A letter to Bill Beckeley, on art theory

Over the years, Bill Beckley and I have occasionally discussed the possibility of my writing a book about art theory. Early in 2005, it seemed that I had found a way--and a reason--to take on this dreary task. September, 2007

2/8/05

Dear Bill,

I have finally figured out how to approach the subject of art theory. Until now, I thought that one had to develop an argument against it, but that effort always seemed to be somewhat pointless. After all, art theory is so lame intellectually that the task of developing an argument against it is almost too dreary to contemplate—and embarrassing, like developing an argument against religious fundamentalists, which the art theorists resemble in more ways than one. Then, too, it began to feel as if it were too late to argue against it, now that theory-types are talking about life and art “after theory.”

So the era of art theory is receding in the rear view mirror. Nonetheless, bits and pieces of art theory still give a kind of substance—something like ectoplasm at a séance—to much of the art criticism and curatorial blathering that we read, and those who write press releases and wall labels would never be able to fill up their empty spaces if they didn’t have those theoretical bits and pieces to arrange and rearrange. Image of Shelley in the desert at noon or in the Coliseum by moonlight come to mind.

For reasons I won’t go into now, you can’t be truly modern unless your pulse quickens at the sight of a “colossal wreck,” provided that it is ancient. Given the shortness of the art world’s short-term memory, art theory is certainly old enough to count as ancient. It is in enough disarray to count as a wreck, a ruin, a heap of glorious fragments. And, in the eyes of its surviving practitioners—as in those of easily awed art journalists—it is or was big enough to look colossal. So the romance of art theory now belongs the to romance of ruins that we Westerners have been carrying on ever since the beginning of modern times. In ruins now, art theory is glamorous.

Having seen that, I saw that art theory had always been glamorous. Its appeal was not its intellectual power, which, as I’ve suggested, is negligible. Art theory’s interpretations of its favored artists are simply dopey. Sherrie Levine’s art as a challenge to the myth of male genius? Yes, according to her and her theoretical supporters, but how feeble can a challenge be and still count as a challenge? Levine’s work did nothing to discourage Shakespeare worship or Rembrandt worship or, for that matter, Walker Evans worship. Far from challenging myths of genius, Levine’s art made her a candidate for genius-status, and that is the position she occupies in the art theorists’ pantheon—though of course they never use the word as praise, of her or of any of the artists they favor. Yet they praise Barbara Kruger as the brilliant, daring innovator—in a word, the genius—who “deconstructed” the “male gaze” and consumerism, when, after all, she made a career of providing hip collectors with targets for their gazes, which were, in fact or in spirit, those of consumers and Neanderthal males. They praise Michael Asher for his “institutional critique,” though he made a career of supplying museums with desirable goods: works that look edgy and challenging in a doggedly stylish way. In short, Asher developed from Minimalism an austere sort of glamor, and art theory acquired some of its glamor by inventing empty, absolutist—and right-thinking—terms of praise for him and for others who played the fake-radical game.

The thing to remember about glamor is that it may shock but it is always safe, for glamor does two things at once: it asserts our most banal and reassuring assumptions; then it obscures them with an aura of newness and urgency that is always, explicitly or implicitly, sexy. Thus certain people are not glamorous because they are sexy; they are sexy because they are glamorous. Anyway, as weak as they were as intellects, the art theorists were effective enough as rhetoricians to charge their judgments with the sexiness of absolute truth. Truth, when it is absolute, is sexy in the way that power—I mean, absolute, absolutely dominant power—is sexy, and the glamor of art theory has a strong tinge of S&M. Art theory tells us what to think, and if we are people of the right sort, we obey. It is remarkable how many in the art world did obey, and how many now yearn, in the time “after theory,” for those long-ago days when obedience was still possible, still demanded, still rewarded with the warm certainty that one had submitted utterly to the indubitable—the necessary—Truth.

Never an intellectual tradition worthy of challenge, art theory is a rhetoric of glamor in need of interpretation. Having seen that, I realized that I have a way to deal it. I would like to write a book called

Hot Logic
The Glamor of Art Theory

The book might consist solely of an essay called “Hot Logic.” Or it might include with that essay shorter writings on the subject, as well as letters and poetry that seems pertinent in one way or another. All that remains to be decided.

We’re off to Florida today and will be gone for most of the month, but let’s be in touch by email or phone.
Best wishes,

Carter

A critic's credo

I believe that art is useless.
I believe that the task of the critic is to invent uses for the uselessness of art.

