Ms. Senior (yes, apparently that’s her real name) discusses therein recent research indicating that the very worst thing you can do to adolescents is to force them to rise early five days a week and confine them for six hours each of those days for four years in indoor spaces with only other adolescents for company and a few adults as moderators. (Adolescence stretching as it does into the first several years of college, this applies at least to post-secondary frosh and sophs.)

Conventional high school, by those accounts, is bad for your mental health, social development, and intellectual growth. (Such 20th-century educational reformers as A. S. Neill, John Holt, Neil Postman, and Jonathan Kozol would certainly agree.) Throw in the distractions of electronic gadgets and digital media ― not to mention anxieties over bullying and random slaughter ― and it’s a wonder any of you got out with your f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact, much less the skills necessary for entrance-level college coursework. That’s assuming any of you graduating today managed to do so, of course. But I digress.

The Market Value of Your Sheepskin

College Grade Inflation 1940-2008. Chart © copyright 2008 by Stuart Rojstaczer.

In any event, I’m sure none of that tendency toward grade inflation and social promotion to which I referred earlier applies to whatever college, university, polytechnic or art institute has inadvertently allowed me on stage here today to give this inspirational talk to its graduating class. Nonetheless, the net effect of this contagious syndrome has been to degrade the market value of a college diploma. Though certainly necessary in some fields, it’s merely decorative in others. “[N]early half of graduates from four-year colleges say they are in jobs that do not require a four-year degree,” according to a wide-ranging study by consulting firm McKinsey & Co. in collaboration with the research data group Chegg. Indeed, in some cases the diploma proves counterproductive, because the degree identifies its holder as overqualified, thus presumably prone to dissatisfaction on the job and unlikely to commit to it long-term.

This has led to a widespread questioning of aspects of the traditional liberal-arts education. For example, in an August 10, 2011 op-ed piece published at the website of The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, “Down with Research Papers!” by Thomas Bertonneau, the author proposes that the standard research paper ― which typically requires a student to become familiar with some portion of the literature on the given topic, and thus to engage with the measured opinion of recognized figures in the field ― has become outmoded. (He ascribes this, with unconvincing vagueness, to “the internet.”)

Thomas Bertonneau

For the research paper Bertonneau would substitute a form that prioritizes the students’ own opinions. “The essay is the genre that answers to the emergency. The essay, not the research paper, best suits the desperate need of badly prepared students to come to terms with primary sources and to apply the wisdom of belles-lettres to the contemporary social, cultural, and political situation,” he argues.

Exactly how “badly prepared students” whose skillset deficiencies include serious reading and writing problems ― present company excepted once again, needless to say ― would manage to “apply the wisdom of belles-lettres to the contemporary social, cultural, and political situation” Bertonneau leaves to the reader’s imagination. He does prescribe doses of Plutarch, Montaigne, and G. K. Chesterton as bracing tonics. Right. It seems to have escaped him that a research paper can include both a distillation of the considered thought of experts and the student’s own newly informed commentary on and dispute with those ideas. (That’s how I’ve always assigned it in my own courses.)

Piled Higher and Deeper

Others cast a wider net, addressing the larger problem of an oversupply of PhDs in relation to the available employment opportunities, inside academe and out, for those with such credentials. Here’s an excellent contemplation of that situation by an anonymous biologist, “The disposable academic: Why doing a PhD is often a waste of time,” published by The Economist on December 16, 2010, and a well-researched response thereto by Jeremy Garwood at Lab Times, from May 2011.

Meanwhile, more radical thinkers have begun a reconsideration of the entire graduate-school enterprise, especially in the liberal arts. See, for example, “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” by Thomas H. Benton, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009, “Just Don’t Go, Part 2,” from March 13, 2009, and his even more depressing follow-up, “The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind,’” from February 8, 2010. “Graduate school in the humanities is a trap,” Benton asserts. “It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon ‘the life of the mind.’” He suggests this “should particularly alarm women, who are now the majority of graduate students in the humanities and the overwhelming majority of adjuncts.”

“Thomas H. Benton” is the pen name of one William Pannapacker, associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan. For reasons unclear to me, he writes about the same subject under both names, in the same skeptical, cautionary tone. Whatever his reasons for this self-bifurcation, you should consider one of his efforts as Pannapacker essential reading: “Overeducated, Underemployed: How to fix humanities grad school,” published at Slate.com on July 27, 2011.

Don’t Say I Never Warned You . . .

I’m charmed to find that his work under both monikers confirms diagnoses and predictions that I made in my 1978 keynote address to the Society for Photographic Education, “No Future For You? Speculations on the Next Decade in Photography Education.” (It’s in my 1979 book, Light Readings. Click here for a PDF of that talk.) He also echoes my elaborations on some of those themes in a 1986 lecture I delivered in honor of Manuel Alvarez Bravo at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the pertinent section of which I excerpted under the title “Items for An Agenda” and published first as a magazine column and then as the epilogue to my 1998 collection of essays, Depth of Field. (Click here for a PDF.)

I doubt very much that Benton/Pannapacker has ever heard of me, much less read my work, which I find cheering. It reassures me to read spontaneous, underivative variations on those vintage jeremiads of mine in a major journal of post-secondary education and a prominent mainstream multi-subject website. Perhaps I wasn’t as crazy as people thought when I had the temerity to offer such cautions in the midst of the photo boom of the ’70s and ’80s.

But for those of you graduating today that will come as cold comfort or, more likely, no comfort at all. A system that was still taking shape at the time of my prognoses, and could perhaps have undergone revision had anyone listened back then, has entrenched itself and calcified in the 35 years since my SPE talk.

 . . . When Your Train Gets Lost

Remarkably, members of your own generation (give or take a few years) have begun to challenge the very assumption that a college education and degree ― an MA or MFA, a BA or BFA, even a junior-college AA certificate ― is necessary or useful in the 21st century. They look to a plethora ― indeed, a veritable pantheon ― of prominent figures who skipped higher education entirely. From Bob Dylan, Christina Aguilera, Michael and Janet Jackson, and Will Smith to Rachael Ray, Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and David Karp, there’s a long and expanding list of people who either dropped out of college or never opted in, yet managed to have enormous impact on their culture and, in many cases, also made prodigious amounts of money along the way.

You enter the “real world” at a moment in which adolescent scientists solve problems that have stumped older figures with doctoral degrees from prestigious universities: think here of 18-year-old Indian-American Eesha Khare and her inexpensive 20-second cellphone recharger, or 15-year-old Jack Andraka and his inexpensive advanced pancreatic cancer test. These members of the cohort breathing down your necks need college about as much as the proverbial fish needs a bicycle. The list of teenagers who chose to postpone college, or skip it entirely, in order to change the world and/or make a fortune, and succeeded, grows apace.

Dale J. Stephens, “Hacking Your Education” (2013), cover.

There’s even an emerging culture dedicated to providing various forms of support for those who, taking their cue from Steve Jobs, decide that “It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy.” Generically called “hacking your education,” this burgeoning movement offers websites, how-to info online and in print, success stories, mentoring, crowdfunding advice for entrepreneurs, alternative environments, and an assortment of other useful tools for those inclined to cut the academic umbilicus early and emerge from the classroom womb as preemies. What with homeschooling and assorted experiments in hands-on education, this has begun to trickle down to the lower grades.

It’s too late for that for some of you, those who conclude their so-called “educational careers” with today’s awarding of diplomas. But others of you, those considering going on for more, or even already committed to doing so, might want to take a step back and weigh the alternatives. You have options you may not have pondered, and role models at whom you might want to take a look.

I might have done that myself, back in the day ― which for me means 1960-67, before many of your parents were born. But setting aside my parents’ expectations, with which I could have negotiated, skipping college would have made me 1A for the draft, cannon fodder for the Vietnam War, so I stayed in school. My entire college education (all in public institutions through my M.A.), tuition and living expenses included, totalled less than $15K, so even if it delayed my engagement with the real world for several years it definitely beat getting my ass shot off.

Morituri Te Salutamus

In the event, here you are, having invested two or more years of your lives and tens of thousands of dollars ― yours, your parents’, or someone else’s ― in acquiring a credential that has decreased in value during the time you devoted to earning it. The market for the knowledge and skills on which most of you concentrated has shrunk during that same period. On average, you’re $26,000 in debt for student loans.

So say goodbye to whatever campus of Lake Wobegon U. you’re leaving, which likely graded you not wisely but too well. Throw those mortarboards in the air, hug the friends and relatives who’ve come to see you off, party tonight with your classmates, sleep in tomorrow, and then go get ‘em, kids.

(Postscript, June 18, 2013: In today’s Washington Post, Lyndsey Layton writes that “The vast majority of the 1,430 education programs that prepare the nation’s K-12 teachers are mediocre, according to a first-ever ranking that immediately touched off a firestorm. Released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group, the rankings are part of a $5 million project funded by major U.S. foundations.” Click here to download a PDF file of , “an unprecedented evaluation of more than 1,100 colleges and universities that prepare elementary and secondary teachers.” Read it and weep.)

(Part 1 I 2.)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

Greetings, Graduates

As you’ll no doubt recall from the National Public Radio show “Prairie Home Companion,” in Garrison Keillor’s fictional midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota “all the children are above average.” Just like all of you, I’m sure.

Garrison Keillor, “News from Lake Wobegon” (1990), cover.

Well, Lake Wobegon now has its own law school, where the same principle applies. Or, to be more accurate, the Lake Wobegon model ― “all the children are above average” ― has now spread to law schools nationwide. See Catherine Rampell’s New York Times story of June 21, 2010, “In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That.” According to Rampell, law schools across the country are using assorted formulae to bump up their recent students’ grades across the board, in order to increase their employment opportunities after graduation.

