The Crisis in Criticism. Wrong Answers Only.
I was traveling when 4Columns published the group of manifestos that five critics read aloud at a standing-room-only event at KGB bar in March, and so I haven’t shared my contribution (they were posted online last month)—that is, until now. The magazine’s senior editor, Ania Szremski, to address her frustration with the never-ending procession of panels on topics like “the death of criticism” or “the crisis in criticism,” invited five of us to present 500-word polemics toward its reformation. (You might argue this is a way of slipping in through the back door of the crisis-in-criticism discourse…)
Written to be performed live, and consciously engaging with some of the rhetorical excesses and eccentricities associated with the manifesto form, my take is not totally serious. Although, I’m not wrong—or I’m not wronger than anyone else, except for Ciarán Finlayson, whose manifesto is pretty much right. (Sometimes we talk about criticism and forget to be Marxists.) But, I love each of these pieces, by Emily LaBarge, Alex Kitnick, and Brian Dillon.
The sad post-script here is that one real crisis in criticism—for me, at least—is that 4C is closing shop in June next year. It’s been my favorite place to read criticism (and to write it) for a long time. I think my best-written and most meticulously edited reviews have been for Margaret Sundell’s 10-year labor of love, working with Margaret, Ania, and Melissa Anderson as editors.
On the bright side, at TCT, a critic is born. Gee Wesley’s debut—the first review he’s ever written—is an excellent, insightful text on Stan Douglas’s exhibition “Ghostlight” at Bard’s Hessel Museum. Maybe you’ve heard the buzz: it’s turning out to be the show of the summer.
The success of this exhibition isn’t so much in its deft demonstration of Douglas’s approach to history as a living and unfolding medium, it’s it in its capacity to stop us, and ask that we consider the poetics of history, and the surprising efficacy of music, films, and public actions that might initially appear devoid of clear liberatory potential. In this sense, the ghost-lit theater of the title image, as a site for mythologizing narratives of human experience, serves as a fitting emblem for Douglas’s art.—Gee Wesley