Criticism at Odds with Its Art: Prophecy, Projection, Doubt, Paranoia

It has always been one of the most essential functions of art to engender a demand for which the hour of full satisfaction is yet to come. The history of every art form has critical moments of striving toward effects that can only be freely realized with a changed technical standard, that is, in the context of a new art form. The excesses and crudeness associated with art in this type of situation... emerge from the richest historical concentration of forces.

—Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit"

Every art epoch, like every age, has its romantic dream age.

—Barnett Newman, undated manuscript note, c. 1947

Beginnings are dreams in retrospect, the projection of fantasies we ought to have experienced as the first awareness of our future. When the future has arrived, what we call dreaming is a false memory of having imagined our eventful actuality through a prognostic dream that never occurred. Artists, not their critics or historians, are society's dreamers.

Walter Benjamin, a critic of history, claimed that art shines forth, dreamlike, at times "of the richest historical concentration," when history takes a critical turn. ¹ The nature of the turn emerges only when completed, with the movement stabilized and its perspective cleared. At that consequential moment, art of the recent past acquires its status as prophetic sign, allowing us to discern meaning in our present situation. Recognizing the prophecy, we mark both beginning and end of the historical period we have been living.

Interpreting a more distant past, modern thinkers have readily tolerated indeterminacy in the assignment of origins and ends—"impure time," as Georges Didi-Huberman calls it, taking cues from those who have most influentially discussed medieval and Renaissance periodization. ² The psychological stakes are quite different when we attend to the limited span of our own lives. We want ends to come in a timely fashion, "purely" within our time; and if this desire requires indulgence in historical fictions, they will be beneficial ones. We need to agree on an end before we identify the signs of beginning, where the origin of our historical condition and individual purpose will have been found. With end and beginning collapsed into a single intuition, a critical mind can then commit to a position and work to define its implications.

We may need to agree on an end, but to disagree is unfortunately human, as Jeffrey Perl (interpreting Aristotle) suggests. ³ Lack of an adversary forces us to internalize all the possible arguments and take issue with our own thinking. Such self-assessment comes hard; and for many, it proves unbearable. Better that an antagonist appear to confirm the justness of one's view through opposition and negativity. With the presence of an opponent, competitiveness replaces self-questioning. A position will be defended as long as an attack continues. Antagonisms generate activity while increasing inertia.

The painter Barnett Newman will be my first example. Newman wrote a number of trenchant essays during the 1940s when he thought no one else was doing the critic's job of justifying his work and that of his generational allies. These artists recognized their new historical situation; and that recognition, Newman claimed, "forced" them to defend it. The verbal defense may have been a hardship for others, but Newman admitted that he "liked it." ⁴ The persistence of his adversaries affirmed his talent for argument.

When speaking publicly, Newman usually referred to a group of like-minded individuals; yet he operated as a one-person movement that began with the inception of his personal style and found its fulfillment in his maturity. This aesthetic end was not a result Newman could foresee, as if the only thing needed were to master the necessary technique. His end came conjoined with the painting process, appearing suddenly around a turn, like the spontaneous conclusion to a spoken stream of words. "I'm the subject," he stated...