critiquing the critique: construction in process V by gregory volk

Critiquing the Critique: Construction In Process V •

Mitzpe Ramon, Israel

A review by Owen Drolet of the exhibition “Construction in Process V” in Mitzpe Ramon, Israel, published in the inaugural issue of this magazine, raises some very pertinent issues of responsibility and ethics when it comes to writing about art. Before addressing these issues, and Mr. Drolet’s text, I wish to announce from the outset that I also attended this exhibition, that I am friends with some of the organizers and with some of the participating artists, that I contributed my own, much more favorable review to the newspaper The Forward, and that I recently curated the exhibition “Shattered Latitudes” at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts featuring several of the Polish artists who were also in Israel. My quarrel with Drolet’s piece has little to do with his generally negative response to an exhibition that I have supported; it is right and excellent that there be a variety of viewpoints concerning these things, as has been the case with several other reviews. My quarrel, instead, is otherwise and has much more to do with these notions of responsibility and ethics.

One of the most important, and also most obvious, responsibilities of a critic is, of course, to be as accurate as possible. Yet Mr. Drolet’s text is strewn with errors, and whether the result of sloppiness, carelessness, or something worse, they yield, or at least should yield, a feeling of deep uneasiness concerning the fundamental validity of his text. Ryszard Wasko is, and has been for some time, a prominent Polish artist and curator with a distinguished international career. He is one of the primary organizers of the ongoing series of artist-generated exhibitions called “Construction in Process,” and he is also familiar to many in New York from the time in 1990-1991 when he was Program Director of the P.S. 1 Museum. For the record, his name is spelled “Wasko,” as I have spelled it here, not “Wasco” as Mr. Drolet consistently spelled it. And lest one think that I am nitpicking, consider this: What would one think if I wrote a generally scathing review of the American artist Carl Ondre, or the Austrian artist Frank West?

In discussing the history of “Construction in Process,” Drolet informs us that the third such event was held in Poland in 1989 when in fact it was held in 1990; he announces that the American poet Allen Ginsberg attended this event, when in reality he attended another exhibition in 1993; and he misses this 1993 exhibition altogether in his chronicle in favor of saying that the fourth “Construction in Process” occurred in Cardiff, Wales in 1994 (this exhibition, “Site-Ations,” was a loosely-related and much smaller event, but not officially a “Construction in Process” exhibition). If a writer has so much trouble with readily available and much-published facts, how then should one approach his text when it comes to the much more taxing and intellectually demanding field of interpretation? Namely, the interpretation of art? And even more than that, the interpretation of art by roughly 100 artists from many different countries? I would hold that these accumulating errors, arising from, to put it mildly, poor and sketchy research, should make one exceedingly suspicious when it comes to Drolet’s other interpretations.

Near the beginning of Drolet’s review there is a fascinating sentence dealing with the origins of “Construction in Process” in 1981 (a groundbreaking event in Poland that continues to have a remarkable resonance for those who participated and for the many Polish people who attended). Discussing Ryszard Wasko’s involvement with this project, Drolet writes, “His (Wasko’s) strategy (my italics) was to write to many of the most prominent artists in the art world at the time (most of whose work he had seen only in reproduction), and try to convince them to come to Lodz, at their own expense, to create a work to be donated to Solidarity.” I have no idea how or why Drolet came up with this statement, but it is completely wrong, and I’d like to take this opportunity to restore things to the barest level of truthfulness.

During the height of the Solidarity labor movement, Ryszard Wasko and others organized the first “Construction in Process” event in Lodz, Poland. A number of things were especially noteworthy about this exhibition; for instance, that it was organized by artists for other artists, that it brought together artists from both the West and the East, that the social interaction and exchange of ideas occurring between the artists was as much a part of the exhibition as anything else, and that it was the first-ever independent exhibition of contemporary art in communist Poland entirely free of governmental strictures and control (for more information on this exhibition and time I refer you to an interview conducted between myself and Ryszard Wasko, New Observations 102, 1994, as well as to Richard Nonas’s essay published in Tema Celeste, March 1991.). Even though the Solidarity labor movement was strong at the time, this generally utopian venture remained fraught with considerable risk, such as jail or exile for the organizers. It was still highly illegal in Poland to organize anything without governmental authorization, and certainly anything having to do with the free association of artists, especially with artists from both the West and the East. The exhibition was just that—a large-scale international exhibition, albeit an especially free-spirited and unusual one—but it was also a radical attempt to reach beyond the barriers imposed by the Cold War, as well as a brazen, and in many ways courageous, challenge to a decades-old political system built on outright control. This first “Construction in Process” occurred, and was an unprecedented success. Shortly thereafter, martial law was declared, the exhibition was shut down by the military, the artworks were seized, some of the organizers were jailed, and Ryszard Wasko spent the next several years in exile in Germany.

