COMMENT | Art and travel ...

Browsing through the email news headlines, I note a story about Salvador Dali's theatre-memorial in Figueres, Spain in the travel section of today's bulletin. Still disappointed by the ABC's decision to axe its Radio National program, The Deep End, as the latest loss of arts coverage in the media (and this blog is full of such reports from around the world), I can't help but wonder if travel sections and writers might gradually pick up the slack. Unlike everyday life (note of sarcasm), travel and tourism seem to go hand in hand with cultural experiences such as visits to 'edgy' cultural precincts or pilgrimages to the great masters in their resting places. While alternative arts and culture seem to garner no interest from the local media, tourism and travel guides highlight them as adding much colour and interest and well worth visiting.

What's particularly notable about this intersection between travel and art is that it seems to hark to an older style of art writing that David Carrier describes in his book Writing About Visual Art and something akin to Alain de Botton's undertaking in The Art of Travel.

COMMENT | Arts policy (in progress)

by Linda Carroli

I'm in a bit of writing, perhaps catching up, mode having been otherwise occupied for a few months. During this time, I have had the strange experience of being engaged in various aspects of policy/strategy development. Subsequently, I am trying to think around an idea of policy as a type of writing about art or culture, as part of the written framing of cultural practices.

Because I enjoy the nth degree of things - the frames within frames within frames - it seems somehow vaguely displacing to be reading a policy (or strategy or whatever governmentalism) that stresses the need for critical writing initiatives. I do, of course, applaud any initiative that will result in a more open, multipled and flexible critical environment, rather than the privileging of some voices or styles or tropes over others but something ... else. My previous post touched ever so slightly on this via Lee Weng Choy's recent essay in Eyeline.

Much to my chagrin, I hear, quite regularly, about the 'crisis in criticism'. This intrigues me as I have not quite been able to get my head around this, wondering what fronts this crisis is unravelling and whether those events are perhaps more of an indication of crisis of things other than criticism. There are many strangely disparate examples that somehow indicate that this environment is almost unreadable: unnavigable. Recently I heard of regional artists' despondency about not having their work reviewed ie perhaps that criticism is not evenly distributed geographically. Then I heard that an artist applying for a grant application would probably have received her grant had her work been critically reviewed ie artists need criticism to be taken seriously or be legimated. There were also the comments in my post about the editorial in a local art zine Machine - comments that I believe have been refuted elsewhere either for their purported roughshod inadequacy, or for my own purported roughshod inadequacy as a critic/media maker. Then there is the situation where, in a funding round decided by a panel of artists as peer assessors, that someone who is not a professional writer or critic received a grant to undertake an art writing project.

Then there's the various scoping studies and strategy documents that have statements in them pointing to a need for 'more critical writing' while simulataneously rendering the writers invisible, as critical writing just happens. Fund publications rather than writers; fund publishing houses rather than writers; fund critical writing initiatives rather than writers; fund school students rather than writers; publish more writing rather than develop the practice of writers; etc. Do we hear the same kind of things about artists or fiction writers? No. In most policy the development of artistic practice is predicated on the development or funding of artists. Somehow, this is absent when addressing critical writing. Does it have something to do with a strange binary of critical/creative or imaginary/real?

As isolated events I am not sure they really tell us anything and that's why I think some kind of mapping exercise might be useful rather than an ad hoc approach to funding this or that publication or publishing those monographs. Are these indicators of a crisis? Or are they indicators of something ... else. I love that word - else. The imposing threat of an 'or else' ... Of an unknown otherness that supposedly shifts the power relations or regimes. An other writing. An other criticism. An other way. Other than what is ...

So to return to the cause of my bafflement, and this is really just a personal musing, I wonder why I so often read in various documents that government will be pursuing various kinds of critical writing initiatives which have absolutely nothing to do with writers. I never get very far in my thinking about this and always catch myself in a tail-chasing exercise. However, it remains unclear as to why - to what end, who will do it, who it's for and what it's meant to do and how, most importantly, writers can and will benefit from these ventures.

