How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Write an Introduction to an Art Catalogue

The following notes are meant to assist writers of introductions to art catalogues (hereafter referred to as WIAC). But first a word of warning: these instructions are not valid for the writing of a critical-historical essay to be published in a scholarly review. There are numerous, complex reasons for this distinction, the first of which is that critical essays are read and judged by other critics and only rarely by the analyzed artist, who either does not subscribe to the publication or has been dead for two centuries. A catalogue for a show of contemporary art exists in quite a different context.

How does one become a WIAC? Unfortunately, the process is all too easy. You have only to be involved in some intellectual profession (nuclear physicists and molecular biologists are in great demand), have a listed telephone number, and enjoy a certain fame. Fame is calculated in this fashion: it must have a geographical extension superior to the impact area of the show (fame should be at state level for a city of less than seventy thousand inhabitants, at national level for a state capital, at worldwide level for the capital city of an independent nation, San Marino and Andorra excepted) and must be of a depth inferior to that of the cultural knowledge of possible purchasers of pictures (if the show features wooded landscapes in the style of Daubigny, it is not necessary—indeed, it is counterproductive—for the writer to be a contributor to The New York Review of Books; it would be more advisable for him to be the principal of the local teachers' college). Naturally, you must be invited by the exhibiting artist, but this is not a problem: exhibiting artists far outnumber potential WIACs. Given these conditions, your engagement as WIAC is inevitable, quite independent of your will. If the artist has made up his mind, the potential WIAC cannot escape the task, unless he decides to emigrate to another continent.

Now, when the WIAC has accepted, he can decide on one of the following motivations:

1) Corruption (very rare, for, as we shall see, there are motivations that cost the artist less). 2) Sexual reward. 3) Friendship, in either of its two versions: genuine affection or inability to refuse. 4) Gift of a work by the artist (this motive is not the same as the following one, namely admiration for the artist; in fact, it is possible to want gifts of pictures in order to accumulate a commercially viable stock). 5) Sincere admiration for the artist's work. 6) Desire to link one's own name with the name of the artist: a splendid investment for young intellectuals, since the artist will go to great pains to publicize the WIAC's name in bibliographies for innumerable later catalogues, both nationally and abroad. 7) Ideological, esthetic, or commercial association, to promote a political movement or assist an idealistic art gallery.

The latter raises a delicate question, which even the most resolutely altruistic WIAC cannot evade. In fact, literary, film, or theater critics, whether they praise or demolish the work they criticize, have fairly little effect on its fate. The literary critic, with a favorable review, may increase a novel's sales by a few hundred copies; the movie critic can pan a cheap porno comedy without preventing it from taking in vast sums at the box office, and the same observation applies to the drama critic. The WIAC, on the other hand, contributes to the enhancement of all the artist's work, occasionally causing its value to jump by a factor of ten.

This special position also affects the critical situation of the WIAC: while the literary critic can speak ill of an author he may or may not know, but who as a rule cannot control the appearance of the article in a given paper, the artist commissions and controls his catalogue. Even when he says to the WIAC, "Feel free to be severe," the situation is, in point of fact, untenable. Either you refuse—but as we have seen, this is impossible—or you are, at the very least, polite. Or evasive.

This is why, since the WIAC wants to maintain his dignity and his friendship with the artist, evasiveness is the essential element in art catalogues.

Let us examine an imaginary situation. We'll take the painter Prosciuttini, who for thirty years has been painting ochre backgrounds with, in their center, a superimposed blue isosceles triangle, its base parallel to the southern edge of the painting. Over it is a red scalene triangle, tilted to the southeast with respect to the base of the blue triangle. The WIAC must bear in mind the fact that, depending on the period in the painter's development, the artist will have entitled his painting, in this order from 1950 to 1980: Composition, Two Plus Infinity, Minimal, Make Love Not War, Watergate, Effete Snobs, A/cross, Miss/ reading, Pictorially Correct. What (honorable) possibilities does the WIAC have, in writing his contribution? If he's a poet, it's easy: he dedicates a poem to Prosciuttini. For example: "Like an arrow—(Ah! cruel Zeno!)—the flash—of another dart—parasang traced—on a cosmos infected—with black holes—of every color!" This solution creates new prestige—for the WIAC, for Prosciuttini, for the dealer, for the purchaser.

