Oops! Her name is Sarah Shipman not Susan.

I’d like to correct my name… it’s Sarah Shipman, not Susan.

Dear Nathan,
I don’t want to drag this discussion out to the crack of doom (on October 21, I believe, according to the prophets) but since you wrote so perceptively in response to the exhibition, I’d like to reiterate that I was writing a review to tell people what the show was actually about, which is by and large not what the artists thought it was about. (How could they? They were working independently of one another, and the correlation of their investigations is remarkably revelatory of larger social forces.)

The premise of the curator was that we don’t have the same kind of belief in the supernatural that primitive people did. (Or at least we think we don’t.) Giving the artists free rein was a way of investigating what it is that in fact we do believe is inexplicable. This is kind of how some international biennials (not all of them) operate, positing a theme and telling artists to have at it as they see fit.

The results of the investigation confirmed the suppositions of contemporary theorists. (“Contemporary”? I personally think they should still be called postmodern, or at least post-postmodern, given that “postmodern” became the name for a specific cynically ironic moment in the history of Europe, Australia, and the Americas circa 1979-1989. But I can’t change artworld jargon singlehandedly.)

What is mysterious to us, it would appear, is history, to what degree the actuality of history is knowable in any reliable way, or the way we let history into ourselves and/or make it part of our own story. The other inexplicable thing at issue is how we receive our own story and then adapt the story we receive from our culture, or else make it up ourselves in conscious or unconscious resistance to the dominant currents in our culture. (We still get the building blocks from the culture that gave us the words and images with which to produce a story at all. What we do with them, and what we could or should be doing with them, is the topic of contemporary debate that is the unspoken undercurrent of the “supra+natura” exhibition—unspoken until I spoke it in my review, anyway.)

I had been thinking that Jim O’Donnell’s visual metaphor of a refrigerator with life mask and photograph and messy liquid was a hackneyed enough metaphor for the complications of life and history that he would be better served by imitating the late Spalding Gray and just standing on stage or sitting without props at a desk, telling us the exact same story he wrote down on the cards—a story or a written narrative that is held together in a fragile fashion, one that could easily get out of order, have parts of it get lost altogether; a story of the reconstruction of a history that slips out of our hands as fast as we are telling it to someone else.

Now that I know that he actually DID lose some of the cards in the mire before they could be read, I am even more impressed. I think the gesture would be ineffective unless it was done on video where it could be watched again, however. Hearing a story, after all, we may not know at first that the story is about the problem of even HAVING a story to tell, or a history to report, because history is a vast trash heap of fragments and misremembered anecdotes told by your informants, sitting there as useless and as potentially hazardous as the expired yogurt in your grandmother’s refrigerator. How the historian (personal or professional) sorts this out is what is at issue.

It was profound of O’Donnell to perceive this, which is why this is a great piece even though the physical artwork isn’t all that original or well-composed, although it’s certainly physically engaging. (I love some of his other interrogations of history, such as the invention of faux-evidence for the existence of General John B. Gordon’s pet rabbit.)

Likewise, Truett Dietz’s love for the mute raw materials of history (a.k.a. photographs and letters and printed narratives and objects such as masks) may have led him to an expression of the problems of the digital age in an outworn physical vehicle, the wall collage. (I remarked on first seeing it that it was hard to start interpreting the meaning of the thing’s randomness because we are so used to seeing the genre used as incidental decoration.) The connection to the Internet is conspicuous by its absence, and without further explanation we would never be able to figure out that it is a rather profound commentary on our inability to piece together a picture of history from our web surfing. Maybe putting a succession of images from the collage together as an iMovie on a laptop in front of the collage would have gotten this point across, but to do that you need a laptop you don’t mind putting at risk. Probably a different title would have done the job.

But I’m not the artist, so who cares how I might have remade the piece? That’s like Clement Greenberg sandblasting those sculptures because he thought they should be about truth to materials. Whether the piece provides the needed context—that, the critic can comment on, and I thought I did so in the review.

