Love and Joy (and criticism) ((for DOUBLE magazine))
I may have been wrong about love. David sends me a Zizek quote. I’ve seen it before, as an instagraphic–you can hardly call them memes anymore. It says: “if you have a reason for loving someone, you don’t really love them,” or something like that.
I'm not really sure how that fits into our theme: transactional love; since transactional love is, well, transactional, and ‘criticism’ may or may not be all about reasons to love or hate something. Love and hate, good and bad, it's all very moral, and this moralism is a perennial theme in my art writing, but maybe I'm looking for a divorce. Maybe I want to divorce my conundrums and theories of love (and hate) from my (art) criticism.
Talking about love seems to be a big part of falling into it. Funny we have to theorize together what love is in order to do it, or maybe it's an exercise in drawing closer together. For a long time my banner essay on love was a conversation between the philosophers Lauren Berlant and Michael Hardt. I thought of love as a project for revolution and becoming, and I read this idea of romantic love into their conversation which is actually about love as a form of political agency.
The moment in the conversation that stuck out to me, which I turned into a talking point (a motto, and a form of seduction) was when Hardt compares joy and love. He describes love as “the social mobilization of joy.” He says “Joy can be without others, whereas love can't” and I thought that was soo Romantic. Romantic (in the classical sense, i.e. all about failure) because the precarity of the project was tied up in the necessity that we do it together. That the end of our collaboration would be the end of our love project, for me, supercharged the potential of being in love.
Out of this I made a false hierarchy between joy and love. I felt like: together is better, and harder–which meant more meaningful–and over time the collaborative nature of love became too important. My reading twisted their ideas about being “in relation” into being in a relationship, switching the word mobilization for collaboration. Maybe it was never love, or not at first. Maybe it was joy occasioned by the other–a no less beautiful and rare thing.
In the past, this feeling of ecstatic and excited communion with someone would signal to me the beginning of a possible love collaboration. Now I understand it as maybe just joy, something I am experiencing not alone but not collaboratively. It is a moment of affirmation, an opening created through intimacy. I'm stuck on this word occasioned because it feels so close to my idea of how art ideally functions, as an occasion for an affirmative increase in joyful self awareness.
Maybe it was never a relationship at all, the one between the artist and the critic. What if art is just an offering, the objectification of a joyful occasion, waiting to be picked up by someone. And you can't be in a relationship with it, just in relation to it. Maybe these two, the artist and the critic, remain individuals, mobilized by each other but not collaborators. This nullifies the fraught transactional question of criticism and art–what we owe each other. I get something from you, not that I organized myself in order to obtain, but that I did not know I needed.
So then is it necessary to theorize this joy, must we talk about art in order to do it? I don't know. Is that criticism? I think criticism is just another form of the same offering, it's the relationality of the experience being amplified once more by another reaction. Maybe I can give up wondering about criticism's relationship to art and just do art criticism–another way of being in love (in relation, having joy on occasion) with art.