The second solution is for writers of fiction only, and it takes the form of a freewheeling open letter: "Dear Prosciuttini, When I look at your triangles, I am once more at Uqbar, with Jorge Luis ... A Pierre Menard who suggests forms recreated in another era, a Don Pitágoras de la Mancha. Lust at 180 degrees: can we rid ourselves of Necessity? It was a June morning, in the sun-baked countryside: a partisan hanged from a telegraph pole. In adolescence, I doubted the substance of the Rule...." Et cetera.

If the WIAC has a scientific background his task is much easier. He can begin with the conviction (correct, as it happens) that a picture, too, is an element of Reality; then all he has to do is talk about the profundities of reality and, no matter what he says, he will not be lying. For example: "Prosciuttini's triangles are graphs. Propositional functions of concrete typologies. Knots. How to proceed from knot U to another knot? As everyone knows, an evaluating function F is required, and if, for every other knot V ≠ U considered, F (U) appears less than or equal to F (V), it is necessary to "develop" U, in the sense of generating knots that descend from U. A perfect function of evaluation will then fulfill the condition F (U) less than or equal to F (V), so that D (U,Q) is then inferior or equal to D (V,Q), where (obviously) D (A,B) is the distance between A and B in the graph. Art is mathematics. This is what Prosciuttini is telling us."

At first sight this tactic might seem to work well for an abstract painting but not for a Morandi or a Norman Rockwell. Wrong. Naturally everything depends on the skill of the man of science. As a generic indication, we would say that, today, adopting—with a fair amount of metaphorical nonchalance—René Thorn's theory of catastrophes, we can demonstrate that Morandi's still lifes represent forms on that extreme edge of equilibrium beyond which the natural forms of the bottles would become cusps beyond and against themselves, cracking like a crystal injured by an ultrasonic sound; thus the painter's magic consists in the very fact of having depicted this extreme situation. The writer could also play with the meaning of the words: still, i.e., for a temporal extension—but until when? Magic of the difference between still living and living on.

Another possibility existed from 1968 until, roughly, 1972: the political interpretation. Observations on the class struggle, on the corruption of objects tainted by their commodification. Art as rebellion against the world of consumer goods, the triangles of Prosciuttini as forms that refuse to become trade values, open to working-class inventiveness, expropriated by capitalistic greed. The return to a golden age, announcement of a Utopia.

All that has been said so far, however, applies only to the WIAC who is not a professional art critic. The art critic's situation is, shall we say, more critical. He must somehow talk about the work, but without expressing any value judgments. The easiest solution is to show that the artist has worked in harmony with the dominant view of the world or, as we say now, the Influent Metaphysic. Any sort of metaphysic represents a way of accounting for what is. A picture undoubtedly belongs in the category of things that are and, moreover, no matter how bad it may be, it somehow represents that which is (even an abstract painting represents that which could be, or that which is in the universe of pure forms). If, for example, the Influent Metaphysic sustains that everything that is is nothing but energy, to say that Prosciuttini's painting is energy and depicts energy is not a lie: at worst, it is obvious, but obvious in a way that saves the critic, while making Prosciuttini happy, not to mention his dealer, and the possible purchaser.

The problem is to identify that Influent Metaphysic of which, because of its popularity at a given time, everybody has heard. To be sure, you can join Berkeley is asserting that esse est percipi and say that Prosciuttini's works are because they are perceived: but as the metaphysic in question is not particularly influent, both Prosciuttini and the readers of the catalogue would perceive the excessive obviousness of the statement.

Therefore, if Prosciuttini's triangles had had to be described in the late fifties, exploiting the Sartre-Merleau-Ponty influence (and, above all, the teachings of Husserl), it would have been suitable to define the triangles in question as "the representation of the very act of intending, which, setting up eidetic regions, turns those same pure forms of geometry into a modality of the Lebenswelt." In that period, too (as variations were permissible also in terms of the psychology of form), to say that Prosciuttini's triangles have a "gestaltic" pregnancy would have been unassailable—every triangle, if it is recognizable as a triangle, has a gestaltic pregnancy. In the sixties, Prosciuttini would have seemed more à la page if in his triangles a structure homologous to Lévi-Strauss's parental patterns could be discerned. Desiring to play with structuralism in '68, the WIAC could have said that, according to Mao's theory of contradiction, which subsumes the Hegelian triad in the binary principles of yin and yang, the two triangles of Prosciuttini evidenced the rapport between primary contradiction and secondary contradiction. It must not be thought that the structuralist module could not also be applied to Morandi: deep bottle as opposed to surface bottle.

