Creation and revision of this text have been encouraged by Olivetti, which provided me with an M 21 computer. I would like to express my gratitude for the MicroPro and its Wordstar 2000 program as well. The text has been printed on an Okidata Micro-line 182.
I could not have made the lines above and below available to the English-language audience without the affectionate, constant insistence and encouragement of Grace Budd, Otello Venturovic, Michael Kandel, Martha Browne, and Dr. Ferdinando Adornato, who have sustained me with heart-warming and pressing daily telephone calls, informing me that the presses were rolling and, that at all costs, I had to provide the final footnotes.
Obviously, they are in no way accountable for the scholarly content of what appears on these pages; any defects in the present article, as in those of the past and the future, are my responsibility alone.
1987
How to Write an Introduction to an Art Catalogue
The following notes are meant to assist writers of introductions to art catalogues (hereafter referred to as WIAC). But first a word of warning: these instructions are not valid for the writing of a critical-historical essay to be published in a scholarly review. There are numerous, complex reasons for this distinction, the first of which is that critical essays are read and judged by other critics and only rarely by the analyzed artist, who either does not subscribe to the publication or has been dead for two centuries. A catalogue for a show of contemporary art exists in quite a different context.
How does one become a WIAC? Unfortunately, the process is all too easy. You have only to be involved in some intellectual profession (nuclear physicists and molecular biologists are in great demand), have a listed telephone number, and enjoy a certain fame. Fame is calculated in this fashion: it must have a geographical extension superior to the impact area of the show (fame should be at state level for a city of less than seventy thousand inhabitants, at national level for a state capital, at worldwide level for the capital city of an independent nation, San Marino and Andorra excepted) and must be of a depth inferior to that of the cultural knowledge of possible purchasers of pictures (if the show features wooded landscapes in the style of Daubigny, it is not necessary—indeed, it is counterproductive—for the writer to be a contributor to The New York Review of Books; it would be more advisable for him to be the principal of the local teachers’ college). Naturally, you must be invited by the exhibiting artist, but this is not a problem: exhibiting artists far outnumber potential WIACs. Given these conditions, your engagement as WIAC is inevitable, quite independent of your will. If the artist has made up his mind, the potential WIAC cannot escape the task, unless he decides to emigrate to another continent.
Now, when the WIAC has accepted, he can decide on one of the following motivations:
1) Corruption (very rare, for, as we shall see, there are motivations that cost the artist less). 2) Sexual reward. 3) Friendship, in either of its two versions: genuine affection or inability to refuse. 4) Gift of a work by the artist (this motive is not the same as the following one, namely admiration for the artist; in fact, it is possible to want gifts of pictures in order to accumulate a commercially viable stock). 5) Sincere admiration for the artist’s work. 6) Desire to link one’s own name with the name of the artist: a splendid investment for young intellectuals, since the artist will go to great pains to publicize the WIAC’s name in bibliographies for innumerable later catalogues, both nationally and abroad. 7) Ideological, esthetic, or commercial association, to promote a political movement or assist an idealistic art gallery.
The latter raises a delicate question, which even the most resolutely altruistic WIAC cannot evade. In fact, literary, film, or theater critics, whether they praise or demolish the work they criticize, have fairly little effect on its fate. The literary critic, with a favorable review, may increase a novel’s sales by a few hundred copies; the movie critic can pan a cheap porno comedy without preventing it from taking in vast sums at the box office, and the same observation applies to the drama critic. The WIAC, on the other hand, contributes to the enhancement of all the artist’s work, occasionally causing its value to jump by a factor of ten.
This special position also affects the critical situation of the WIAC: while the literary critic can speak ill of an author he may or may not know, but who as a rule cannot control the appearance of the article in a given paper, the artist commissions and controls his catalogue. Even when he says to the WIAC, «Feel free to be severe,» the situation is, in point of fact, untenable. Either you refuse—but as we have seen, this is impossible—or you are, at the very least, polite. Or evasive.
