The Free Hunter of Meanings
Sergej Timofejev
15/12/2011
Marek Bartelik PhD is the President of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). During the Art and Reality forum, arterritory.com took the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his road to a career in art criticism from... his previous job in civil engineering, as well as his preferences in contemporary art, Marek Bartelik’s distinctive approach to selecting the subjects of his art critiques and his thoughts on where the Rembrandts and Cézannes of our time are hiding.
There is usually a system to the way in which people tend to set about building a career in the arts: they attend some sort of classes, art circles, then move on to professional training and complete their studies while still in their twenties. As far as I know, things were a bit different in your case...
Yes, I first spent two years at École des Beaux Arts in Paris and then went back to theUSA. I wanted to choose something quite specific and practical and decided that civil engineering was just the thing for me. I graduated formColumbiaUniversityand worked for some three or four years worked at a company that dealt with bridge construction. At some point I realised that it was over. It was around the time that I had a very intriguing conversation with this artist I interviewed inParis. He was 92, I was 30. He asked me how old I was. I told him and expected to hear that I was still very young or something along those lines. What he said, however, was: ‘Well... It’s time for you to focus on things you really want to do with your life.’ I went back toNew Yorkand, after another couple of months on the job, quit. And the whole of my previous life collapsed. And I started doing what I really wanted to do. It was by no means easy. Getting a PhD is way more complicated in theUSAthan it is inEurope; first you have to complete a multitude of courses in a number of disciplines. It took me some ten years or so. And yet this turnabout was probably the best thing I had done in my whole life. During my study years, I was asked by Art Forum to write a piece, which made me feel that I was no longer just a student – I was also already a professional. And yet my technical education was also not wasted on me: it taught me to discipline and focus my thinking; I also had acquired a taste for logics...
I do think that, in some occupations, a second professional training may be quite important. It allows one to mix and combine certain skills.
It is probably the same old left hemisphere – right hemisphere thing. In my life, it really does work. On the other hand, I am perfectly aware that I would never, ever go back to engineering...
Because you are not likely to get to apply your art critic skills?
Or, more likely, because I was too fascinated with design, the appearance of things while I was working in civil engineering.
So now you are teaching and writing for art publications?
Yes. I have been writing for Art Forum for over twenty years now, and it is a fantastic magazine. I love it that they let me write the way I like and on subjects I like. Which is the reason why I only write art reviews when I am travelling. I go someplace – toSaint Petersburg, for instance – visit art shows and look for something interesting to write about.
Like a free hunter?
Quite. It is, in a way, an adventure. I love it that I do not have a preconception of what I have to see. I just walk around and look at things. And if I happen to write an article on someone who has not been covered by Art Forum as yet, an artist from Riga, say – all the better. For instance, I recently did a piece on a young female artist from South Korea; it was only her first or maybe second solo exhibition. It is a nomad way of doing my job. And I love it that I am free not to belong to a single place, a single scene; it makes it possible for me to escape the status quo of the system: I am constantly on the move.
When in theUSA, I only write articles on the history of art criticism; I write and publish books and yet I never review American art shows. >>
There was this opinion voiced today at the forum that an art critic cannot maintain a friendly relationship with the artists he reviews...
I don’t agree with that. I know many artists who, apart from creating interesting art, are also essentially very interesting people. They are not in the slightest interested in perpetual adulation; what they are interested in is dialogue. Anyway, I am not particularly aggressive in my critique; a conversation between two friends can sometimes be quite intense as long as it is based on mutual understanding. For me it is a privilege to write about someone whom I know; after all, I believe in this person. And everybody has their ups and downs. Take Robert Rauschenberg – he is an outstanding artist and yet sometimes he is brilliant and sometimes terrible. Jasper Johns, on the other hand, was always the same, and I find him somewhat boring. That is why I prefer Rauschenberg. He varies, and that is what makes him more human. Anyway, we all benefit from being reminded once in a while that we are actually not something mega-special.
Who are your favourites in this century?
I just completed an extensive essay on Cai Guo-Qiang who works with gunpowder and explosions. I went to see him work in Donetsk, in Ukraine. That was a fantastic project they did there in an abandoned mine. What he did there was engage in a kind of dialogue with socialist realism. He asked a number of local artists working in the traditional manner create portraits of miners. And then he transformed these pictures into his gunpowder images. The result was an installation in a huge industrial setting; as you enter, you see these portraits of ‘blown-up miners’...
It is for this dialogue with traditional art that I like his works. Cai Guo-Qiang was born inChina, and he knows the value of both tradition and avant-garde. If you take away the ideology, socialist realism can be a pretty noteworthy art. It may not suit everyone’s taste; however, it is an interesting way of looking at things. There are lots of camouflaged, hidden things in socialist realism. Gender themes, the dynamics of these kinds of subjects are also represented in socialist realism quite significantly. Cai Guo-Qiang is exactly the type of artist with whom I would love to sustain a perpetual dialogue.
