The following letter I wrote as a response to An Open Letter to Frank Stella on the Occasion of His Whitney Retrospective written by the post-conceptual digital artist and art theoretician Joseph Nechvatal and published November 16, 2015 on hyperallergic.com. As of writing this response I have not seen the Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and in writing this I am by no means passing any sort of critical judgement on the work Mr. Stella in that exhibition or elsewhere. I wrote the response because I found the manner in which Dr. Nechvatal chose to engage with the exhibition in his writing irritating, unfair, and misleading. This could be unfair or a misunderstanding on my part; I invite you to judge for your self by first reading Dr. Nechvatal's letter, and then my response.
Dear Joseph Nechvatal,
Pardon my forthcomingness with this letter, but who cares if Frank Stella’s “object-paintings choke you”, are “hammy”, “smothering”, and “their literal heaps of jutting materiality block” you “from engaging with effective imagination or speculative participation”? This is not some big name artist showing his latest or greatest paintings in the tastefully designed commercial palace of some equally big name dealer, whose only goal is to line pockets, his own, his dealer’s and the collectors who will sell the work off for profit in a few years before the artist’s ashes have cooled enough to seal the urn. This isn’t some gallery show to which hoards of art tourist pilgrimage by the bus load on crisp Saturday afternoon so they can tell their friends “I saw the latest paintings by … at …”. The direction of your criticism seems to reveal that you, like those Saturday afternoon gallery hoppers, seem to have forgotten the difference between a museum, a commercial gallery and a non-commercial gallery.
This is a museum retrospective.
Museums are not galleries, even for artists still living and creating. Museums are archives. They are mausoleums housing both permanently and temporarily works of art to be viewed through the transitional lenses of the works’ critical relevance at the time of its inception as well as its significance to future discourse. The works they house are not meant to be viewed through single lens, hipster horn rims.
An argument which passes judgement upon art work exhibited in museums using the critical framework by which one would rate, pass judgement upon, or analyze contemporary art work exhibited in both nonprofit and for-profit galleries or exhibition venues is not just weak; such an argument is lacking in critical validity.
In your open letter to Mr. Stella you write:
“The gaudy, hackneyed formalism of your work does not provide many hopeful occasions for thinking through the complex issues around the state of contemporary painting.”
Although you and Mr. Stella have and continue to produce contemporaneously painting by which you both believe to be provocative of thoughts surrounding the ‘complex issues’ of contemporary painting, need I remind you that Mr. Stella’s ‘contemporary painting’ is not your ‘contemporary painting’; and neither of your’s or his is mine.
This is a museum retrospective.
The work exhibited in a retrospective is no longer relevant to contemporary discourse in the way new work from the same artist exhibited in an exhibition of recent work is. The work in a retrospective is like the taxidermy lion in a natural history museum. We can approach it and study it in ways we cannot otherwise do to the lion in a zoo or roaming on the savannah. Art included in a museum retrospective is just a stop along the artist’s journey exploring the complex issues of his or less likely her, choosing. As viewers we can only take the work as such, studying its relevance, its success and failure from a distance. From that distance we can then critically question the work's relevance to the discourse of its time and the discourse of today; then we can apply lessons we might learn from its success and failure to the contemporary art we encounter beyond the crypt.
By no means is this to say that we cannot ask those questions of relevance or apply those lessons learned from an artist’s retrospective to new work the same artist might produce and exhibit outside the museum. In fact, I think it would be an incredibly valuable thing to do. It is not about the questions we ask, it about how we ask the questions we are asking.
With this Dr. Nechvatal, I send the suggestion you lobbed to Mr. Stella back your way[1]. You too might become a better artist and writer on art if you think harder on how you handle authorial aggression. Perhaps it is time to delve further into your consciousness for the personal frailty you masquerade as sensitivity to others. I do not mean to imply that your own understanding of those complex issues surrounding contemporary painting are of lesser validity or in any way invalid. I am saying don’t push your complex issues onto others in areas where they have no critical validity, such as a museum retrospective of another artist.
So yes Joseph, by all means, do this and someday maybe you too will have your museum retrospective. Maybe it will even be at the Whitney!
Sincerely,
Robyn Thomas
[1] “So yes Frank, by all means, chuck swirling stuff into my eyes if you want to, but you will probably get better as an artist if you think hard about how you handle authorial aggression.” http://hyperallergic.com/253681/an-open-letter-to-frank-stella-on-the-occasion-of-his-whitney-retrospective/
Addendum November 20, 2015
The initial intent of my writing the letter above was as part of the exploration of writing within my studio practice; hence I included this piece here on my website.
