Laboratory

Following on from the questions Jock and Mia asked me last week, now it’s Steven and Sarah’s turn…

Question from Steven:

How much of ‘Laboratory’ is about the idea of ‘art as process’?
I think the process of making artwork has obviously been pushed to the fore in ‘Laboratory’, but I think this has been balanced by the many other concerns of the exhibition, such as giving artists a space to experiment, being experimental with the exhibition catalogue and the curation, trying to blur distinctions based on media, etc. Also, the artists are still focused on creating completed artworks to some degree I think. There doesn’t seem to be any self-imposed deadline to create finished work for the closing party, but I think everyone wants to ensure that they have used their time at Jerwood to extend their practice and try new things with a view to creating works in the future that they are happy with. As a result there hasn’t been the pure emphasis on ‘art as process’ that you would see during the height of Conceptualism in the work of Douglas Huebler, for example, where the art piece would be a set of instructions to create a work that is yet to be realised in any corporeal way.

Questions from Sarah:

How will critical writing evolve with the influx of online forums and discussion sites, where shared opinions are more readily available?
Online discussion sites have the benefit of allowing the views of critics to be instantly challenged to a level and with a frequency that was never possible before – and they give the critic the opportunity to argue back as often as he or she wishes as well. There is now far greater immediacy in critical writing: you can blog about a show that you attended only an hour or two beforehand and Twitter has made it even possible to comment on exhibitions while you are still there. Inevitably this compressed time scale will cause stylistic changes in your writing. In a blog, I think you will invariably write in a more conversational style that approaches your patterns of speech – far more so than when writing for a specialist art magazine that trades on its erudition – which seems to be a good development because discussion websites give you a forum to explore a different part of your writing practice. Some people have argued that the proliferation of new sites and the ever-expanding number of people who can publicly comment on art poses a threat to the traditional role of the critic, but I think this means that expert opinion has become, perhaps counter-intuitively, even more valued. In a world where there is a wealth of comment available – on politics, economics, art, sport, etc. – who do you turn to first? I think the answer is the media outlets and commentators who have built up a profile that makes them trustworthy. To use an example from cinema, it is now apparent that any film release can get a couple of good reviews to emblazon across its posters. A famous example of this was the manufactured praise, supposedly from the Sun, which was used for advertising Guy Ritchie’s Revolver in response to the wall-to-wall derision it had received from critics. (See http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/oct/03/pressandpublishing.sun)

What role does the critic play in writing about an exhibition?
For me, I’ve always felt that the exhibition catalogues that work best are the ones in which the critic tries to set the exhibition in some sort of wider context: what the artworks say about current developments in the art world or how they comment on wider political or social issues. Because of this, art writing is in many ways a creative process that runs parallel to the exhibition itself. This idea is something that I’ve been interested in for some time and was what attracted me to ‘Laboratory’, as you [Sarah] made it apparent from the outset that the critical writing undertaken during the show was to be treated as a creative act in its own right. The concepts behind the artworks – what the artists are trying to achieve – are vitally important too, but you can spend a lot of time relaying these views and also describing what you see, which to me sometimes feels like an easy way to fill up some space. I also think it is interesting that, although you are always drawn to reviews that have strong reactions to an exhibition – “this is great!” / “this is execrable!” – if you explain the context well then this allows the reader to make up his or her own mind about whether this is an exhibition that they want to see, irrespective of the writer’s personal preference. When I read Brian Sewell’s reviews, for example, I almost never agree with his take on what is or isn’t a worthwhile exhibition, but he writes in an engaging style that usually gives a sense of what the show is trying to achieve, so quite often I’ll be intrigued to see the exhibition even though he has panned it.

And what effect does the critic’s writings have on the exhibition and the artists involved?
Critics add to the discussions that inform the making of art and the staging of exhibitions, which, like all aesthetic discourses, involve championing ideas that can be both inspiring and constricting to artists. One of the most famous examples I can think of where the critic’s power became rather too overbearing involved Clement Greenberg, who seemed to almost single-handedly create the genre of Post-painterly Abstraction by his continual promptings, through his critical writings, that this was the next logical step for abstract art to take. Usually though, critical texts have an influence on art that ebbs and flows depending on the artists involved. At university I did a project on appropriation in American art in the 1980s and the philosophies of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and Baudrillard seemed to be quoted ad nauseum by the artists I was looking at: Sherrie Levine, Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, etc. I then remember reading an article at some point in the late 1990s which argued that the reason why the yBa artists seemed like such a breath of fresh air was because they didn’t read, understand or care about all these philosophers that the Americans were still so obsessed by.