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His Loss

“Most of the better things we can think or say about pictures stand in a slightly peripheral relation to the picture itself.” This claim, by Michael Baxandall in ‘Patterns of Intention’ (1985), provides a tenet for one of my methodologies for writing “about” art. Baxandall invites us to consider the relation between subjectivity and objectivity in our dealings with visual art. “What we actually explain,” he continues, “seems likely to be not the unmediated picture but the picture as considered under a partially interpretative description.” To Baxandall, I add Hayden White who argues that history, as a form of writing, is a form of fiction, ‘Tropics of Discourse’ (1978). How do we acknowledge the subjectivity of the writer and the inherent tendencies of his medium whilst respecting the independent ontological existence of the work addressed by that writing? In 2009 Rallou Panagiotou was shortlisted for the prestigious biennial Deste Prize for contemporary Greek art (Cycladic Museum of Art, Athens). Panagiotou invited me to write a piece for the accompanying publication. Each artist was paired with a writer. The artist sent me a statement outlining her motivating interests as a point of reference for my text. Key concepts offered were: the modern; ruins and fragments; memory; modern subjectivity. Following Gregory Ulmer’s claims that the issue at stake in contemporary critical writing is “representation of the object of study in a critical text”, I wrote my essay acknowledging that critical writing today has broken from “mimesis” and “the values and assumptions of ‘realism’” (Ulmer). The following texts are among those that have also informed this aspect of my critical practice: B. Wallis (ed), Blasted Allegories (1987); Louise Neri (ed), Silence Please! Stories After the Works of Juan Munoz (1996); A. Robbe-Grillet, La Belle Captive (1996); R. Barthes, From Work to Text (1971).