“If somebody’s paying $150,000 for a law school degree, you don’t want to call them a loser at the end,” Rampell quotes Stuart Rojstaczer, a former geophysics professor at Duke who now studies grade inflation, as saying. “So you artificially call every student a success.” The official name the schools use for this process is the wonderful euphemism “grade reform.”

Grade inflation and social promotion didn’t start in law schools, of course. It’s pandemic now throughout the K-12 system, and commonplace in the liberal arts, humanities, and social sciences. What’s unusual here is that it’s infected the study of law, heretofore considered a rigorous discipline. As Rampell writes, “Unlike undergraduate grading, which has drifted northward over the years because most undergraduate campuses do not strictly regulate the schoolwide distribution of As and Bs, law schools have long employed clean, crisp, bell-shaped grading curves.”

College Grade Inflation 1940-2008. Chart © copyright 2008 by Stuart Rojstaczer.

Not any more, it seems. As the charts accompanying “A History of College Grade Inflation” (a July 14, 2011 follow-up piece by Rampell) indicate, by Y2K the letter grade A had become the most frequent grade given to college students in the United States. Click here for the study by Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy on which Rampell based that story, plus other disheartening graphs.

Kiss Those Curves Goodbye

Having witnessed this “northward drift” of grades as a teacher in both undergraduate and graduate liberal-arts programs over the past four decades, I can testify that it’s very real. And I’m willing to wager that, if this practice ever get traced to its origins in higher education, we will learn that it began in college-level studio art programs, and, even more specifically, in college-level photo programs, circa 1965. As I noted in this blog last summer,

Post-secondary photo education is notoriously one big gut course, evidenced by the facts that nobody flunks photography and a GPA below A-minus has become unusual in most such programs. Social promotion, grade inflation, the overall lowering of the basketball hoops, are the norm. (Like the children of Lake Wobegon, all post-secondary photo students are above average.) Over the past decade I’ve guest-taught at two schools — one a BFA program in a university, the other an MFA program in an art school — that tacitly required me to grade all my students between A-plus and A-minus, lest they lose tuition remission and other financial perks, an imperative not disclosed to me until I turned in my initial grade sheets.

I’d struck approximately that same note in a keynote address I delivered to the Photo Imaging Education Association (PIEA) Conference at the Sydney Convention Centre, Australia, on April 29, 2006:

I believe that I err on the side of generosity in calling photo education a discipline. There’s little discipline involved in it, by any definition of the term. No one flunks photography, certainly not in fine-art photo programs. How could they? In the current environment for photography-as-art, there’s no right way to make photographic work, because there’s no wrong way to do so; there’s only pleasing your faculty’s taste patterns or failing to do so.

As my former colleague Richard Kirstel used to say, “The difference between commercial photography and creative photography today is that the commercial photography has to be well done.” I can remember curator, critic, and editor Carol Squiers asserting, at a regional SPE conference in the 1980s, that the pomo photographers — Cindy Sherman et al — were gradually “bringing their work up to professional standards.” I can remember, in the same era, the director of the photo program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art boasting that 80 percent of their most recent crop of students had graduated cum laude. Neither he nor Ms. Squiers showed the slightest trace of ironic intent in their statements. (Click here for a PDF of that talk.)

The Survey Not Taken

Here’s a survey that I guarantee you will never get undertaken by the Society for Photographic Education — and whose results will never get published in the unlikely event that someone does undertake it.

1. Over the past 10 years, in your BFA department of photography, how many students have you had working toward their degree in photography? How many taking photography as a minor, or part-time?

2. Over the past 10 years, in your BFA department of photography, how many times cumulatively have your faculty given students the grade of:

• A (inc. A+, A, and A-)
• B (inc. B+, B, and B-)
• C (inc. C+, C, and C-)
• D (inc. D+, D, and D-)
• F

3. If your BFA program has an honors/cum laude designation for graduates, how many of your students during that period have graduated with honors/cum laude?

4. Over the past 10 years, in your MFA department of photography, how many students have you had working toward their degree in photography? How many taking photography as a minor, or part-time?

5. Over the past 10 years, in your MFA department of photography, how many times cumulatively have your faculty given students the grade of:

• A (inc. A+, A, and A-)
• B (inc. B+, B, and B-)
• C (inc. C+, C, and C-)
• D (inc. D+, D, and D-)
• F

6. If your MFA program has an honors/cum laude designation for graduates, how many of your students during that period have graduated with honors/cum laude?

•

A. D. Coleman, “Tarnished Silver” (1996), cover.

The phenomenon of social promotion had risen to visibility but not to centrality when I delivered a much earlier talk, “Identity Crisis: The State of Photography Education Today,” at the Second Annual Photography Congress of the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, Maine, on August 17, 1987. On that occasion I emphasized the lamentable conflation of polytechnic, art-institute, and university models and goals in post-secondary photo-ed programs everywhere, now such a done deal that no one gives it a moment’s thought anymore. (You’ll find an expanded version of that text in my 1996 collection of essays, Tarnished Silver: After the Photo Boom, Essays and Lectures 1979-1989. Click here for a PDF version.)

Since then the tendency toward social promotion has gone viral, at least in the U.S., an inevitable consequence of viewing students as clients in a mercantile culture where the customer is always right. For other perspectives on this plague, see the following:

• “Need 3 Quick Credits to Play Ball? Call Western Oklahoma” by Brad Wolverton, The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 9, 2012.
• “Who Will Hold Colleges Accountable?” by Kevin Carey, New York Times, December 9, 2012.

GIGO

Yet even if we trace post-secondary grade inflation to college-level photo programs, the practice surely didn’t begin there, but much further down the pedagogical chain. “Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes,” Tamara Lewin informs us in her New York Times report, “Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden,” dated April 29, 2013.

If, as commonly understood, a high-school degree certifies one as ready for college, yet 50 percent of incoming freshmen require “remedial work” before beginning college-level classes, how can we explain this without confronting social promotion? Especially when, statistically, 75 percent of incoming U.S. college students rate themselves as “above average,” according to the American Freshman Survey?

So, inundated by underprepared and underachieving applicants with excessive self-esteem, the post-secondary institutions dumb themselves down in order not to discourage their client base, while handing out an ever greater number of degrees. Thus they have gotten sucked into the academic version of the classic inflationary spiral that comes with debasing the coin of the realm by printing up too much fiat currency. This may help to explain “the prevalence of unrealistic self-assessment among applicants” that prospective employers find among today’s college graduates. (The clinical term for this cognitive bias is “illusory superiority.”) This exemplifies the concept known to information technology by the acronym GIGO: Garbage in, garbage out. Present company excepted, of course.

Of course, it may turn out that the cause of this apparent diminished capacity is that, according to recent research reported on by Macrina Cooper-White in a recent article in The Huffington Post, “[H]uman intelligence is on the decline. . . . Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.” Social promotion over the past four decades wouldn’t account for 170 years of intellectual devolution. Some of you will probably find that reassuring.

(For a bit of perspective, see George E. Howard on “The State University in America,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in March, 1891: ”[T]here is a widespread feeling of discontent with the present ideal of academic culture which sometimes degenerates into downright pessimism. It must be conceded that education costs too much time and too much money for the kind. The college curriculum should be still further transformed in order to bring it into harmony with the requirements of modern life. Our average standard of attainment is very low, and the reason is plain, we have wasted our resources.”)

(Part 1 I 2.)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

(On March 17, 2013, the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography held a Scholars’ Day devoted to the work of Robert Heinecken (1931-2006), in advance of a retrospective that they’ll mount in March 2014. This intramural event was organized by Eva Respini, Associate Curator, and Drew Sawyer, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Curatorial Fellow, Department of Photography. It involved a handful of presenters and a small, invited audience comprised of people with substantial personal and professional connections to the late photographer and educator. Presenters included Luke Batten, Director, The Robert Heinecken Trust, and Matthew Biro, Professor, Art History, University of Michigan. I gave the concluding talk, which I titled “Inside the Tent, Pissing In: Robert Heinecken as Black Sheep.” Part 2 appears below; click here for Part 1. ― A. D. C.)

•

“Speaking in Tongues: Wallace Berman and Robert Heinecken 1961–1976,” Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA, 2011, exhibition poster.

Unlike Stieglitz, Weston, Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, and others who had pledged fealty to particularly strict approaches to photography, Robert Heinecken and other members of his cohort felt no obligatory loyalty to the medium and did not hold its tools, materials, and processes sacrosanct. I suspect they’d all agree with Man Ray’s dictum, “A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of this idea.”

Heinecken’s rejection in his own practice of anything resembling the then-dominant approaches of “purism” and “straight” photography guaranteed his status as an outlier, even an outlaw, within the field. Unless afflicted with a perverse fondness for frustration, under those circumstances to what end would a teaching artist who hung out regularly with Wallace Berman and certainly knew the work of fellow Angeleno John Baldessari insist on calling himself a photographer?

“Robert Heinecken: Photographist,” catalog, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999, cover.

It’s true that Heinecken did describe himself for a time as a “para-photographer,” and that, late in his life, he became fond of art critic Arthur Danto’s 1993 neologism, photographist. Danto proposed a distinction between photographers, who produce “photography as art,” and those he named “photographists,” concerned with “photography in art.” There are numerous major flaws in this idea; to define photographers simplistically as picture-makers concerned with generating, in Danto’s words, “aestheticized work of the kind urged, for example, by Alfred Stieglitz,” is to ignore ― or be ignorant of ― not only the complexity of Stieglitz’s own thought but some five decades of subsequent photographic activity by people who called themselves photographers (Heinecken prominent among them), including serious hermeneutic and exegetic inquiry.

Danto’s essay serves as evidence that the pernicious art-world bias against photographers endures. The noted critic minted that term precisely to separate soi-disant “artists using photography” from picture-makers aware of photography’s history and working, however transgressively, within that medium’s rich field of ideas, which is where Heinecken had always positioned himself. Notably, Danto does not discuss or even name Heinecken in that essay; I’d wager he was then and still remains entirely unfamiliar with his work. Hence my disagreement with Heinecken’s acceptance of his coinage.