A number of hours after writing this letter I showed it, along with Dr. Nechvatal’s original piece on hyperallergic.com to another person. The response of this other reader to Dr. Nechvatal’s letter mirrored my own. After reading my response the reader decided to go back to the hyperallergic.com website and read the comments others were leaving. I had not read the comments, I rarely read the comments because they seldom influence or change my opinion. But this time, with the other reader, I took a look. Mostly brief and flippant, the comments which were being left did not stray too far from my own response. Seeing this the reader encouraged me to post my letter as a comment.
Not only do I rarely read comments, I never post. So first I needed to create a login, a more time consuming task than posting itself. Within a few minutes of posting I did have my first reply to my comment. It came from the editor-in-chief and co-founder of hyperallergic.com, Hrag Vartanian. “I appreciate your creative response, Robyn.” Perhaps this is just an automatically generated reply for first time comment posters?
The next morning I awoke to an email notifying me of Dr. Nechvatal’s own reply to my comments. You can read his reply by clicking on this link and scrolling down to the comments section.[2]
As it was never my intention with writing this piece to open the floodgates of discussion, I will not be responding to Dr. Nechvatal. While I am honored that he took the time to reply, his response in no way has altered my initial impression of his Open Letter to Frank Stella, if anything it has reinforced my opinion just as my comments seem to have reinforced the opinion of Dr. Nehvatal. Perhaps it is my lack of skill as a writer that prevents my point from being absorbed, or it could be the solidity of the brick wall blocking Dr. Nechvatal’s ability to see beyond his own paradigm. To address the shortcomings in my own writing I can only improve my skills by practicing writing; Dr. Nechvatal can address the brick wall however he sees fit.
I would like to end this addendum with a couple of quotes I came across this week while reading Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America [1993]. Here Mr. Hughes’ is writing specifically about history as it is being addressed by Americans, from academia down through the culture of the masses, in the climate of “political and patriotic correctness” and multiculturalism of the post-Vietnam War era [1975-1990], although much of what he writes is still applicable 25 years later and has increased in obtusity. What Mr. Hughes’ wrote can be applied more broadly to the visual arts relevant to the way we look at, talk, and write about all art...contemporary or historical, high or low, local or international, object or time based. Even more, what he writes can be carried over into how we address identity. It is about finding the original context of what we are addressing and then identifying the relevance of that being addressed from the point of its origins through the shifting which occurs to the point it meets the own context within which we find ourselves.
“The reading of history is never static. Revise we historians must. There is no such thing as the last word. And who could doubt that there is still much to revise in the story of the European conquest of North and South America that we inherited?...The notion that all historians propagated this triumphalist myth uncritically is quite false:...But after the myth sank from the histories deep into popular culture, it became a potent justification for the plunder, murder and enslavement of peoples, and the wreckage of nature.
So now, in reaction to it, comes the manufacture of its opposite myth.” [Hughes, 1993: 116]
And further on:
“The need for absolute goodies and absolute baddies runs deep in us, but it drags history into propaganda and denies humanity of the dead: their sins, their virtues, their efforts, their failures. To preserve complexity, and not flatten it under the weight of anachronistic moralizing, is part of the historian’s task. One could do worse than remembering the advice of the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado, reflecting on the 500th Anniversary of Columbus and the conquest of the New World: for some, he wrote, it means
the epic of discovery, the meaning of two worlds; for others, the infamy of the conquista and of genocide...One must set up and compare appearances and differences, because only in this way, by understanding what was great and will be an eternal glory, by disclosing what was wretched and will be a perpetual shame, only thus, in reflection and understanding, can we both celebrate the epic and condemn the massacre, neither of which expunges the other. We are the product of both--the mixed peoples of America. [Jorge Amado, “El embeleso colonial.” El Pais, 8/23/1992.] [Hughes, 1993: 120-121]
[2] When I originally read the piece on hyperallergic.com I thought the the heading under which it was published was ‘Museum’. Upon returning to the article later that day, before posting my comment, I noticed the heading now reads ‘Reactor’. This change could have been a figment of my imagination, I have done no research on this. In either case I was well aware that what Dr. Nechvatal wrote was not intended to be read as a review of the current retrospective of Mr. Stella at the Whitney Museum of American Art. However it was a piece of writing about a current exhibition, published on a website that has published reviews of the exhibition. Even if what Dr. Nechvatal wrote was intended to be a personal response in the form of a biting, slightly snarky and satirical critique of the work of Mr. Stella, the context in which his Open Letter was published [time and place] does place it into the category of a ‘review’. Afterall, what review of an exhibition is ever a neutral response on part of the reviewer to the work exhibited? Hence my irritation with the irresponsible writing Dr. Nechvatal put forth, and his subsequent reply to other commenters attempting to back away from this irresponsible writing by claiming it was not a review. And yes, I was being "cheeky".