Against trademark hollowness: The difference that “Theory” makes

I.

Now seems as good as any moment, as history breaks around us, to reconsider our attachments to modernism and formalism — along with the implications of such attachments — for the purpose of developing an art criticism that aspires to be adequate to the present. In the December 12th, 2024 essay, “Cornering the Critics” — published a month before I was approached to write something for Caesura — Sean Tatol mounted a critique of fellow art critic Taylor Ervin (who has, it bears noting, no affiliation with Caesura but is nevertheless associated with the Platypus Affiliated Society) that offers one of the best descriptions I’ve encountered of how one’s attachment to the formalist-modernist enterprise can essentially backfire and become a crutch that prevents not only criticism itself from transpiring but also the comprehension of the art historical present. In what follows, I hope to offer a brief rejoinder to Tatol’s essay that also branches out to explore a number of other related topics.

Taking aim at Ervin in the essay, Tatol writes:

Only someone who still believes wholeheartedly in the project of modernism could so fully misunderstand art since then, but that’s an easy narrative to fall for if your understanding of art history doesn’t account for the last six decades...[Ervin’s] understanding of theory dictates that art should be these things [i.e., “something that should be visionary or beautiful”], but he doesn’t really have any understanding of art or aesthetics beyond the explanation provided to him by the theory...Taylor has incorporated aesthetics into a political conception of art, but he’s still a Marxist that has no sense for aesthetics. Not that I have anything against Marxists, even unfeeling ones, I just don’t like when they condescend to everyone with their self-assurance that their frigidity is inherently enlightened. I even sympathize inasmuch that I’m relatively detached and analytical toward art, but I see that as an intellectual affliction where the type of Marxist I have in mind sees it as a virtue...My primary conviction is that the modernism that Taylor champions, the artist envisioning a new reality to uplift humanity, etc., is simply an inadequate idealism that doesn’t actually work.

There’s a lot to parse in these passages, but I find myself particularly drawn to the issue of frigidity, which seems to be the crux of Tatol’s critique. Suffice it to say that the above modernist/Marxist’s frigidity is the opposite of giving oneself over to one’s object — a lost art if there ever was one, and one which the beloved Benjamin, early Horkheimer, and Adorno so finely practice. It strikes me that if philosopher Søren Kierkegaard qua Johannes Climacus met such a modernist/Marxist, he might describe them along the following lines he develops in Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

when the insanity [in a person] is the absence of inwardness, the comic is that the something known by the blissful person is the truth, truth that pertains to the whole human race but does not in the least pertain to the highly honored parroter. This kind of insanity is more inhuman...one does not dare to look at [the person] at all for fear of discovering that he does not have proper eyes but glass eyes and hair made from a floor mat, in short, that he is an artificial product. If one happens to meet a mentally deranged person of that sort, whose illness is simply that he has no mind, one listens to him in cold horror. One does not know whether one dares to believe that it is a human being with whom one is speaking, or perhaps a “walking stick,” an artificial contrivance of Døbler that conceals in itself a barrel organ. To drink Dus with the executioner can indeed be unpleasant for a self-respecting man, but to get into a rational and speculative conversation with a walking stick — now that is almost enough to drive one crazy.

This paragraph, I find, helps to flesh out and clarify the above matter of frigidity. We might say that the bone Climacus has to pick with this “walking stick” — to whom “one listens...in cold horror” — is not their mere emptiness but rather their hollowness or withheld presence.

II.

What Tatol’s targeted modernist/Marxist seems to miss is that their clinging to modernism is not only potentially critically unproductive but also possibly off-putting (let’s bracket cringe and boredom here). Thus, they run the risk of turning people off from both art and criticism. (Interestingly, it is here that the respective skepticisms of the man on the street and the modernist/Marxist align.) So much for uplifting humanity. Yes, of course we need footholds like modernism and Marxism — here I echo Tatol’s essay — to help us get a grip on history and reality, but these can ossify over time and effectively become defense mechanisms if they are not supplemented or overhauled altogether. And as Tatol suggests above, the clinging to the model of modernism seems more and more to amount to an abdication for wrestling with the past six decades.

Some of our best critics and art historians who have sought to process what has transpired in “art since then” have exhorted us to attend to the long goodbye of 1967 (not that of 1973) — and all its resonances. 1967, then, conceived as a hinge of sorts (unsurprisingly, some of these figures have also suggested seeing Rauschenberg as a similar kind of inflection point). Doing so has offered the hope of something akin to a Science of Logic for (broadly speaking) our post-Minimalist present: an appropriate lens through which to trace Minimalism’s aftermath as a complex nexus of problems entailing both the negation and affirmation of the formalist-modernist enterprise. Notably, these figures have also insisted on the specificity and distinctness of description and reading in relation to interpretation and method — such that embodied experience would seem to be emphasized.

