The New Action Criticism: Restraining Authority Via Public Networks.

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 18.10.11

In the United States, the so-called “crisis” in art criticism has taken the form of a profound anxiety over the current institutions in which art criticism is embedded: primarily daily newspapers, which have shed most of their art criticism staff in most US cities. But this anxiety also extends to university art history departments, the publishing industry as a whole, and even to the online realm.

Meanwhile, the social effects of this crisis have gone almost entirely unexamined. That is, the crisis is framed in terms of a crisis of production rather than as a crisis of social meaning. Focusing on the precarious conditions of production has led to an increasingly timid art criticism establishment that cleaves to the powerful institutions of the art world—its museums, its art fairs, its galleries. Meanwhile, the edifice upon which the entire art establishment is built—the social substructure—is left intact and unperturbed.

However, it is well within the historical role of the art critic to use critical tools to challenge not just cultural production, but the social order that led to such production. In so doing, the art critic has historically aided in the creation of a public sphere; the space in which a collectivity comes to understand itself as not just a society, but as a body politic, a people with expressible political autonomy and will; not just subjects of the state, but citizens of the nation.

Shifting the focus to the effects rather than the conditions of art criticism has led me to the conclusion that what art criticism needs most is to get out from behind the its veil of objective, dispassionate evaluation. I question whether the exhibition review, the scholarly article and the catalog essay are valid forms, at least to the extent that these are not tied to some larger social program.

A New Action Criticism is called for.

Here, I will read a sort of manifesto for what I tentatively call the “New Action Criticism.” In short, the New Action Criticism perhaps resembles community organizing, political activism, and event production more than it does solitary practices of viewing and writing. It favors engaging with specific persons over addressing anonymous masses. It favors action in the world over disinterested contemplation of it.

[From the statement of principles, in progress]

The New Action Criticism is not concerned with producing definitive texts, as were the textual critics up through the opening of the 21st century. The New Action Criticism is the broad-based management of conversations. It organizes the babble of voices in a network society of indeterminate topology and creates a vehicle for the public creation of meaning by transforming audiences into publics able to speak back on their own behalf.

The New Action Criticism (NAC)…

• concerns itself with managing broad-based, public conversations, not with producing authoritative texts. The public forum is as crucial as the newspaper column, the resource database as central as the exhibition review.
• is baldly political. It seeks to create publics for their express traditional purpose: to act as a check on power, in this case the atomizing effects of globalized capitalism.
• rejects authority of all kinds. It does not seek to arrest art through the dictatorial foreclosure of meaning, but rather to allow art’s meanings and uses to proliferate uncontrollably in the public sphere. Although different voices may engage in the conversation with different levels of knowledge, the entry into the conversation itself is radically egalitarian.
• rejects genius and virtuosity as other forms of blind authority. The NAC values skill, but regard virtuosity as valuable only in the conversations it catalyzes rather than in its ability to function in an autonomous realm of aesthetics.
• regards the short-form review writing of the twentieth century to be merely the background research to a wider engagement. It is not the end of the critical process, but the start.
• assumes that work is done collaboratively and in teams. Under the deluge of information and in light of the number of skills required to manage large-scale conversation, group critical work must be the rule rather than the exception. The lone, authoritative, genius critic is a relic of a bygone Romantic era.
• assumes meaning is derived cooperatively. Rejecting the authoritative voice, critics must also reject the act of attempting to assign authoritative meaning. Meaning is emergent from the innumerable transactions over the interpretation of art.
• allows art to lead the conversation. Criticism as conversation takes as its starting point the concerns, obsessions and insights of art work. It does not choose issues of general interest, but rather reacts to art work and regards it as an argument about the nature of reality and society, an argument that demands engagement on its own terms.
• but also assumes that both artists and writers are fictitious. In the absence of authority, the artist’s intent as well as the writer’s are at best irrelevant and distracting at worst. What is real is emergent from cooperative interaction.
• is radically platform agnostic. The NAC is prepared to engage not only in print, but in digital media, in live conversation and in other forms of social practice, such as community organizing and protests as necessary the advance the conversation at hand.
• does not attempt to substitute for public sight. Recognizing that the review–or consumer-reports–format has become merely an appliance for bestowing market legitimacy, the NAC makes no attempt to recommend or favor. It assumes the autonomy of individuals to decide among themselves what to see. It rejects the preview and the private showing. It experiences art at the same time everyone else does. In its journalistic manifestation it makes no attempt to be “timely” or to give advance notice. It presumes the continuous relevance and valence of art.
• does not presume to educate tastes. It is anti-connoisseurial. If it attempts to establish market value, it does so openly, not by covering its tracks with misleading assessments of quality.
• creates for the public a voice by which the public can manage its own culture and symbolic order through means other than the market. It provides tools other than the purchase and the boycott for articulating an empowered relationship to culture.
• in radically anti-modernist: the NAC recognizes that the purpose of writing about art is no longer to learn about art, but to learn about life

I very briefly now present a few facts about Atlanta Art Now, a new organization in the city of Atlanta in which an expanded art criticism practice has already begun to redefine the social sphere in which it sits. Although Atlanta Art Now was not at all conceived as an exercise in New Action Criticism, through my involvement, we have begun to approach the project with some of the New Action tenets in the background.

Atlanta Art Now is a serial book publishing program supported by a nonprofit arts foundation. Its first volume is to be release in November (2011), and I am both a co-author of the first book in the series and the creative director of the publishing program as a whole.

The first book is called Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape and addresses artists who reflect or react to changing ideas of place and space in the era of globalization.

With this book, we have sought not only to chronicle contemporary art being made in Atlanta, but have paired the book with a program of public talks, online discussions, and supplementary written materials. These auxiliary programs use the artwork as a platform from which to launch critical discussions about urbanism, globalization and social stratification. In the book, as well as in other fora, these issues are taken seriously as the lens through which we look at a subset of contemporary work. Gone is the formalist criticism of modernism. As critics, the authors of Noplaceness are convening physical and virtual audiences to catalyze broader discussions about issues of general importance. The goal here is an ongoing, continuous, city-wide conversation that starts with art but ends with life.

In the United States platforms for a deliberative political discourse are few and degraded. I propose the practice I call the New Action Criticism as a revived formulation for creating reinvigorated spaces of social contact and discussion. Atlanta Art Now is a first and very partial attempt at this practice, a practice I hope will grow and become a model for general use.

© Cinque Hicks

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