From: Shannon Stoney (shannonstoney@earthlink.net)
Date: 12/15/02-01:37:01 AM Z
Katherine wrote:
>
> According to an article in the New Yorker several months ago about a
> crisis in the Harvard studio art program, artists started getting more
> intellectual when more of them started getting academic degrees, and
> it's my personal opinion (and as I recall it was also the opinion of the
> writer of the article, and no, it wasn't Jed Perl) that this
> intellectualism hasn't served art very well.
>
> But I'm an intellectual myself, and although I mostly keep art separate
> from my intellectual interests,
I read that article about the Harvard art school too, and I thought it was
correct in its diagnosis of why theory has taken a greater place in the art
world recently: it is because of the academicization of visual art, if you
will. Academia is a wordy place. A lot of academics don't understand the
different vocabulary of visual art--line, color, form, gradations of value,
depth in space, light, etc--and they have trouble talking about that, so
they talk about visual art in terms of what they do know: narrative. A
critical meta-narrative is still a narrative. It's a kind of colonization
of visual art by mainly verbal people, and we are right to reject it.
But we don't have to reject the idea of thinking and talking and writing
about visual art, just because it has mostly been done badly recently, or
because for the last two decades the word "intellectual," when paired with
visual art, has been associated with long, un-readable articles in Art
Forum, and
crazy French theories that really came from linguistics and literary
criticism. When the guy who works on my car hears about another mechanic
who did a bad job, he says, "That gives all mechanics a black eye."
Similarly, when some art theorists go overboard, it gives all intellectuals
who think and write about art a black eye. We don't want to be associated
with that, and we are tired of excessive theory, so we throw out the baby
with the bath water.
But there is nothing wrong with thinking about your work and how it relates
to the larger world. Artists have always done that. An intellectual in the
good sense is a person who thinks, reads and writes broadly and deeply
about the physical world and about culture and society. Leonardo da Vinci
was an
intellectual. So was Edward Weston, and Frida Kahlo. Not all visual
artists are always, at all times, politically engaged, but it's impossible
to make images without thinking about the effect they might have on other
people, and as soon as you start down that path, you are thinking pretty
soon in larger terms about who the other people in your society are, what
their beliefs are, what kind of beliefs or hopes are embodied in your own
work, how people might be changed by looking at your work, etc. All that
leads you into the realm of sociology, if not politics, as well as into
wider
discussions about the role of the arts in general in society. So if that
makes you an intellectual, be proud.
But, I think Jon is right that you only usually know *later,* after you've
made it , what your work "means." And you shouldn't be forced to justify it
verbally by other people, especially while you're in the process of making
it. That critique that Chris described sounded painfully familiar.
I think Katherine was also right when she said that the writing of working
photographers is often more useful to us than the writing of professional
critics, theorists, and prominent intellectuals. But, sometimes I like to
read what non-photographers think about photography, as outsiders as it
were, especially if they are as thoughtful and articulate as Susan Sontag.
Most of our audience, after all, are not professional photographers.
--shannon
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