In Terms Of

Tag: Southern United States

  • Good Ol’ Boys of the Appalachian Connection

    This week the College Art Association is holding its 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. In recognition of the event, In Terms Of is republishing four reviews of sessions from CAA’s 1979 conference, which also took place in the nation’s capital, on topics still relevant to the art world today.

    Recurring Regionalism: The Southern Rim
    Friday, February 2, 1979
    67th Annual Conference, College Art Association, Washington Hilton Hotel, Monroe Room, Washington, DC

    Moderator: William R. Dunlap
    Panelists: John Alexander, John Canaday, William Christenberry, Larry Edwards, Jim Roche, and James Surls

    Cynthia Navaretta, “Good Ol’ Boys of the Southern Rim” Women Artists News 5, no. 1 (May 1979): 11

    John Canaday, for those of you too young to remember, used to be senior art critic on the New York Times, and hence, some felt, the most powerful art critic in the country. I remember a Sunday column of his about a woman in the art department of Appalachian [State] University who had put together an exhibition so fine that he praised it unstintingly. This was particularly impressive to a New Yorker because at the time the very name of the university conjured up an isolated pocket of insularity where it was hardly expected art would be taught, let alone exhibited—and abstract art at that. Canaday’s Appalachian connection appeared again at College Art [Association], as we saw him on the panel, “Recurring Regionalism: The Southern Rim.” (The title came from an earlier conference of the same name.)

    Moderator William R. Dunlap of Appalachian [State] University acted like a suave cosmopolitan—that is, until he exhibited all the worst characteristics the rest of the country might attribute to New Yorkers. He was rude, egotistical, insulting, arrogant, uncaring, and crude. He also made a great show of swilling bourbon from a prominently displayed bottle. Typical of this Southern gentleman’s behavior was his reply to Elsa Fine’s question from the floor about the absence of women, or even one good ol’ girl, on the panel with the good ol’ boys. It was OK, Dunlap said, because there were two homosexuals on the panel.

    Having arrived late, I missed the opening presentation of slides, but I was in time to hear John Alexander entertain the audience with anecdotes from the past year which he had spent traveling the country in the role of famous artist, accepting recognition and success. He declared himself on the side of minority artists (Chicanos) but definitely against New York lady art critics with briefcases. (One had spent no more than three minutes scanning his show before writing a several-page magazine article.) He was bemused by Lions Club audiences who, in Lions Club tradition, roared approval of his witticisms rather than applauding. His other adventures ranged the country both sociologically and geographically. Alexander enchanted the CAA audience in general, the women less so.

    James Surls, apparently the only member of the panel concerned with human values, was generous in crediting the Dallas Women’s Co-op with opening up the art scene there. They did all the work, he said—politicking, letter writing, and the rest—that made it possible to exhibit art in Dallas outside the museum. He said he himself “rode in on the coat tails.”

    Discussion continued as, by and large, a series of rambling non sequiturs. Members of the audience seemed to feel compelled to make statements themselves, like at a revival meeting, and their random statements, usually irrelevant to the discussion, prompted other remotely connected observations. One item surfacing in this manner was the moderator’s statement that New York had “closed down for young artists.” He attributed that to Marcia Tucker’s departure from the Whitney. (Maybe it was the bourbon.)

    This profundity was followed by an editor of Art Voices South—an expensively glossy magazine dedicated to praise of Southern artists—who got to his feet in the audience to say that the magazine covers twenty-two Southern states and is trying to attract an audience not accustomed to going to galleries. The panel responded very warmly to this and the subject of regional art came up—whether the South was producing any, whether any Southern state had ever produced any. Washington, DC, got some credit here, specifically the Washington Color School, but that was quickly dismissed by a panelist—Canaday perhaps—as a “suburban” expression of New York Abstract Expressionism.

    Well, things just moved along. Soon Alexander spoke in recognition of the people of Iran—he felt they should be honored for “standing up and getting rid of a cancerous tyrant.” (This was the week of street riots in Iran.) Dunlap even managed an insulting joke on the subject. Then Margaret Gorove, chairperson of the art department at the University of Mississippi—and former teacher of moderator Dunlap—got to her feet to say, first, that a proper grad of Ole Miss would have kept the bottle in a paper bag, and second, to describe the very real problems of women artists in the South. She pointed out that, as is well known, women do well in blind-juried shows but aren’t included in invitationals, not having had the exposure or experience.

    Moderator Dunlap’s response to this serious and impassioned statement was, “Let me say, I love your hair, and the color of your dress.” Gorove, resigned, even gentle, replied, “You haven’t changed a bit.” Dunlap then felt it necessary to go on record with, “I make no apology for the sexual make-up of this panel.”