After the sixties the critic's options became freer. Naturally, the blue triangle intersected by the red triangle is the epiphany of a Desire in pursuit of an Other with which it can never identify itself. Prosciuttini is the painter of Difference, or rather of Difference within Identity. Difference within identity is also found in the "heads/tails" relationship of a hundred-lira coin, but Prosciuttini's triangles would lend themselves also to pinpointing a case of Implosion as, for that matter, would the paintings of Pollock or the introduction of suppositories into the anal tract (black holes). In Prosciuttini's triangles, however, there is also the reciprocal cancellation of use value and exchange value.

With an astute reference to Difference in the smile of the Mona Lisa, which, seen obliquely, can be recognized as a vulva, and is in any case béance, Prosciuttini's triangles, with their reciprocal cancellation and "catastrophic" rotation, could appear as an im-plosiveness of the phallus that becomes cogged vagina. The phallus of Fallacy. In other words, to conclude, the golden rule for the WIAC is to describe the work is such a way that the description, besides being applicable to other pictures, can be applied also to the emotional experience of looking in a delicatessen window. If the WIAC writes, "In Prosciuttini's paintings perception of forms is never inert reception of sense-data. Prosciuttini tells us that there is no perception without interpretation and work, and the passage from the felt to the perceived is activity, praxis, being-in-the-world as construction of Abshaetungen cut deliberately in the very flesh of the thing-in-itself," the reader recognizes Prosciuttini's truth because it corresponds to the mechanisms through which he distinguishes, in the deli, a slice of baloney from the macaroni salad.

Which establishes, in addition to a criterion of viability and efficacy, also a criterion of morality: it is enough to tell the truth. Naturally, truth comes in all sizes.

1980

Appendix

The following text was actually written—by me—to introduce the painting of Antonio Fomez in accordance with the rules of postmodern quotation (cf. Antonio Fomez, From Ruoppolo to Me. Studio Annunciata, Milan, 1982).

To give the reader (for concept of "reader" cf. D. Coste, "Three concepts of the reader and their contribution to a theory of literary texts," Orbis literarum 34, 1880; W. Iser, Der Akt des Lesens, München, 1972; Der implizite Leser, München, 1976; U. Eco, Lector in fabula, Milano, 1979; G. Prince, "Introduction à l'étude du narrataire," Poétique 14, 1973; M. Nojgaard, "Le lecteur et la critique," Degrés 21, 1980) some creative intuitions (cf. B. Croce, Estetica come scienza dell'espressione e linguistica generale, Bari, 1902; H. Bergson, Oeuvres, Edition du Centenaire, Paris, 1963; E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer Phaenomenologie und phaenomenologischen Philosophie, Den Haag, 1950) about the painting (for the concept of "painting" cf. Cennino Cennini, Trattato della pittura; Bellori, Vite d'artisti; Vasari, Le vite; P. Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d'arte del Cinque-cento, Bari, 1960; Lomazzo, Trattato dell'arte della pittura; Alberti, Della pittura; Armenini, De' veri precetti della pittura; Baldinucci, Vocabolario toscano dell'arte del disegno; S. van Hoogstraaten, Inleyding tot de Hooge Scboole der Schilderkonst, 1678, VIII, 1, pp. 279 et seq.; L. Dolce, Dialogo della pittura; Zuccari, Idea de'pittori) of Antonio Fomez (cf., for a general bibliography, G. Pedicini, Fomez, Milan, 1980, and in particular [>]), I should essay an analysis (cf. H. Putnam, "The analytic and the synthetic," in Mind, language, and reality 2, London and Cambridge, 1975; M. White (ed.), The Age of Analysis, New York, 1955) in a form (cf. W. Köhler, Gestalt Psychology, New York, 1947; P. Guillaume, La psychologie de la forme, Paris, 1937) that is absolutely innocent and unbiased (cf. J. Piaget, La representation du monde chez l'enfant, Paris, 1955; G. Kanizsa, Grammatica del vedere, Bologna, 1981). But this is a thing (for the thing in itself, cf. I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781–1787) that is very difficult in this world (cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics) of the postmodern (cf. cf. ((cf. (((cf. cf.)))))). Hence I will do nothing (cf. Sartre, L'ètre et le néant, Paris, 1943). The rest is silence (Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 7). Sorry, maybe some other (cf. Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, 1966) time (cf. J.B. Priestley, Time and the Conways, London, 1937; J. Hilton, Lost Horizon, London, 1933).