A note on my life and poetry

The following paragraphs have been excerpted from the biographical note accompanying the publication of my poem "The Raven Was Right" in Green Integer's most recent Gertrude Stein Awards

Born in Seattle, Washington, Carter Ratcliff grew up in Michigan and Ohio. In 1963, he earned a BA in English from the University of Chicago. By 1967, he had settled in New York and found his way into the milieu of the St. Mark's Poetry Project. His poems first appeared in The World, the Poetry Project magazine. Early in the 1970s, he conducted one of the Project's poetry workshops. With the publication of his gallery reviews in Artnews, in 1969, Ratcliff joined the ranks of those New York poets who pursue a second career as art critics.

Though Ratcliff has said, "My poems are all love poems," his poetry ranges over many themes and subjects, among them landscape and, in particular, the American sense of space; the interplay of poetry and painting; politics, with an emphasis on questions of individual agency; the nature of narrative, as exemplified by such genres as the detective story and the political thriller; figures of ancient myth and tragedy; and the characters of the commedia dell'arte. "A quality of language brings with it an intuition of character," says Ratcliff. "When I put my sense of another's voice into play I am brought by a roundabout path to my own interests. Or to some of them. The full range of my voices brings me to the full array of my interests. This is anything but mysterious. The dramatic monologue is about as transparent as a fiction can be. To elaborate it--to speak in a variety of obviously made-up voices--is to stay alive to something we all know, that meaning is not only a work in progress but a perennial collaboration between oneself and all the others, real and fictional, who inhabit one's landscape."

Reply to a questionnaire

I made the following statements in reply to a questionnaire sent to me by Terence Diggory, of The Encyclopedia of New York Poets

Places of residence: Though I was born in Seattle, I am not a native of the West Coast. A few weeks after my birth, my family returned to the Midwest—more specifically, to Castle Park, a settlement on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, where my family spent its summers. When I was very young, we spent the winter in Chagrin Falls, near Cleveland. During grade school and the first year of high school, I lived with my family in Birmingham, to the west of Detroit. We then moved to Ottawa Hills, near Toledo. After eleventh grade, I left for the University of Chicago. My sister, Mary Curtis, finished high school in Switzerland and went on to the Rhode Island School of Design. My parents settled in the south of France.

At Chicago, I ended up in the English Department. After graduation, I spent two years in the Army, then stayed for awhile with relatives in Washington, D. C. In 1967, I drifted to New York, living here and there on the Lower East Side (St. Mark’s Place, East 12th Street, East 5th Street). From that neighborhood, I moved with Phyllis Derfner to a loft on Broadway, just north of Union Square, and, a few years later, to an apartment in a building at East 11th Street and Broadway. From 1984 to 2003, we lived in a loft on Beaver Street, in the Financial District. Since then, we have lived in the Hudson River Valley.

Personal information: Thinking of my family background and how it might bear on my poetry, I recall that T. S. Eliot was among the most reliable of my parents’ pretexts for launching a spat. At the mention of his name, my mother would declare her belief that, however good his early work might be, the later work was hopelessly marred by religious feeling. My father disagreed, routinely and vehemently. I suppose these squabbles gave me my first intimation that poetry puts important thing at stake. More generally, just about everyone I remember from my childhood put great stress on language—not on poetry, for the most part, but on language itself, as a sign of who one is and a means of being who one wants to be.

I met Phyllis Derfner in 1968, when she came to my first reading in New York. Soon we were living together. We got married at some point in the 1970s. I’m not sure exactly when because marriage was incidental and changed nothing. From the start, Phyllis’s sense of language was of the greatest importance to me. Her command of American idiom is amazing, all the more so because English is her fourth language, after Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She is the ideal reader embodied.

New York School connections: I was drawn to New York by my sense that the poets who interested me were there. Kenneth Koch and Ted Berrigan were the first to come into focus, then John Ashbery, Ron Padgett, and Tom Clark. After I moved to the Lower East Side and began to go to readings at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, everyone became important — everyone, that is, who published in The World and Angel Hair and Adventures in Poetry and was on the scene. Ted Berrigan was inescapable, because of his poetry and because of the way he ran his workshop at the Project, which I attended for several years. From all the New York poets but especially from Ted I got the idea that poetry is not only supremely important but endlessly, indefatigably open.

New York disconnections: Ted said that he got his idea of poetry’s importance and possibilities from Frank O’Hara. Though I admired O’Hara’s writing, his most influential works—the “I-do-this-I do-that” poems, as he called them—were not useful to me. My favorite O’Hara poem, “To the Harbormaster,” is unmistakably his and yet grandly impersonal: one of the great set pieces of the twentieth century and a recapitulation of the entire history of the sonnet.

