Critical Quandaries

BY RICHARD SPEER.

"How did you become an art critic?"  people love to ask me, and often there's an edge in the voice asking it that betrays the subtext:  "Hey buddy, why are you qualified to pan or praise my art?"

Richard Speer dishes the truth on what it's like to be an art critic, particularly in Portland, particularly now. Read his exclusive article for 2GQ.org.

If there's anything more exciting than being a visual arts critic in Portland, Oregon, I'd like to know what it is. There's a synergy here that can't be topped, a sense of being in the flush of a flowering, yet hovering on the cusp of something even greater. Plus, it's a helluva lot of fun---but make no mistake, the gig comes with perils attached.

"How did you become an art critic?" people love to ask, and often there's an edge in the voice that betrays the subtext:  "Hey buddy, why are you qualified to pan or praise my art?"

There's a short and a long answer. The long one is that my college major was journalism, my minor humanities---a combination that lends itself to writing about the arts.  Before college, in tender adolescence, I came of age in Europe beneath the circling silver putti of Munich's Amalienburg, only to later trade gild for the neoplastic rigor of DeStijl and gradually, even grudgingly, arrive in the present day of Koons, Hirst, and Barney.  Also, as a Gen-Xer, I bring a certain Hollywood-weaned generational sensibility---more Ebert or Kael than Greenberg---to my arts writing, folded in with a polymorphous perversity that led one Willamette Week reader, in a letter to the editor, to opine that "Richard Speer has an Oedipus complex and should return to the whorehouse where his inspiration lies."

The short answer to the question of how I became a critic is this:  I am blessed and cursed with having an opinion about things.  An opinion is a valuable and surprisingly rare thing to have if you presume to wax editorially.  It's also something that can get you into serious trouble, which is why you should never, ever become an art critic if you want to win a popularity contest.

"I'm surprised to see you in here," a gallery owner at Everett Station Lofts said to me one recent First Thursday.

"Why's that?"

"Because this isn't the sort of art you like."

"Oh, really?  And you base that on what?"

"Well, you've never done a review of any artist in this gallery before."

I reminded him of a favorable review I'd given a painter at the gallery a year earlier.

"Oh, that's right," he remembered.  "But that was more than a year ago."

There you go.  The memory is short, the thirst for ink never quenched.

I used to drink Scotch and talk art at the Virginia Café with Sam Gould, co-founder of arts group Red76.  Then one day I obliquely referred to Red76 in print as "Derrida's bitch," grouping them in with Harrell Fletcher and CharmBracelet as purveyors of postmodern disconnect.  Certainly, my point was arguable:  Sam believes Red76 is about connection, not fragmentation, and he was not shy about sharing this contention.  He fired off an email instructing me to "go fuck yourself" and alleging that my writing amounts to little more than "a fucking gossip column---and a poorly researched one at that."  We do not guzzle Scotch together any more.  It's an illustration that speaking one's mind in print is apt to make for some awkward moments socially.  Rest assured, if you trash an artist/curator/gallerist in your column, you will undoubtedly cross paths with that person the following night at a party.  They will be pissy, you will be prissy, and all will be strained and strange.

This applies quite readily to the strange misadventure of yours truly and an artist who put on a controversial show at a leading Pearl District gallery.  She and I had enjoyed a spirited, far-ranging email exchange about the content of her show both before and after I'd seen the work.  But there was a problem:  I didn't fully buy into the premises and implications of her work, and in my review, I said so.  After the review hit the newsstands, my email inbox flamed red with her response:  "You just don't get it.  You're every bit as bad as Chas Bowie."  Chas, then my counterpart at the Portland Mercury, had dared publish a negative review of one of the artist's previous shows.  A full year after the article ran, the artist and I passed one another on NW 9th Street.  I opened my mouth to say hello; she averted her eyes and continued implacably forth.  Whatev'.

The leap she had been unwilling to make is that the dialogue between artist, critic, and yes, collector, is part of a larger conversation of ideas in which congruence of viewpoint is neither requisite nor desired.  Yes, Virginia, it actually is possible for a critic and an artist to bat ideas back and forth in a civil, even amicable, fashion, whether or not one believes wholeheartedly that the other is full of shit.  Multimedia artist Daniel Kaven knows this.  When his works at a 2004 Mark Woolley group show didn't live up to the thematic coherence of his previous work at the AFFAIR @ Jupiter Hotel, I took him to task in black and white.  He disagreed with me, but we kept the dialogue open.  In July 2005, he came out with Divorce at Gallery 500, which I considered his strongest body of work to date.  And so the conversation continues.

