Sebastian Smee is quite right that the recent cancellation of a Philip Guston exhibition is an act of abject cowardice on the part of the four museum directors responsible for it. Apparently, a cultural institution's "responsibility to meet the very real urgencies of the moment" (as the museum directors put it in their joint statement) is to protect people from art that might offend or disturb. Most likely, the cancellation actually represents the directors' attempt to protect themselves from even the possibility of controversy, controversy that exposes them to the pitchforks of the social media mob.
Smee is certainly correct that the directors' assertion that the Guston exhibition should wait until "his work can be more clearly interpreted” betrays an assumption that is "utterly antithetical to what art is about," but I think that such a demand is not really so much for "clear" interpretation as it is for no interpretation. If a work of art has been "clearly" interpreted, its "meaning" has been fully assimilated, presumably because it was always obvious. The work was not intended to be interpreted--it offers no resistance to understanding and communicates its purpose (usually an easily discernible "message") quite directly and transparently. The artist speaks, the audience listens.
We appear to be quite rapidly becoming a culture that wants its art delivered in this way. The act of interpretation, it would seem, is too likely to lead to messy areas of ambivalence and ambiguity. Interpretation means the work's significance requires the participation of viewers (or readers or listeners) to be deduced, and they might differ about it, both among themselves and with the artist. Better to go with "clarity." But if there is no interpretation, there is no art, only declarations, decrees, and lectures. Yet this seems to be the order of the day.
Artists are actually very poor choices to act as founts of wisdom and virtue. Historically speaking, only the most benighted or deluded have claimed to be sages (and usually they're very poor artists, anyway). Artists can be plenty self-absorbed, but that's because they're preoccupied with the materials of their art, of shaping those materials so as to realize a vision of what the form of art they practice can be made to do. This sort of preoccupation can make artists seem disconnected from ordinary concerns (which they often are), but this is the price to be paid for the attention that must be given to making art that is true to that vision. It is not a particularly expedient place from which to make pronouncements about how to live or what to believe.
I have little doubt that Philip Guston fits this profile quite readily. Certainly the intensity of focus on the structure of painting itself is reflected in the major shifts or phases in his career, from the early social realism to the abstraction of his middle phase (for which he initially became well known ) to the final return to something like figuration (though surreal and fragmented). Paradoxically, his paintings in the first and third phases frequently incorporate images that can be taken as forms of political commentary (satirical, anti-racist, and generally anti-establishment) of the sort that ought to be welcome to the progressive contingent that the directors seem most concerned about, but it is these very images that have driven the museum directors to terminate the exhibition (at least for now). Perhaps Guston's own contention that "painting is 'impure,'" that "It is the adjustment of 'impurities' which forces its continuity" helps account for the disquiet Guston's work has caused these directors. Guston's use of these impudent images still needs to be interpreted: their impurities provoke, but they don't explain.
In his statement of support for the museum directors' action, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker asserted that "the context in the US has fundamentally, profoundly changed on issues of incendiary and toxic racial imagery in art, regardless of the virtue or intention of the artist who created it." Apparently Walker doesn't agree with the museum directors that Guston's work is too ambiguous. He has determined that it is "incendiary and toxic," a pretty clear interpretation. Perhaps it is incendiary, since it irritated both those who thought it had become too obviously political (Robert Hughes, among others) and now those who think it isn't political in exactly the right way. But if it is "toxic," it is for reasons that have little to do with the paintings themselves. It should be the purpose of a museum exhibition to make this point clear, to help viewers to, indeed, interpret complex works of art more fruitfully. Museums should not just abandon interpretation altogether.
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