    Alexander added quickly that he himself is concerned with the problems of women artists and is aware of prejudice against them and minorities. But, he claimed, the previous night’s panel. “Modern Art and Economics,” had been “all big names, all men, and no one brought the issue up there.” Aggrieved at what he saw as discrimination against the Southern panel, Alexander wanted to pursue the topic. “I recommend we continue and go for the throat” (which throat he didn’t say).

    Surls mentioned that, having found the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston without a director, curator, or scheduled exhibition, he had grabbed the free slot to do a show of one hundred Texas artists (Fire!). He may have intended to say women as well as men were included, but never got to it, because next came Robert Pincus-Witten from the audience.

    Bitingly sarcastic about Art Voices South’s self-congratulatory tone and self-serving ways, Pincus-Witten said that “without a critical voice for the Southern Rim you’ll be back on this panel continuing this conversation for the rest of your lives.” Only the development of a critical voice can bring Southern artists recognition from the rest of the country, he said.

    Canaday didn’t see it that way. “American art would have been better off without all the known critics,” said the former known critic. He quoted from an essay by Harold Rosenberg: “Artists are faced with a wall of opinion—a formulated taste dictating the direction of art.” Canaday advised us that “what is really needed is a buying public for the arts.” (An exemplary opinion, certainly.)

    Next it was Irving Sandler’s turn. Sandler said from the audience that there was “more energy, more wit in this panel” than any he had heard in New York. That seemed like a good time to leave.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “Good Ol’ Boys of the Appalachian Connection” was originally published in Women Artists News 5, no. 1 (May 1979): 11; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 120–21. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

     

  • The Still Life

    Eric Banks
    Wednesday, December 2, 2015
    Creative Writing Program
    New School, Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, New York

    Eric Banks (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    In academic art history, the single-author, single-subject monograph—an extended study on an individual artist, a group of artists, or a chronological or geographic range—is typically considered the pinnacle of scholarly achievement. A parallel to it in the hierarchy of subject matter in Western art would be history painting, a large work that addresses a biblical, historical, or mythological subject. To continue the analogy, a coauthored or edited book is comparable to a portrait, and an essay in a book is a genre scene. The article published in a peer-reviewed journal would be the landscape. The lowest form is the book review—the still life of academic writing.

    “I’m a book reviewer,” said Eric Banks, director of the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University since 2013, to about thirty attendees of a talk at the New School. No kidding—he has assessed hundreds of books on a wide range of subjects (art, literature, nonfiction) over the last twenty years for the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, Chicago Tribune, Slate, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Financial Times, to name a few. Despite this hierarchy established in the opening, the book review and its parent form, the critical essay, allow for a high amount of creative liberty for its author, as demonstrated every week in “The Critics” section of the New Yorker. “Writing about books,” Banks said, is “a springboard to talk about so many other things in culture.”

    The critical essay is the hardest thing to write, said Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at the New School, who introduced the speaker. Where do you begin? Who are you when you write one? How do you manage a voice that is neither an encyclopedia entry nor a bad sermon? All good questions. What seemed to concern Banks the most, when reviewing books, is to avoid writing that’s too “plotty.”

    Banks admitted that he misunderstood the initial invitation to speak and became preoccupied with preparing a talk on the autodidact as critic, or on what it means to be self-taught in the internet age. Another possible topic could have contrasted the work of a critic with that of an academic scholar or a writer of personal interest. (Is that a semiprofessional blogger or a contributor to Amazon or Yelp?) He could have kicked around a “praise of digression” but instead read his work and talked about it—a strategy Moore had suggested.

    The cover of Artforum in October 1997

    Before reading three of his own short critical essays from the past few years, Banks gave us a brief professional biography. In the mid-1990s, he found himself in a senior-editor seat at Artforum, his first real job out of graduate school. At the time, he said, voices in the magazine came from the belletristic tradition of poets and novelists, from people interested in film, photography, and fashion (“fashion was an extremely important thing around 1995”), and from art historians and graduate students. Art criticism is always tied to higher education, Banks remarked, but book reviewers for the types of publications in which he publishes (journalistic and cultural outlets covering literature and nonfiction) don’t interact with the academy. A good essay on art achieves good formal description, which Banks said comprises 90 percent of the text. “Students are really trained—and they’re trained very well by their professors—to be able to look at something and describe it. You can’t write a critical essay unless you really describe in form[al] terms, in descriptive terms, the object you’re writing about.”

    I beg to differ. First, I would put that figure at no more than 50 percent, because subject matter, biography, history, and cultural context are crucial topics. And this rigorous training of graduate students? A few years ago, while editing the first sixty pages of a doctoral student’s dissertation, I was astonished by the inability of the author to describe works of art: her words hardly corresponded with the accompanying illustrations. Then again Banks, as an editor for Artforum and Bookforum—two of the top publications of criticism of any kind—probably saw only the best stuff from the brightest academics.

