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On the Arts: When evaluating art, a key question is: Was it worth seeing?
Sunday, February 13, 2000 By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Arts Writer
The variance in critical response to the current Carnegie International may seem puzzling if critical opinion is thought of as an absolute. It's useful to remember, when reading reviews of this and other exhibitions, that the author's viewpoint may be informed, but it's also subjective, and a good critique may raise more questions than it answers.
Mary Thomas is the Post-Gazette art critic.
This is especially true of contemporary art, because its creators have abandoned traditional alliances of inspiration, patronage and form. In their place, the artists have adopted texts, themes and materials that are subject to intense debate -- as may be the validity of the art itself.
The historic definition of "art" has been replaced by a cornucopia of possibility because of the favoring of process and concept over final product, the introduction of local and global multiculturalism, continuing expansion of acceptable mediums, rejection of market control and challenges to institutional presentations and traditions. All of this makes for a dynamic that is as exciting and as rapidly changing as the society is.
Since newly created art has not been subject to the investigations and winnowing of time, a critic's review is near the beginning of a trail of evaluations that will determine whether a work is a momentary product of trend or an important addition to the art historic canon. Often this is not easy to predict, as with the famous example of Vincent van Gogh, whose greatness was not recognized while he was alive.
Critics, who have wide ranges of personal taste and professional experience, may arrive at disparate conclusions, as with the Carnegie International paintings by Luc Tuymans that are so faintly rendered as almost to appear to be fading. Christopher Knight, art critic for the Los Angeles Times, described them as "spare and strangely haunted essays in painterly faith," while Katy Siegel wrote in Artforum magazine that Tuymans "puts in a particularly wan appearance."
My own opinion is that they are not compelling paintings and they aren't among Tuymans' strongest. I have heard visitors to the gallery both praise and denounce the works.
The expansiveness within the current art world does not suggest the end of the need for evaluative criteria (though some would argue that), nor should it. Besides, critics, curators, jurors, funding agencies and patrons all ultimately have some set of standards by which they make selection. Continually evolving formal and intrinsic languages call for critical readings appropriate to the new expression.
My approach to the International was first to do a walk-through of the galleries, giving the work time to speak, to see how the exhibition held together and how much it had to offer. It surprised me to discover that my original overall opinion changed considerably after I'd found the time to view the large number of video and film entries, which played back and forth against other works exhibited and included some of the finest pieces in the exhibition. To miss these is not to see the International, but viewing them all is admittedly a time-intensive commitment.
When I returned to each artist's work I asked six main questions: What was the artist trying to express? Was that goal accomplished? Does the work succeed in quality of craft and/or technically? How does it fit into the stated theme of the exhibition? How does it fit within the contexts of contemporary art and art historic lineage? What does it say to me?
Evaluating group exhibitions is difficult and lengthy because one has to shift visual points of entry so often to "see" each work adequately. When the artists are as globally diverse and as sophisticatedly vested in current visual and philosophical art dialogue as those in a survey like the International, the effort required is even larger.
Factors besides the actual art, such as how it is presented, contribute to a critique. The proliferation of large global exhibitions in recent years was on the minds of many critics, who complained of seeing the same artists at many of them.
I find this line of objection only vaguely useful. For instance, I don't buy into the opinion that a Sarah Sze installation in Pittsburgh is lessened by the fact that she created one in Venice last year, even if it did look similar. Sze's works may be huge, but they are still only one work (at the Carnegie, she exhibits two pieces), essentially part of a series. Using the same argument for dismissal, there would be no point in hanging eight of John Currin's nudes in the gallery next to Sze, since they are all of a kind.
A more significant concern sullying the large exhibitions is that the quality of the work created by artists trying to exhibit at too many is becoming compromised.
Rather than a specialized global set, I chose to critique the International for a local audience, one that lived close enough to make several visits during its long -- five months -- presence, and to take advantage of the many auxiliary programs that the Carnegie had scheduled. This did not mean lowering the standards to which the works were held, but, within the constraints of time and space, elaborating upon artworks with a complexity that a less-hurried audience might ponder.
While issues and uniqueness were important, the bottom line for recommending works was that they were worth the visitor's attention.
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