Heinecken’s effect on the field of photography, as both a picture-maker and an educator, depended to a considerable extent on his acute awareness of the medium’s history, morphology, and dominant tendencies. As he said in 1978, “I have taken advantage very much of the photographic medium, and photographers supply the ideas in my work. My ideas are photographic ideas, they are not drawing ideas, and most printmaking ideas are drawing ideas.” (Emphasis mine.)

For example, both his lecture-cum-performance critique of John Szarkowski’s reductivist formalism and his acidulous commentary on Susan Sontag’s uninformed diatribe sprang from an insider’s knowledge of photography’s field of ideas; both those projects of his, in turn, required for a full appreciation of their complexities and nuances an understanding of what Szarkowski’s problematic stewardship at MoMA and Sontag’s brief but high-profile foray into writing about photography meant to the medium in their time.

•

In the 1960s, considering the option of firing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Johnson famously decided that he’d “rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in.” I propose that Heinecken adopted an alternative position, based on the premise that photography’s already fertile field of ideas, little-known to any save the medium’s adherents, would expand more rapidly if challenged and diversified by its own committed practitioners. Faced with the options of separating himself from what, for convenience’s sake, I’ll call the photography community, in order to pressure it from beyond its perimeter, or else to stay within the stockade to defend the tribe from marauders, Heinecken characteristically chose a third strategy, that of the self-appointed troublemaker ― standing inside the tent, pissing in. Electing to stay in the fold, he thereby made himself into one of its most visible black sheep.

Robert Heinecken, “Untitled,” altered fashion-magazine page, 1970.

Heinecken sometimes called himself a “guerrilla photographer,” gravitating as he did toward the tactics of remaining inconspicuous and unidentifiable; as he once said, “I like to go into something, shake it up and disappear.” Think of him as a kindred spirit to Terry Southern’s Guy Grand, the “Magic Christian,” who delighted in anonymously “making things hot for people” — as well as for himself. He combined that inclination with aspects of the tradition among Japanese woodblock artists of the classic period, who periodically changed both style and name in order to avoid the traps inherent in both. This project-specific diversity of materials and methods, which vitiated the very possibility of anything resembling a signature style, placed Heinecken even further outside the mainstream of photography, closer in spirit to Marcel Duchamp than to even such photographic experimenters as Frederick Sommer, Jerry Uelsmann, and Ralph Eugene Meatyard, also marginalized by the medium’s gatekeepers in the early ’70s.

Thus, while pioneering many forms of what some now call “photo-based art,” Heinecken served photography as a kind of mirror-image or doppelgänger for artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and John Baldessari. All were insistent that the mass-media photographic image was an integral aspect of contemporary visual consciousness, and hence a logical, even necessary component of contemporary (visual) artworks; all proposed, in their different ways, that reworking and/or recontextualizing that imagery imaginatively and critically was a sufficient creative act in and of itself to qualify as a serious contribution to the current field of ideas.

Robert Heinecken, “He/She,” 1980, cover.

The most important difference between Heinecken and his art-world counterparts ― because, I think, it’s the least understood, especially by today’s audiences ― is how wide the gulf then was between those identified as artists and those labelled photographers, even when what the photographers were up to closely parallelled or even anticipated the artists’ inquiries. The photographic image as a communicative vehicle and a cultural function may have become hot and trendy by the middle ’60s, but, to return to my starting point, identifying oneself as a photographer then had definite consequences within the art world (certainly including the art market), virtually all of them negative.

One challenge any curator engaging with Heinecken’s work confronts today is that of bringing today’s audience to an awareness of that dichotomy, and what it signified when Heinecken began his project. As a corollary, one obligation facing any curator who does so for the institution hosting this conference is to explain to that audience the pervasive influence on the medium of this department as gatekeeper during the period 1965-85, because much of Heinecken’s activity can best be understood as an oppositional response thereto.

“Robert Heinecken checking prints,” 1982. © Copyright 1982 by Bill Jay.

It seems to me unquestionable that had Heinecken simply opted to switch labels and then produced the very same work he generated subsequently, he’d be far better known than he is today; playing with photographic images did no post-1960 experimental artist any harm, and made the careers of more than a few. But his challenges to photographic practice and theory would thereby have become significantly weakened in the eyes of most of the medium’s practitioners and commentators, as coming from outside the medium rather than from within it.

By staying inside the tent, pissing in, Robert Heinecken as volunteer black sheep went far beyond the creation of his own durable, provocative body of work. He expanded the working definition of photographic practice, had a profound effect on photo education, and forced photo critics, historians, theorists, and curators to reconsider their assumptions concerning the medium’s parameters.

Though it’s taken a good bit longer, he’s gradually forced those who privilege art over photography, and artists over photographers, to confront their prejudices. The best way for both sides to thank this unlikely bodhisattva for his service would be to erase the arbitrary line that divides them.

(Part 1 I 2.)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

•

Before I begin, let me thank Eva Respini and Drew Sawyer of the Department of Photography here at the Museum of Modern Art for inviting me to participate in this gathering. Let me also congratulate the department for evolving to the stage where it can recognize and celebrate Robert Heinecken’s contribution to the medium.

•

In the early 1970s, the art world began one of its most adroit yet least discussed maneuvers: accepting as legitimate, marketable, collectible, and worthy of preservation and study a class of artifacts that until then it had disdained and trivialized, while continuing its traditional treatment as second-class citizens of those theretofore committed lifelong to making these objects.

The objects in question were photographs, of course, and the dedicated makers thereof were known, at least until that point, as photographers. Up through the early ’70s, no photographer had achieved art-world recognition on an equal plane with painters, sculptors, lithographers, and workers in the other visual media. Indeed, one can reasonably assert that no individual who had primarily made photographs then qualified as an artist by art-world standards, though several who had pursued photography along with other media did not have their involvement with light-sensitive materials held against them ― most prominently Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy, both of whom had professional-level skills and credits as photographers.

“Robert Heinecken checking prints,” 1982. © Copyright 1982 by Bill Jay.

The ’70s saw the emergence of a generation of picture-makers who in many cases incorporated photography into their practice, often centrally, yet recognized the pernicious art-world bias against the medium’s practitioners. The need to separate themselves from those designated as photographers while continuing to make photographs had many motives, one of them certainly economic: photographs by picture-makers labelled as artists achieved market prices considerably higher than they would have if identified as made by photographers, and the related benefits ― gallery and museum shows, sales to private collectors and institutional collections, auction prices, monographs, lectures, teaching gigs, fellowships and residencies, etc. ― followed suit.

Practically speaking, in other words, then as now, from a strictly financial and career standpoint only a fool would choose to define him- or herself as a photographer if another rubric would fit. And those evasive, exculpatory alternatives soon emerged, most commonly “photo-based art” and “artists using photography.”

“Robert Heinecken: Photographist,” catalog, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999, cover.

As this situation took shape, a number of the picture-makers whose activity and output I tracked in my role as photography critic, starting in 1968, seemed to me positioned to switch sides ― that is, to redefine themselves as makers of “photo-based art” and/or “artists using photography,” thereby escaping the perpetual ghetto to which the art world has historically relegated photographers. Of that cluster, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll single out Les Krims, Duane Michals, Kenneth Josephson, and especially Robert Heinecken as examples of recognizable figures who could have accomplished a transition to that presumably higher status with relative ease.

Of them, only Josephson had a classic grounding in photography’s field of ideas, his post-secondary education combining Minor White’s poetic extension of the purist attitude with Moholy’s polymathic, nonjudgmental relationship to all the medium’s performative options. Krims and Heinecken came to photography from printmaking; Michals, an autodidact, came to it from Pittsburgh. Krims and Michals both worked directorially, pioneering a mode then rising to prominence in contemporary art practice. Josephson’s work certainly qualified as conceptual. And Heinecken, whom I’d met in 1965 in San Francisco, was even back then appropriating and recontextualizing mass-media imagery in radical and inventive ways, prefiguring postmodernist practice by at least a decade.

John Szarkowski, “The Photographer’s Eye,” catalog, Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1966, cover.

All of this work was viewed as at best outré and at worst transgressive and even anti-photographic by the photography establishment. That then-small cluster of gatekeepers certainly included John Szarkowski, director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Photography at the time, whose canonical theoretical text The Photographer’s Eye Heinecken would satirize in the mid-’70s via a frequently delivered public lecture in which he droned excerpts from the curator’s prose over slides of randomly selected found snapshots. Hardly a move calculated to endear himself to the midwestern impresario with the handlebar mustache. But by then Szarkowski had settled in to what Christopher Phillips would call “the judgment seat of photography” for the long haul, and had enunciated his commitment to a narrow, formalist, Greenbergian vision of the medium, which clearly excluded what dissenters like Heinecken, Josephson, Michals, and Krims were about ― so in for a penny, in for a pound.

I consider it a measure of a certain kind of stubborn integrity that those four (and others too numerous to list here) continued to self-identify as photographers instead of jumping ship and reinventing themselves as picture-makers in one or another of the art world’s approved categories. I got to know them all well enough to certify that this wasn’t a matter of unawareness of or disinterest in the field of ideas of contemporary art practice, nor of feeling more comfortable in a small pond than in a big one. They were all cognizant of how their work related to that of others identified as photographers, as well as to the output of artists past and present using photography in various ways. They also knew the dynamics and politics of the art scene, and understood the price they’d pay for their decision. Which made this an act of principle, oddly akin to the unapologetic embrace of the label “photographer” by such figures as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston several generations earlier, though they had little else in common with those predecessors.

Robert Heinecken, “Are You Rea #1,” 1966. © 1966 by Robert Heinecken.

