An Open Letter to Howard Singerman:
Dear Howard Singerman, April 14, 2008
Awhile back I had written to you a brief note expressing my gratitude and appreciation for your book Art Subjects, in which you provide a detailed account of the history of art education in this country and raise convincing possibilities about some of the causes that have contributed to the current state of affairs in the artworld. I found your book extremely gratifying and also relieving, in the way that finding a map can be relieving; I may not know how to get to where I’d like to go, but at least I’ve got some kind of sense about where I am and how I arrived here.
Near the end of the book, just before the conclusion, you bring a discussion about the quality of transcendence that I found deeply moving and poignant and that I would like to quote at length:
The distance Adorno and Marcuse promised is no longer available. The space of the aesthetic can no longer be a critical space; the work of art cannot escape to be somewhere or something else. Marcuse’s thesis that art’s radical possibilities—“its indictment of the established reality and its invocation of the beautiful image of liberations”—lie “precisely in the dimensions where art transcends its social determination and emancipates itself from the given universe of discourse and behavior” becomes not just unbelievable but also, and more damningly in the modern university, terribly naïve. That version of transcendence has been replaced by another one. The works of postmodernism in the university thematize their positions and reflect their knowing better, letting those of us who know, know that they too are vigilant. They will not be unknowing victims of history or theory, just necessarily, historically, victims. This thinking, or outthinking, the end of each attempt operates now as transcendence.
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999), 211-212.
This hit me in the chest like a brick. I feel that you got it right, and painfully so. Not as an indictment of the university, as you immediately go on to explain in your conclusion, where you “insist on the university as a crucial structuring site where artists and art worlds are mapped and reproduced, and which is, therefore, a place to be looked at.” Rather, what I found so stunning in what you wrote is the description of the withering of the power of transcendence in the creative life of our culture. No way out. No belief in a way out. But rather we must find sufficient an analysis of how we are necessarily trapped and take refuge in our having figured this out without getting blindsided.
I’m sure I am not alone and that among all of the many artists working today there are those who have not abandoned a belief in the function and power of transcendence in their work. Transcendence here is a slippery term; perhaps it is more apt to say that there is something more, something beyond our current conditions, something of fuller life, something more human, something of love. And art, as it has in the past, may have a role to play, in our collective awareness, in nurturing our living with this something more.
This is perhaps not university fare. What I am trying to say certainly doesn’t wield any great criticality, and it can easily be seen as steeped in an archaic romanticism. But I believe that what I am saying comes not just from the heart, but also from a sure practicality. If we’re going to somehow together get beyond our apparent cul-de-sac of a culture, and if we’re going to survive this current mess that our planet is in, we’re going to need to sense a “something more” that the heart opens to. And our art can courageously touch the heart and call upon it, and remind us of who we may have always been and who we may yet be.
If this is naïve, so be it. But I believe it is time for the mind in our culture to regain its intimate alliance with the power of the heart. Is this an appropriate endeavor for a university setting? I don’t know – but I believe it is a deeply necessary endeavor for our time.
Thank you again for your important book and for your consideration of these words.
Sincere regards,
Jordan Wolfson