III.

From a certain angle, clinging to modernism in the face of the ever-changing reality of contemporary art curiously resembles, however ironically, the conservative resistance to French Theory that arose in the field of American literary studies during the latter half of the twentieth century. It was through such resistance that the questions raised by theory starting in the ‘60s became reduced, over time, to matters of method by the ‘90s. In the face of reading — the practice sponsored by theory — a seminal admixture of professionalism, skepticism, epistemology, and method coalesced in the ‘80s which worked to militate against it. The conservative response to French Theory, in short, took refuge in interpretation and method over and against reading and description. The procedure of Tatol’s modernist/Marxist noticeably resembles such conservatism in terms of its elevation of interpretation — the practice of making out a meaning — above reading. From this stance, the artwork is called upon to pave the way for didactic redemption. What’s crucially at stake in such conservatism is, quite simply, the avoidance or failure of expression — in a word, hollowness.

In the provocative and deeply resonant essay, “Minimalism and the Fate of ‘Theory’” (2013), art historian Stephen Melville triangulates the avoidance of expression as a phenomenon common to artistic practice, Minimalism as it emerged in the ‘60s, and the university. Concerning the first of these, Melville offers us the following difficult scene of the studio critique:

In the late 1980s and more pronouncedly in the 1990s, a frequent experience for those of us visiting studio critiques in American art schools was to find ourselves in a studio with a student who was very eager to talk about, or more often simply expound, the theories of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, or Gilles Deleuze. Typically, there would be no texts by the relevant figure at hand, and typically it would be very hard to get the student to talk about the things in the studio that were the presumed object of the visit, and almost impossible to generate any discussion around questions of what the artworks were, rather than what they meant.

Notice here how theory serves to enable the student-artist’s avoidance of their own central object — their art. In such a case, Melville argues how “theory” simply consists of what Michael Fried calls “acting accordingly” (a phrase which Melville notes “can only mean absolutely anything, and by that token also absolutely nothing”) in view of “an object that is the evasion of its own claims and condition.” (Melville alternatively calls this “the sort of talk around proper names that somehow could never quite turn into a conversation about the object in the room.”) Here, as in the case of the conservative response to French Theory in literary studies, theory conceived as method is a way in which we keep ourselves baffled, whereas “reading,” understood as the crux of theory, promises to deliver us from this state via expression.

Over the course of the essay, Melville connects the student-artist’s evasion with the trademark hollowness of the Minimalist object, which, on Fried’s classic reading, fails to amount to an expression but rather consists of its curious evasion. Writing on Minimalism, Melville returns us to the problematic of hollowness: “at the heart of Minimalism is the placement of a cube whose problematic interiority — ‘hollowness,’ in Fried’s terminology — ties it in complex, self-evading ways to its situation and its architectural situation in particular.” Like the studio critique that doesn’t add up to being one, Minimalism is an instance of “art” not amounting to itself. It is thus (baffled) theater — which for Fried “lies between the arts”; hence the formalist’s choice to speak of the Minimalist object rather than Minimalist art (Fried’s original emphasis). In contrast to theory construed as “a stance or posture one can assume toward an object or practice,” Melville offers the example of the theory-steeped Robert Smithson, for whom theory is “shorthand for a line of thought or practice”—theory thus conceived as coextensive with the material practice of art itself.

Finally, Melville explores hollowness in the contexts of both the late-modern university and artistic practice, before then branching out to consider the resonance of the idea in the broader context of America itself:

The American use of the word “theory” began as this kind of shorthand for something whose interdisciplinary nature seemed to need some special marking, but very quickly it took on the sense I have called a “stance” or “posture”—a fundamentally epistemological or methodological sense. The dominant reception of theory in artistic practice essentially follows this same trajectory, and so it becomes tempting to say very generally that in the United States what theory has mostly been asked to do is relieve people of the demand for articulation while nonetheless assuring them of something they can still lay claim to as their voice (call this the hollowness of identity). One can take this as a version of the American idea of freedom, and it would be one in which a certain openness to experience goes hand in hand with a freedom from any obligation to its sense or articulation—from what more generally might be called the actual having of that experience. The orientation to experience at once claimed and evaded, withdrawn in its very offering, may be a deep feature of American life from early on, but it seems clear to me that it takes on a new sharpness and pervasiveness in the wake of the 1960s.