    Twenty years ago, Banks observed, writers on art didn’t need to explain a lot in their criticism because their readership was small and dedicated. Now the art world has a wider audience that may not share the same knowledge base. When he took over the editorship of Bookforum from Andrew Hultkrans in 2003, and with the publication’s relaunch later that year, Banks said he wanted swagger from his writers.1 He led the bimonthly journal for five years before replacing Lawrence Weschler at the New York Institute of the Humanities.

    The covers of three books on horse racing from the collection of Eric Banks

    The first text Banks that read tonight, “Pony Up,” came from the April/May 2012 issue of Bookforum. The piece grew, he disclosed, from evolved from avoiding a book review (Patricia Meyer Spacks’s On Rereading from 2011) to a musing on his longtime obsession, horse racing, and in particular, his collection of “ridiculous books” on the subject (from pulp novels to betting tips). Banks eventually shoehorned the book review into the piece, in the fourth of seven paragraphs, but the essay was truly his own thoughts—delightfully self-indulgent, if not somewhat neglectful of the author.

    Banks said his stuff is good when it hits both high and low culture. He also identified the pitfalls of the middle-ranged piece, which plagues many writers of short-form criticism:

    People have written a lot of short reviews, reviews in the fifteen-hundred-word range, which are just long enough to take you forever [to write], and to involve a lot of work and … thought about how to structure an essay, but just short enough that you really can’t get into great depth into the kinds of things you’d like to get into. It’s eye opening, because you frequently will go back and read something you’ve written and think, “I have no idea what I was trying to say with this sentence. I have no idea why I reviewed this book. I don’t even remember reviewing this book.”

    Some reviewers, he said, don’t even remember reading the book.

    Banks apologized in advance for the scatological passages from the Franz West catalogue essay he read, saying he is uncomfortable with colorful language.2 The piece was structured into three sections: Twinkies, roses, and sausages. Banks read from the sausages passage, telling us how the artist’s studio often ate at a Chinese restaurant nearby and sourced their own lentils to accompany the brown rice, and how West’s body was deteriorating because of illness, looking not unlike Ichabod Crane, bad teeth, still smoking cigarettes and marijuana. In West’s work on paper, “sausage equals dick equals turd equals sausage.” Banks described a handful of sculptures and drawings, how the artist’s work was autobiographical despite the collaborators in his studio, and how his audience-engaged pieces differ from that of Relational Aesthetics (they are private).

    Eric Banks reads from three review essays (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    “Public Anomie,” his review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, recently translated from French to English, was freshly published by Bookforum. It was difficult to avoid thinking about the November terrorist attacks in Paris, Banks mentioned, which took place after he wrote the review. Banks remarked how both his essay and a New York Times review of Submission compared Houellebecq to Lars von Trier, which Banks thought was his observation was a special discovery. Sometimes things are in the air. The plague of modern life, Banks said, borrowing a term from Benedict Anderson, is short-lived communities we form. Those which surround books (and their reviews) still engender “magic conversation.”

    Moore moderated the event’s Q&A, first addressing the solitude of book reviewing. Banks thinks about voice a lot, and he writes, rewrites, and rewrites. Moore concurred, “One has to keep rewriting to find out what you think.” Banks replied, “You’re always writing criticism in your head. You’re constantly taking notes in your head for essays that will never be written.” Yet “When you finally arrive at something, it’s almost like the smelling salts have been broken open, and you’re really alert to what you’re thinking about, reading about, what you’ve read [already].” Critical writing, he implied, sharpens your perception of the world. “There’s something about the critical essay, it makes you more attuned to … a lot of things. Somehow your senses are shot into another level of awareness. It’s the cocaine of writing, or something.” Yet he worries if a piece be embarrassing in a year—not unlike many people’s regret, the next day, about their behavior on the illegal stimulant.

    Banks wished he was more daring in certain areas. Born and raised in Louisiana, he feels he needs a weird Southern high-brow persona yet cannot write a history of the South. Nor could he write a book on smoking cigarettes (he once was a smoker) and the invention of obscenity in the Middle Ages. The questions I didn’t ask were: Is it harder to write about art than about books? How important is the editor, and what is it like writing and publishing without one?

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Banks’s career path was chronicled in Cynthia Cotts, “Banks Knows His Books,” Village Voice, July 1, 2003.

    2 Rachel Harrison and Eric Banks, “Hostess with the Mostess,” in Darsie Alexander, ed., Franz West: To Build a House You Start with the Roof (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008).