I took it for granted, overall, that if you need the curator or the artist to get you in the right frame of mind, why then, somebody, namely the curator, needs to write some wall text.

It is one of the presuppositions of my reviews over the years (and part of my advice to artists and curators) that wall text should be limited to what is necessary to get the viewer up to speed with what is going on in the room or in the piece. But if you need to know the presuppositions behind a piece in order to experience the piece rightly, the presuppositions had better be spelled out someplace—in the title of the piece or somewhere else. There are artworks in which the title is a bigger part of the piece than the stuff on the wall, floor, pedestal or screen.

I had to squeeze all this into 600 words maximum, which is like writing a sequence of haiku. Art reviewing is really the practice of making every word do many, many different jobs at once because you are never given enough space to explain in detail why you hold the opinions you hold, or even what those opinions are. If the writer is on a tight deadline, sometimes this just does not happen. Ideas take time to mature. Snap judgments don’t, but sometimes snap judgments are just plain wrong because we are all ignorant, only about different things, as Will Rogers put it, and the best we can do is try to know what it is that we don’t know, and try to remedy the situation in site-specific cases (such as asking questions in order to write a review).

I personally detest critical commentary, because my usual reaction is “Who cares what you think? Give me an analytical reason for why you think what you think, at least.”

And you did. This was useful information, because all reviews, all of them, are really reviews of the critic’s own blindness. Reading them, we see why the critic screwed something up, or why we think the critic screwed something up, which is the beginning of beginning to see why it is both we and the critic who may have screwed something up.

And that is what I think the show was about, too. Mike Germon was the most reflective in juxtaposing potent shorthand for a bunch of incompatible belief systems, all of which have in common the effort to impose a grid of meaning on the mess of history. I’m not really sure Sarah Shipman’s effort to adapt existing mythic emblems to communicate the truths of feminine existence really overcame the existing historical baggage of the mythic emblems, which may or may not in themselves be meaningless when encountered apart from traditional connections. On this topic, see, for example, Umberto Eco’s comments on the symbol of the rose, for example. Roses have physical characteristics that make them natural symbols for some social or emotional states and not for others, but if you just saw a rose nailed to the wall, you couldn’t necessarily guess which symbolic meaning was meant, even if you got a gut reaction. This is the case with some of Shipman’s stuff, some of which I love and some of which doesn’t work for me at all—the operative words being “for me.” I have explained in the addendum to my review why I think it would be difficult to sort out the variables.

Having just gone through a discussion in which one professional explained why he considered a piece unworthy for exactly the same reasons that I considered it worthy (starting from different premises and past experiences), I respect your reaction to Jennifer Morris’ bells, but for me they needed to be where they were, keeping us riffraff out along with whatever other Influences are meant in the title about keeping things out that she once willingly let it. If we were almost inevitably going to collide with the bells no matter what we did, they wouldn’t be doing a very good job of keeping us out, now would they? If they almost blocked the entrance or something, they would be communicating that the artist fails at all her efforts at self-preservation, which would be a message, but apparently not the one that Morris wanted to convey. I felt them, pre-title, to be magical objects not to be messed with, archetypal talismans as well as warning bells to “stay away.” But who cares what the hell I felt? What were they meant to be doing? Did the artist give us enough information to figure our whether our first emotional reaction was right or wrong?

The show would have been better, yes, if the curator had written something about how interesting it was that the artists independently came up with ideas about family and putting pieces together and such, and only tangentially (some less tangentially than others) about the traditional “supernatural.” Then we would have had a clue to guide us through the labyrinth. But I thought that was implied by my original review, and I was interested in what the show revealed about contemporary consciousness, which would have had to be incorporated in the curatorial statement.

Instead of saying she should have written a curatorial statement, I wrote one for her. It was my review.

We are now at three thousand words and counting, but I think we are close to unpacking the implications of this show. I appreciate the chance to do that, since the opportunity is rarely offered.

This is probably the most in depth discussion/analysis of any show I’ve ever been a part of. Thanks to Jerry for several responses now and to Nathan for his response to Jerry’s response as well as the assessment of the show.