Ana Finel Honigman: As a critic, curator and poet, do you perceive a hierarchical distinction between criticism, fiction and studio practice?
Tim Griffin: No, I don’t believe in any
hierarchy in my own approach. It’s true that people have cited a ‘crisis’ in
criticism today. But I’d rather think that, in the same way that much art
today ‘crunches contexts’, so might criticism. Criticism could function
nicely in forums that are akin to the artistic models they address. And
that’s not a new idea. Apollinaire wrote journalism, while Baudelaire wrote
some of the most important pieces of his day from a position outside the
academy – as did Judd and Smithson when they expanded their artistic
practices to include writing. And Smithson used to publish in Harper’s
Bazaar! One of my favourite observations is from William Gibson, who said,
‘I get more of a sci-fi buzz from Vogue than from Scientific American’. Art
criticism should have that sci-fi buzz. It ought to show up where and when
it doesn’t belong, discerning and creating correspondences, in order to be
compelling.
Does a similar ‘sci-fi
buzz’ happen in the recent rise of interdisciplinary studio practice?
There’s an analogy to be had. European curators use the term ‘relational aesthetics’ to describe artistic practices that move from one sphere or context to another and derive meaning from that interface. In effect, that’s taking cues from capitalist manoeuvres of the past decade, when, say, businesses realised that they needed anthropologists in order to survive. It’s the idea that art is inscribed in culture, that art is a category of culture. The passage from medium to medium by an individual artist finds an analogy in the passage from context to context; although, interestingly, there is also some introspection recently among artists – a revisiting of individual mediums, and even individual identity politics, in the face of grand shifts in material and culture.
Politics often feels ousted from recent art dialogue. Will these changes in aesthetic discussion help reintroduce political concerns in future art practice?
The acknowledgement of politics that comes with rummaging through subjectivity in art makes sense to me. I think that happened in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Post-Black show, and in its Black Romantic. I think you could see that in the most recent Whitney Biennial, where there was a challenging, imagined or real, of the fine-art gallery circuit. That amounted to a re-reading of regionalism in an age of globalism – which is also one way you might describe Enwezor’s Documenta.
You were the editor of the now defunct artbyte magazine, which focused on new media art. What are your notions about the lasting impact of technology on art and ways of seeing?
Artbyte never looked at digital media as being totally ‘new’. The magazine came out of a single piece written about digital inkjet prints, of all things. These traditional questions about printmaking provided models through which to describe the contemporary situation. There were concerns about originality, infinite reproduction, archivability, as well as an attention to specific materials as things that defined meaning. Artbyte always took a very historical view of digital media, seeing networking properties in terms of conceptual strategies of the sixties and also seeing the rise of a corporate avant-garde, as a conceptual move turned up more readily in the business pages than in art galleries. Artbyte always used art as a lens upon culture, and culture as a lens upon art. The concerns of art were inscribed everywhere: the metaphor of information leapt across platforms. And so we took a darker look at a decade of lollypop colours. Now, in Documenta, you can tell that networking practices linked to digital media have provided art with a practical language that is lasting. When it comes to ways of seeing, technology is interested in how it relates to our perception of traditional media. It recalls Judd’s assertion that ‘materials determine depictions of space’. New materials are introduced on the scene, and our perception of space and the depictions of it changes. The visual vocabulary expands and contracts at once. These two aspects were things I wanted to deal with when I co-curated The Production of Production with Bennett Simpson, who was with me at artbyte, at Apex Art in 1999, and Compression at Feigen Contemporary in 2000.
With globalism and regionalism, how relevant is the myth of New York as an art world centre?
In the nineties, New York could feel like a
fly-over town between Midwestern art centres and Europe. Artists would
arrive here already ‘made’. Maybe it was like rock bands: New York bands
never got any play because there were too many of them, whereas rock bands
in smaller cities built up followings and then landed the big contract. But
New York is still a place where artists want to show. The Whitney Biennial
was interesting because, while it professed to have no centre, it supposedly
came from outside the gallery circuit – the show could be mounted
meaningfully only in New York. The Biennial was all about the rise of
regionalism, and yet there is no other place in the US where it would have
had the same implications. Try to put the show up in LA or the Midwest and
the concept of regionalism gets swamped. The idea of fractured art is
sustainable only within a place as strong as New York, which is always
destroying and remaking itself anyway.
Tim Griffin was art editor at Time Out New York at the time of the interview
Ana Finel Honigman is a freelance writer based in New York