Of the four photographers I’ve named, Heinecken was unquestionably the one to whom the label “photographer” as conventionally understood applied least. From the projections of found photomontages that I saw in 1965 through his Are You Rea portfolio of offset lithographs generated by a similar method, the altered newsstand magazines, and on to the “Inaugural Excerpt Videograms” of 1981 and the “Shiva” paper sculptures of his later output, Heinecken worked almost exclusively with found imagery drawn from the mass media.

He knew his way around a camera and darkroom, as demonstrated surreptitiously by the black & white half of his 1978 diptych, “The S.S. Copyright Project ‘On Photography,’” in the MoMA collection, and various other works. But the generation of original negatives describing event-space relationships that he observed directly, and the production of photographic prints therefrom, was not central to his practice, which instead emphasized the recontextualizing of existing materials from visual culture via strategies he derived from each specific project.

Heinecken said of this inclination of his, “Content can be built on the facture of a picture ― not on subject matter or anything else. I want to be identified by the attitude of a picture, not its stylistic appearance.” In effect, he wanted each work assessed on the basis of the approach it reflected toward the process of working with that specific concept ― for which inclination he saw Marcel Duchamp as a model. He termed this an “analytical facture,” which involved matching the production strategy to the particular idea, rather than conforming every idea to the Procrustean bed of a predetermined way of working or recurrent visual appearance. Some of his efforts, consequently, are as blunt and mechanical as any of Warhol’s Factory-made silk-screen prints. But then he turned around and produced exquisitely crafted, extensively hand-worked objects like the prints in the “Cliché Vary” series from 1974 and the later “Shiva” relief collages.

Robert Heinecken, “Food, Sex and TV,” catalog, Fotoforum, Kassel, Germany, 1983, cover.

Consequently, only his ongoing concern with a set of core cultural issues and his calculatedly shifting strategies of facture function as what the film theorist Christian Metz calls the diegesis, the running thread, connecting all of Heinecken’s works together. Perhaps that fact, in combination with his choice of the photography world rather than the art world as his testing ground, explains the comparative lack of public awareness of his contribution to the dialogue between photography and art ― despite the fact that the radical multiplication in the 1960s and ’70s of the active variety of physical forms of photographic work was traceable in considerable part to Heinecken’s example in his own practice, to his teaching method at U.C.L.A., and to his influence as a lecturer and visiting artist in many workshops and other tutorial situations during that period.

(Part 1 I 2.)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

Alix Rule and David Levine, to whose cogent report on what they’ve named “International Art English” I referred, compiled a database of the 13,000 art-world press releases sent out in email bursts to “art professionals” since January 1999 through e-flux, the New York-based subscriber network. Then they ran that material through some language-analysis software called Sketch Engine, developed by a company in Brighton, UK, to identify its recurrent phrases and other commonalities, turning those into a statistical profile. (See Andy Beckett’s January 27, 2013 piece in The Guardian (UK), “A user’s guide to artspeak,” which includes snippets from his interview with Rule and Levine.)

The results are fascinating, delivered in highly readable prose, and well worth your time. One caveat, which does not impeach their findings: Rule and Levine insist that IAE constitutes “a unique language” that “has everything to do with English, but . . . is emphatically not English.  . . . [W]hat ultimately makes it a language . . . is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.” I have to disagree with them on this point, as I think most specialists in the field of linguistics would. With all its idiosyncrasies and neologisms, IAE so closely approximates English that it qualifies as a dialect thereof, rather than as a separate and autonomous language.

In fact, IAE ― which some call Artspeak ― is a subset of what we could dub International Postmodern English, or IPE, variant forms of which have arisen in almost all disciplines that fall within the arts and humanities, from literature to anthropology.

I’m pleased to note that Rule and Levine agree with something I asserted in my 1998 essay “The Destruction Business” ― that IAE has gatekeeping as one of its primary functions. Like IPE and its variants generally, it’s elitist, and exclusionary. No accident, that; it serves to create a cognoscenti, and to distinguish that in-group from the great unwashed. In a 1996 column for The Nation, Katha Pollitt asked, ”How else explain how pomo leftists can talk constantly about the need to democratize knowledge and write in a way that excludes all but the initiated few?”

Regarding the then-recent, inadvertent publication by the unwitting editors of the journal Social Text of a blatant parody of such obscurantist writing, Pollitt added,

the comedy of the [Alan] Sokal incident is that it suggests that even the postmodernists don’t really understand one another’s writing and make their way through the text by moving from one familiar name or notion to the next like a frog jumping across a murky pond by way of lily pads. Lacan . . . performativity . . . Judith Butler . . . scandal . . . (en)gendering (w)holeness . . . Lunch!” (Click here for her article, “Pomolotov Cocktail.”)

Some of the locutions of IPE, and some of its underlying assumptions, have actually trickled down into everyday usage among swathes of the populace at large. (For example, an April 17 report in The Atlantic by Rebecca J. Rosen refers to an issue of a periodical seized by the Nazis and lately returned to a descendant of its original Jewish owner as “sort of a synecdoche for the person lost,” mingling the colloquial “sort of” with the highbrow, though how this improves on the more familiar word “surrogate” escapes me.) Despite that fact, IPE, which includes IAE, has more in common with the jargon or shoptalk of a specialized usergroup than it does even with a typical dialect, perhaps because it developed mainly out of written and printed expression rather than face-to-face verbal interchange. As a consequence (though not necessarily a desideratum), it thus narrows the readership and support base for criticism of the visual arts, photography among them.

Dung cakes being prepared for fuel in Brittany, c. 1900. Postcard.

Be that as it may, there’s no denying that IAE exists. Nor does it exist in a vacuum. Here you have the counterpart, in textual form, of the visual tropes that infest contemporary photographic work, about which I’ve written in another series of posts. Which came first ― theory-driven art by academically trained artists or academic theorizing about art? Asking the inevitable chicken-or-egg question gets us no closer to a useful understanding of groupthink in academe than it does to the origins of poultry.

More important to ask: Can we deem it sheer coincidence that this standardization of thought and expression in both modes came out of the same environment? I think not. They emerged at almost exactly the same time, from within the same hothouse ― the international post-secondary art-education system. Their virtually simultaneous birth merely manifests that sheltered microcosm’s belated recognition of something the hardscrabble working class has known for millennia: bullshit makes effective and inexpensive fuel, and if everyone’s using it the smell soon goes unnoticed.

BANK, “Press Release” Project (1998), stamp.

Artists are not unaware of this phenomenon; indeed, no one who’s gone through the art-education production line over the past four decades has completely escaped the force-feeding of it. Most succumb to the blandishments of IAE, recognizing its usefulness in getting one’s foot in the art-establishment door, as Rule and Levine note. But some resist. The short-lived London collective BANK (no relation to Banksy, so far as I know), concerned with “the sinister implications of this particular linguistic manifestation,” mounted an exhibition in 1999 titled “Press Release,” in which they displayed the result of a 1998 project that involved their correcting, rewriting, commenting on, grading, and faxing back to the sources an assortment of art-world PR. Predictably, IAE comprises much of the content of those releases.

That those who create these lame semantic mashups often do so out of necessity, as a consequence of having to write about art they’ve never seen, may explain their actions, but doesn’t justify them, or the situation that engenders such behavior. Its net effect is not the enrichment of the discourse on art (including photography) but its impoverishment, with the consequent alienation of the audience from engagement with texts about art. That doesn’t bode well for the future of art criticism ― and, to the extent (considerable) that this tendency has trickled down into the discourse on photography, it doesn’t augur favorably for the future of photo criticism either.

•

October, No. 1 (Spring 1976), cover.

I’d love to claim that it took great willpower on my part to resist the magnetic pull of IAE at its inception, and eternal vigilance to keep it from infiltrating my prose ever since. Alas, like George Washington I cannot tell a lie. From its very birth ― Rule and Levine consider the journal October as its cradle, making the date of its first issue, sometime in spring 1976, the birthday of IAE ― I have found IAE, with its recondite vocabulary and stilted syntax, not just off-putting but actually repellent. No aspect of it furthers anything I’ve sought to accomplish as either a working critic, historian, and theorist of photography and new media or as a prose stylist concerned with engaging my readership in an energetic discourse.

Avoiding it has therefore proved easy, especially as no editor with whom I’ve ever worked has required it from me. Indeed, given that, as noted in my last post, I’ve subscribed to e-flux since its debut in 1999, and have thus received (if not read) some 13,000 of their emails, most of them written in IAE, I may simply have an inbuilt immunity to jargon addiction. (Musician and composer Glenn Gould once defined jargon thus: “[A] fancy hermetic language of questionable usefulness even to specialists.”) Still, needless to say, there’s a price to pay when you opt out of the in crowd that way, even if effortlessly, and I’ve forked it over gladly. I’m a Marxist of the Groucho-deviationist tendency, meaning that I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member. For better or worse, now as ever, you’ll need no decoder ring to access my prose, and no secret handshake to enter the field of ideas in which I do my work.

•

Postscript: After the last sentence above I was going to add “English spoken here.” But I learned only recently of the passing, almost a year ago, on May 16, 2012, of the Québécoise photographer, writer, and editor Denyse Gérin-Lajoie. (Click here for an obituary by photographer Vincenzo Pietropaolo.) Which reminded me of something pertinent.

Le Magazine OVO, Vol. 12 (1982), cover.

In the ’70s and ’80s Denise, with her life partner Jorge Guerra, made a small Montreal journal, OVO, into an influential platform for the discourse on photography ― one of a cluster of “little” magazines that served as important forums for photo criticism back then. Eventually, in the early ’90s, some years after its demise, I provided a letter of support for the placing of the OVO Archives at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, considering it imperative to conserve such resources for future study.

OVO concerned itself primarily with Canadian photographers, and published mostly Canadian writers. But an essay I wrote for the New York Times in 1973 ― “Must They ‘Progress’ So Fast?” ― struck her as relevant to the emerging Canadian photo scene. So she asked me for permission to publish it in both the English and French editions of OVO in 1974, doing the French translation herself. This marked the first time anything of mine had achieved translation, a notable moment for any writer.

