As The Chronicle's liberal columnist du jour passé and a proud member of The Duke Review's Hall of Shame, I can't help but come to the defense of my latter-day successor Maureen McClarnon, who was attacked in the latest issue of that illustrious publication by Eric Adler, a graduate student in classical studies.
What really gets me is not that I completely disagree with Adler's position or that he seems incapable of comprehending a fellow writer's argument. As a matter of fact, I don't even agree with Adler's description of McClarnon's position-that art is supposed to be separate from politics. What really gets me, though, is that Adler commits the very error of which he accuses his target-he provides no aesthetic argument.
Adler's comments on Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" have no substance behind them at all: He says that "one need not be Jed Perl to realize... that [Ofili's] work exists as a political provocation only" and he answers his own rhetorical question of whether the piece has enough merit to warrant hanging in the Brooklyn Museum of Art with a resounding, "It doesn't, of course."
Too bad he doesn't give us any reasons for either of these claims.
Personally, I'm not quite sure what to make of "Mary," which shows a black Virgin surrounded by elephant dung and pictures of naked butts from pornographic magazines. It's an artistic provocation, flying in the face of traditional representations of Christ's mother-but to what purpose, I'm not sure.
It certainly comments on the fact that our artistic tradition is biased in favor of "white" figures, and eschews the kind of images Ofili highlights, like excrement and nakedness. In addition, I think it should be interpreted as an attempt to establish an alternative aesthetic standard, one based on African nature rather than the European class.
Not that I necessarily think that this new standard would be a good idea-but offering it, and opening a discussion about it, is what makes a work like "Mary" interesting. Now this kind of aesthetic discussion seems to be something Adler is incapable of entering.
In addition to missing his own point, Adler misses several of McClarnon's. For example, he claims that she writes that politics should not interfere with art. However, a passage from the original article that The Duke Review has helpfully reprinted shows that this is not what McClarnon says at all: She says, and I quote, "No one person should have the power to decide what the nation should or shouldn't see." This is about the power of one individual (Rudy Giuliani), not about left- or right-wing politics.
Adler also does not seem to understand the distinction between an artist and a show-there was never a question of anyone or any institution supporting Olifi directly; it was only an issue of whether his artwork should be included in a show of many works (some controversial, others not at all) in a museum that is to some extent publicly funded.
But what am I thinking-a writer for The Duke Review who comprehends, reproduces and addresses or critiques another's writing? That would almost be like writing an actual argument.
But apart from all that, I feel the overwhelming need to address the issue where Adler finds an amazing overlap between right-wing ideas about aesthetics and McClarnon's: Both, he asserts, want to separate art from politics.
This position, I'm afraid, is just incredibly naïve and outdated (it's hardly surprising that the New Criterion quote Adler gives is from 1982). Sorry Eric, but art has been intertwined with (or tainted by, as you might say) politics since the dawn of time.
Artistic statements, or works of art, are not and cannot be made in a vacuum completely apart from the society in which the artist lives. Some art might try to-and succeed in-transcending its time in a variety of ways, yet that merely obscures its origin-but does not erase it. That Shakespeare wrote in Renaissance England, that the Nok "Thinker" was created in Nigeria in the last millennium (see Recess) or that Ofili is producing his art now inevitably shape these artworks-and turn them, in some way or other, into a commentary on their time.
The sooner you recognize that, the sooner you might be able to create an argument that makes us think, not cringe.
Norbert Schürer is a student in the Graduate Program in Literature and senior editor of Recess.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.