[go back] to connect a personal politics with a transparent method that does justice to the art itself. Uncertainty and contention encircles Jacir in particular. We used various pronunciations of her surname. Basic biographical facts, such as her place of birth, are disputed, as Jennifer Gheith pointed out. As it happened, three of the four panelists considered Jacir’s art, and we all employed different approaches. Our panel was titled ‘Feminist Art and Postnationalist Jewish and Arab Identities’ but Gheith argued that in fact Jacir’s work is not about gender at all, rather the daily blockages suffered by Palestinians. Judy Bullington, in a wide-ranging talk on Palestinian women artists, interpreted Jacir’s video ‘From Texas with Love’ as transforming the ‘placescape’ (Edward Casey’s term) of the Marfa hinterland into a zone of Palestinian longing. Jacir is clearly ‘a problem for critics,’ to quote the title of Howard Putzel’s 1945 show of the emerging Abstract Expressionists. Her work is way ahead of us, and we need to find new critical frameworks if we are to understand her exceedingly complex network of allegiances, formal quotations, and dialectics.
Indeed, in my panel, and in many others I attended over three days of CAA, divergent and unharmonized responses greeted the current art situation, which is at once gloriously wide open, infused with global capital, and riven by the clash of civilizations. Sadly, the latter political and economic conditions were so taken for granted that they were usually dropped from conversation entirely. Presenters, myself included, rarely strayed beyond the cozy confines of the vast art world, even on panels such as ‘Minimal Art and the Common Culture: Art and Politics in the 1960s’ that would seem to demand serious consideration of power. I couldn’t believe how often presenters showed pages from art magazines and books as visual ‘evidence’ (of reception history) without questioning the context and bias of that same ‘evidence.’ With contemporary art so thoroughly de-universalized, it seems that a generalized postcolonial sensibility has replaced the sharper political positions of the past. Presenters gleefully crossed borders, renegotiated, and grouped themes around ‘post,’ ‘trans’ and ‘between’ categories.
Not all talks can be reduced to this generalization, fortunately. During the Q & A at the panel, ‘Contemporary Asian Art: Strategies, Negotiations, Renegotiations,’ Murtaza Vali made the astute point that art is ‘all about the body,’ that whether it’s performance or abstract painting, the body and its power relations are implicated in our readings of the work of art. This warning was echoed by Nada Shabout in her paper on the absence of Arab art from the global context, delivered at the ‘Regarding Postcolonialism’ panel. In her analysis of the reception of the group show, ‘Made in Palestine’ (coming to New York in March), Shabout worries that this seemingly groundbreaking show, the first of Palestinian artists in a United States museum, in fact circumscribed the artists within Western notions of gender, religion, and politics. Postcolonialism, she says, has simply found new ways to brand Arab art as ethnic and not aesthetic. ‘The monster [of ethnocentrism] is created by those who wish to defeat it,’ she lamented. On a different note, Helen Molesworth, on a Saturday lunchtime panel convened by the International Association of Art Critics, challenged the traditional art-world division of labor implied in the panel title, ‘Curators as Critics.’ Molesworth said she perceived an increasingly rigid art world organized around university degree programs and professional training that prevents curators from functioning as true critics.
So, in an effort to reach some provisional conclusion, I’ll suggest that the independent critic is a cobwebbed myth, entombed long ago, the day that Clement Greenberg became an advisor at French and Company in the late ‘50s. Putzel’s open-ended ‘problem for critics’ was answered by Greenberg’s alliance with the market, at least in American art. Yet we all must examine our own positions within the art world they made. Many of the debates I witnessed at CAA used terms coined in the context of Abstract Expressionism, yet few panels addressed its legacy, save the one monographic session on Pollock. The triumph of its version of American art history was so deeply repressed at CAA that it was rarely acknowledged. It would be useful for we American art historians to reexamine the first premises of our collective postcolonial, feminist, transnational theory, which has so thoroughly been digested that it is beginning to come out the other end.”
