October 11, 2004
Jennifer Higgie on why we write
In her Editor's Letter at the front of the new Frieze, Jennifer Higgie makes public her internal dialogue about why she writes about art. It contains a concise explanation of my reasons for writing last month about Thomas Scheibitz's new exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar: "I write for the same reason that I read novels or look at art: either to decipher something I don't understand or to be reassured....Looking properly at something and then writing about it, especially to deadline, tends more often than not to be an act of panic tempered with an interest inspired by incomprehension." Schiebitz's last exhibition in New York piqued my interest but didn't entirely convince me. I see so much art that my typical response to this feeling is fairly passive: I file the mental images away for later retrieval. Yet when his new show began to preoccupy my mind similarly, I forced myself to interrogate why. Without a constraint—my deadline—I probably would have deferred thinking thoroughly about his work once again. Instead, I tried to make an assessment as a means of explaining the work and my reaction to myself. To quote Higgie again, anxieties appeared: "...do these words and these objects or gestures ultimately nourish the art work or yourself or the world....Do they avoid being prescriptive....Do they at least try to reveal some of the multitudinous tones that litter the world unacknowledged....Do they make anyone less lonely?" My review, a scant 218 words, may not do any of these things. But Higgie's conclusion, which I second, allows that "Even making a mess of it and repeatedly getting it wrong is preferable—at least it's an assertion of something alive: fallibility." You try not to be fallible in responding to a work of art—like the artist tries not to be fallible during the act of creation—and hope that there is something of merit in the connection sought by the act of writing.