One of my fellow lecturers at the college where I teach is the Lebanese-born Walid Raad. He completely won me over with a video of his. It is a story of a spy in Beirut, an agent whose job is spying on people walking on the famous promenade along the seashore, a nice place for an evening walk. You see everything through the eyes of the spy, all those different people walking by. The spy, however, is a bit of a softie; he has this weakness for sunsets. And every time he sees a sunset, the camera moves from people (‘subjects’) to the sun that is going down. That is an excellent piece: poetic, definitely not silly and not too long, as so often is the case with videos.
There is a brilliant exhibition by Willem de Kooning running currently back home. There has been quite a discussion going on regarding his final pieces: did he or didn’t he paint them himself. He had Alzheimer’s, and there is this possibility that someone else was physically moving his hand during the actual painting. The works are very different from the stuff he did earlier. Now, there is an interesting subject: what do you actually use to create art? Is it your hand or your brain, or perhaps both? In this case, someone else was guiding his hand. So do these paintings actually belong to him? In my personal opinion, yes, they do. >>
+++pagesplit+++
What is happening with the discourse of art criticism? Has it changed significantly since you first started writing?
Yes, things have changed. Critics now have to react, respond to events so much faster than they used to. And there are fewer periodicals to publish your articles. There is only one art critic among the staff of the New York Times Newspaper; the rest are freelancers. And that’s the largest of our newspapers. Magazines also do not employ art critics. Since the emergence of blogging, many critics have been writing art blogs; however, as they would tell you, they have no idea how long they will be able to afford doing that: they have to do something else to earn their living. Also, due to this need for instant responding, so typical for the internet, paradoxical situations tend to arise. An art blogger confessed to me that he was scared of someone else writing a piece on the same subject and publishing it first. Can you imagine that? And if you are scared of that, you end up living in fear: there will always be a chance of someone being quicker than you.
This anxiety – it is probably not just typical for art critics today; it is in the air. And the surest way of self-assertion today is to come up with new keywords, new terms that fit a problem or describe some sort of new art fact, and everybody else will start repeating it after you. And then you become famous.
I recall the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and I think that, with his slow and melancholy style of writing, he probably would not have become famous in our time. His verses are completely devoid of any urgency of communication; all communication takes place on a completely different level there. And I think that this sort of opposition to this ‘urgency of account’ makes sense. On the other hand, I have noticed a new trend of critics starting to write their texts like fiction, introducing elements of inventions, sometimes even a proper storyline. You can make up a whole personal art universe; you can write your critique as a story. My new book features a chapter on an imaginary artist although the rest of the characters are quite real.
You mentioned during the discussion that you sometimes use a similar approach in teaching when you are telling your students about art...
Yes, and sometimes I worry that I may be ‘mixing up their coordinates’ too much. I do think, however, that they should always be given an opportunity to make up their own mind.
How do you do it?
You want me to give you an example? Well, for example, there was this class when I showed my students a drawing of an elephant by Rembrandt, having first clipped it so that it did not include the animal’s tail. I said to them: ‘Look at the brilliant way Rembrandt was working. To show the elephant’s giant size, he cut off the tail in his picture.’ And later someone googled the drawing and found out that the tail was actually still there. Of course, I don’t do this sort of thing very often. However, I do think that these little catches for imagination, for critical evaluation of the ingested information are really necessary. What it also shows is that art can become a sort of separate reality. We are attending a conference on art and reality here. Yes, they do have occasional points of intersection. And yet they exist separately. And I am teaching my students art, I am not teaching them reality.
Of course, education is not a copy/paste of things said by the teacher. You have to process them and check if they are actually true.
It also has to do with feelings, not only with the brain, as well as with the fact that teaching is passing on not only knowledge but also the understanding that this knowledge alone is not enough, that there is this space of search which we enter together. Of course, I may be more experienced in this, having been around for a longer time. And yet we have to discover things together. When we start teaching, we forget that the most memorable moments have actually always been about things not going quite right. The professors I personally liked best as a student were the ones notable for a certain eccentricity of behaviour: they could do bizarre or even silly things. And it is they who I remember, not the ones who were paragons of perfection.
Quite a few negative things have been said here, at the conference, as to the ability contemporary art to interact with reality, describe it in its own language. All these endless installations and video screens that do not make any sense unless you read a page of the curator’s explanations first... What do you think of that?
Yes, contemporary art can sometimes be somewhat dry or, rather, somewhat empty. It is very much sensation-orientated, built according to the principle of ‘fast delivery’. It only has to be packaged in the right way to become a reality, to become ‘art’. There is another trend, however, which turns to, I would say, spirituality. It may also be quite dangerous as the whole thing can knock against religiosity. There are quite a few artists going that way in search of the fourth dimension referred to by Malevich in his time.
As for video, it is a relatively easy medium – easy to distribute. You can send your DVD wherever you want while an installation, sculpture or painting takes some physical exertion to be transported. I sometimes find it hard to keep my attention focused on a video if the piece is nor very well structured. If it happens to be a simple story someone wants to tell me, I’d rather watch some news or a good movie perhaps. I don’t need to visit an art gallery for that. The new media actually demand an incredibly deep level of understanding what you are doing, and artists often do not think about that: to them, it is the easy way. It is the same with installations. It looks easy, and yet it is incredibly hard to create a really good installation. I don’t think that contemporary art is, say, ‘colder’ than it used to be. The thing is, there is so much of it produced that it is quite hard to figure it out what really is going on or what is the point of it all.