COMMENT | Breaking down ...

by Linda Carroli

I stumbled upon something recently, like a crack in the footpath across which your step falters or twists. A frayed editorial in a local art publication that focuses on emerging art and writers. The magazine is tiny - it sits somewhere between a zine, street press and art magazine, not really making a mark or packing a punch as any of those entities. Given away but not cheap-looking enough to be disposable - without the breadth of information - like a street mag. Independent but not fugitive or unconventional enough to be a zine. Carrying reviews and essays and published bi-monthly but not long enough to be taken too seriously as an art journal or magazine. The formality and legacy of art history studies permeates the pages.

The editorial (and I am only talking about the editorial at this point) bemoans why there is no critical environment in this state (being Queensland). I can hear your eyes rolling. Strange how that chestnut rolls around with predictable regularity in variously self-righteous tones, as if no one understands their world-weariness. I’ve read these kinds of purportedly thought-provoking pleas for intelligence many times over and have responded to these questions many times over. Somewhere in its 16-between-A4-and-A5-sized-pages and 1000-copy-every-two-months print run, it set itself the task of “fostering a critically engaged environment in Queensland, with the outlook of establishing and encouraging honest, opinionated and creative responses to the visual arts in this state and elsewhere”. Perhaps the editors of that publication might start by being honest with themselves about scale.

Initially, I wasn’t going to respond to those comments. This isn’t the first publishing experiment to fall a little flat – to overreach, to beat its chest about the failures of its community rather than to reflect on its own failure to capture the imaginations of writers and critics in that community. Why point to the critics and writers for a failure in critical environment when one presumes that the publications are the pathways that connect the critics to the audiences? Who published the “flat and timid, conservative, descriptive and uncritical” prose in the first instance? Editors can seem so remote from, extraneous to, the writing process. If writers are to engage creatively then perhaps that engagement is best focused on their own writing rather than with the artworks they are writing about. ‘Aboutness’ is an arrogant bastard. I’ve said it before – I don’t wan’t to ‘write about art’ when it’s so much more enjoyable to ‘write art’.

Every generation has to make its media in its own image. It has to somehow negotiate the conventions it wants broken. In the current technosphere, we have an opportunity to do something else with printed publications. Criticism might be a technology (or technique) but it is not necessarily a medium. Printing is oh so slow. Printed publications perhaps need to find their niche and their voice within that temporality, within its own materiality. McLuhan identified the need to put print to different or new purposes. Reviews feel like yesterday’s news. Critical writing takes time, publishing takes time and, in all that passing of time, we (readers/viewers) tend to forget. Where’s the currency in that? Why must our critical culture, generated by expert opinion (either self-appointed or somehow ordained), exist in this kind of lapse, these mediatised faultlines? How can print create that appreciation of time, the time it takes to think visually, write and process complexity? I could wax lyrical about the explosion of weblogs and other online entities that are reworking critical tropes.

I wonder if 'criticism' is fluid, reinvented generationally, geographically and culturally. I wonder if the sort of criticism regarded as ‘conventional’ is tied to institutional preference. Is criticism necessarily a written or printed object? Or can it be other things and could the written-ness of it preclude new publishing (making public) tropes and oralities ...

I’m tinkering with my new mobile phone, having just had an epiphany about how to bluetooth. Having seen an exhibition, I send an SMS into the ether, hoping someone will accept that message as a genuine attempt (experiment) to communicate critically. My short message refutes the comments in the weekend paper about the exhibition I’ve just seen. In turn I receive a couple of messages telling me to fuck off and another couple saying thanks; even going as far as to commit to having a look sometime.

And so, time to applaud this little publication, burdened by the weight of its championing of a ‘new criticism’ (that reads very much like the old), called Machine and let’s also give thanks for their brave step into cyber-connectivity via, of all things, a message board as a means for fostering this brave new critical environment …