September 17, 2004
Steven Henry Madoff in the new Bookforum
Madoff, author of Christopher Wilmarth: Light and Gravity, writes, by way of introduction to a review of Doris von Drathen's Vortex of Silence:
To write about an artist's work is to objective our own deep think, if we have one, about the world that we "discover" in the artist's project. We confess through description and explication; we bring our tics and quirks, our needs to seduce and be praised, our histories and educations, feelings and intellects into the light as ventriloquists, making the mouths of various helpless artworks move. [Giorgio Agamben's] notion of the inaccessible has a certain pathos, as if the act of criticism were about the ultimately unsayable, the unreachable essence, like Wallace Stevens's "palm at the end of the mind," when it's really about the abundantly, profusely, lavishly sayable, talking largely about ourselves.