From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 08/18/02-04:56:30 PM Z
On Sun, 18 Aug 2002, Shannon Stoney wrote:
>
> >> Just out of curiosity: why do you not trust Jed Perl? I know you don't
> >> like him, but I've been wondering why. Do you know him? Is he a jerk or
> >> something? Or do you just usually disagree with what he writes?
> >
> >
> > Good grief Shannon, did you forget the list "discussion" about Perl &
> > Conrad Richter?
>
>
> OH, that! I did sort of forget about it. But now that I think about it,
> all I remember is that you thought he was wrong about Richter. He probably
> was. But, in two recent posts you seemed to think he was wrong about
> EVERYTHING. So I just wondered why you thought that. I thought you might
> know him because I know you know a lot of critics in the NYC area.
Hmm, sorry ... for better or worse, I *know* very few critics, but do read
them, also for better or worse. And thus I feel qualified to award Perl
top honors as master of the unsupported assertion. When one of such
insidious sentiments parallels our own preconceptions it can pass as
"criticism." But we owe it to art & argument to notice. I can't guarantee
Perl never gets anything right, even a stopped clock is right twice a
day... but given his predilections and history, his simplisms and
mistakes, not to mention my growing backlog, I see no point in further
checking.
Here's an excerpt from the discussion slipped your mind, starting with a
Perl quote from my "Dumb Quote File," & continuing with comments
pertaining to his Richter rant, that may show why Perl is a frail reed as
commentator and guide. If I fail to prove this, like they say in the funny
papers: de gustibus non est disputandum. (Translation: you're wrong.)
"The Dumb Quote File" was an article I'd written in P-F #5. Perl had
earned inclusion for "There can be no grand style in photography since the
camera cannot generalize." (New Criterion, April '85.)
I wrote on the list, April 12, 2002:
=======================================================================
He didn't say why "grand style," a 19th century notion, is desirable, let
alone why it's supposed to generalize, which might have made an
interesting discussion. Perl doesn't do interesting discussion. He does
angry assertion and rant, repeated in lieu of supporting argument. He also
does gross error -- in this case about photography. As I commented in my
article, "Someone should explain to Mr. Perl that the genius of
photography is exactly the grand way it generalizes."
But Perl has an inferiority complex about painting vs photography
generally, his tin eye perhaps infected by fear of photography -- and in
2002 is STILL sounding the tocsin. He hates Gerhard Richter, largely, it
seems, for playing paintings off photography. He says Richter and Chuck
Close "have ceded the act of creation to the camera." (Tho that bit of
sublime silliness at least defies the conventional assumption that the
camera isn't "creative" !)
Perl is still bitterly lamenting a 1981 show in which most of the painters
"felt a need to slavishly mimic photographs." He wants painters to
"respond to nature" without "a camera to do the looking for them." And so,
failing to understand either art or art history, he falls back on a
romantic notion of painting directly from "life" rather than photographs.
(And thinks he could tell the difference, which he couldn't unless it came
with a printed announcement, like Close & Richter's.)
That this wretched "photo-dependency" has long been a "fact of artistic
life" drives him batty. He even, or maybe especially, finds painting from
photographs made from life an affront. This, he feels, simply shows the
painter's "inability to make anything on their own."
Earth to Perl: "painting from nature" is NOT "working on one's own."
Making it up entirely out of one's head might be "working on one's own,"
somewhat, but who cares? The notion, cobbled up to fit Perl's bizarre
agenda, evokes old ideas of "purity" in photography, but now backwards.
Fifty or 75 years ago, the photo police were calling for photographers to
do it on their own, "pure" and "straight" without a whiff of painting.
Now Perl cries for painters to do it "on their own," without a whiff of
photography. Both notions are irrelevant, a grasping for rules where
there can be none, the wrong rules even if there were any, and a
thoroughly debunked notion of purity.
============================= In other words, I think the Perl traits
shown in that "review" go well beyond Richter.
> Also I am puzzled because a lot of what he says seems to make sense to me.
> Surely a person like that could not be wrong all the time? A lot of what he
> said, for example, in the recent review of Le Gray, Weston, etc, seemed
> thought-provoking anyway. I liked the idea that photography floats between
See prior remarks about stopped clocks... But thought provoking is hardly
enough. A bomb through the window, a broken neck, a fly in one's soup, a
bankruptcy, a case of ptomaine, etc. are all "thought provoking."
> lyricism and empiricism, for example. I don't know how you judge whether a
> critic is "right" or not. Maybe critics are more like poets than like
> scientists.
I agree that good criticism can often be poetic, yet it works best when
grounded in fact, not a personal scheme that has history and its evolution
backwards & upside down or invented out of whole cloth. (See above about
Perl's comments re generalization, for example.)
> Ah, no, I always use the pronoun "she" to avoid always saying "he."
> Sometimes I alternate between the two, in a longer essay. Maybe I should
> say "it"? At the time that I wrote that, I didn't know you hated Jed Perl at
> all. And I would never shoot a flaming arrow at you. It might kill you,
> and I like debating with you too much to do that!
Well, that's a relief -- glad I asked...
> ...It's an Xtreme sport,
> like ladies' mud wrestling, which we used to have here at the Putnam County
> Fair every August.
I've heard they do it in Jello now.
Judy
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