This is a piece about words, the words of others and their effect on my own.
The occasion is an anniversary, for on June 3, 1973, in these pages, I began putting words-mine and others’-at the service of visual art.
I was then 26 and, week by week, did not think of growing up in print. But that was what happened, and as I now look over the weeks, seeing how they became months and eventually a nice round number of years, I feel I should go back further to explain how they happened and, more important, why.
I came from a home with no books, at least, none anyone would call serious. So not having had an easy familiarity with literature, I did not take for granted the printed word. In fact, once I began to bring books into that home, I did the opposite: I not only read but believed them.
Because I felt books were instruments teaching us how to live, I nourished a violent adolescent idealism that erupted from my writing and has taken me 20 years to calm if not to tame completely.
My first influence was critic and art theorist John Ruskin, who wrote, “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.”
That gave me a reason for writing, and as I repeat it now, without benefit of more stentorian Ruskin prose, I am aware that it may not seem like much, though to me the declaration still is powerful.
Then came poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold, who wrote, “Criticism is a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.”
This told me to stand apart from artists so I might see more clearly their results instead of intentions and keep whatever I might learn and propagate free from the narrowness of personal allegiances.
So there I was, armed with principles and a fair amount of coursework in art history. That, plus a line from George Orwell-“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity”-I thought would get me through.
The naivete with which I entered the pages of the Tribune now seems appalling. I, an overheated student wanting to be an eminent Victorian, was going to inform, guide, instruct and amaze a good but benighted people whose scales would fall from their eyes in the face of hard words set down with ever-so-much honesty.
How childish I was to think that a community, any community, might accept the reason of opinions that went against its own financial, emotional and intellectual decisions.
And how foolish was the reason itself when, at times, at the beginning, it mistook an artist’s dexterity for achievement and simplicity for spiritual depth.
Did I actually believe all the people who had committed themselves to Chicago art of the ’60s and early ’70s would put it aside after sharp words from me?
Was the sharpness even necessary, given the limited ambitions of the work and the isolation in which its artists appeared to be content?
Twenty years ago, the nature of art in Chicago troubled me because works that now are scarcely more than period pieces seemed to be engines of power thrusting people into a tight, crowded spotlight having more to do with celebrity than quality.
But what I didn’t realize, in all my knotted seriousness, was that the distinction between the two was hardly a matter of life and death. People might know the difference and still enjoy the one without the other because, that way, they at least got the slice of pie to which they felt entitled before the whole of it went somewhere else.
I remember being taken aback when one of the tastemakers in town told me, “It’s all a game, and I am only playing at it.” That didn’t sound right. But taste is a game we play even when we’re unaware we are playing because however much we appeal to “objective” standards, we are in fact their architects, constructing them in direct relation to the image we hold of ourselves.
As for standards that can affect artistic form, the ones I valued were reason, balance, rigor, worldliness, pleasure and a more general condition I unashamedly thought of as truth.
Such qualities existed outside myself, so I might grasp and apply them to artworks as touchstones. Yet the degree to which they mattered and the peculiarities of how they came together in each individual work of art were still highly subjective, as it ever is for the person who does the applying.
The most celebrated art of the ’80s illustrated that beyond any doubt, for whatever commonly held standards that remained in painting, sculpture, drawing and photography all seemed to break down. And yet, as we saw everywhere, from the galleries to the journals and museums, the art in no way suffered. On the contrary, it met with a welcome more immediate and widespread than at any other time in the century.
What’s more, the taste of the ’80s was unpredictably broad, embracing artists as different as Sandro Chia, Anselm Kiefer, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Peter Halley and Jeff Koons. So, in Chicago, the time when more than one idea might be supported by a collecting community at last seemed to have come.
But, as it turned out, that didn’t rest on anything much more solid than a British ad man named Charles Saatchi whose voraciousness as a collector was imitated on a smaller scale and for a shorter period. It was not meaningful artistic pluralism after all.
My reactions were mixed, as would have been anyone’s who had hoped for diversity and found it was not what one had thought. I envisioned a range of styles and approaches accompanied by healthy discrimination. But I had not considered that in a small artistic community like Chicago’s, more than a single idea could be sustained only by keeping interests high through schizoid and tireless cheerleading.
Once the confidence of the ’80s crumbled, gallery closings were not far behind, and the scene in Chicago became even safer than it had been before.
Then, virtually every art writer in town, myself included, indulged in special pleading on behalf of work that had to be shown, regardless of quality, on principle.
But that was not a practice with which I ever felt comfortable, so I, too, reverted to an earlier time in my life, prompted by what I believe are more lasting motives.
I went back to the words of Proust, which I first encountered in my teens. At the end of the long journey that is “Remembrance of Things Past,” the narrator says he will write the book you hold in your hand, and this occasions more general thoughts about writing and reading:
“In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.”
That renewed some of the feelings I had when I began at the Tribune, for in truth, the greatest pleasure and highest reward of a life in the arts is to go outside oneself, to a painting or a piece of music, and find, in the process, that one is taken back inward.
I am lucky, because of what I do, not only to have repeated this but also to have been in a position to share it through my words, which may prompt others to see the painting or hear the piece of music and, so, begin the process all over again.
I cannot think of anything I would rather be responsible for as I start my 21st year. Of course, I’d also like to be rich.
