Gut's role in criticism

I've been getting a good deal of drinks-and-dinner conversation out of an interesting topic lately. What's the gut's role in criticism? And what should that role be?

Anyone is capable of having a strong reaction to a piece of art. Last Sunday I was giving a talk on the Rudolf Stingel exhibition at the Whitney. As I was discussing one particular piece in the show--an untitled work that's nothing more than a few carved Styrofoam panels--I was interrupted by one of the group, an elderly woman wearing sensible shoes. She had asked me a few questions earlier that made it clear that she didn't spend much time with contemporary art.

"I really don't like this," she started. "It makes me upset." "OK," I thought to myself, "I know where this is going." But she surprised me.

"I mean, what would the Old Masters think?" she continued. "They made paintings that were supposed to last for hundreds of years. This stuff. It's Styrofoam. It's not going to last. And he's even screwed it right onto the wall. Why is he making something that's not going to last? I just don't like that." It was the perfect question--or rant, or whatever it was.

"Stingel's got you," I said. "He's making you question your assumptions about what makes a painting a painting. And that's what the work is about."

After the group split up, we talked for a while. She had become enthusiastic about the exhibition. Her gut reaction to seeing an inherently unstable material being used to create an object that usually carries with it the assumption of permanence led her to see something in a new way. And that insight excited her.

The same experience happens to those of us who spend much more time looking at art. I took an unexpected sucker punch to the gut a couple weeks ago when I found myself in Tokyo for the day job. Jetlagged and harried because of meetings, I hadn't planned on seeing any art. But a colleague talked me into sneaking out one afternoon to pay a quick visit the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography which is in the same complex as the building where we were working.

The museum is currently hosting a show of Martin Parr's photography. I'm horribly conflicted about Parr's work. I love it. And I hate it. And I love it. And I hate it that I love it because I hate it. But I still hate it. Or love it. Or something. You get the picture.

A couple pieces in the show stunned me, but one piece really knocked the wind out of me. It was a snapshot of nothing, really--people shopping at a supermarket. But at the same time it was the perfect portrait of a place, a time, and a whole way of life. This one moment (captured so artlessly--ugly, repugnant in its rejection of anything aesthetic) tells everything anyone will ever need to know about what it was like to live in the West at the end of the twentieth century. And the fact that Parr is able to say so much so economically and with such banal material put a knot in my stomach and made me pause to catch my breath.

It's rare that art is able to cause that sort of reaction for a viewer. When it does, it pays to savor, and then to dissect, the moment of discomfort.

But what I want to know--and what none of my dinner companions has really been able to tell me--is why it's even more rare to read a piece of criticism that describes that sort of immediate and visceral reaction to a piece of art but that goes on to explain, contextualize, and critique what caused the moment to occur without draining away the passion of the experience. Gut on its own is never enough to make a good piece of criticism, but it seems that most critics either don't trust their instincts or they feel the need to explain them away when they write for an audience.

And that's a shame. Because engaged, informed, passionate writing about art is what most people who care about art really want to read. But they so rarely get to.

--Todd Gibson