Image by Jessica Pamp.
Most genres of writing are governed by some principle of unity. The novel traditionally has a plot structure; historical writing tells the story of a place or a national culture; and biographies present the life of a noted person. Even anthologies with multiple authors usually have an organizing theme: recent writing about Nicholas Poussin, say, or French social history. Collections of single-author art writing are interesting case studies, for then that unifying structure often comes from the writer’s theorizing. What gathers together Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism, Roger Fry’s essays about painting, and Clement Greenberg’s writing for The Nation is, mostly, the development of their theorizing. Baudelaire contrasts the painting of his hero, Eugène Delacroix with the emerging modernism of Édouard Manet. And Fry and Greenberg define their conceptions of formalism. Reference to theorizing often unifies art writing. Arthur Danto’s numerous collections of his critical essays almost inevitably appeal to his canonical account of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. And readers of Michael Fried’s books on a myriad of old masters and modernists expect allusion to his contrast between the two modes of composition developed in his early, renowned critique of minimalism.
A study of these examples is a good way to identify by contrast what is highly distinctive about In and Out of the Museum. The artists Klaus Ottmann admires are very varied. And so he gives each of them a distinctive, individual focus. They include Wolfgang Laib, a radically self-sufficient figure who gathers elements such as milk, pollen, rice, beeswax, and marble; Christian Marclay, who does video assemblages; Frank Stella, the abstract painter whose later works are relief sculptors; James Lee Byars, whose performances developed his longtime experience of Indian and Japanese culture; the minimalist sculptor Robert Grosvenor; Mark Rothko, the renowned abstract artist; Lawrence Weiner, who did conceptual works; the Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning; the sculptor Carl Andre; Chantal Akerman, the film maker; the paintings containing words by Joan Snyder; Fairfield Porter’s figurative paintings; the cityscapes of Rackstraw Downes; the French conceptual artist Yves Klein – Ottmann’s account of his style is astonishing; the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor; and the famous American painter Jennifer Bartlett. This very incomplete listing includes only the artists I have some familiarity with and considers only the second volume of his art writing.
Many critics offer a catalog of contemporary artists. Ottmann does something more special; he focuses on an extraordinary variety of conceptual artists, painters and sculptors, responding to each one of them in his reconstruction of their own terms, without offering a reductive analysis. I know of no other contemporary art writer who goes justice to our pluralistic situation in such an original and consistently successful way. This art writing is something new and most suggestive: looking at each work without reducing it to some essential quality (as we find in Danto’s accounts). Ottmann offers concise, surprising descriptions. Kirkeby, for example, he says, “is a historical painter of nature who combines paleontology with art history.” Ottmann can summarize a long analysis very economically: “Arguably Kirkeby’s greatest achievement may be that he succeeded in merging two separate forms of classicism—landscape painting and history painting—into a new category, which can be described as natural history painting.” The framework in which he presents diverse perspectives is extraordinarily original. I know of no other writer whose writing does justice in this way to the sheer variety of such varied excellent artworks of the present. And although he has a high tolerance for some of his artists’ seemingly crazy ways of thinking, his own account is always focused and plausible. We see why each artist he discusses matters, in criticism whose form reveals his philosophical claims. In this situation, I believe that only writing that is as boldly original as the art it describes has a chance of success.
Reading Ottmann is fun, for the accounts in this very long book are marvelously highly condensed. Carl Andre and Wolfgang Laib, he writes, “are foremost examples of the struggle of artists to not only make sense of our world but, in their own ways, reshape it by making us stand still and reflect on the fundamental questions of human existence: What can I know? What ought I to do? For what may I hope?” What a surprising use of these Kantian ideas applied to these two very different artists! His goal, Ottmann says, is not necessarily a reconstruction of each artist’s own experience, but a search rather for ways to phrase his experience of the art. He does that in dazzling prose, never formulaic, and quite unlike any other art writing that I know. Ottmann employs both the usual French deconstructive literature and other texts less familiar in the art world—the literature of German Romanticism, for example.
Ottmann does offer a principle of unity for his criticism in his general characterization of how he describes art today:
“We realize that, in Wittgenstein’s words, we are always running against the boundaries of language. In art, we call this boundary the unrepresentable or inexpressible. The creation of extraordinary concepts in art are a result of this existential struggle between the artist and the Nonrepresentable (that which will always remain out of bounds but still presses or urges for representation).”
This I believe is an important, novel and plausible way of describing our situation. In our present art world, there are many interesting options, but no sense of direction, and so no movements—nothing like the Pop Art or Minimalism of the 1960s. And so only radically original ways of writing can do justice to this novel situation. If, as Ottmann goes on to say, this task is impossibly difficult, “there is no calculated strategy, only failure. In Samuel Beckett’s words, one can only ‘fail better’. . . . “ Judge in these terms, In and Out of the Museum is a brilliant failure. And sometimes, I would add, there is a personal reason, generally not obvious, that one is attracted to a writer. That’s the case for me here. Usually, art historians focus on individual artifacts. But when you are faced with group shows, as I have often done recently, then you need to change your focus and attend to diverse artifacts. And that is not easy in my experience. What fascinates me, then, is that Ottomann’s book provides a most suggestive model for my practice of art criticism. The form of his writing is adjusted to the nature of contemporary art in a way that promises to inspire imitation.
Note:
In and Out of the Museum and Ottomann’s other books are published by Spring Publications.