Barry Schwabsky on 'A Critic's Job of Work' at The Nation

Poet and art critic Barry Schwabsky contributes to The Nation "A Critic's Job of Work," a stellar essay about an art critic's labors, adapted from the introduction to his recently published Verso collection The Perpetual Guest, which includes many articles, reviews, and essays written by Schwabsky just like this one. He writes: "It’s not just that I like my job and want to keep it; I also think the critical distance of the spectator is in itself worth preserving and developing." From the beginning:

Art was no part of my milieu when I was growing up; nor was art criticism. I must have first heard tell of that profession in the movies. I dimly recall watching a horror film about the enmity between an artist who declares “I live by my hand!” and a critic whose motto is “I live by my eye!” After the critic murders the artist, a pair of disembodied hands takes revenge by tearing out his eyes.

Yet I remember, too, the grade-school art teacher who showed us reproductions of works by Matisse and Picasso. When I made a crayon drawing of some downhill skiers—I’d never seen a ski slope any more than I’d met an art critic—she praised my decision to have one of the skiers cut off by the bottom edge of the paper. She thought this very sophisticated. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. That was probably my first practical experience of art criticism, and it made me at least nebulously aware that what someone sees in a picture isn’t necessarily just what its maker meant to put there.

Many years later, I learned of Marcel Duchamp’s view, usually paraphrased as “The viewer completes the work.” It’s a dictum I repeat regularly. What Duchamp proposed was that “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” I suspect that he did not know—nor did I, until after I was already familiar with Duchamp’s idea—that Walt Whitman had much earlier declared that “the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does.”

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