Telling Stories

We must all be critics as we stand before the work, for to encounter is to interpret and to judge. Clement Greenberg asserts that ‘it is the first responsibility of the critic to make judgments of value’. The British critic, Lawrence Alloway, expands on this, claiming that the task of the critic is the ‘interpretation and evaluation of new, or at least recent, art’.
In describing Diderot’s reviews of the Salons, Alloway states ‘it is clear that his working method was to… react to the works with a mind well stocked with prior ideas, some of them habitual, some of them fresh’. This was the early model for criticism, but should also be our model for experiencing and thinking about our experiences of art. In a sense, Diderot was describing his personal response to art, but it was a response informed by an absolute affinity to art’s past.
In his 1991 lecture, ‘Homage to the Half-Truth’, Stuart Morgan argues the case for a model for criticism which returns to Diderot’s ‘walking-thinking-writing’. The work, he suggests, reveals only part of the story – the task of the critic is to tell the rest. But wherein does the story reside? In the work, or in the (fallacic) intention of the artist? Perhaps we need only look into the space between the artist, the work and ourselves.
The subjective response remains, and this time in relation to the critic’s own story, as well as to his understanding of the histories and traditions within which the artist is located or locates him/herself. This model suggests the opposite of Clive Bell’s entreaty to ‘bring with us [to the work] nothing from life’. Morgan’s riposte seems to be that the only answer is to bring everything of ourselves and our lives to the work.
The works in the current exhibition seem to speak of Morgan’s more creative model, as we are presented with the artists’ earliest and most recent works – the “once upon a time…” and the “…happily ever after”. Between these poles lie the mystery of meaning. As critic, surely my role is to fill you in, provide the rest of the story, and to make it a good one.
What’s your story?
I know these artists, and their work, and I have spoken to them at length about their practices, their motivations and their lives. I would appear, then, to be in a privileged position with regards to meaning, if we were to apply the older models. However, the stories their work reveals lie somewhere between the private (theirs and mine) and the public (yours). The stories speak of lives spent making art, but also, to me, of a life spent looking.

© James A. Brown, Exhibition Writers Project, 2008