« Art Critics' Reading List
MICHELLE WHITE
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Michelle White, curator at The Menil Collection in Houston, is co-curator of “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective,” which opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in April 2011. She is currently working on a retrospective of the drawings of Lee Bontecou and a film installation by Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young. Her exhibitions at The Menil have included “Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing” and “Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Realist Performance.” She has also worked on projects with Vija Celmins and the collective Otabenga Jones & Associates. |
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W. G. Sebald. Austerlitz. New York: Random House, 2001. This book is an extraordinary novel that slowly unravels a mystery about the protagonist’s childhood in Wales during WWII. As Jacques Austerlitz pieces together fragments from his past, presented as a fleeting series of images of fortresses, libraries and train stations, his depiction of the Holocaust becomes a larger meditation about the fear of obsolescence. It is also a profoundly eloquent statement about the complicated intersection of personal memory, history and place. I continually return to this novel, as I think it touches on many contemporary cultural issues that are being addressed in the visual arts. I have often recommended it to artists I have worked with who are also grappling with how a subjective perspective of one’s past is interwoven into a larger cultural history, especially as it pertains to stories of oppression or trauma and the very human struggle to not forget.
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Jacques Derrida. Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. This beautifully dense essay about drawing by the philosopher Jacques Derrida was written for an exhibition he organized at the Louvre in 1990. In the text, he uses his selection of figurative old master drawings of blind men and women, and people suffering from ailments having to do with sight, pulled from the museum’s department of prints and drawings, as an allegory of drawing itself. Specifically, drawing as a way of making and thinking that is rooted in memory and is subservient to sight. He writes, “One draws only on the condition of not seeing.” With this claim, his essay yields what I believe is by far the best and most lucid definition of contemporary drawing: a visible trace of action carried out in time.
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Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001. Susan Sontag’s analysis of criticality and her brilliant stand against easily digestible explanations in her 1964 essay “Against Interpretation,” published in this compilation of texts, haunts me. When I write or when I give advice to young critics, I keep in mind her stance that we too often take the visual, and potential for sensory pleasure, for granted, and I often quote her passage that “the function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” As we barrel towards a landscape where criticism is in crisis, if not superfluous, the worst crime in arts writing is a sloppy jump to definitive conclusion without grounding opinion in acute observation of the formal mechanisms of how an image, or work of art, operates. Sontag’s call to arms about the important relationship of form of content is inspiring and, still, extremely relevant.
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