The History of Photography by Beaumont Newhall (review)

180 Books for first-hand experience than reproductions are for conventional paintings and we all know how misleading they can be. So what should he do, the writer on new art? Well, one possibility would be to change his job. As Tom Lehrer said, if someone claims they can’t communicate, the least they can do is shut up. But actually they do not claim this, they merely tend to demonstrate it; and to shut up would leave a socially important function unfulfilled. New art stands in particular need of mediation in words, if it is not to become even more desperately isolated from ordinary people than it is at present. The best answer, I think, would be to begin with description. This would have to be at once carefully factual and suffused with poetry-no easy task in itself. Description should be accompanied by interpretation: an account of the philosophical, aesthetic, social and political strategy underlying the work, together with comments on how it relates to what has gone before. Here any source alluded to should be made explicit, unless its familiarity to the class of readers addressed can be assumed. If the piece, so far from being a doctoral thesis, is intended for general circulation, it will not do to write ‘It [Earth Art] is the materialisation of Smithson’s wish to constantly risk an art that stays in Ehrenzweig’s de-differentiation field.. .’, because this gives the impression of name-dropping and mystification and puts people’s backs up. Thirdly, there should be evaluation. The critic who confines himself to the roles of expounder or advocate (or for that matter salesman) may justly be suspected of impotence. If he wants to prove otherwise, let him say whether he thinks the manifestation he is writing about really is a worthwhile use of time, energy and resources and, if not, why not. Can wrapping a tract of coastline in Polythene do much for a racked, starvingand half-poisoned world? Do a few clefts in the Nevada desert amount to anything when compared with, say, the Avebury circles or Ostia Antica or even open-cast mining? Such criticism--carefully descriptive, philosophically lucid, courteously free from show-off allusions, historically informed and with a firm but not pedantic commitment to a base of judgement-is a real service to our culture but is rarely encountered. Far commoner are the tendentious tones of the critic-advocate, a being whose single most tiresome habit is to claim as distinguishing marks (and also as stunningly novel) characteristics of new art work that it shares with more or less any good art throughout history, e.g. that it probes deeply into the paradox of permanence and flux; that it heightens our awareness of space or mass or gravity; that it is an intense engagement with the enigma of what is and so on and so forth. All this is an ill-tempered but relevant prologue to what 1am supposed to be writing, which is a review of two books about recent art. The New Avant-Garde consists of short pieces on each of the following: Flavin, Lewitt, Andre, Morris, Serra, Sonnier, Naumann, Beuys, Men, de Maria, Heizer-followed by mostly very good photographs of them and their work or them in their work. The essays are serious in intent and sometimes illuminating but also distressingly prone to the aberrations 1 have been complaining about: the passage above citing Ehrenzweig is taken from one of them. Moreover, they are too short and too slightly analytical for the student, yet too elliptical and allusive for the general reader. But the pictures have their own eloquence , usually intriguing, often moving. I am glad to have the book. Arf withoitt Boundaries is a naively amiable illustrated Who’s Who on international art events, graphics and cinema scenes. 77 practitioners get the treatment, which is uniformly a double-page spread of blurb-length and blurbstyle text, together with half a dozen or so small pictures, a few in colour. Thus Jean-Luc Godard gets the same space as, for instance, someone called Grignani, who does clever posters and layouts. There are potted biographies at the end. It would do as...