Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 11 Number 2, August 2010
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Schor, Mira, A Decade of Negative Thinking, Durham, Duke University Press, 2009. 336 pages, 978-0-8223-4584-8, $89.95, $24.95
Reviewed by
Saint Vincent College
Mira Schor is a painter and writer. She was cofounder and co-editor of M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal devoted to contemporary art issues that ran from 1986 through 1996. Most recently she received the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism. A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Art, Politics, and Daily Life is a crash course of her work.
Divided into three sections with one interlude, the book covers major themes such as feminist art, abstraction and feminism, contemporary art tropes, politically motivated art and the attacks of 9/11. Each of these sections, in turn includes pieces written in various voices: autobiographical, critical, journalistic and academic but all of it is characteristically quite readable.
Part One entitled, “She Said, She Said: Feminist Debates, 1971-2009” includes Schor’s personal experience with feminism as an idea and as a movement. One of many experiences she had involving institutional feminism was her enrollment in the Feminist Art Project Program at CalArts. There she worked with program founder and artist Judy Chicago. From the start Schor was interested yet critical of the program. In a collection of letters she wrote during that time she confides,
“…I also had many reservations [about joining] and they did quite a pressure sell on me. My reservations have not been allayed yet and in fact I am having a tough time within the group. The program is totally time consuming so that I don’t have time to cash checks, buy food or do my laundry, or paint! Or think.”
Moreover, she shares her views of Chicago in this letter. While admiring her for starting the program and recognizing the need for such a leader, Schor also found Chicago to be a “tough, loud, aggressive, messianic, and insecure woman.” Chicago’s feminism riled Schor:
“I cannot give my life over to anyone, especially not to a tough person. I can only be molded by gentle means. Also I don’t completely go along with her vision of a new women. She goes too far I think and really wants women to pick up some of the worse characteristics of men, the inhuman driving of oneself beyond one’s limits, etc.”
She is not militant like Chicago. These reflections illuminate other parts of the book particularly those that present Schor’s historical outline of feminist art. In “The Ism that dare not speak its name” and “Generation 2.5” Schor gives her personal history and observations related to feminist art practice. In these sections she notes generational differences between “Generation 2.0,” more commonly referred to as second wave feminism, “Generation 3.0,” as she defines as those born after 1960 and her cohort, “Generation 2.5” that is caught in the middle. While she is aware that success in the art world requires one to be in the right place at the right time, she does partially lament the fact that her generation is not represented well in the history of feminist art. It is small consolation that she is also critical of canons that erect historical frameworks. However this analysis does approach traditional art historical methods in which style and subject matter are closely followed to determine origins and moments of change. Though she provides few specific differences between generations 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0, she does note that 2.5 pushed the groundbreaking work of the previous generation further.
A Decade of Negative Thinking is significantly more than a personal account of feminist art. Extended discussions of Alice Neel and and Gerhart Richter illuminate the growing and profound influence these two artists have had on the art world. Moreover, Schor’s underlying admiration for these painters betrays her desire for great art, with a capitol g, that is often concealed within her postmodern approach. Of abstraction and feminism she writes,
“The problematics of considering women artists’ work in abstraction are ensnared in the subtext of the ideals of abstraction as a universal – ergo, genderless – language as expressed in the hypermasculinist rhetoric of the New York school, and in the dangers of essentialism lurking in any efforts to perceive difference in the work of abstract artists who are women.”
She is right. But at the same time, analysis must not be stymied by current critical conventions. In discussing Neel’s Two Black Girls (1959), she writes, “One could imaginatively construct a sociological analysis that would posit these expressive marks as representative, say, of the turmoil of the subjects’ urban environment,” but for this writer that would fall short of the mark. Instead one must see past contemporary predilections. She continues,
“The expression on the girls’ faces, one of shyness and tremendous curiosity about this white lady who is painting them, is certainly the principle subject matter of the work as a representational painting, but what makes it interesting as a painting is what is in surplus to that representational content: the completely abstract, painterly strokes of pink and gray that swirl around the two girls, containing them within the rectangle and also separating them from each other, and the separate paintings within the painting of the skirts of each little girl.”
Neel’s greatness is not in her social commentary; it is in her painting. Schor demonstrates rare courage to address any formal painterly characteristics of a work of art. Even more, to insist that those characteristics make the painting great is a kind of postmodern heresy.
Schor’s analysis of Richter is no less remarkable for applying postmodern acuity while maintaining the demand for practical expertise. Concerning Richter’s Uncle Rudi (1965), a blurred portrait of a German Nazi soldier from World War II, she writes,
“The conceptual clarity and formal acuity of Richter’s use of the blur in Uncle Rudi makes it a perfect point of entry for considering the historical, moral, and affective dimensions of the blur, which has become an established convention of contemporary art in painting and photography, both in works about the same historical moment as Uncle Rudi and in works about contemporary culture.”
The blur is expertly employed by Richter and becomes a contemporary trope of memory, history and relation. No one, according to Schor has employed it as well as Richter precisely because of his skill. To make an astoundingly photorealistic painting only to smear it is the ultimate gesture of artistic bravura.
“There are other artists who share at least some of the same historical context or his desire to address a particularly unrepresentable history... The blur effect as an instrument of distantiation has been a trope since the history of early cinema. But bringing all this together within a painting project is hard to replicate with any level of effectiveness. It requires “dazzlement of skill” to do what Richter does...”
Schor’s ability to see through postmodern analysis to great painting is a tremendous achievement. She however is hesitant to see through her own political views. When discussing the holocaust with reference to Richter and autobiography, she writes,
“I point to a great irony of contemporary art – that because the great horror of the holocaust is perhaps fundamentally unrepresentable and because overly emotional expressions can seem either unequal to that reality or even historically compromised, what has won out is an emotional temperature of coolness and a romancing of mediation and distantiation that can at times share the hard heart of the horror, except attenuated to a survivable constant.”
Her sharp observations regarding ones emotional response to history are not only accurate but do point to how art and culture find a way to cope with the horrors of war. But emotional historical memory is different from lived experience. Quickly on the heals of “Weather Conditions in Lower Manhattan: September 11, 2001, to October 2, 2001” in which Schor provides a diary of events as a resident of lower Manhattan, Schor includes an essay called “Work and Play” written several years later. “Weather Conditions” is an eloquently written account of an individual’s experience. She knows it is not unique, but it is a good piece of personal journalism with much reporting and little editorial. “Work and Play” is also personal in that it is her account of enjoying political cartoons distributed on the internet before and after the 2004 United States presidential election. She is partially embarrassed by this sudden interest and says so suggesting that more serious art should be her focus.
“My enjoyment [of internet political cartoons] does not change my professional appreciation for much contemporary art, but the intensity of my consumption of this alternative news analysis and humor indicates that, in a world where there are few if any dissenting voices in the center of the media, I need somewhere to feel at home. These works address pressing concerns and relieve my sense of political isolation.”
One should find places of release and connection as she has. But while she may have felt politically isolated then, she was not then nor is she today. As she successfully navigated her position between ideological and conceptual generations of feminism, one wonders how she has or will navigate through the tremendous political swings of the last two presidential administrations. Her own historical position has enabled her to stand outside the predictable ideological continuum of feminist and art critique. Her diary of 9/11 is presented in its own section “Off the Grid” suggesting that its effect on her thinking is still being formed like all her other writing. Perhaps that experience will not be merely an outlier in her future work as it seems to be in this book.
A Decade of Negative Thinking presents a myriad of ideas many of which could stand alone in their own publications. Presented together they bring into focus this sensitive analytical writer who has enriched many minds. Mira Schor’s writing is insightful and important.