TATE ETC. issue 2: Encounters: Criticism Trouv
TATE ETC. issue 2: Encounters: Criticism Trouv:
Art is long, life is short; art criticism is quite short, but, at the same time, usually too long. The critic, unfortunately, must use words, although he or she knows “that for which we find words is already something dead in our hearts”. Explicating the visual through the verbal is an impossible job, however well informed and cogent the writer may be.
Therefore, I am proposing a different form of criticism that is unconsidered, spontaneous, organic and largely superficial; the main insights it offers are into the ephemeral experience of being in a gallery in the presence of an artwork. It is a mundane poem to the infinite variety of the human personality through small fragments of language spoken among people who are not critics and do not expect their words to be recorded. This is a form I have called “criticism trouvé”, which means that I have been hanging around Tate Britain surreptitiously jotting down comments made by visitors, in this case to Michael Landy’s Semi-detached.
At the end of my experiment I had pages of stuff with contributions from scores of critics trouvés. I have selected those remarks that pleased, entertained or enlightened me most and stitched them together into a verbal collage of anti-criticism. The review starts with comments recorded at the moment gallery-goers are confronted with the full-sized semi-detached house Landy has created to stand in the high space of the Duveen Galleries:
posted by vielip to art, writing
[tags]critics, writing, recording, archiving, realtime, information flow, exhibition[/tags]
(Via del.icio.us/vielip.)