This is why, since the WIAC wants to maintain his dignity and his friendship with the artist, evasiveness is the essential element in art catalogues.
Let us examine an imaginary situation. We’ll take the painter Prosciuttini, who for thirty years has been painting ochre backgrounds with, in their center, a superimposed blue isosceles triangle, its base parallel to the southern edge of the painting. Over it is a red scalene triangle, tilted to the southeast with respect to the base of the blue triangle. The WIAC must bear in mind the fact that, depending on the period in the painter’s development, the artist will have entitled his painting, in this order from 1950 to 1980: Composition, Two Plus Infinity, Minimal, Make Love Not War, Watergate, Effete Snobs, A/cross, Miss/ reading, Pictorially Correct. What (honorable) possibilities does the WIAC have, in writing his contribution? If he’s a poet, it’s easy: he dedicates a poem to Prosciuttini. For example: «Like an arrow—(Ah! cruel Zeno!)—the flash—of another dart—parasang traced—on a cosmos infected—with black holes—of every color!» This solution creates new prestige—for the WIAC, for Prosciuttini, for the dealer, for the purchaser.
The second solution is for writers of fiction only, and it takes the form of a freewheeling open letter: «Dear Prosciuttini, When I look at your triangles, I am once more at Uqbar, with Jorge Luis … A Pierre Menard who suggests forms recreated in another era, a Don Pitágoras de la Mancha. Lust at 180 degrees: can we rid ourselves of Necessity? It was a June morning, in the sun-baked countryside: a partisan hanged from a telegraph pole. In adolescence, I doubted the substance of the Rule….» Et cetera.
If the WIAC has a scientific background his task is much easier. He can begin with the conviction (correct, as it happens) that a picture, too, is an element of Reality; then all he has to do is talk about the profundities of reality and, no matter what he says, he will not be lying. For example: «Prosciuttini’s triangles are graphs. Propositional functions of concrete typologies. Knots. How to proceed from knot U to another knot?
As everyone knows, an evaluating function F is required, and if, for every other knot V ≠ U considered, F (U) appears less than or equal to F (V), it is necessary to «develop» U, in the sense of generating knots that descend from U. A perfect function of evaluation will then fulfill the condition F (U) less than or equal to F (V), so that D (U,Q) is then inferior or equal to D (V,Q), where (obviously) D (A,B) is the distance between A and B in the graph. Art is mathematics. This is what Prosciuttini is telling us.»
At first sight this tactic might seem to work well for an abstract painting but not for a Morandi or a Norman Rockwell. Wrong. Naturally everything depends on the skill of the man of science. As a generic indication, we would say that, today, adopting—with a fair amount of metaphorical nonchalance—René Thorn’s theory of catastrophes, we can demonstrate that Morandi’s still lifes represent forms on that extreme edge of equilibrium beyond which the natural forms of the bottles would become cusps beyond and against themselves, cracking like a crystal injured by an ultrasonic sound; thus the painter’s magic consists in the very fact of having depicted this extreme situation. The writer could also play with the meaning of the words: still, i.e., for a temporal extension—but until when? Magic of the difference between still living and living on.
Another possibility existed from 1968 until, roughly, 1972: the political interpretation. Observations on the class struggle, on the corruption of objects tainted by their commodification. Art as rebellion against the world of consumer goods, the triangles of Prosciuttini as forms that refuse to become trade values, open to working-class inventiveness, expropriated by capitalistic greed. The return to a golden age, announcement of a Utopia.
All that has been said so far, however, applies only to the WIAC who is not a professional art critic. The art critic’s situation is, shall we say, more critical. He must somehow talk about the work, but without expressing any value judgments. The easiest solution is to show that the artist has worked in harmony with the dominant view of the world or, as we say now, the Influent Metaphysic.
Any sort of metaphysic represents a way of accounting for what is. A picture undoubtedly belongs in the
