Published to accompany the exhibition "Concerning Jealousy" at Scherben in Berlin
DTR
Im wiring (sic) ab jealousy rn
What are you jealous of
Other ppls freedom to make bad work
You can make bad work too!
Don’t hold yourself back!
1. Fairness
I remember this basic cool fact; “you cant see words without reading them.” I say remember because I’m sure it's not such a simple and true tenet, but it was an intriguing idea to me when I was younger, opening a whole new way of beginning to think about how complex the relationship between seeing and reading was. Is.
Sylvere Lotringer: The interviews, or what people say, it's just text.
Kathy Acker: Yeah. But even when you’re doing art criticism, paintings are a text.
S: It's like plagiarism without plagiarism.
K: Exactly.1
So what's a text and what's an image? SoiL Thornton (notice the spelling and capitalization of their chosen name) has made a practice of complicating the two. Speaking of the two––or more, their pronoun, “they,” insists on this complication. How many me’s in-between? What part of my singular-ness or sovereignty am I responsible for making legible to you? But these aren't language games, or are they? Thornton’s practice began in painting (continues in painting too), but a large part of their early work has been kind of disowned by them. Its status as work, or their work, is now somewhat ambiguated. It's worth mentioning, because this expressive body of drawing and painting, on paper and various found surfaces (saw blades, fences, rocks), is composed of a non-linguistic grammar. Their work now is a more elaborate negotiation between spaces, people; our images, our titles; the work’s titles, materials lists; and what expression is left around or in-between those nodes. I keep saying in-between because it's important. It’s where the meaning is made––for SoiL’s work specifically, but also between art and language in general.
I didn't sit down to write about SoiL’s work exactly. I wanted to think about a disagreement they had with an art writer, a critic. Their disagreement, over the production of an artwork that involved quoted material, resonated with a question about criticism that has been lingering for me. The question is how do we allow each other––or don't. When today we generally seem to be interested in ordering our responsibilities to each other and disorganizing unequal compensation systems, how do we sort out what's fair? In other words, what is the nature of the relationship between the artist and the critic? It feels less important to try to decide what is legally or fiscally fair in the disagreement between SoiL and their critic and more important to focus on what type of agreement should have been entered into in the first place. Nonetheless, let me describe the terrain.
An art writer––a critic––writes a review of SoiL’s show. SoiL thanks the writer; the writer is paid by the magazine (a grossly nominal fee surely). The two become sort of friends over the review. Both benefit from a type of mutual association, their works being now symbiotically tied together. SoiL is an artist who has enjoyed success (fiscally for sure), but has also committed themselves to undermining and rebuilding their career as their integrity seems to demand. Later, SoiL includes the review (cut from the pages of the magazine, including the front page and the entirety of the article) in a collage. SoiL tells the writer about the new work. The writer includes a picture of the new work on their linkedin, publicizing the association, turning it into status.
Some time passes and it seems the writer begins to sour on the arrangement. They feel an extra value has now been extracted unfairly from their labor (the writing of the review), and they want to be paid for it. They contact SoiL’s galleries, who then contact SoiL. SoiL, sensitive to issues of representation, exploitation, utilization, multiplication, immediately concedes that something can be done, offers to take the work out of circulation, asks the writer what they think a fair percentage could be. But then they also start to think about where the boundary is between the work that went into the work (the text into the collage), but also the work that went into the text (the original art show). “Whose is it?” is a question we can ask, and are asking about a lot of things, specifically artworks, these days.
The law offers here to intercede, to sort out questions of “fair use.” But we know the courts don't do fair well. What’s legal is just a set of worked over social negotiations, calcified into laws. More importantly, law is historically prejudiced in whom it looks after. There are so many examples of successful and unsuccessful litigation of artist’s use of each other's images that it clarifies little to explicate them here. Our communities are also regulated by any number of para legal and informal intersocial arrangements about ownership, territory, boundaries… Norms, also flawed.
Envy is the feeling that fairness has not been properly ordered. It is a feeling that arises to order what is fair. In Texte Zur Kunst’s “Envy” issue (“Neid '' in German, a clue? even if only a false cognate of “need”), Sighard Neckel describes the difficulty or impossibility of mutuality, so sought after and so hard to obtain in the art world. “This is why Freud believed that only the demand for fairness can process envy, for it alone indicates the condition on which we can desist from envy. The elementary rule is that giving and taking, as well as rights and duties, be correlated by principles of mutuality.”2
What’s fair? An artist makes a show. The artist generally takes on a large part of the investment themselves and is (hopefully) compensated by selling the works. But every show is an opportunity to fail. An artist is put in a considerable amount of risk every time they share their work––increasingly my most pressing definition of “artist” is someone who is committed (not romantically but practically) to precarity. The artist’s practice is always up for a certain amount of damming reconsideration; they don't generally work in a team nor do they stick to a line or aesthetic that creates the type of continuity of a brand. But actually, some do. A lot do, and they don't live in any real proximity to precarity. They live indulgently next to vulgar wealth (not really possessing it themselves, but also some do, yes) and benefit from it while imagining themselves apart. But refusal is integral to art, right? I'm getting lost. There are a lot of ways to be an artist, and an artist is a dramatic image set in and amongst a drastically vague set of conditions, around and without: money, support, stability.
