The Upside-Down CriticWhat to make of Robert Hughes' Australian roots.
Posted Friday, Jan. 19, 2007, at 3:09 PM ET
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StumbleUponHughes can be just as vivid when writing about the art he loves. He has described the boys in Caravaggio's paintings, for example, as "overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream," and evoked Francis Bacon's famous screaming pope "smearily rising from blackness like carnivorous ectoplasm." In general, his taste tends toward art with a sensuous, intelligent physicality, a tactile sense of craftedness, and subject matter you can sink your teeth into. Goya is a longstanding favorite (his superb biography of the artist was recently issued in paperback), and he has published persuasive encomiums to contemporaries including Lucian Freud, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Crumb.
But all critics have their blind spots: particular styles or tendencies that they categorically dismiss, unable or unwilling to engage with the work on its own terms. Hughes' is conceptual art, particularly the ludic, cerebral variety that began with Duchamp and has been carried on by generations of artists, from Joseph Beuys and John Baldessari through Tracy Emin and Maurizio Cattelan. For Hughes, most conceptual art is too intellectualized, too disembodied; it lacks the substance and sensual immediacy that defines truly great art. "Art requires the long look," he wrote in the introduction to his 1990 collection of essays, Nothing If Not Critical. "It is a physical object, with its own scale and density as a thing in the world." While this is true of most art up through the 19th century, the new century ushered in a new way of thinking about art as a set of concepts, a mode of interaction, a manner of seeing and apprehending the world that may—or may not—be tied to a discrete physical object. To reject this approach entirely is to cut oneself off from much of what's interesting and compelling in the art of the last 100 years. And it's here, in his refusal to engage with this core tenet of contemporary art, that Hughes still exudes a faint whiff of provincialism.
Though he has lived and worked outside Australia for more than 40 years—more than half his lifetime—Hughes has never renounced his Australian citizenship; in American Visions, he confesses that he has always found "a degree of freedom" in his status as a resident alien. This jealously guarded outsider's perspective is one of his great strengths as a critic—it has enabled him to look at art with fresh eyes and to dissent from the majority opinion, particularly concerning contemporary art—but it's also the source of his greatest weakness. To Hughes, conceptual art looks like nothing more than an insider's mind game. And while it's true that much conceptual art is trivial or banal or needlessly hermetic, the track record of traditional, object-based art is no better. I would love to see Hughes set aside his doubts (at least temporarily), step inside the circle, and grapple with conceptual art on its own terms. But perhaps it's too much to expect even our greatest village explainer to explain it all.
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Remarks from the Fray Editor:
For an example of the Fray at its finest, check out the discussion between Utek1 and melvil in the Art Fray. I've reproduced some of the dialogue below, but the full discussion isn't to be missed. –G.A.
Remarks from the Fray:
Hughes was a kind of provincial: a country-boy poser. He loved to flaunt his classical education -- nothing like the Latin for showing up the rubes, eh? And he didn't know a hell of a lot about art that hadn't been made in London or New York, but generally got away with faking it. He doesn't like writing about Beuys because he doesn't know a word of German and hasn't the patience to learn from people who do. The Schwarzkogler fiasco was entirely Hughes' fault and was entirely avoidable.
In late middle age, Hughes has gradually overcome the ugliest aspect of his psyche -- that hyper-masculine "muscular prose" crapola: the conviction nearly every lout from the antipodes seems to have that every living homosexual wants him, wants him badly. Hughes has always had a penchant for dressing like rough trade -- you know, the Mapplethorpe look. Hughes' kinks are not my concern here -- what is, is his tendency to fag-bait artists whose work he fails to understand.
Ms. Fineman is, I think, excessively kind about that tendency. Life has been rough on Hughes: he had a terrible car crash and also had the ugly experience of returning to Australia and discovering that he was a joke there: an explainer without a village. These experiences seem to have made him a better person, which says a lot that's good about him. I like him, NOW. In his first act, he was a blowhard and a poser.
--melvil
(To reply, click here.)