The principle applies to gallerists, too.  When Mark Woolley plastered his walls with the garish, trunk-atomized abstractions of Rama, the painting elephant from the Oregon Zoo, I suggested in no uncertain terms that the paintings were not worth the price for which they were being sold.  There is nothing worse a critic can say than that an artwork is a ripoff, because it hits the artist and gallerist in a place even more sensitive than the ego:  the wallet.  Nevertheless, Woolley called me to say my review was, in his opinion, the best and funniest he had ever read in Portland.  When Alysia Duckler showed the hopelessly 1980s-flavored glass sculptures of David Ruth, I wrote that the pieces were so Flashdance–tacky, she should have handed out free legwarmers to First Thursday gallery-goers.  Duckler left me a voicemail saying she disagreed with my assessment but respected my position and, moreover, had a pair of legwarmers waiting for me at the gallery.  And when I wrote up Iggi Green's show at Froelick Gallery, I predicted that artsy types would fall into two camps regarding her work:  those who would hail it as "delightfully twisted in a Tim Burton-esque way" and those who would find it "quite simply to be shit…  I fall into the latter category."  The next time I entered the gallery, Charles Froelick didn't mention the review, but he proceeded to brief me on the gallery's next show as if the understanding between us were implicit:  A critic's review is one person's opinion---no more, no less.  There will be good reviews and bad reviews and reviews in between.  There is always next month, next year, next body of work.  Artists' perspectives change, and so do critics'.

This premise was not shared, however, by one of WW's more vocal Native American readers.  The gentleman took mortal offense that, in a review of a photography show at Onda Arte Latina, I called the ancient Maya a "brilliant but brutal people."  As you might guess, it was not the "brilliant" part that raised the man's ire, but the "brutal" bit, and he wrote me to express his righteousness on behalf of all indigenous Meso-Americans.  I replied to him:  "The Maya's human sacrifices are a matter of historic record, not just my editorial opinion."  And I sent him a hyperlink to a recent New York Times article reporting on recently unearthed anthropological evidence that the Maya's ritual decapitations were in fact even more widespread than previously assumed.  "Of course," I qualified, "I readily concede that many things we today may consider ‘brutal' were once viewed as sacred."  This line of engagement did not satisfy him, who, in his subsequent reply, all but put a curse upon me and my progeny.

It may well be that others wish wish me the same misfortune.  In 2003, Bruce Guenther, the Portland Art Museum's curator of contemporary art, was uniformly taken to task for his dry, boxy Oregon Biennial.  In my review, I used the Biennial as an example of what art should and should not do.  "Great art kicks you to the ground," I wrote, "knocks your teeth in, takes you by force.  Great art scandalizes, vandalizes, and sodomizes.  Alas, the Biennial is content to peck you on the cheek and call it a night."

Apparently, Guenther's response (allegedly relayed via his friend, a longtime WW columnist) was:  "Poor Richard Speer…  The Biennial didn't sodomize him.  I guess he'll have to settle on getting his kicks at Fantasy Video."

The review's strong tone went on to provoke heated discussion within WW.  "You use too many sexual metaphors," the arts and culture editor groused at our weekly department meeting.  "The whole thing about sodomy is just going too far."  To which the longtime columnist added, "Yes, it's an art review written from the perspective"---he glanced at me pointedly---"of an asshole."

These are the joys of having strong opinions.

It occurred to me when I first became an arts writer---as it has variously occurred to theorists from Freud to Paglia---that the history of art is scrawled in red upon the battleground between id and superego, Dionysus and Apollo, Donatello's David and Michelangelo's.  The sloppy ejaculations and menstrual drips of Abstract Expressionism find their contemporary antipodes in Peter Halley's immaculate computer-circuit rhapsodies.  Rather than swim against the tide of psychosexual history, then, the critic is wise to ride the wave---and more:  to dive deeper into those currents running Gulf Stream warm and Marianas cold; to find within those polarities some semblance of dialectic truth, for the more wholly a critic avails himself to art's most elemental subtexts, the better she may serve as a conduit for the reader.

Along these lines, I believe that arts writers would do better to embrace criticism's inherent subjectivity than to pretend to recoil from it.  Macro-photography has always fascinated me:  The more closely we examine something, the more profoundly we understand its essence.  Which is why, unlike other local critics, I'm not afraid to talk to the artists I review, to get to know something of their personalities, backgrounds, and intents.  Informing an opinion with a backstory is a good thing.

To be sure, this orientation is not the only path to authentic criticism, but it's my path, and I'm stickin' to it.  My modus operandi is sensualist rather than conceptual, my sovereign honesty my only integrity.  My mode is not that of metro-suburban translator; I will leave that to D.K. Row.  Nor is it that of historical contextualizer; I will leave that to Jeff Jahn.  And I am grateful that Portland has D.K. and Jeff to take those valid, valuable approaches.  This town is blessed with a varied critical mélange, and I'm honored to be a morsel in such a distinguished stew.  My own addition to the recipe, I hope, is to recreate for readers the moment of engagement with and surrender to an artwork, filtered through my individual sensibility in all its maddening and hopefully thought-provoking subjectivity.

We are humans:  We possess the faculties for articulation and civilized debate.  Art is the realm in which we most fully taste the sweet-and-sour reduction of life in all its ecstasy and horror.  "Take a deep breath and roll with the punches," I told hyperventilating gallery owner Chris Bennett in June after he read my less-than-flattering review of a Newspace group show.  "It's all part of the dialogue."

Richard Speer is the author of Matt Lamb:  The Art of Success (Wiley, 2005).  He reviews art for Willamette Week and ARTnews and has contributed to Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, and Opera News.