In framing this important event in his own peculiar and peculiarly derogatory way, Drolet presents an implicit picture to an American audience: a grasping and “strategizing” Ryszard Wasko, hunkered down in poor Poland, leafing through much-fingered copies of outdated magazines in search of “reproductions,” and then inviting, willy-nilly, “many of the most prominent artists in the world” to travel to Poland for the exhibition, as if their prominence and not their actual work, and not his own respect for their work, was the fundamental point. What we find are two things: a caricature of a deprived, out-of-touch Eastern European looking longingly to the superior West, which is then infused with a burst of late 1980s/early 1990s on-the-make “strategizing”—in order to get ahead, in order to make a career. But if one looks a little more closely at history, and not at Drolet’s hegemonic interference with history, a far more accurate portrayal can be discerned. Already in 1976 Wasko was showing his own work at Galerie M in Bochum, Germany, and in 1977 he was included in Documenta 6, where, incidentally, he personally met and formed friendships with some of the Western artists who later came to Lodz; in fact some of them came to Lodz precisely because of their friendships with him. Of course during these exhibitions, and also during several others in the late 1970s when Wasko was one of the few Polish artists able to show internationally, he saw original works by these and other artists, and not reproductions, although not with the ease or the scope one would have had been able to do so here. Furthermore, by no means did the artists participating in this first “Construction in Process” constitute a veritable Who’s Who of prominent art world figures at the time, as Drolet erroneously suggests. While it is true that some “prominent” Western artists attended, such as Richard Serra, Carl Andre, Richard Nonas and Dennis Oppenheim, other participants were hardly household names here, either because they were Eastern Europeans, and Eastern Europeans have an extremely difficult time achieving recognition in the West, or due to the simple fact that they hadn’t, at the time, received overwhelming accolades. A list of those who did participate is readily available. Before making his bizarre and entirely unsubstantiated insinuation that fame or “prominence” was some sort of major curatorial premise, Drolet should have consulted this list. If one does consult this list, one immediately gets the sense of just how non-hierarchical, and inattentive to fame, this exhibition was.

I’d like to suggest another curatorial premise that I’m quite confident is a lot closer to the truth, one that is very far indeed from Drolet’s very New Yorkerish absorption with “prominence,” stars, and art-world big shots. In deciding which artists to invite, Wasko generally chose people whose work, in his opinion, was either affected by, implicated in, or psychically connected to the tradition of Polish Constructivism, especially its utopian outlook. The city of Lodz, where the exhibition occurred, was the center of Polish Constructivism in the 1920s and 30s. Organizing that particular exhibition in Lodz, at that particularly intense time, was a conscious attempt to resuscitate not really Polish Constructivism but its enduring legacy as a driving cultural force after decades of state-enforced Socialist Realism; at the same time it was an attempt to imagine how something of that utopian spirit might be extended into the future in terms of art-making and art-related events. Why Drolet, with his own thin vision of “prominence” or positioning in the art world, demeans such an important historical event—one which, according to all the people who actually were there and participated, really did arise from altruistic motives, which included a political risk unfathomable to artists (or critics, I might add) in the West, and which impacted dramatically on the lives of the participants—is anybody’s guess. In any event, a critic has absolutely no right whatsoever to blunder into a very different cultural context that he clearly doesn’t understand, and once there, to rearrange historical events according to his own fantasy, to attribute woefully incorrect motives and actions to people whose actual ones were in all likelihood entirely different and probably a lot better, in the process blithely recasting a past situation as something that winds up looking a lot more like desultory New York art scene politicking and careerist maneuvering than like something belonging to the tumultuous Poland of that era.

Continuing, Drolet is intensely dismissive when it comes to the actual works made in Israel, referring to them as “bland and/or derivative” or hyperbolic. Speaking as a critic who was there as well, I would strongly disagree, but that’s not the point; as I said at the beginning, differences in viewpoints are normal and helpful. However, it’s one thing to state that works—and in this case Drolet is writing specifically about works made outdoors—are “derivative,” yet it’s quite another, and in fact the duty of the critic, to explain what that means. One can’t very well announce that not only a work, but instead almost all works in a given location, are “derivative” without stating what they are derivative of. Please bear in mind that among the many such works presented outdoors in Israel were pieces by Palestinian artists, and believe me, with their political engagement, with their accessing of specifically Islamic motifs, and with their references to the tradition of Arabic art in general (the work of Sharif Waked is an excellent example) these works do not base themselves at all on the kind of American, or Western, art to which, I guess, Drolet is referring, and I’m also guessing that he is no expert concerning Palestinian art. The same can absolutely be said of work by artists from Eastern Europe, whose traditions and influences are different from ours, or to Israeli artists (likewise), or to Chinese artists, or to British artists, for that matter. In lumping everything together within his own self-constructed rubrics, Drolet takes a weirdly colonialist viewpoint, implicitly comparing art from entirely different traditions with the one (presumably American, although he’s not telling) with which he is familiar. It’s a kind of ill-informed arrogance, a juvenile attempt to impose blanket judgments without elucidation, corroborative evidence, and, importantly, risk, as if making thumbs-up or thumbs-down, yes or no, I like it or I don’t, judgments were enough. But such unsubstantiated judgments are hardly the critic’s God-given right.