Between artists, endless competition and backstabbing, a type of begrudging sharing that can only be called love (with all the hate it entails). But what is the relationship between the artist and critic? The same, or is the tradition of art and its commentary a more mutual arrangement? What are its norms? Envy wants to seek out a better arrangement.
Must the critic act in good faith? Are they not engaged in what is an almost altruistic act of service? Their work lives off the artist’s work;3 it is a type of collaboration. The critic must enter seriously into this cooperation, precisely because they do not have to ask; the artist has already made themselves available, open to criticism. One doesn't need to praise or love the art or artist, better if they don’t, but they should proceed carefully. They must practice integrity.
These questions make it sound like the critic is a type of volunteer or social worker. There is the uncomfortable tension between the critics' circumstances and the way in which their work creates value in the artist's production; though this position has been quite diminished, gallerists seem to make most of the decisions on who is in and out nowadays and all they care about is the market (p.aintings o.nly p.lease). Also criticism is almost always under/not compensated. What do you get for a TzK article? A hundred euros or an artist edition. Sounds like a knock knock joke. 50 bucks for a critics pick, and we have a real critical problem with our publishing institutions, just as we have a broader problem with newspapers and news platforms. Not only are these platforms insufficiently funded or staffed to support good journalism/criticism (or reply in a timely manner to your pitch/invoice/email), but also that they are owned/bought by parent companies with illiberal politics or hemmed by editorial boards with pickled and retrograde political positions. That said, when we are so quick to kick such institutions down the stairs, what place do we have left for criticism? These magazines took decades to build as platforms. That these magazines had already abdicated much of their critical position and become so watered down and positive, maybe make it so much easier to feel that they have no value for us in moments when they then go and become really politically offensive. But institutions have phases, they are not only what they are now.
In relationships, what I need from you is a negotiation that is always ongoing. I parse and sort out the limits of what I can live with. Mutuality is the goal––I give it, I get it4–– but compromise is the mode. In one of their many conversations on the political potential of love, Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt are talking and Hardt says “Love is the social mobilization of joy. They’re intimately related. The short version is: Joy can be without others, whereas love can’t.”5 If criticism is a relationship you don't do it alone.
2. Jealousy
Jealousy is up all night with the moon.
A friend of mine used to joke, “everyone’s a critic, especially the critics.” A quote she always attributed to some imaginary author/comedian, but was actually only ever her own saying, herself a critic. If the first impulse here in this meaderning text is towards fairness the second is to the souring of an unfair or unfavorable dynamic into jealousy. Neckel provides a very succinct explanation of the difference between jealousy and envy: “When envy is complemented by an individual’s sentiment that they have a legitimate claim to the coveted object, it turns to jealousy.”6
The philosopher Agnes Callard, who’s essay on Jealousy7 can be found elsewhere in this catalog, expands further: Callard sees jealousy not only as a negative emotion but also as an essential motor of our erotic desire. She describes jealousy as a blindspot, the need to inhabit the exact position you can not be in. In her explanation, you are not jealous of your beloved’s attention and affection for another lover, but jealous that the other lover knows your beloved in a way you can not and will never be able to––they know your beloved without you. You don’t want to get rid of the other lover, but instead you want to become him, and to know your beloved as him.
So is my (our) beloved object art? and he/it stuck between us? Are we even in a relationship?
Maybe I'm just a jealous (critical) guy. What I have been worrying about lately is that my critical spirit is more about jealousy than anything else. Not the righteous judgment that takes care of our shared project, but jealousy at others’ liberty. I watch myself use intelligence like a cudgel, fomenting arguments to beat others down (and keep me down too). But I also feel the way some of my peers participate in art is not only bad: weak, ineffective, silly, superficial, but also Bad: manipulative, corrosive, and antagonistic to all the wrong things––that they undermine a project we are all wagered in that is vital to our society, my life––that they haven't earned their success or more specifically that the things they did to “earn” it are wrong, are things I would not do, “should” not want.
Where is the balance between criticality and jealousy? Eve Klossoky Sedgwick (in “Paranoia and Reparative Reading”) encourages us that to give up a type of paranoid critical reading does not have to mean giving up our political discernment, “to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression,”8 Still, I am suspicious of my very moral imperative.
