the light/tunnel ratio

"As minimalist artists have taught us, form is never pure; it can always stimulate associations." (Freedman, p 42)


"In Mr. Serra’s case you can also call it democratic art because it sticks to pure form that requires no previous expertise to grasp." (Kimmelman's New York Times review of MoMA's Serra retrospective)


First of all (or rather, second of all--see how I snuck those two quotations up there to set up a dichotomy for my arguments before I even began to address the reader directly?), let me apologize because I never got around to finishing the argument that I'd worked up in my previous post.  What it boiled down to is pretty neatly captured by the jotted note that I made while reading those first two chapters: "Freedman's approach, with its broad narrative and exhaustive citations, strives for subjectivity, while her tone works against it," the overall effect of which serves to make her argument less coherent and her history less convincing.  I suspect that her goal is to provide us with a catalog of the ideas that have influenced her thinking, some of which she has assimilated or built on and some of which she has reacted against.  This approach makes sense if she aligns herself with post-structuralist theory (and, to my mind, the quote from her that I used up top confirms that alignment), but it comes off as a history with a not-so-well-hidden argument as a subtext.  Her book would gain substantial clarity, credibility, and readability if she would take the first sentence of chapter four (which comes, tellingly, with a citation from Eisner attached) to heart and foreground her own sensibilities, tell some stories, and generally let the reader see how she evolved into the voice that is presently speaking to them through her book instead of burying her head in the forest of erudition and Lacanian quadruple speak.


My own intention in taking so very long to work my way up to that conclusion in that past post was to provide an example of the kind of writing that I prefer: writing that demonstrates a sense of personhood and brings the reader along a path with definite landmarks that can be retraced like bread crumbs.  Eisner, I feel, represents this type of writing as well.  When I finish reading Eisner, I can remember various descriptions that he's incorporated into the chapter and, whether I agree with him or not, I have a pretty strong sense that I've followed the thrust of his argument.  By contrast, when I finish reading a chapter of Freedman, I have to look back at the notes I've made in the margins and do my darnedest to form a picture of the chapter as a whole--and if I don't do this, I leave the reading almost completely blank.

Ironically (or does it become meta-irony, since irony is one of the favorite languages of the type of "post-Pop Surrealism" that Serra dismisses and that Freedman would adamantly defend?), the aesthetic choices that Freedman has made as a writer do not follow the standards that she advocates for both art and learning.  Instead of creating a context-rich environment in which metacognitively-activated learning will be scaffolded by the materials that she presents, she has created a hermetic world in which her research and thought is presented unmediated by familiar (or uncanny) structures.  And just as ironically, that great stalwart structuralist, Richard Serra, whose works appeals unmediated to each and every viewer regardless the wealth of their "imagic stores," once made the comment that "Art is not democratic."