Feb

21

Dancing About Art.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

February 21, 2007 |

In an interview, Elvis Costello once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” Actually I’m not so sure about that. I’d love to see some dancing about, say, I.M. Pei’s pyramid in front of the Louvre, or even some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s creations.


I’ve read a lot about art, mainly about specific artists or art movements that interest me, so a few years ago when I heard about a magazine starting up at Vanderbilt University where I work that was going to focus on art and travel, I immediately contacted the editors and said I’d like to write art reviews. The Vanderbilt campus has three art galleries, the Fine Arts Gallery, the Kennedy Center Art Gallery,
and the Sarratt Art Gallery. And I’d read a lot about art, including reviews of specific artists. Art critics like Robert Hughes and David Sylvester made it look easy, although the only reviews I really got anything out of were ones of artists whose work I already knew. That, and the fact that the reviews were mostly biographical, should have told me that I was getting in over my head.

I started with a review of an artist named Margo Kren, whose work was on display at Sarratt at the time. And immediately I was hit with a problem. I didn’t know anything about Kren, aside from a little bit of biographical information in the gallery’s handout. I didn’t know how to reach her, and, aside from a little extrapolating from the brief bio and what I knew about art history, I didn’t have a clue how to proceed.
Since art history–at least until about, oh, 1950, was where I was most solid, I started with that. Margo Kren’s works were large, multi-colored paintings on black paper.

It may seem painfully obvious and uninteresting, but I was flailing around for anything I could find and settled on Picasso and the influence of African art on his Cubism. It wasn’t bad just because it was apples-and-pineapples; I was shoehorning Margo Kren into an art history context with a gap of about seventy or eighty years. And while non-European art has influenced artists of the 20th Century and beyond, including Margo Kren, Picasso wasn’t solely responsible for this influence.

While writing this I found that Margo Kren has a web site, and some of the paintings I saw at Sarratt can be found there. I especially like States of Crawfishing. The big pink shapes look to me like the cross section of a brain, which reminds me of the skill involved in crawfishing, as well as the fact that the brains are supposed to be the tastiest part of a crawfish. Looking at her other works, it’s clear that she’s got a very broad artistic range. The paintings I saw were part of a group called “Snook’s Jazz”, a tribute to Kren’s late husband.

crawfishing.jpg
This might have made an interesting review, but I didn’t know any of this. I should have given up, but instead I did something worse: I tried describing each painting in detail. I hoped I’d come to some conclusion, but instead all I ended up with was a bunch of descriptions of paintings. Think there’s nothing more boring than watching paint dry? Reading what I wrote is more like watching dry paint.

A funny thing did happen during the process, though. My knee-jerk reaction to abstraction used to be that I didn’t like it. And yet the more time I spent looking at Kren’s paintings the more I liked them. They really were beautiful, and there were a lot of interesting details, including blobs of paint like multi-colored chocolate chips that appeared in most of her works, that a quick glance would miss. If I hadn’t been under a deadline I might have been able to turn observations of detail into generalities that might have been more insightful, and probably more interesting, than just descriptions of the paintings, but it doesn’t do much good for an art critic to say, “Here are some things you might have noticed about the work of an artist who was here a couple of years ago.”

I turned in my article, they published it, and that was pretty much the end of my affiliation with the magazine and my career as an art critic. What is an art critic supposed to do, anyway? They can draw our attention to details and occasionally change minds, but there’s a reason most writing about art isn’t really about art, but about the artists themselves. A picture may be worth a thousand words but a thousand words don’t necessarily add up to a picture.


Comments

4 Comments so far

  1. James on February 21, 2007 10:32 am

    I love that last line. Very true. I remember once being in Amsterdam with a couple of “art people” and they tried to explain to me what it was I could look for in a piece of art. That it is what the eye beholds so to speak. It was an interesting afternoon to say the least. But I kept thinking I would have gotten more out of it if I had returned to look at the paintings after visiting a couple of local cafes. But you are right, most of the “art critics” pieces that I have seen do focus on the biography of the artists, in the hopes that helps to explain their style and in turn help you understand what it is you are looking at. Good point on that one.

  2. Joe on February 21, 2007 11:04 am

    Great article. And as someone who does write about music, I love that Costello quote, always have….

  3. Angel on February 22, 2007 10:39 am

    You jumped in and for that I applaud you. I’ve always been wary of critics, but then I expect that they have their own biases before I even begin to read their reviews. I approach an art piece by asking, “How does this make me feel?” but that certainly doesn’t put the piece in the context of history. What is it that people looking at art want to know? I think the first question for beginners is “What is it?”. Others wonder about the artist’s inspiration for the piece. Then there’s always the biography of the artist–but as you said, that’s sometimes overdone. Anyway, thanks for the article and the thoughts it continues to generate for me.

  4. Christopher Waldrop on February 22, 2007 10:45 am

    I love it too, although I wasn’t kidding when I said I’d like to see some dancing about architecture.
    As I get older and more curmudgeonly I think that if you need to know about an artist’s life, their influences, or the movement they were part of then the art must not be very good. But then I remember that the reason we want to know about an artist is because their work fascinates us first. At least that’s the way it should be. Sometimes I think bad artists get promoted because their lives are interesting while good artists get overlooked because their personal life is pretty dull. But that’s another story.

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