… it’s been adapted to presenting things in this situation with other people there in the shadows, listening.
This is from the interiew with Molly Nesbit found in What It Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics by Jarrett Earnest (2018):
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Molly Nesbit: … There’s no model. And what people search for, especially at the beginning of their studies, is some map that can explain everything. If you’re really going to tell the truth about what we’re doing, there is no map. There are questions — What is actuality? — but there is no map. Some people can cope with that, but it means you have to go forward in the dark. In life we go forward in the dark, too, and one of the problems now in early 2017 is that we are in fact going forward in a dark that doesn’t seem even to take the shape of a tunnel.
[ … ]
MN: I learned to write and speak about the past from teaching. Art history, as you know, is taught in the dark — lecturing in front of luminous images. I think what you’re really hearing in my writing is a spoken voice. It’s not the voice of the radio broadcaster; rather, it’s been adapted to presenting things in this situation with other people there in the shadows, listening.
[ … ]
MN: … I am now committed to the idea that one can and should think about art and historical material from the bottom up. I work on contemporary artists from the same kind of bottom-up perspective. The idea that philosophical ideas function to illuminate the world from the bottom up is slightly destabilizing for many academics, but it’s just how I understand things. I don’t have a good feeling for the abiding importance of hierarchy — I really don’t. I’m impressed by accomplishment, but I’m not particularly impressed by power in and of itself. It follows from the fact that Duchamp was a person, that everyone is a person, so we should all be able to talk together — hierarchy shouldn’t get in the way of that.
Jarrett Earnest: There are very few times in your writing where you say, So-and-so said to me. You do not make yourself a feature in the writing, although in many cases the writing feels that it can only be held together by the gravity of a single person.
MN: The decision to use the first person is often temperamental. Also, I suppose it’s a set of attitudes inculcated from the very reality of writing about the past. Obviously you don’t walk around as yourself saying “I” when you’re recounting the past. It’s not as though I’m seeking to say, So-and so said to me, but on the other hand, you learn things through conversation, and there is no reason why knowledge that comes in conversation shouldn’t be communicated. But you have to reference it somehow. The line of Leon Golub’s that I used as an epigraph for Midnight — “Life is wild” — was said in conversation at the end of his life. We were talking, as we did in those day, about utopia.
My most recent previous post from Earnest’s book is here.
-Julie
Coloring 