Now well into the 21st century, it is curious, but not at all surprising, how modernism and formalism are being used to relieve us of the demand for expression. Indeed, I think this is exactly what Tatol is describing above. Criticism and art, then, can be seen as sharing the threat of bafflement (which entails the failure of expression), and as we know all too well, theory is often a means by which we keep ourselves in that condition.

IV.

So, then, what is to be done if modernism and formalism cannot be used as crutches?

1) Part of the task, I would submit, will be descriptive and so linked with reading — both of which one is obliged to undergo or submit oneself to (rather than taking comfort in the security of interpretation). Afterall, it is Tatol’s recovery of description that helps us to see the “walking- stick” modernist for what they are (this, I think, is one way of specifying what Bret Schneider registers as Tatol’s “earthly orientation”). The 20th century love affair with phenomenology, more precisely, phenomenological description, is not mere fad, woo-woo, or tantamount to a belief in access to some realm of pure immediacy. Rather, this romance aided in the recovery of description, and ultimately the blurring of the discrete boundaries between description and interpretation. (In the latter half of the 20th century, structuralism + phenomenology came to equal poststructuralism.)

Arguably besting both Marxism and Wittgenstein, phenomenology — particularly, of course, by way of Merleau-Ponty — has spawned many important figures in the fields of both art and criticism (on the latter side, Fried and Krauss). The appeals these individuals have made to phenomenology, importantly, are not as a method, but as a way of shifting their orientation to the object of experience — from which a judgment, rather than a method, can issue. (However ironically, one could probably show how the license that poststructuralism/theory gave to reading over the past six decades has made possible the reemergence of modernism and Marxism — and perhaps especially their most robust forms.) The point in invoking phenomenology here, of course, is not to advocate for the critic to come undone to art (or to advance a belief that art proffers some realm of immediacy — objecthood — that we need to submit ourselves to — in order to, say, atone for the sins of formalism). Rather, it is to insist on orienting ourselves in relation to our own experience such that the terms of description and reading take on new meanings for us — through which we can (perhaps) bypass our critical defense mechanisms.

2) Instead of taking modernism as a given at such a late date as we find ourselves, we are obliged to perceive it in relation to “art since then,” i.e., postmodernism. Linking modernism, allegory, and a putative “postmodernism,” Stephen Melville succinctly recasts critic Craig Owens’ seminal work from the early ‘80s as follows: “‘Postmodernism’ means, if it means anything, something about the way in which modernism must inevitably come to see in itself its own allegory.” A return to modernism, then, that is in some way nearly unrecognizable or is monstrous, as it is inflected in postmodernism. This is perhaps one way of slicing David Antin’s aperçu, “From the modernism that you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve.” Needless to say, it’s not as if the choice is simply between postmodern anti-aesthetics or modernist aesthetics, as many of the latter would have us believe.

3) Another part of the task, I would argue, will also be to wrestle with legibility (much as Benjamin spoke of wrestling with Marxism in his correspondence). Afterall, dealing with legibility — to leave aside Benjaminian citability here — is necessary for modernism, formalism, Marxism, etc. to have any purchase in the present, let alone for them to elicit conviction; all three must summon reading. Minimally, then, we are obliged to grasp language as a condition of a thing’s appearing. It has naturally only been those forms of Marxism, formalism, and modernism that actively take up these questions of mediation (e.g., the notion of messages in a bottle), and so put themselves under a kind of erasure, that resonate with us today.

This article will likely be read by some as a problematic concession to, even affirmation of, postmodernism and poststructuralism. But in response to that view, I would underline again how one cannot simply act like nothing has happened since modernism or dismiss what has happened out of hand as regression — let alone assume the enterprise of modernism is intact, unscathed. To do so ultimately seems more lazy or psychotic than it does principled. And, in any case, isn’t the point to be more real than reality? To, as it were, get ahead of the curve? So, then: Who’s afraid of undergoing experience?

Addendum

A brief note on the included music: For me, all of these pieces raise the question/problematic of hollowness in an interesting way that can be seen as relating to the issues raised in this article. Provisionally, we might say that these pieces make themselves out of hollowness or, alternatively, from an acknowledgment of hollowness. The following quotes from Bret Schneider’s essay “Judgment Days,” might be worth considering in relation to these works:

True aesthetic experience is actually very private, not much of its substance has been brought to light, so we suppose it doesn't exist. It does, but in a shadowy kind of way. Yet it's in the shadows where profound change often occurs.

Personally, I think artists should turn inwards more, acquire sensitivity, learn gratitude for exceptional historical achievements, confidently turn their backs on social trends that don't work for their vision, practice thoughtful dissonance, become almost monkish, retune the ears, become curious for forms which demand it, strive for formal excellence instead of subversion ... as preconditions to make something really moving.