Thinking While Making Things : Open Thread

Of all the blunders the John McCain team made during the last presidential campaign, to my mind the single biggest error in judgment came when he suggested he needed to delay a debate in order to return to Washington to help address the economic crisis. It was a remarkable mistake because the response was devastating and should have been so obvious: “It’s going to be part of the president’s job to be able to deal with more than one thing at once,” said Barack Obama. In one fell swoop, the young senator with so much less experience looked more presidential. Again, though, the McCain team should have seen that response coming from a million miles away.

I thought of that turn in the campaign while reading Robert Storr's interview with The Art Newspaper about the role of art theory in making art. In general, I agree with much of what Mr. Storr noted, but the implication of his assertion that reading theory is so different from making art seems to be that the better you are at reading the theory, the worse your art will be:

[A] lot of people who do theory full time don’t really want to acknowledge that the process of making art is fundamentally different from the process of writing theory. And, therefore, even though you may share a vocabulary, you don’t share at all the same kind of generative process or goals. [...] People who have real theoretical minds read widely, they read selectively and they read for use.

I'm making a bit of a stretch here, but the idea seems to suggest that being really good at reading theory is so different from being really good at creating art that one would be hard pressed to find anyone who does both all that well. Taken to its logical conclusion, then, this would suggest that art making and art theory should be done by separate specialists.

Then I read Mark Staff Brandl's article for Proximity "Artists Write: Thinking While Making Things," (republished on Sharkforum). Mark argues that:

[T]here is a need for primary secondary literature: theoretical musings by artists, not critics, curators or professional theorists (unless they are artists first and foremost and do one of the latter activities as a sideline). [emphasis mine]

OK, so Mark's article delves significantly into one of the best comment threads ever on this blog (which as Mark notes, resulted in 198 comments), including this kernel in a comment by Mark:

[O]nly the journals, philosophy journals, and the like offer real theoretical opportunities. The glossies are the problem here, not the artists.

Robert and Mark are talking about different parts of the same issue. Robert is noting how so few artists read theory well, and Mark is noting how those who wish to write theory have so few opportunities to have it published. But I can't help but feel that Robert's opinion contributes in part to Mark's complaint.

In the end of the his article, Mark writes "I assert that artists are indeed thinkers...and deep ones, especially when they do not spout pre-digested, memorized, consensus approved jargon." In comparing the leader of the country with the potential leaders in contemporary art, I would side with Mark in saying our best theory could (if not should) come from our best artists. It makes no sense to me to suggest they can't excel at more than one thing at the same time. I would personally much rather read art theory by someone who makes it, knowing that their studio experience is the single best validation or refutation of their hypotheses. So long as that art theory is sound and compelling, obviously.

Consider this an open thread on whether art theory by artists is important.