Word: visualizers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...them. So it's not as though I'm resisting new departures in art historical method, but I suppose I feel very strongly that that kind of critique is powerful and productive when it's conducted within a discipline, when a discipline renews itself. So what I have against "visual studies" is the project of getting rid of the disciplines. People say "film studies, what's that?" or "art history, jene connais pas." That's just forgetting about the fact that there are certain skills involved in both the fabrications of certain objects and the unpacking of those objects...
...fact, October magazine, which I coedit and cofounded in 1976, recently did a special issue that was an attack on the visual culture project. Like cultural studies, visual culture is aimed at what we could call pejoratively, abusively, deskilling. Part of that project is to attack the very idea of disciplines which are bound to knowing how to do something, certain skills. Obviously, in French literature you would to be able to read French very well, not just modern French but Medieval French. In art history there are also skills, like connoiseurship, and at least some slight knowledge of conservation...
...October to deal with contemporary visual practice, we need young writers. The time when October was most plugged into contemporary visual practice was during the early eighties. In a sense you could say that there was a certain generation of critic connecting with a certain generation of contemporary practice...
...issue of Picasso's stylistic appropriation and contemporary post modernism seems especially appropriate to your work, given your past writing and October's theorizing of post modernism and visual practice in the eighties. I'm interested to know, however, if you still see a place for critical writing on really contemporary art in October...
...generation of critics, do you think that in any way undermines the art historical method that you and people like Yve-Alian Bois have pioneered? To me, you way of working is so useful in the sense that it is about really analyzing an object and applying very precise visual tools to unpack it and discover how it signifies. And in that sense, this methodology would seem somehow completely impervious to generational differences...