Because I’m bilingual francophone, Denyse sent me down drafts of her French rendition for comment and eventual approval before going to press. Somewhere along the line, she remarked in a note that during the translation process she’d discovered that I didn’t write in English. “You write in American,” she observed.

What a useful insight. Perhaps that’s why the siren song of International Art English falls on deaf ears around these parts. So I dedicate the last in this series of posts to Denyse Gérin-Lajoie, who taught me something about my relationship to language.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

Which brings me to “International Art English,” a recent report by Alix Rule, a PhD candidate in Sociology at Columbia University, and David Levine, an artist based in Brooklyn and Berlin. Here’s their abstract:

The internationalized art world relies on a unique language. Its purest articulation is found in the digital press release. This language has everything to do with English, but it is emphatically not English. It is largely an export of the Anglophone world and can thank the global dominance of English for its current reach. But what really matters for this language — what ultimately makes it a language — is the pointed distance from English that it has always cultivated.

In what follows, we examine some of the curious lexical, grammatical, and stylistic features of what we call International Art English. We consider IAE’s origins, and speculate about the future of this language through which contemporary art is created, promoted, sold, and understood. Some will read our argument as an overelaborate joke. But there’s nothing funny about this language to its users. And the scale of its use testifies to the stakes involved. We are quite serious.

They are indeed, though often tongue-in-cheekily so. As a methodology, Rule and Levine concentrated exclusively on press releases issued through e-flux, which they describe as “a listserv that sends out roughly three announcements per day about contemporary-art events worldwide” and “the art world’s flagship digital institution.” They add, “When it comes to communication about contemporary art, e-flux is the most powerful instrument and its metonym.”

Involvement with e-flux takes place from two different directions, that of producers and that of consumers, though participants often play both roles in the international art world. Members of the client base ― nominally non-profit organizations and institutions (museums, festivals, alternative spaces, but not commercial galleries) ― pay e-flux an annual fee in return for the right to send out email bursts of their announcements a certain number of times per year. Those who want to receive these announcements ― which includes “90,000+ visual arts professionals,” a high proportion of them inevitably from the selfsame sources supplying the emails to this system ― subscribe (for free) to this information stream.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569), “The Tower of Babel,” circa 1563.

Rule and Levine subjected the entirety of what they refer to as the e-flux “corpus” (the total output since its inception) to various forms of statistical and linguistic analysis. I’ve subscribed to e-flux since its debut 13 years ago, which means I’ve received approximately 13,000 emails through this system. E-flux emails all look the same, since the distribution system conforms them layout-wise and typographically to a standardized “house style.” (Here’s a sample.) The source determines the content, however ― headlines, text, image selection and caption. Given the genuinely global client base, one would expect a diversity of vocabularies, phrasings, references, and other components in the releases. Instead, one finds a surprising sameness of thought and locution.

Most of these press releases, Rule and Levine point out in their preamble, are written by interns or junior staffers at these institutions, who with rare exceptions are still in or recently graduated from programs in studio art, art history, museum studies, or arts management ― programs in which the use of a certain “artspeak” vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and canonical reference points has become de rigeur. Moreover (and Rule and Levine don’t mention this, surprisingly), these jejune authors also number among the core demographic of recipients and readers of art-world press releases, certainly including the steady stream from e-flux itself. Not surprising, therefore, that the output of these epigones should prove so homogeneous.

October, No. 1 (Spring 1976), cover.

Rule and Levine ask, “How did we end up writing in a way that sounds like inexpertly translated French?” I’m reminded of a colleague’s description of much written artbabble as ”aspiring to read as if translated from the German.” Along with American and UK English, French and German represent the languages that predominate in the production of art-related theory. Thus I don’t find it surprising that academic writing styles derived from translations of such materials infiltrate English-language production of such texts. “If e-flux is the crucible of today’s IAE, the journal October is a viable candidate for the language’s point of origin,” Rule and Levine propose, adding, further on, “October’s emulators mimicked both the deliberate and unintentional features of the journal’s writing, without discriminating between the two. . . . [T]he progeny of October elevated accidents of translation to the level of linguistic norms.”

How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007), cover.

What the authors don’t say, perhaps because they didn’t know it, is that many of these press releases get written by people who aren’t just art-world wannabes but individuals who have never laid eyes on the work in question. That is, they’re exercises in “How to Write about Art You Haven’t Seen.” That’s because the publicity cycle in the art world runs on a three-month time lag. Let me explain. (Note that I speak here as a recipient of art-world press releases for the past 45 years, and one who, in his more recent role as curator, has had an involvement in the writing and delivery of press releases as well. I speak also as one who has written for periodicals ranging in publication frequency from quarterly to weekly.)

The logistics of print-media production and distribution determine the schedule under which editorial content gets planned, assigned to writers, selected from incoming materials, and finalized for eventual publication. Monthly magazines such as the major art periodicals ― Artforum, ARTnews, Art in America ― wrap up about three months ahead of the date on which they hit the newsstands and kiosks and get mailed out to subscribers. So, as I write this in mid-April, the editors of those journals are pulling together their July 2013 issues.

For them to include the announcement of a show that will open that month, they need to have the press release in hand today. For them to have it now, someone had to write it and get it approved through channels awhile back, so that the release and its accompanying materials (images for illustration, artist’s CV, etc.) could wend its way through the mails or over the internet to that destination ― Artforum, let’s say. Periodicals that appear on a more frequent schedule (bi-weekly, weekly, daily) get press releases closer to their deadlines. But these will be the same releases drafted months earlier.

However, unless it’s a show drawn from an in-house collection, the works included almost certainly won’t have reached the venue three months ahead of opening day. Given that many institutions now sponsor the premieres of works made to order for them, and that many artists work right up to deadline when producing such commissions, or even generate them from scratch on-site, it’s often the case that no one, including the curators and the artist(s) involved, will have seen the work actualized in its final form until shortly before the opening. And if it’s a new work, and/or a site-specific one, and/or one that involves some ongoing aleatory or performance-based or audience-participation aspects, its idiosyncratic qualities and effects remain indeterminate until completed or concluded.

Imagine yourself, then, an intern at Alternative Space X or Museum Y or Biennial Z, charged with writing a press release today for a solo or group show scheduled three months hence, on whose content you’ve never laid eyes. You can perhaps find images of the work online, but, like the projected transparencies of the art-history courses of yesteryear, digital representations emulsify distinctions between visual works of art, deleting most of the relevant information about a work’s physicality or object nature, overemphasizing its iconography. Hardly enough to allow even a pretense of informed description. What to do?

Robert Atkins, “Artspeak” (1997), cover.

You turn, for expediency’s sake, to what others have said about the work, cobbling together a collage of extracts from artist’s statements and interviews, published reviews, and previous press releases from prior exhibitions by the artist(s), possibly augmented by the notes for or early draft of the curator’s wall label for the upcoming show. You put this into the blender, perhaps adding a few choice items from a glossary such as ArtSpeak : A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present, slyly dropping in a dollop from the Postmodernism Generator, hit the purée button, and serve.

If you’ve done your job right, the result will sound just like the e-flux releases to which all involved in this semantic daisychain have become accustomed. Your supervisor in the institution’s publicity department will review and tweak it, as will the curator(s) of the show and, perhaps, even the artist him- or herself. Then out it will go, another dribble into the stream feeding into the river of e-flux PR that empties into the sea of International Art English, where it will mingle with the outflow of that seas’s other tributaries, evaporate, and return as fog, as dew, as rain, in an endless cycle.

Rule and Levine conducted their scholarly study under the sponsorship of Triple Canopy. I think we owe all involved a debt of gratitude for verifying what many of us have long suspected and some (myself included) have openly averred: That a preponderance of contemporary artspeak comes from people talking through their hats, or more crudely put, bullshitting, and doing so by dipping from a small repertoire of stock phrases and ideas, most of them long since emptied of any meaning they might once have had.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

In passing, I made mention of Alan Sokal’s classic, still-controversial piss-take on postmodern jargon and the pomo pretense of “doing science.” This merits some elaboration, especially because, despite the international furore that erupted in the wake of Sokal’s intervention, you’re unlikely to meet anyone “doing theory” or teaching it who includes the Sokal hoax in the syllabus.

In brief, back in the ’90s Sokal, a professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University, became acquainted with an assortment of purportedly classic postmodern texts in the area commonly referred to as “cultural studies” ― works by such figures as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan. Noting therein a plethora of uninformed and erroneous references to scientific concepts, Sokal conceived of an experiment. Could he write a pseudo-scientific article filled with scientistic gibberish masked by postmodern buzzwords and tropes, ostensibly buttressed by endnotes referencing the usual postmodern authorities, and get it published in a prominent journal of postmodern “thought”?

The result, which he titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was submitted to and indeed published in just such a forum, the highly reputed Social Text. It appeared in issue #46/47, pp. 217-252, spring/summer 1996, an issue devoted to what the editors described as the ”Science Wars.” Spoiler alert: standing atop a veritable mountain of postmodernist clichés, Sokal proposes therein that the force we call gravity is merely a social consensus, among other ridiculous notions.

Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, “Fashionable Nonsense” (1998), cover.

Once the article appeared in print, Sokal blew the whistle on himself and the editorial crew at Social Text, revealing the parodic nature of his hodgepodge in a subsequent essay, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” published in the journal Lingua Franca. This generated an uproar that ― fed by subsequent publications by Sokal, often in collaboration with Jean Bricmont, a Belgian theoretical physicist, philosopher of science and professor at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium ― continues to this day. (The academic left does not take kindly to its debunking, to put it mildly.)