One artist writes bestseller novels (Calla Henkel). They are fine, formulaic, stated plainly so, the author tells how she read the ‘how to write a novel’ books and just followed the instructions. I read the first book, grudgingly enjoying it but hating its manipulative simplicity, designed to conquer airport bookshops, to top the charts. This is not literature, I thought. I also chided myself for being so uptight. I went to the launch of her second book––nope––I felt reassured of my judgment––this was something corrosive, stupid, and worse, mean. The author was taking all her fine intelligence and using it to dupe people. We knew the book was a trojan horse (though without a subversive fighting force inside), but everyone else did not. (But who cares?!) Is it still satire if the reader doesn't know it's a critique? I asked her later in a roundabout way if she thought she was acting in bad faith, she told me she thought Americans believed way too much in the power or sanctity of literature, that that was dumb. Maybe I just want to write my own book; “You should!”, she said.
Below all of this there is an anxiety about effect and effectiveness in culture. Is art essentially supposed to work against culture? This is not a rhetorical question. Is art culture’s critic?!
3. Self-Portrait
Picasso said every portrait is a self-portrait. Maybe SoiL’s critic is jealous that SoiL has confused their relationship, made it ambiguous, made their art so much into a type of criticism that they have eclipsed the critic’s position. They have taken their writing and made an image of it––covered their song; they have become what the other thinks they cannot be, a critical lover of art… Which one?
Carla Lonzi, in the introduction to her book/text/artwork Self Portrait, asks:
“But how could one distinguish the true artist from the false artist, if there were no more critics, this is the question that emerges in this case. However, first, one must ask why this distinction is considered so essential by society.”9
The book, a portmanteau of long interviews with different artists mixed into one text, was also the site of her departure from criticism into a more direct political practice. Having given up the position of critic she writes:
“What remains, now that I’ve lost this role within the art world? Maybe I’ve become an artist myself? I can respond: I am no longer alienated. If art is not in my abilities as creation, it is as creativity, as consciousness of art in the willingness to do good.”10
Art is transformed into an awareness, and the loss of her critical distance is only the loss of her alienation. She is passing into a type of participation; she is engaging communally with enjoyment. Later in Self Portrait Carla Accardi, one of Lonzi’s interview subjects, commenting on the public conversations between artists and critics held in Milan in the 70s, urges that we must remain thorough in what we allow in dialogue and in art.
“But let me tell you, how false it all is. Look, it seems to me that in Italy there is actually a tradition of falsity, because people think, ‘It does no harm, falsity isn’t what destroys ideas . . . deep down maybe there are good ideas, new ideas . . .’ No, this isn’t the way. One must be a bit tougher, a bit more puritanical and should say, ‘No, where we find good ideas, new ideas, we can cut them out, we can make a division.”
and then she playfully but vindictively turns on Lonzi, the critic, her friend and interlocutor.
”So, I wanted then to clarify: what does the critic do? He does the opposite of everything I previously mentioned, he does everything at random, comments waft about like when you smell a good fragrance, a rose and you remember ‘roses exist,’ or you go into someone’s studio and say ‘Oh, look at this thought that he had . . .’ But the critic has knowledge locked in a certain phase, in its own neurotic form.”11
Just now, back on instagram, I see a friend (the most successful painter?) has posted a screenshot of her story, a black and white text caption: “Also fuck that Manhattan art reviewer fucker I’d like to see what kind of art you make bitch” I send it to another friend, the comedian critic, she writes back, “Lol that insta. But also…. / That’s kind of a big mistake about art criticism / It’s not supposed to be written by artists”
To all of it, I insert Lonzi’s reply to Accardi, or the reply Lonzi had originally inserted herself:
“I want to kiss you!”12
Such loving effacement, such love of being effaced!
I tell my friend I’m putting her texts in the essay
“Ya go ahead / As long as u don’t make me look lame / I wanna be jealous of myself”
________________
[1] Kathy Acker, “Devoured by Myths” interview by Sylvère Lotringer, reprinted in May Magazine #22, March, 2024
[2] Sighard Neckel, “Invidia Modern: The Order of Resentment”, Texte zur Kunst, September 2021.
[3] My friend Stefano Faoro comments: “Is this 100% true? I think the curatorial turn made it possible to not need artists anymore. And this didn't make artists disappear. But it made them not essential for critics. And being not essential is a status––even if you are there, you know you are not essential. Is this some kind of freedom? On both sides? Or maybe I am wrong and critics really depend on artists? I think my problem is to see this relation as a dialectic. I don't think it is. It has lost this dialectical condition for a much more free- coercive and neoliberal––freedom: absence of mutuality and also, therefore, absence of consequences. Artists and critics can never meet, and, on the other hand, sometimes they are the same person. Both annihilate dialectics.”
[4] Here misquoted from the original text: “I give it, get it,” Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 52.
[5] Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt, “On the Risk of a New Relationality,” interview by Heather Davis and Paige Sarlin, Reviews in Cultural Theory: Issue 2.3.
[6] Neckel, “Invidia Modern: The Order of Resentment.”
[7] Agnes Callard, “The Other Woman”, https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-other-woman/
[8] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 128.
[9] Carla Lonzi, Self-portrait, Translated by
Allison Grimaldi Donahue. (Brussels: Divided Publishing, 2021), 15.
[10] Ibid. 16.
[11] Ibid. 33.
[12] Ibid.