In all, I would say that we are currently living in an age of mannerism. People are not making real breakthroughs, they are busy ‘crossbreeding’, hybridising stuff. That will, of course, change. Hard to say in which direction the whole thing will go, though. And, by the way, that is yet another reason why I am teaching: I want to see what my students are doing. This way, I am also learning – from them. I have no intention to tell them what to do.
On the other hand, it is simply necessary to be famous today, even in art criticism. If you are not very famous, no-one will ever read your texts, people are not that curious. And therefore, unless you are famous, there is a very little chance of you being heard, getting noticed.
And yet we constantly hear voices asking where the Rembrandts and Cézannes of our time are...
Yes, Rembrandt and Cézanne worked very hard and long to become the artists they were. Today, there is an incredible pressure on young artists; the very situation they find themselves in demands that they strive for ‘success’, and it does paralyse them to an extent. They stop growing and don’t develop into the Cézannes and Rembrandts of their time. Admittedly, young artists today use a much more diverse visual language, and yet it takes the same intense focusing on their profession it did in those times. They need space to grow in.
The very paradigm of the way the artist operates in the society has changed. Of course, it is easy to judge for us. And yet I cannot predict which of the contemporary artists will still be remembered thirty years from now, who will be considered key figures. As far as I am concerned, I hope it’s not Jeff Koons or someone like him. Now, that would be a pretty sad testimony of our time, of who we were.
In Latvia, there was a huge explosion of interest in the new media from the mid-1990s onward. It seems to me now that the focus has somewhat shifted to painting, for example, to moderately sized pictures influenced by naïve art... Are there similar trends in the USA?
It makes sense to look for parallels in history. While the 1970s were the age of conceptual art, the 1980s were marked by the return of painting. And when people started to analyse how that had come about, they arrived at the conclusion that in many cases the changes could be traced to art galleries which had long since realised that they could not sell conceptual art: the pieces were insufficiently material and compact, they looked too esoteric. And the galleries said: ‘It is time to go back to painting!’ And then neo-expressionism emerged, and so on. To a considerable extent, the whole thing was staged. Perhaps it would be wise to try and figure out how much of it is actually a natural development and to what extent it is a a market-imposed strategy that influences young artists who follow its lead. Because everyone is informed that ‘there are similar trends in art galleries everywhere’... I would put a question mark there. Perhaps the problem is that art had become too political or esoteric and insufficiently ‘materialised’. I don’t see a potential of escape in painting. It is nothing more than one of a number of currently existing parallel forms of expression. Although it is, of course, easier to separate the good from the bad in painting.
I think it also has to do with the subject of questions and answers. Contemporary art as we know it – installations, video, performances – is more about asking questions, topical questions at that. The audience, however, experiences a deficiency of answers. Perhaps painting is more like an answer.
Yes, perhaps it is a return to the original impulse, to a more personal kind of art. When an artist is painting in a studio, he exists in a world of his own. And it is a more sensual kind of art. For instance, the sense of smell is involved in it. The Greeks said that art had to smell. If you take a piece of marble and start to work with it, the stone does release a smell. The difference between American and European art lies, among other things, in its attitude toward smells. In Europe it is quite acceptable. In America, we think that there should be no smell. It is the same with cheese: we eat the same cheeses, except they are pasteurised: they must not smell. People are afraid of anything with a smell. In Europe, on the other hand, art sometimes still has a smell, and that’s a good thing...
As for predictions and theorising, I prefer to see first and then respond to it, having processed the impressions. In the 1980s, the famous American art critic and curator Barbara Rose mounted an excellent exhibition titled ‘Painting in the 1980s’; it also toured throughout Europe. And then, in the late 1980s, she put on another show, this one under the title of ‘Painting in the 1990s’. Now, that was a complete fiasco. All the artists and works she thought would play a major part in the 1990s faded from significance during the actual decade. And I wouldn’t like to find myself in a similar role of the failed predictor. It is like a relationship: you are dying to know how things are going to work out. But it’s impossible to tell someone: be this kind of person, and then I will like you. The same thing with art...
The final question: how did you become the President of the International Association of Art Critics?
That’s a good question. I don’t really know. I spent the greatest part of my life trying to be a very private person and avoid getting seriously involved in organisations of any kind. And then at some point I realised that if I wanted to do something in this area, it had to be then. Because ten years from now, I won’t feel like doing that kind of work; I will probably be more inclined to focus on my poetry, etc. I attended a number of international conferences as a representative of our chapter of AICA. And we talked. And I felt that people seem to like my ideas. I was elected in October 2011 at the AICA congress in Asunción, Paraguay. It is both a great honour and a huge challenge for me. My life is changing once again, like it did when I was 30. I am 55 now, and that’s great – it is the beginning of a new adventure.
