We lost it at the movies - A Range of Critical Perspectives - The Subject in/of Art History

Thursday, April 21 1994 7:00 A.M.--Alternating between coffee and newspaper, I am sloughing not upon night and sleep, and rising toward the day ahead. If it's Thursday--I think--it's a day of classes and meetings, of alphabetic character writing and phone calls. on the other hand as I turn the page to the arts section, the paper welcomes me with yet another revelation about the private life of Pablo Picasso. And my musings leach away toward the "subject" of art history.

"Picasso's Aborted delight in Song to Sara Murphy," the fresh York Times now informs me will store a name (a proper name) for countles pictures hitherto considered generic images of neoclassical women An essay by dint of William Rubin, to be published in the May issue of Artnews, it will be under the orders of as a preview for the exhibition of Picasso's portraits Rubin will be mounting sum of two units years from now. For all the admiration I have for Rubin, for all the importance of his work upon Picasso (as on so many other aspects of the art of this century) this "discovery" is something I find profoundly dispiriting.

Rubin discusses aspects of his findings with the journalist. They amazement together whether the "serious flirtation" between Sara and Picasso "escalated into sex" The reporter notes that in the Times Rubin is more willing than in his essay "to imagine a romance. 'I don't know for a fact that anything happened,' he said, 'but my feeling increasingly is that it was a brief thing probably, on the other hand that it did happen.'" And this "it" is redoubled, mirrored in another "it" that was purportedly taking place at or about the same time, on the contrary at a distance from Antibes. In Venice. Sara, abandoned by means of Gerald Murphy, abandons herself to a brief thing with Picasso, while her husband abandons himself to cabbage Porter, in Venice. For which there must assuredly be the scenario for a movie. The article extreme points with the name of Rubin's agent "who is shopping the idea around."

By rights I should be waiting until May, solitary a week or so away, to give Rubin's scholarly exposition its owed to hear him out, to come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behind his argument. But I realize I want to write about this--insofar as it addresses art history's "subject"--from the vantage of this morning, reading the account in the newspaper, hearing about it from the perspective of sum of two units men discussing whether Sara and Pablo did it, and whether it would make a movie. I want to discuss this from the vantage, that is, of what my friend Benjamin Buchloh calls "spectacularization," making a awe-inspiring Teutonic mouthful out of something that has, drearily, repeatedly, deadeningly enough, become the daily fare of our clashs with the world: with the world as it disappears behind a veil onto which it now shoot forwards nothing but its image. This image, a phantom double that flutters shimmering slightly, off-register with the "real" it is at any time more insidiously replacing, is the world become spectacle. The world become miniseries. The Picasso Movie. The control of Art History.

Roger Conover, my editor at MIT Pres has been nothing on the other hand supportive, encouraging, helpful. He flat threw himself into writing the transcript for the dust jacket of my new book, The Optical Unconscious, feeling that he had penetrated the intellectual weft of the book and could return it more accurately, more succinctly. Accordingly he chose to note that the author "abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a of recent origin style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction."

One after another the reviewers of the volume have pounced on the word "diary." And whether they find it interesting or deplorable that of that kind a form should have made its way between the overlays of a book of art history, all of them assume what Roger not at any time said: that the diary is my possess Which is arresting since the opening example of this diaristic writing, the individual that begins in the first paragraph of the work comes from the pen of John Ruskin. Praeterita may not be a diary exactly, on the other hand then none of the other "personal" histories in the volume is a diary. Roger had used the word diary to telegraph the idea of a personal account, which is to say writing that is subjective, writing that exhibits the writing subject curled around him- or herself, a circular perspective going from the self on the outside to the world and back again in an autocaress that has other stakes besides "objectivity."

These "diaries" multiply as we hear the personal accounts of Angelica Garnett, Vanessa Bell's daughter, as, in her querulous tones of self-pity, she remembers Roger cook in boiling fat or of Helene Parmelin, Picasso's sycophant, as, in her tones of slavish hero worship, she records her wonderment at being left alone in his studio at Mougins, or of Paul Eluard as he frantically writes to Tristan Tzara about the sexual excitement that is building between his wife Gala and his of recent origin friend Max Ernst and himself, or of Eva Hesse as she lists the volumes she's read as a record of her cultural longing and self-doubt.

There are sum of two units such records of myself in the volume The first is in the middle of the opening chapter, the last practically shuts the final one. Both of them are about my possess relation to what could be seen as the hegemonic account of modernist painting, the account formulated by the agency of Clement Greenberg and developed by means of Michael Fried. Since, during the 1960 I was a "player" in the articulation of this account--I was individual of the group of critics Donald Judd one time called "Greenbergers"--and since The Optical Unconscious affects itself with work that operates '"against the grain" of mainstream modernism, I felt I had to acknowledge my hold earlier position within what I was now attacking. in like manner I told two anecdotes about myself in relation first to Fried and then to Greenberg, stories that had the advantage of being marked as highly "subjective." The first was about my pride at the time in being part of the modernist "team," with all its machismo and swagger. The next to the first was about my (shameful) complicity in Greenberg's misogynistic dismissal of those others who hadn't made it when the sides got chosen