You’ll find many of the relevant texts, including Sokal’s germinal hoax in its entirety as well as his disclosure thereof, at his New York University website. I commend them to you, as I do the first Sokal-Bricmont book, Fashionable Nonsense (1998) and its successors. No specialized knowledge of science required, and extremely readable to boot. Fun, in fact.

I bring up the Sokal affair, as it’s often called, to point out the longevity and pervasiveness of the insidious idea promulgated by Bayard, his confrères in the academic world, and their fellow travelers inside and outside the ivory tower ― all those who take pride in and celebrate their status as know-nothings, and advocate that position to others. Their posturing boils down to just another version of the pervasive anti-intellectualism of our time, different from the blatherings of a Rush Limbaugh or a Sarah Palin only in that they’ve managed to smear some faux-scholarly lip gloss on their oinker du jour.

DIY . . .

Just aborning as Sokal devised his hoax, the World Wide Web has enabled the production of an unprecedented volume of “fashionable nonsense.” By this I don’t just mean providing endless free space for the mostly mindless babble that swamps forums and the comment threads at periodicals, blogs, and other web publications. I’m referring specifically to online applications that purposefully use algorithms to generate meaningless prose which, randomly constructed from recognizable buzzwords and phrases organized into syntactically correct sentences, conforms to the style of a particular universe of discourse.

In my previous column I pointed out one such online system, The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator. Type any five-digit number into a field there, click a button, and you get a result like this: “I agree with some of the things that have just been said, but the sublime beauty of the purity of line seems very disturbing in light of the remarkable handling of light.” Or this: “With regard to the issue of content, the disjunctive perturbation of the sexual signifier threatens to penetrate the inherent overspecificity.”

Certainly sufficient to get you through a tight spot in a studio critique if called up surreptitiously on your smartphone. Lard enough of these gems of obfuscation judiciously into some prose that contains names, titles of works, etc., and you’ll have an essay likely to confound and impress the grad students who read and grade most college papers nowadays. You might even slip one past an editor at an art website.

The publishers boast, “We here at Pixmaven have developed The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator so you need never again feel at a loss for pithy commentary or savvy ‘insights.’ With this device you can speak about Art with both authority and confidence.” (Separated at birth from M. Bayard, were they?) But they’re stingy, doling out the gobbledygook one sentence at a time ― all of them quite generic, and none of them including the oh-so-necessary references, citations, and other scholarly apparatus.

For that you’ll have to turn to the Postmodernism Generator, every visit to which yields a brand-new, lengthy essay in classic pomo style, complete with title, fictitious author with fictitious academic affiliation, and endnotes. A sample extract:

“The Defining Characteristic of Expression: The cultural paradigm of reality in the works of Stone”

John E. Werther, Department of Politics, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Mass.

1. Stone and the cultural paradigm of reality

“Reality is unattainable,” says Foucault. Marx uses the term “the textual paradigm of consensus” to denote not, in fact, theory, but subtheory.

The characteristic theme of Drucker’s[1] model of Sontagist camp is a self-supporting paradox. But the premise of the postdialectic paradigm of context implies that the goal of the participant is deconstruction. An abundance of discourses concerning patriarchialist modernism exist.

However, in The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Burroughs analyses the cultural paradigm of reality; in Queer, although, he examines the postdialectic paradigm of context. The subject is contextualised into a Debordist image that includes sexuality as a reality.

Therefore, Sontag uses the term “the postdialectic paradigm of context” to denote the bridge between sexual identity and class. D’Erlette[2] suggests that we have to choose between the textual paradigm of consensus and structural Marxism.

In a sense, Marx uses the term “the cultural paradigm of reality” to denote a mythopoetical whole. The neodialectic paradigm of context implies that truth is part of the economy of consciousness, given that reality is interchangeable with art.

But if the textual paradigm of consensus holds, we have to choose between the postdialectic paradigm of context and textual desublimation. A number of narratives concerning the common ground between sexual identity and class may be discovered. . . .

1. Drucker, M. ed. (1999) The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Burroughs. University of Illinois Press.]

2. d’Erlette, E. C. (1983) Neocultural Narratives: The cultural paradigm of reality and the textual paradigm of consensus. Loompanics.

(I’m particularly taken with this author’s affiliation with Miskatonic University, as I’d expect no less from anyone associated with H. P. Lovecraft’s alma mater.)

. . . with a Little Help from Your Friends

Based on an algorithmic structure called the Dada Engine, “a system for generating random text from recursive grammars,” the Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak of the Dept. of Computer Science, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, in 1996 ― the same year in which Sokal perpetrated his seditious deconstruction of the pomo façade. (Coincidence? You decide!)

“Chimpanzee Typing,” 1907. Courtesy New York Zoological Society.

You’ll find a paper by Bulhak explicating this program, “On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks,” here. Like Sokal’s work, it’s reasonably comprehensible to the lay reader, and enjoyable too. (Perhaps facetiously, Bulhak dated it April 1, 1996.) Meanwhile, like pomo monkeys with wordprocessors, macros, and ample time, Bulhak’s “Pomo Machine” produces endless pastiches not notably different from Sokal’s (except for the scientific terminology) and resembling very much the sort of stuff you find gracing the pages of Social Text and similar publications.

The Postmodernism Generator offers its output under a Creative Commons license, which includes remix permissions. So you can substitute your own name for those of the invented authors of these papers. Likely, therefore, that at least two generations of students have availed themselves of it for the creation of papers submitted in classes where they’re obliged to “do theory.” And conceivable that any given postmodernist text you happen upon in print came from this source. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say, since postmodern theory hypothesizes that no original ideas exist, only regurgitated ones. A recycling machine for the standardized, predictable locutions of postmodernist theory comes as a logical extension of that philosophical position.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

•

This post supported in part by a donation from Michael Zastre.

Among other dangers, such a proposition, especially when it comes from an authority figure such as a French professor of literature, risks getting taken as permission to skip active, direct engagement with the works that constitute the primary source materials of any medium or discipline, directing attention instead to what are called secondary sources ― in other words, emphasizing what people say about those works over what the works say for themselves. Were this a legal context, this would represent prioritizing hearsay over hard evidence.

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007), cover.

If you’ve followed me this far, however reservedly, you’ve perhaps come to share with me the realization that Bayard’s formulation, though restricted by him to literature, applies no less to material in other media ― film, dance, music, art, and yes, even photography ― than it does to books. Taking Bayard’s treatise as a model, we could easily craft a counterpart ― “How to Talk about Photographs You Haven’t Seen” ― for our own field. Since that’s my bailiwick here, to what extent do we (and, if we teach, do our students) talk about photographs we don’t know at all, or have looked at carefully sometime in the past but since forgotten, or have only glanced at, or have merely heard of?

I’ll go first. Let me admit that in my schoolboy period, from pre-adolescence through early adulthood, I did in fact and not infrequently talk about books I hadn’t read. This seemed inevitable, given the archaic texts (Hiawatha, anyone?) and workload teachers imposed on me and my fellow students from junior high school onward, combined with the emphasis those various faculties placed on what constituted the necessary and expected thoroughness of a responsible scholar’s reading of any text.

H. W. Longfellow, “The Song of Hiawatha,” cover.

Once I left the hallowed halls, circa 1967, I vowed never again to talk about books I hadn’t read, because I found it more embarrassing to bullshit my way through such a discussion than to admit frankly my unfamiliarity with the work. In fact, I went further, deciding not to venture opinions on anything with which I hadn’t engaged (literature, music, art) or to which I hadn’t given sufficient attention and thought to qualify my opinion as considered.

As Bayard notes repeatedly (indeed, he presents it as the motive for his project), shame attaches itself unreasonably to an admission of ignorance of any individual work within the “collective library” of a given cohort. As a result, the habit of lying to disguise unfamiliarity with this or that book (or film, or song, or painting, etc.) becomes ingrained in most people, socially taken for granted to such an extent that truthfulness in this regard comes as a shock. Over the years a number of people have found this contrariness of mine disconcerting, not least my son Edward in his pre-teen years, when for some reason he expected me to have an informed position on everything and seemed crushed, even offended, whenever I proved that assumption wrong.

I made that same commitment as I moved into my professional role as a critic. In fact, careful description and formal analysis became central to my critical practice over time. Reflection led me to perceive in my own early work an emphasis on the imagery I encountered and the content I extracted therefrom, with a not necessarily consequent lack of close attention to the form of the work ― the particulars of the physical objects and spaces (books, prints, exhibitions) about which I wrote.

Presently, for example, I’m collating a volume of all my columns for the New York Times, 1970-74. Re-reading them, I’m hard-pressed to glean from them even the sizes of prints on display in a show or the number of works that constituted a given exhibition, much less the type of print and the printing strategies involved. As I came to understand the signification of the ways in which form and content mesh (or fail to do so) in photography, those issues came to the foreground in my consideration.

A. D. Coleman, Critical Focus, 1995

And though it’s hard to make description and formal analysis interesting to read, more so certainly than interpretation and evaluation, I began to build those into my writing. You’ll see the difference, I think, if you contrast the essays collected in my book Light Readings (1979), which includes much of the cream of my work for the Village Voice and the New York Times, with those in a subsequent collection, Critical Focus (1995), written from 1988 on, mostly for the New York Observer.

Description and formal analysis also became central to my concurrent practice as a teacher of history, theory, and criticism of photography, at New York University most extensively but also at other schools and venues for workshops and seminars. Whether done on paper, for readers, or in a Socratic dialogue with students, grounding a discussion in the blunt, ineluctable facts of what someone actually made has a salutory effect on the quality of the discourse. Conversely, wandering far afield from what you can point to and verify within the work leads (at least in my view) down the path to airy blather.

Aside from my own decision to anchor my commentaries in the concrete details of the works I chose to weigh, I pursued this approach in good part to counterbalance a disturbing tendency to avoid even mentioning the specific characteristics of photographic works that I saw in the writing of most of my colleagues in the 1970s, and still see today. The decreasing editorial space devoted to photography in most mainstream publications exacerbates that tendency by excusing it; how do you fit any telling amount of detailed description and formal analysis into a two-paragraph “review”?

