all aspects [of painting] now had to voice the profound skepticism, if not the decisive disillusionment, that at the moment of the formation of a society of spectacle and control, any claim for a transformative participatory agency would at best be a parody and at worst be a blatant lie.” (p. 24)
2. Rothko and Reinhardt: ‘seemingly parthenogenetic planes or veils of color’. –“their chromatic projects would now have to be embedded all the deeper within transcendental, if not outright mystical registers.” (p. 34)
3. “Since the mid- to late 1950s in Wes Germany, the renewed permeation of the social fabric by photographic imagery . . . had promised the subject access to historical memory as much as it would increasingly record, if not actively contribute to, the erasure of the subject’s political and social agency.” (p. 36)
4. The painting’s “almost ostentatious declaration, if not its performative enactment, of those private and public epistemological breaks addresses the collectively ruling forces of historical disavowal in post-World War II Germany” (p. 46)
5. “We would argue that the semiotic performance of acts of memory, i.e. actually working through a given system of repressive representations, seems to be at least as crucial, if not more integral, to the elaboration of mnemonic experience as its iconographic representation.” (p. 59)
6. “While it [Richter’s painting Tisch] is by now generally recognized as one of the key works of German if not European reconstruction culture . . . “ (p. 67)
7. “the painting engages in an infinitely more complex and subtle set of operations: an initiation, a rehearsal, and an ultimate transformation, if not a travesty, of all of the blinding discoveries that the young Richter had made at Documenta II in 1959” (p. 68)
8. “To encounter these decontextualized citations of monochrome painting, abstract automatist gestures, and photomontage aesthetics, and to try to integrate them, would have caused major collisions, if not a chasm, of painterly identity in any young artist at that time.” (p. 71)
9. “Warhol’s anomic despair, if not cynicism” (p. 78)
10. “Second, and equally if not more complex and important, is the question . . .” (p. 82)
11. “what is generated by the semiosis of an aleatory accumulation of randomly chosen images is an overall effect of iconic dissolution, if not effacement” (ibid)
One approaches the analysis of such prose with trepidation. Buchloh seems to use the phrase like this: ‘X if not Y’, where (a) X is asserted and Y is not; (b) Y is on the extreme end of spectrum, with X close to but not identical with Y; (c) Although X is not at the end of the spectrum, it is still pretty darned extreme. Yet if this analysis is right, then one wonders: Why bother with ‘if not Y’? Why not just state X? I cannot come up with an answer to this question that seems fitting for someone with Buchloh’s intelligence.
There are other academic tics in this prose, including one that infests inter alia Judith Butler’s writing, where the author says that they ‘would argue X’ (see Buchloh #5 above for an instance). One retorts: Well, are you going to argue for X or not?? Here the phrase ‘would argue’ seems to mean in practice ‘assert without evidence’. Having disburdened myself and warned the reader, I proceed with the review proper of Buchloh’s important book, first with a consideration of his account of Richter’s initial formulation of his practice of artistic painting.
References:
Benjamin Buchloh, Gerhard Richter: Painting after the Subject of History (2022)
Arthur Danto, ‘The 1993 Whitney Biennial’ in Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic Meditations (1994)
Bob Dylan, ‘If Not For You’ (1970)
John Rapko, Review of Art in the Making (2016) by Glenn Adamson and Julia Bryan-Wilson at https://www.academia.edu/31585034/Review_Glenn_Adamson_and_Julia_Bryan_Wilson_Art_in_the_Making_2016_