September 13, 2006
A few words
I had the pleasure of speaking to a fairly large audience at Parsons today. Here is one paragraph from my talk:
Instead, one should live by the creed of verbs—to review, to write criticism, to make art—rather than nouns. I have taken recently to saying that I “write about art” rather than “I’m an art critic.” Doing so flattens out the implicit hierarchies lodged in the terms, even potentially opening up the opportunity for radical—and instructive—role switching. Doing so likewise creates a situation in which one must apply oneself fully to each task, because there are no laurels to rest on. I have published several hundred pieces of writing about art in the past three and a half years, but having done so neither guarantees that what I write next will be mind-opening, authoritative, or even factually correct—alongside working as an editor, I work with and rely on editors, too—nor does it grant me intrinsic authority over any of you in the field of “art criticism,” much less in the art world at large. Perfect evidence of this lies in the fact that it’s quite possible that some of you, even knowing that I was coming to speak today, have never read anything that I have written.
I also spoke about understanding one's own limits and not presuming to take up more resources (in the art world, that is) than one can properly use and maintaining a sense of community in the face of all kinds of forces that would tear them apart. It seemed to go over well. Here's a quote that I was inspired by as I was planning the talk:
What with the fairs and the steroidal explosion of Chelsea, it’s no wonder that even the New York Times realizes that the current model of success for many artists is monetary. Can the interest in [Lee] Lozano be anything but the flip side of this coin? It’s up to us to heed Lozano’s cautionary quip, “Win first don’t last.” But the oxymoronic “Win last don’t care” is worth taking to heart as well. In the face of an autocratic regime bent on totalizing knowledge and war, many feminists have called for explorations of failure—as the only viable form of practice under today’s political and market conditions. Lozano offers a model not of failure per se but of a very particular form of achievement, in which when you win last and don’t care, you are capable of become a tool that transforms the rules of the game. — Helen Molesworth, from a review of “Lee Lozano,” Artforum, September 2006Posted in Art. Permanent link here.