Speedwriting ad, 1950s.

To my dismay, we’re heading rapidly toward critique by tweet ― or, now, the more expansive Summly review ― in whose compaction the Speedwriting advertised widely in the 1950s (“f u cn rd ths, u cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb w hi pa”) will find its apotheosis. But few of my colleagues chafe at such strictures; for most, I dare say, it comes as a relief.

I gave up reviewing books and exhibitions a long time ago, with occasional exceptions, so the shrinkage of available editorial space for such expository prose doesn’t affect me directly as a writer. The essays I work on and publish nowadays allow me sufficient room for the exploration of a work’s facture, its physicality, and its formal structure. Among other effects, I think this helps convince my readers that I have actually spent time focusing closely on the work under scrutiny. I also believe that my own example of careful attention to such specifics helps persuade readers that they too might profitably devote some time to a hands-on, eyes-on engagement with said works, rather than relying on reports about them.

Bayard’s position does put me in mind of much of the writing about photography of the past four decades ― by Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and sundry others, many of them (perhaps significantly) French, like Bayard himself, or else intellectually francophile by inclination. Their commentaries concern themselves almost exclusively with what Bayard terms the “locations” of given photographs or bodies of work within what he calls the “collective library” of photographs about which the chattering classes natter. To put it another way, they eschew the act of attending closely to the specifics of said photographs or bodies of work, preferring instead to divagate on the presumed skein of relationships among them.

This isn’t a tendency of the French alone. As I pointed out back in 1997, you can peruse the entire English-language “discourse” around Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” without encountering any substantive engagement with the particulars of any one image of hers. Most people “doing theory” vis-a-vis photography exemplify this attitude. When they do talk about an image, they tend to discuss not its content but rather its contents, the literal subject matter, and their personal response thereto ― equivalent to assessing a Cézanne still life according to your preferences in fruit. And I can’t manifest much interest in reading essays by, or talking about photography with, anyone who finds concentrating on the actual work itself bothersome and tedious and fundamentally beside the point.

Roland Barthes, “Camera Lucida” (1981), cover.

I realize that this attention to the work, the specific artifact created by the artist, will sound laughably antiquated to many. But I view it as a technique for restraining oneself from the tendency to talk through one’s hat, and also as a way of detecting in others an inclination toward uttering what Alan Sokal has so pithily described as “fashionable nonsense.” Unmoored from the precise and verifiable, floating free of all accountability to a referent that can be checked for accuracy, the result invariably sounds like something out of The Instant Art Critique Phrase Generator.

With that said, while I’ve never reviewed or otherwise discussed an exhibition or book or photo-related event that I didn’t actually visit or peruse or attend, I’d have to admit that some of them I merely skimmed in comparison to the attention I paid to others. Undoubtedly I got distracted from time to time during my involvement with them, even the most engrossing. And, by now, I’ve surely forgotten much about most of them, even those to which I attended closely at the time I encountered them.

Speedwriting subway ad, 1950s

Bayard’s not entirely wrong; no book’s reader, no picture’s viewer, achieves perfect stillness and full absorption of any work. I don’t consider that a justification for abandoning the effort; I’d rather live with my failures, striving for improvement, than convert them into a methodology and celebrate it.

Your turn.

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

I’ve made the terrible mistake of reading and re-reading an extremely unsettling book, and want to warn you against engaging with it.

The volume in question is How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard, translated from the French by Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007). The copy I have is a paperbound “uncorrected bound manuscript” purchased for $1 at Strand Books in Manhattan ― that is, a review copy sent out in advance of the official publication date. The significance of this fact will become clear shortly.

Hippolyte Bayard, “Le Noyé (Self-portrait as a drowned man),” October 18, 1840.

Bayard is a professor of French literature at the University of Paris VIII, also a psychoanalyst, and what we sometimes call a public intellectual. I’ve yet to determine whether he’s related to Hippolyte Bayard, the French inventor of photography who faked his own suicide in a photograph. Be that as it may, the book under consideration, though directed toward our relation to works of literature, pertains no less to our relation to photographs, as I’ll explain.

In this slender, elegantly reasoned, and eminently readable book, Bayard makes a complex but persuasive argument with several layers: (a) that those of us who talk (and write) about books must perforce often discuss works we haven’t read ― if only because the canon to which anyone cultivated pays respect has become so vast; (b) that this fact, commonly treated as a shameful secret and thus rarely stated, should be acknowledged, openly discussed, and embraced as truth, because (c) only then can we explore the reality of a discourse based on such fragmentary knowledge of the works in question and enjoy the benefits thereof.

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007), cover.

Bayard’s forthright owning up to this condition in his own case ― especially given his role as a professor of literature — thus constitutes both an act of courage and a breakthrough. As he announces early on, “Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the counter-gesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe.” (For the audio of a National Public Radio interview with Bayard, and a transcript thereof, click here.)

Not content with those radical proposals, Bayard goes further. All reading, he asserts, is necessarily incomplete and otherwise flawed ― we make accidental word substitutions and otherwise misread, our attention lapses, we skip a passage. Having once read something, our memory of what we’ve read dependably elides most of what passed before us on the page, save perhaps for those rare eidetikers among us with photographic memories. (Recent fictional examples include Thomas Harris’s FBI consultant Will Graham and Stig Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander, the ”girl with the dragon tattoo.”) Indeed, even if we could recall it verbatim we won’t have read the book accurately once, since, as information theory teaches us, the message sent (by the author) is never exactly the message received (by the reader).

Pierre Bayard, Vimeo, screenshot, 2013-03-25.

Re-reading doesn’t provide a solution, for, just as, per Heraclitus, we can’t step in the same river twice, we can’t read the same book twice, since both we and the book will have changed during the interval. (The second time you read any book, you know how it concludes; thus the outcome is no longer in doubt.) It follows, then, that no two people can conceivably claim to have read the same book, which would obviate any sane discussion of any book save for conventions that permit us to ignore these truths ― or, as Bayard recommends, to establish new protocols that build on them.

Perhaps mercifully, Bayard doesn’t address at all the fact that books also change in more literal ways. Not only are different editions differently laid out and designed, which affects their reception, but they come to us in different media ― on paper, as audiobooks, on the screen of a digital device ― which also affects our engagement with their content. Not to mention the process of translation, which de facto alters the original. And that content itself is mutable: variant editions add to, delete from, or otherwise revise the text, sometimes significantly.

Pierre Bayard, “How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read” (2007),cover, detail.

Take the case in point, my copy of Bayard’s treatise. As I noted earlier, it’s an “uncorrected bound manuscript,” laid out and typeset but not yet subjected to its final proofreading by its author, the translator, and the publisher’s line editor. As a result, it contains several typographic errors that I spotted which may (but may not) get fixed in the published edition. It’s also possible that the author or his translator will revise some passages during that process, conceivably changing at least the nuances of his argument.

This book, then, exposes the dirty little secret of the literati: None of us have read all the books to which we refer knowingly. By the time you finish “reading” (I use the word advisedly now) Bayard’s wry, sly text, you may find his airing of that secret liberating. Yet it has the insidious effect of luring you down a Borgesian rabbit hole, traversing which you begin to doubt whether, in fact, you have ever truly read any book once in your entire life. Unless you’re prepared to confront that possibility, beware.

The consolation Bayard offers goes beyond the cleansing power of such confession. In addition to enumerating four classes of books ― those we don’t know at all, those we’ve read but forgotten, those we’ve skimmed, those we’ve merely heard of ― he suggests that, in our discursions about books, we access several “libraries.” The first of these he calls the “collective library,” by which he means the particular subset of books with which any of our particular cohorts (say, our fellow faculty members in a department devoted to a specific discipline) expects its members to have at least a passing familiarity.

“Moby Dick” (1956), movie poster.

The second mental bibliothèque Bayard labels the “inner library,” defined as “that set of books ― a subset of the collective library ― around which every personality is constructed, and which then shapes each person’s individual relationship to books and to other people. . . . [T]hese private libraries . . . are primarily composed of fragments of forgotten and imaginary books through which we apprehend the world.” However partial and inaccurate our personal “inner libraries” may be vis-a-vis the texts from which they derive, they provide the reference points with which we navigate the social environment(s) in which we share one or more “collective libraries” with our contemporaries.

In those contexts, Bayard contends, “Being cultivated is a matter . . . of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system . . . .  It is, then, hardly important if a cultivated person hasn’t read a given book, for though he has no exact knowledge of its content, he may still know its location, or in other words how it is situated in relation to other books.”

So, to use an example Bayard gives in relation to James Joyce’s Ulysses (a book he says he’s never “read” and perhaps never will), it suffices for him to know “that it is a retelling of the Odyssey, that its narration takes the form of a stream of consciousness, that its action unfolds in Dublin in the course of a single day, etc.” If this resembles a relationship to a literary work akin to having seen the movie thereof, or perused the CliffsNotes synopsis, or the Classics Illustrated comic-book versions of my childhood, or some equivalent of Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb, I don’t think Bayard would disagree. Au contraire, pal; Bayard holds that such substitutes not only prove socially expedient, but can profitably serve as a basis for serious discussion of any piece of writing.

Thomas, Hardy, “Jude the Obscure,” CliffsNotes, cover.

I wouldn’t recommend this for all books. Nor does Bayard ― though, perversely, he does suggest several times that engaging in depth with any given book can disrupt, even destroy, one’s overview of the field of ideas. Clearly he’s not an advocate of what Roland Barthes called “the pleasures of the text,” in which I’m apparently more wont to indulge that he. All the same, based on my own experience, I learned a lot more about writing from Walt Kelly than I did from Thomas Hardy, and would have profited more as a writer from reading Pogo than I did from ploughing through Jude the Obscure, had I worked up the chutzpah shown by some of my classmates and used the CliffsNotes rendering of the latter to free up time for the former.

