Acknowledgement
Judgement
On making judgements about art, McCaughey later say this:
“The task of Criticism is to make judgements – good and bad. If you’re not making a judgement then you’re not really looking. The essence of criticism is the act of judgement. You’re never right and you’re never wrong, but it is absolutely essential that the critic makes the judgement up and down.”
OA Rule #4 – You must take a discerning approach and make a judgement on all art and all artists.
Forgive the length of this excerpt, but I think it needs to be reproduced in full. On the subject of writing about Aboriginal Art John McDonald has this to say:
“It is important that we don’t ghettoise the writing on Indigenous Art – that it doesn’t become a separate category. I think if we’re going to do justice to Indigenous Art, we have to basically pay it the same kind of attention that we pay to non-Indigenous Art and we have to ask some of the same questions. We have to be critical about the work.
There was a controversy a few years ago about if one could be truly critical about Aboriginal Art. Yes you have to be culturally sensitive, yes you have to understand that the basis of a lot of this art, particularly the art done by people in outback communities, is wildly different to the art which is made to buy and sell in the city…
…So Indigenous Art requires a special certain framework I find. When you talk about it you have to explain your premises, you have to get a few things across – you can’t just plunge in. But on the other hand, i think ideally you should able to be a lot more up front with it that most of the articles we read. Most of the articles we read are sort of stories about the artist – where they came from, what they did, and there is a general happy feeling about it that we don’t want to go into some of the other stuff.”
There are quite a few parallels here between Aboriginal Art and work by artists with disability. In particular the last sentence is interesting because it seems to question the role of biography in criticism, which always has ‘its eye on the object’. This has been an ongoing discussion in relation to Outsider Art. What this excerpt highlights also is the complexity of writing about artists with disability in a critically legitimate way. On the one hand, you need to acknowledge difference and consider the cultural and physical factors that influence an artist’s practice. On the other, you need to made a value judgement on the object itself in a way that is independent of these factors, and in a way that corresponds to the criteria placed on all other contemporary work.
OA Rule #5 – Understand and communicate difference as well as cultural / physical factors that influence an artists practice, but don’t focus on it beyond what is necessary to put forward your premise.
Taking this a bit further, we can bring forward another rule, which in fact comes before all others and could be considered to be the most important:
OA Rule #6 – Have a premise.
Once you have this premise in place…
OA Rule #7 – Interrogate the work as you would any other contemporary work.
“Theory is a box of tools, and you use the tool that is necessary for the occasion. If you want to hammer in a nail you use a hammer, if you need to do a screw you use a screwdriver. A lot of people think that you need to use the whole toolkit and that’s when theory gets a bad name. There is no criticism without some kind of theory.”
While it’s probably fair to say that work by artists with disability doesn’t actually get much theory applied to it at all (beyond its consideration under the banner of Outsider Art), the rule taken from this is:
OA Rule #8 – Only apply theory that is reasonable and relevant.