Hughes is, first and foremost, a journalist, a prose stylist whose forthright opinions and biting wit are what makes him so refreshing amidst the fog of pretentious gobbledygook found in art journals. What people call Hughes' masculine prose is not some sort of macho preening but about the ability to craft a sentence that is by turns funny, smart, earthy, vivid, and always packing a punch. You may find it snobbish, but I think his high-brow/lowbrow routine is part of what makes him entertaining. Like Twain and Mencken, he has little tolerance for cant and takes no prisoners when it comes to skewering artists whose work he disdains.
He can be politically incorrect and proud of it, unleashing his barbs against all comers, propriety be damned, gays and straights alike. To consider him a fag-baiter is to ignore his careful appreciation of gay artists from Caravaggio to Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. [...] If Hughes fails to give Joseph Beuys what you consider his due, it is not because Hughes is ignorant of things German, given his championing of Beuys' countryman Anselm Kiefer, it may simply be because he feels that the work of Beuys has his limitations.
--Utek1
(To reply, click here.)
The best thing about Hughes, and the best stroke of luck in his life, is Time. Time, the passage of days and weeks, has changed him from the blowhard of youth to the far more temperate and nuanced writer of middle age. This is so unusual, so much the opposite of what you'd expect, I have to point at it, though I don't know just what it means. And _Time_ has also been kind to Hughes: Time, the magazine, which has been his academy, giving him a new little self-education project weekly for decades, building him into one of the great aesthetic generalists one brick at a time. [...]
He cares about art in a religious way: it's like church to him. He hates what Dorothy Day used to call cheap grace. The artwork itself can't be too excessive for him -- he loves Canova, for instance. Kitsch, where he sees it, is almost entirely a matter of marketing, which is why his reaction to Koons was so toxic. He got mad at Conceptualism early on and got stuck with the couple of cute things that he came up with in response to it. But look at conceptualism seriously -- it was at its biggest and most important a movement of what, five artists and a small flock of grad students, sort of an outgrowth of Fluxus? When you're a secondary growth of a movement nobody's ever heard of, what does that mean?
On the other hand, ANTI-Conceptualism has been huge for decades. it's just like Communism, which in America has never been much more than an impoverished cult, even in the thirties. But anti-communism has been a huge multi-million dollar business for over a hundred years. It's easy as pie to be an anti-conceptualist. You don't even have to know what it is that you're so opposed to. You can just talk about beauty as if there are other people who are big in the art world and don't care about beauty at all, which is total nonsense. Everyone loves beauty. Joseph Kosuth, who invented conceptualism (just ask him) is as big a fan of beauty as anyone breathing. Enough on the past. Enough.
--melvil
(To reply, click here.)
I'm with you and with Hughes on this one. Most Conceptual Art leaves me cold. "Not the idea, but the thing itself" wrote William Carlos Williams, and it was never more true than in the visual arts. Humans are visual creatures, blessed with a wonderful instrument for observation, able to see in astonishing depth, detail and color, and Hughes values artwork that rewards our primary physical sense.
Whether it is abstract or representational, art should be interesting to look at. One would think that such a conceit would be self-evident, but the rise of Conceptualism has overturned this bit of common sense. Conceptual art is like conceptual music, which may have its own internal logic that can be appreciated intellectually but nevertheless usually sounds awful. Certainly, Conceptual art can be good, but only so long as it is visually strong as well.
That Conceptual Art has generated so much critical ink over the years is because it is easier to write about an artwork that comes with its own built-in philosophy. On the other hand, to be able to explain a visual performance using only words requires a writer of unusual dexterity, especially if one is determined to avoid the worn-out old art jargon that makes most art criticism unreadable. Hughes is one of the very few people who can make a painting come alive on the page. Far from dismissing 20th century art, Hughes book "The Shock of the New" is the best survey I know of that tumultuous era. That Hughes is also willing to point out when the Emperor has no clothes is simply a bonus. Ms. Fineman may think that this is provincial, but I prefer to use the term discriminating instead.
--Utek1
(To reply, click here.)
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