Had I done so, however, that choice ― no matter how I rationalized it at the time, and no matter how reasonable it seems to me (and perhaps you) today ― would have resulted in my performing an act once quaintly known as “talking through my hat” as soon as I opened my mouth in class about Hardy’s tome, or wrote about it on an exam or in a term paper. Bayard’s book, then, represents a spirited defense of ― nay, an energetic advocacy of ― talking through one’s hat. Nowadays we use a more blunt locution as the name of that act: Bullshitting.

[Postscript, May 6, 2013: After wrapping up this series of posts, I remembered Thomas Wolfe's thinly disguised self-portrait as Eugene Gant in Harvard University's Widemer Library, in Of Time and the River (1935): "Now he would prowl the stacks of the library at night, pulling books out of a thousand shelves and reading in them like a madman. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he  read, the less he seemed to know the greater the number of the books  he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be. . . . Yet this terrific orgy of the books brought him no comfort, peace, or wisdom of the mind and heart. Instead, his fury and despair increased from what they fed upon, his hunger mounted with the food it ate. . . . This fury which drove him on to read so many books had nothing to do with scholarship, nothing to do with academic honors, nothing to do with formal learning. He was not in any way a scholar and did not want to be one. He simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth, and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this."]

(Part 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 5)

•

This post supported by a donation from the Estate of Lyle Bongé.

A gradual, month-long computer meltdown that began in mid-January forced me to put this blog on hold in order to concentrate on matters technological and close to home. Making a very long story short, I ended up buying a low-end desktop Mac Mini to serve as my main computer, relegating my beloved MacBook Pro to the role of backup computer and road companion on my increasingly infrequent travels.

Because I back up my hard drive regularly, and have also cloned my hard drive, I lost no data. But it seemed advisable to do clean installs of my applications, while also transferring my data carefully and reviewing it to salvage anything damaged during the month of crashes. A tedious process, though it has resulted in a stripped-down instrument free of bloat.

Mac Mini

Just shy of of 8 inches square and slightly over an inch high, the Mini sits unobtrusively on my desk, its exterior giving no hint of its power. (My wife Anna says it looks more like a purse than a computer.) I’ve added two external monitors ― one 22″ and the other 19″ — to the Mini. This has transformed my visual environment; after 13 years of squinting at a laptop screen, it feels like moving from a studio apartment into a loft. All this space!

Augmenting the novelty, the Mac Mini came loaded with Apple’s current OS, Mountain Lion. I hadn’t upgraded the MacBook Pro from Snow Leopard, leaving me two iterations behind. Hence I’m accommodating to a number of revisions, some of them drastic, to the location and operation of assorted features and components.

In short, I’ve found myself rudely and unwillingly thrust into a radically revamped workspace, and forced to use a considerably revised toolkit to boot. Periodically, as readers of this blog will recall, I grouse about the computer industry’s relentless reconfiguration of hardware and software, with the consequent imposition of top-down changes, often substantial and not infrequently unwelcome.

ADC with ViewSonic Monitor. Photo © copyright 2013 by Anna Lung.

I think of myself as a creature of habit, from time to time muttering grumpily what my late colleague Richard Kirstel used to announce: “All change is for the worse.” Yet, in grappling with this situation, I’ve watched myself adapt with relative ease to these new ways of thinking and acting. (Certain physiological habits, such as keystroke combinations for shortcuts, took a month to fade away as their replacements became customary.) Fortunately, Mountain Lion deletes no features on which I relied heavily or found essential to my workflow. And it certainly adds some intriguing possibilities, among them Dictation, a built-in system-wide speech-to-text function that looks extremely promising.

This leads me to consider the possibility that, pace Kirstel, my brain does manage to wrap itself around these evolutionary shifts in digital technology without extreme difficulty. Which in turn suggests that perhaps this recurrent process helps to keep my brain active and young (or, more precisely, youth-like) by pushing me to learn new skills, to replace old habits with new or revised ones, and in one way or another to get some exercise for the mind. In short, I’ve begun to weigh the mental-health benefits of living la vida digital, with its steady reconfiguring of my neural pathways.

Meanwhile, I’m in the saddle once again, ready now to ride this blog through 2013 and beyond.

Liu Xia in Richmond, VA

Guy Sorman, Liu Xia opening, Richmond, VA, 2-28-13. Photo © copyright 2013 by A. D. Coleman.

This computer crisis came (don’t they always?) at an extremely inconvenient time ― in the midst of preparing a lecture and Keynote presentation for the opening of the exhibition “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia” at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia on February 28. I bought the Mac Mini primarily because I couldn’t wait 3-5 days for repair of my MacBook Pro, with that deadline breathing down my neck. It all worked out, though I left for Richmond on February 27 with nothing more than a thumb drive in my pocket on which I’d saved the text of my lecture and the Keynote slideshow ― first time I’ve traveled to a professional event without my laptop in well over a decade. (I put off repair of the MacBook Pro until after I returned.) Felt naked.

The director of the University of Richmond Museums, Richard Waller, did a fine installation of the images in the Lora Robins Gallery, using new digital prints made there especially for the occasion. They also published a small, handsome catalogue to go with it. The lecture and a subsequent panel drew an overflow crowd, and went well. (Click here for a PDF of my lecture.) The museum recorded these events, and they’ve posted at YouTube the video of my lecture, “Freedom Reflex: The Photographs of Liu Xia,” plus the panel discussion that followed with myself, political economist Guy Sorman, retired U.S. Ambassador Randolph Marshall Bell (president of the First Freedom Center), and Prof. Vincent Wang, Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Political Science, University of Richmond. (If the video doesn’t show below, refresh this page in your browser or click here.)

With these public presentations I concluded my year-long involvement with the international tour of this show, which I served primarily as tour manager and trouble-shooter, while also adding a curatorial essay to the accompanying writings by various authors. Liu Xia has been much in the news these past months; given the recent regime change in Beijing, the controversy surrounding her situation, and the uncertainty of her fate at the hands of China’s new rulers, it’s unclear whether the tour will continue. In any event, that’s out of my hands. It’s been an honor to work on her behalf; I hope that she and her husband, the imprisoned 2010 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Liu Xiaobo, are freed and reunited soon.

I will continue to maintain, enhance, and update the website devoted to Liu Xia’s work that I designed and published a year ago. It’s become the most substantial online English-language source of information about her art and her situation, so it will remain available until further notice. If the exhibition’s tour does extend past Richmond, you’ll find news about it there.

Liu Xia opening, Richmond, VA, 2-28-13. L-R: Vincent Wang, A. D. Coleman, Guy Sorman, Richard Waller, Randolph Marshall Bell. Photo © copyright 2013 by Taylor Dabney.

A Tale of Two Scrolls

Jack Kerouac, scroll of On the Road. Photo used courtesy of a Creative Commons license from Thomas Hawk.

I didn’t know it when I posted my meditation on Jack Kerouac’s typewritten 120-foot “scroll” of his 1957 novel On the Road, but the Dharma Bum had a literary precursor in employing that physical format for a novel ― none other than the Marquis De Sade. Sade wrote his infamous 120 Days of Sodom over a 37-day stretch in 1785, inscribing it in minute characters on both sides of a 39-foot-long roll of paper while imprisoned in the Bastille during the French Revolution. (According to one person who viewed it, it was ”impossible to read without a magnifying glass as the writing was so tiny.”)

Marquis de Sade, “The 120 Days of Sodom” (1785), scroll. Courtesy Fondation Martin Bodmer.

Sade, transferred to an insane asylum just days before the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, feared it had been lost or destroyed during. But, hidden in a crack in his cell, it survived and was eventually retrieved in 1832, though not published (in German) until 1904.

For someone writing by hand, starting a new page doesn’t constitute the same interruption of flow as inserting a new sheet into a typewriter. Sade’s use of a roll of paper wasn’t technologically innovative, as I argued Kerouac’s was in 1951. Still, both authors created their scrolls by pasting together loose sheets of paper. And both produced these particular works in short, concentrated periods of time, working at white heat. Something about that continuous unreeling of prose seems consonant with the urgency of their separate narratives.

Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press in Paris published the first English translation of 120 Days of Sodom in 1957, translated by Austryn Wainhouse (under the pseudonym Pieralessandro Casavini), with an introduction by Georges Bataille. It seems improbable that Kerouac would have had access to that edition in time for it to influence him, more likely that he could have read a French edition. (Kerouac, of French-Canadian descent, spoke and read that language.)

But it’s not Sade’s narrative or literary style that connects the two works; it’s the idea of the scroll as a workspace. Sade’s notoriety certainly preceded the Olympia Press publication of 120 Days of Sodom; he had already become legendary in European and American avant-garde literary circles. The story of this book’s creation on a scroll had circulated widely enough that Kerouac had almost certainly encountered it.

Olympia Press, Marquis de Sade, “120 Days of Sodom” (1957).

In any case, cross-pollination or not, there’s a definite resonance to the fact that, in 1957, two revolutionary books drafted on scrolls 166 years apart achieved their first publication in English.

Sade’s scroll has made headlines lately, due to a bid by La Bibliothèque Nationale de France, that country’s national library, to repatriate the work, smuggled by a thief into Switzerland in 1982 and sold there to a private collector. Currently it’s in the holdings of the Fondation Martin Bodmer, a Swiss cultural foundation. The French consider it a ”national treasure” and “part of our cultural heritage,” according to Bruno Racine, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale; the library wants to acquire it in time for the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Sade’s death next year.

In this book, as in his other works, Sade wrote scathingly about debauchery within the Catholic Church. The bicentennial festivities planned in France will coincide with mounting global scandals over widespread sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. On that subject, it would appear, Sade was right on the money.