By the mid-1970s I had come to feel that, if there was a New York School, it was held together by a shared ambition: to invent a voice as personal and resourceful and convincing as O’Hara’s, though of course his contemporaries—John Ashbery, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch—had already done that. So had Ted Berrigan. But that was not my ambition. I wanted to write poems in as many voices as I could invent. I began to see the importance of T. S. Eliot. Rather, I realized that, ever since I’d come across it, the masquerade of Eliot’s early works—Prufrock, Gerontian, The Wasteland, and so on—had been shaping my idea of what it is to write poetry. Not that I wanted to adopt anything like Eliot’s personae. Their voices were uncool, unlike those of the New York School. But I was entranced by the artifice of Eliot’s voices.

The postures and personages of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats were important to me, as well, as was the highly wrought rhetoric of sincerity deployed by the Romantics—Keats, especially. I have been interested in Milton, Virgil, Aeschylus, Whitman, William Collins, Elizabeth Bishop, and many others. I am indifferent to very little in the great tradition of Western poetry. Yet I think that my reading of that tradition would have been hopelessly earnest and clunky if I hadn’t came at it by way of the St. Mark’s scene in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

Involvement in other arts: Though it is convenient to say that I am from the Midwest, it is more accurate to say that I grew up in the Great Lakes region, a territory that stretches from Buffalo in the East to Chicago in the West. This is the landscape I take seriously, for no better reason than it’s the one I’m from, and I like the Hudson River Valley because it has a cousinly resemblance to the landscape of my youth—and because the part of it where I live, Columbia County, is fairly close to New York, which remains important to me because of my interest in art.

I had always liked paintings, and when I got to know the poets in New York I was happy to learn that many of them wrote for Artnews. In 1969 I became one of the reviewers at the magazine, and within a few years I was writing for Art International and Artforum. Catalog essays and books followed. I feel that there is an affinity between poets and painters. Both produce non-narrative fictions which, if they are any good, draw attention to their mediums—words or paint—in ways that prompt the reader or viewer to come alive to the process of interpretation. Self-conscious interpretation of works of the imagination becomes, at best, self-interpretation. Poetry and painting have the virtue of encouraging us to be more aware of ourselves and thus, one hopes, more humane.

Themes from my art criticism sometimes migrate to my poetry. For instance, writing about Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and other painters of their generation led me to consider certain peculiarly American ideas about space (infinite), order (contingent), and individuality (untrammeled)—in short, the American sublime, which had always tinged my poetry but, at some point late in the 1980s, began to supply it with explicit topics. About this time I returned to Emerson, Whitman, Poe, and Hawthorne: American writers who grappled with the sublime long before American painters did.

Publications: My poetry appeared first in The World, the magazine of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I published work in many of the magazines I the St. Mark’s milieu: The World, Adventures in Poetry, Sun, Extensions, Penumbra, and no doubt others. From 1968 to 1970, I published three issues of a mimeographed magazine, each with its own title: Cicada, Seaplane, Reindeer. Kulcher Press published a collection of my poems, Fever Coast, in 1973. In 983, Vehicle Press published my second collection, Give Me Tomorrow, with illustrations by Alex Katz. In 2007, Arrivederci, Modernismo (1974), with an introduction by Vincent Katz and my note on the poem.

My poems have appeared in several anthologies, among them Another World, ed. Anne Waldman, New York: Bobbs, Merrill, 1971; Aerial, ed. Edwin Denby, with images by Yvonne Jacquette, New York: Eyelight Press, 1981; Out of This World, ed. Anne Waldman, New York: Crown, 1991; KGB Bar Book of Poems, ed. David Lehman and Star Black, New York: HarperCollins, 2000; Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets, ed. Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, New York: 2002. In 1998, “The Violet Hour: An Essay on Beauty” appeared in Uncontrollable Beauty, ed. Bill Beckley and David Shapiro, New York: Allworth Press.

I have no idea how many essays I have published over the years in Artnews, Art International, Artforum, Arts, Art in America, Art on Paper, Modern Painters, Tate, Connaissance des Arts, Flash Art, Artspace, Art & Auction, Parkett, Sculpture, and other art journals. My books and major essays on art include “Joseph Cornell: Mechanic of the Ineffable,” Joseph Cornell. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980; John Singer Sargent, New York: Abbeville Press, 1982; Robert Longo. New York: Rizzoli, 1985; The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art, New York: Ferrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996; Francis Bacon, Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum for Moderne Kunst, 1998; Out of the Box: The Reinvention of Art, 1965-1975. New York: Allworth Press, 2001; “William Blake: The People’s Bard,” Art in America, September 2001; “Barnett Newman’s Perennial Now,” Art in America, September 2002; “Georgia O’Keeffe and ‘the Great American Thing,’” Georgia O’Keeffe, Kunstshaus Zürich, 2003; and Andy Warhol: Portraits, London: Phaidon Press, 2006; "Marisol: The Crowded Mirror, Marisol 1960-2007, New York: Neuhoff-Edelman Gallery, 2007.