Dennis Hollingsworth

Lane Relyea's "All Over and At Once"

My very excellent and impeccable friend Aaron Parazette (an accomplished and remarkable painter living and teaching in Houston, Texas, he and his wife Sharon Englestein - a fabulous sculptor- we're old friends* going back with me to grad school) has sent me the recent four part article by Lane Relyea in the Fall issue of X-tra magazine.

I was riveted. Much of what he wrote parallels and is identical to what I've been thinking about the artworld since art school, with roots going back to my undergrad experience in architecture school in the early 80's.

Essentially: There's a totalizing aspect to the postmodern project, and a simplistic return to earlier modernist coordinates is impossible. (Lord, there's so much to write about this topic...) As Lane writes at the beginning of the fourth part: "So where do we look today for help in negotiating our way beyond this impasse?"

But today, I only have the time to post a transcription of selections from his piece:

(more from me on this later)

?...The collapse of art into the culture industry and the complete defeat of the critic?s function- these have become the subjects of a growing number of books and magazine articles. We seem to no longer recognize art apart from a very general circulation of distribution and consumption, an evermore far-reaching and tightly efficient cultural economy, now that art objects, no matter how densely material and specific, have been dematerialized into digitized images stored in dead archives without end and now that the galleries, museums, art catalogs, and magazines have all become indistinguishable from the ceaseless, overwhelming, flow of mindless entertainment programming and information.

Welcome to the world of the allover.?

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?...Allover and at-once. These terms are associated with post-war art in the United States, particularly color field painting. They?re thought to be complementary, together describing pictures that make of their entire, allover surface a single, all-at-once image. But these terms in fact relate to each other very uneasily, if not in outright opposition.

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?...The pervasive sense that artworks rely on chains of explanation residing outside themselves. that they are a sub-species of theory, that they depend for their legibility and legitimacy on discourse, that they are most fully revealed in books and magazines, in the dual-slide-projector lectures of classrooms and artist talks, in informed discussions among artworld insiders, did much more to erode conviction in the single, framed, all-there-at-once image.?

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?...If either model of criticism- modernist or postmodernist- exists for us today, it?s as a shriveled up version of its former self. The postmodernist critic no longer sounds so triumphant when skeptically shifting focus away from the artwork to the contexts and contingencies that underlie and determine it- many are tenured art historians now, nested in the system, and continue to limit their attention to such long canonized senior artists as Ryman or Richter, artists whose quality hasn?t been in doubt in decades. And on the other hand we have the true judging critic who can feel but can?t think, whose expertise has dwindled to a mute albeit heartfelt and supposedly authentic thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture. What?s left is a postmodernist view of the system that isn?t so much critical as conformist, and a modernist model of the self that?s too incapacitated and dim witted to act.?

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?...We?re concerned that artworks are being too completely absorbed into the various contexts they?re threaded through, the magazines, coffee table books, discourses, slide comparisons, mega-Biennial group shows, Vogue lifestyle layouts, boutique architecture, the designing of experience. Artworks seem knitted at their sides to other works, references, lists, contexts, captions, commodities, product environments, etc., and these chains circulate perpendicular to us, to our attention, like internet data or TV programming, all just flowing by, a parade we?re from and only contemplate. Stopping a work, framing it, having it hold itself before us and challenge and reward our engagement with it- this is no longer a given for art but a stake that needs to be declared, fought for, pushed, risked, secured. Indeed, it?s a struggle for criticism as well, as criticism stands for the unfolding for rewards. or lack thereof, of serious attention to art.?

(you can find X-tra online at:

http://www.x-traonline.org/

but they don't have the Relyea article up yet.)

*OK, five adjectives... and they're worth it.