Oddly enough, every one of the artists that Drolet mentions by name other than Wasko are either American artists or artists based in New York. Yet one of the great elements of this exhibition, occurring in the unlikely setting of the Israeli desert, was the opportunity to discover work by artists from different countries. The Palestinian Sharif Waked springs to mind, the English artist Emma Lawton, the Polish artist Malgorzata Borek, the Australian Richard Thomas, or the Russians Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky, among many others. Speaking very personally, as a writer I try to be extremely aware in such settings of work by artists that I would not normally see in New York, not because it is the correct thing to do, but because seeing such unfamiliar work can be fresh, surprising, and intriguing. At the very least it is bound to be different from the work one sees here. This, thankfully, was the critical approach taken by others who wrote about the exhibition, such as Sarah Bayliss in World Art and Robert Morgan in Cover. Drolet, however, with his New York fixation, is entirely different, and after all the hubbub about multiculturalism, tolerance, and respect for “the Other,” it is amazing that something like this happens. Specifically concerning Drolet’s text, I would put it this way: Is it really so very difficult for us as Americans, and for us as New Yorkers, to understand that we not only share the art world, but the world?

The low point of Drolet’s text merits particular attention, and here is where we really get to questions of personal ethics. In his review one will find two photographs: the first of an excellent piece by Haim Steinbach, and the second by none other than Owen Drolet himself (in collaboration with Glen Seator). In an exhibition featuring, as I said, roughly 100 artists from many different countries, one of the two photographs that Drolet chose to represent the exhibition was of his own work, and in his text one can also find a neat, very satisfied self-review, a sort of small auto-reviewlet, explicating and in fact extolling this piece. On one level this sort of shameless self-promotion warrants little more than a crooked, oyster-shell smile followed by a burst of semi-maniacal laughter. But there are two additional points—which Drolet failed to clarify to his readership—that make this act of self-promotion all the more absurd.

Point number 1: Mr. Drolet was not invited to this exhibition as an artist, but instead as a critic. His name will not be found on any official list of artists in the exhibition in Israel, because he was not officially invited to be an artist in the exhibition. While in Israel as a critic he felt welcomed to develop his own piece, given the prevailing open and non-hierarchical spirit of the event, and I hold that there is probably not another such exhibition in the world where he would have been be so welcomed to do this. But to then single out this particular work to his readership while slyly pretending to be one of the invited artists—in other words to cynically manipulate the generosity bestowed upon him in Israel in order to further his own career as an artist—is an act of truly hilarious hubris. Point number 2 makes things even more ethically woozy: The photography-based work undertaken by Drolet was not realized in finished form during the course of the exhibition. Let me repeat: whatever artwork Drolet undertook was not presented in Israel, was not seen by the other artists (or other critics, for that matter) and was not seen by the audience, and it makes no difference whether this was due to technical difficulties, personal troubles, conceptual complications, or any other reason. Its final form was realized much later, in New York, safe, of course, from the prying eyes of other artists and from the attention of critics. While he rampantly and willingly judged and condemned the work of other artists as a critic, when it came to his own work as an artist he played things close to the vest; no critic could have done the same to him because there was no work by him to be seen. No critic could have done the same then, but one can do so now. Look at the photograph he presented and remember the word “derivative” with which he so easily dismissed other artists, for his own work (judging from this photograph) is derivative as hell. It’s derivative of Walker Evans and it’s derivative of Dan Graham, specifically of Dan Graham’s lonely-looking Staten Island houses. It’s an aesthetic pioneered and dominated by these two figures, transposed onto an Israeli context, and as I said it’s derivative as hell.

This situation, of course, is worse than appalling; it is laughably appalling. It is clumsily and uproariously appalling. It is unabashed hucksterism, self-boosterism, and me-firstism hiding out behind a mask of criticality, and it makes the role of the critic an absolute joke. It is nonsense, pure and simple, but then a great deal of nonsense happens all the time in the art world. Clearly, such an approach reeks of that term “strategizing”—”strategy” being the term that the very young Owen Drolet applied so blithely to the much more experienced Ryszard Wasko—and just as clearly it should have no validity whatsoever in terms of any honest discourse about art. It galls me that Drolet used this particularly experimental, and well-intentioned, exhibition as the backdrop for his strange maneuvers, especially given that the history of these exhibitions has so much to do with opposing such things. It galls me again that he used the pages of this experimental and well-intentioned magazine—in which writers are given an extraordinary freedom, and are enormously trusted—to do the same. It galls me doubly that I personally recommended him to write for this magazine. Consider the recommendation publicly, and emphatically, withdrawn.

Gregory Volk

Brooklyn, New York

1995

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