CINDY'S SCHTICKThis portion of the review has a lot of St. Louis artists at orange-level panty wad. Throwing a cow to defend someone whose paintings contain real value would be one thing, but these people are essentially saying, Sure, she sucks, we all know she sucks, but why did David Bonetti feel the need to say it out loud, where anyone could see it?? Apparently criticism is something for restroom stalls and cocktail parties, whispers behind backs and sneers and snickers as soon as one leaves a room. Ever wonder why that lady is still hauling her canvases across the river to fight off wild packs of dogs to paint crap nobody likes? You think it might be 'cause nobody told her not to? I like to believe that criticism, even nasty criticism, is intended to teach, to either improve one's work or get one to knock it the hell off and do something else. Art suffers when we're afraid to voice our honest opinions of it. One person won't like everything, and one one critic's voice is probably not all that important in the grand scheme of things, but there is value to be gleaned, even from a disemboweling like this one. Instead of wasting words defending the artist, calling for an apology, and issuing catty backhanded compliments, ask yourself why you care. Are you really sick with worry that a middle-aged woman cried herself to sleep with yesterday's Post Dispatch? Or did the reviewer's skewering of a mediocre Midwestern painter hit a little too close to home?
Cindy Tower, who has taught at Washington University, is a late Ash Can School painter. Since those urban realists flourished before World War I, that would make her a very late Ash Can School painter. And since a lot of time has passed since their heyday, you'd expect that she might have added a few tricks of her own. Well, yes, she does drip to show the influence of de Kooning; in some cases she drips a lot. But other than that, not much.
Tower's subject is the abandoned factories and slaughterhouses of East St. Louis. She has a hard time delineating form and space, however, so sometimes it is a struggle to make out what she's painting. Not a rewarding struggle like some artists make you go through to see something you weren't expecting — just a struggle.
When you figure it out, it's just a badly rendered abandoned factory in East St. Louis. And she has a terrible sense of color, using a palette of brown, beige, putty and pink.
Tower must realize that she doesn't cut it as a painter, because she insists that her painting is merely the product of a heroic performance. She breaks the law painting on site! She puts her life at risk! There are rabid dogs prowling the site — not to mention the humans! So, she hires a bodyguard — an ancient man who looks as if he wouldn't be much good if any trouble occurred — and she does her heroic thing.
Sorry, but I'm not buying her schtick. What she's doing is not performance art, not even bad performance art. It's the result of an ego out of control. She would be far better off teaching herself to paint in her studio than wasting her time hauling canvases and paints back and forth across the river.
Oh, the title of the show, "Riding the Rubble Down," refers to 9/11. Hasn't anyone told Tower that making gratuitous references to 9/11 has become the last refuge of the scoundrel?
David Orr's essay The Greatness Game in the NYT Book Review, to which I've already linked once, illustrates what happens when art, in this case, poetry, is ignored by critics. Orr says:
When we lose sight of greatness, we cease being hard on ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being “mean” rather than as evidence of poetry’s health; we stop assuming that poems should be interesting to other people and begin thinking of them as being obliged only to interest our friends — and finally, not even that. Perhaps most disturbing, we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels. Instead, we cling to the ground in those artists’ shadows — John Ashbery’s is enormous at this point — and talk about how rich the darkness is and how lovely it is to be a mushroom. This doesn’t help anyone. What we should be doing is asking why a poet as gifted as Ashbery has written so many poems that are boring or repetitive (or both), because such questions will allow us to better understand the poems he has written that are moving and funny and beautiful. Such questions might even allow other poets — especially younger poets — to find their own ways of writing poems that are moving and funny and beautiful. Which for those of us who read them, for those of us who believe in them, would be a very great thing indeed.If John Ashbery can take that, then so can Cindy Tower.
6 comments:
It's not that Bonetti's art criticisms are bad, or that he's bad, or that the idea of reviewing art critically is bad. It's that he doesn't review the art. He stabs the artist. There are a few things thrown in to let you know he might have looked at the art--icky palette, all brown and pink, Ashcan School, etc.-- but then he doesn't talk about that. Why is the palette so disagreeable; maybe because it's so grounded in current fashion colors? Now there's a problem. How is it derivative Ashcan art? I'd like to know more about that...a lot more. Teach me. I'm ready to learn.
Bonetti doesn't review the art. He's too mad at the artist. I don't really care about a lady dragging her art tools around. I would like to know more about how and why the result might, or might not be, art.
Has anyone watched American Idol? Contemporary popular criticism requires no criteria or justification, or rationale. The mere fact that you have an opinion and are famous is apparently enough.
First off, the eloquence of the writing in Bonetti's review is something you'd find in the bargain bin, especially paragraphs two and three.
Having said that, I'm not getting the feeling that he's attacking the artist here, but rather the process by which the artist makes her paintings. He claims that she insists that this performance aspect of the process is the real art of her work, with the paintings serving more as a kind of evidence of what happened.
So, if Bonetti really thought this art was poor, I'd have liked to see him talk about whether the paintings tell the story of that process well or if there's a significant disconnect between what the paintings are and what viewers are supposed to understand the paintings to be about.
Instead he critiques the declared process, which for all anyone knows who hasn't seen Tower actually do this, could be made up. It seems that the act of telling of the stories behind the paintings plays a bigger role than at least Bonetti seems to mention.
He takes the story at face value and critiques it. He happens to think that the quality of the paintings is sub-par and the process that lead to their making, phony. In the case of performance art it can be difficult to distinguish art criticism from artist criticism, but the artist is the one setting up that stage, inviting people to engage on that level. If the artist isn't assuming the role of an actor in the performance and instead makes the claim that this is just what they do, then how can it be critiqued without at all entering into the personal realm of the artist?
If Tower is bringing her work into a personal realm, then it must be assumed that that cannot be used as a defense shield against harsh critics. Having said all this, I don't get the feeling Bonetti thought all this through before writing, and thus the mudslinging ensues.
Bonetti (not unlike the author of this blog) does not possess the aptitude to write formally about painting and he veils this handicap with insults and ham-fisted analogies- reading a paint drip as a nod to deKooning and calling the artist an ashcan painter because her imagery is industrial is embarassingly bush league but not entirely unexpected from that fishwrap he writes for.
stick to what you know, whatever that is
Good post. I'm not an art critic either, but as the debate rages on I've been thinking about this quite a lot. I think you were right to encourage asking why we care, it made me think.
I think the review bugged me because that portion of it seemed poorly written and juvenile, yet I feel like Bonetti did have some important points to think about lurking underneath the spewing. Thus, conflicted.
I think Tower's art, and the videos on her site, bugged me because I felt indirectly patronized, and about a topic which I'm rather interested in. I really wanted to like her stuff and be outraged at the review, but instead I came away thinking that she was indeed focusing on all this process intended to fossilize the essence of grit, danger, natural aging, the experience of these places, but her actual work wasn't able to translate any of that capture for me. Thus, conflicted.
I think the "debate" about all this bugged me because it felt like a lot of people indulging in righteous indignation without any more thought about things successfully conveyed than Bonetti & Tower were able to manage.
Apparently, I'm just easily annoyed by everything. ;)
But ultimately, I think it prompted some critical examinations on my part of my own work and attitude and presentation. So... that's, um, good? I guess?
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