Arts Professional Story: Lori Waxman

What is the state of Arts Criticism in general (from Chicago to beyond)?

I’m really not sure. I don’t actually read a whole lot of art criticism, since what I’m actually interested in is art and the criticism it offers about the world—not art criticism, and the criticism it offers about art. Great criticism, even good criticism, can tease out these aspects of art, and if I‘m struggling with individual oeuvres or works of art, I might turn to criticism for help. But mostly I turn to the art itself and try to start there.

Why I myself write criticism is that writing has proven for me to be an effective medium through which to think. Some people push their thinking forward via conversation, or through making, or by going for a run. I write. And what I write about is art because it is the medium which for me works most passionately and promisingly through the possibilities for living today. (This is not, of course, what all art does, or even tries to do. But art that involves me in sensations and thoughts lacking from everyday life—because life doesn’t always allow for the full experience of its comedies, tragedies or banalities—is the art I hope for. Art can provide a place in which to do some of the living that gets left out of contemporary life itself.)

I guess in the end the writing of criticism is for me a fairly selfish exercise. That my writing gets published and at least sometimes read seems to indicate that some people find what I have to say about art interesting, whereas what I’m interested in is what artists have to say through their own work.

How can artists, or other budding art critics, garner exposure from their own writing and develop a presence?

Basically what you’re asking here is, How do I get published? I can only answer this question based on my own experience, and how I got published has a lot to do with school. When I was in college at McGill University, I wrote art reviews for the school paper, a practice I continued in graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Obviously these were not paying gigs, but they offered a great first set of experiences in producing criticism for an audience that cared; in trying out a variety of voices and styles; and in learning to deal with editorial criticism of my own texts (never easy!). My first paid review appeared in the New Art Examiner while I was still a student, and that came about because I took a seminar with the magazine’s editor, Kathryn Hixson, through which she came to know my writing and opinions. After gaining a modicum of credibility and confidence through publishing with her, I started to send clippings to other magazines, like Parachute and Tema Celeste, asking if they were looking for new reviewers. They often were, and I was always excited to write for a new venue. Eventually I proposed feature ideas, and eventually some of them were given the okay.

Less traditional sites of criticism that I’ve participated in include a long-lost Chicago ‘zine called FGA, which stood for Fucking Good Art, and which was a blast to work on because it was immediate, responsive, and very sassy, and it did not take itself too seriously (albeit seriously enough to get produced). I’ve also over the past couple years developed a performance called the “60 wrd/min art critic,” where I set myself up in a public space for a couple of days and write reviews on demand, in 20 minute increments, for any artist who wants one. That endeavor probably offers my most engaged commentary on the act of criticism itself, and it’s one in which I basically turn the entire enterprise upside down. Everything becomes transparent, the power dynamic between critic and artist is reversed, there’s no hiding behind a byline, I get exposed to art I might otherwise not see or write about, and the Catch-22 that can leave emerging artists outside the loop—in order to have a show you need a review, in order to get a review you need a show—gets circumvented. What I did not expect was the profound discomfort I felt the first time one of the participating artists read her review in my presence. I’ve gotten more or less used to this over time, but the situation intensified for me the fact that there is a living, breathing human being on the other end of the art+critic=review equation, that the full equation in fact looks like artist+art+critic=review. Ultimately the performance doesn’t solve criticism’s problems; it makes them glaringly visible, alongside all of its constituent parts.

I’m sure there are plenty of other routes for “developing a presence,” as you put it, and today these might include activities like blogging. The above is just my own particular story, or at least part of it.

What/where is your favorite place to read criticism and why?

All the magazines I write for send me free contributor copies, so every month new issues of  Artforum and Modern Painters arrive. They go straight to the bathroom. This is my favorite place to read criticism, and if an article really catches my interest it might eventually find its way to the kitchen, for sustained reading over lunch.

Lori Waxman teaches part-time in the art history department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, writes criticism for Artforum, Modern Painters, and various museum publications, and is currently working on a Ph.D. about walking as an artistic device.