Reading 1.

Theory and practise: What does it mean to work with theoretical material as a creative practitioner?
Garrett, Craig. “Thomas Hirschhorn: Philosophical Battery”, Flash Art no.238. October, 2004, pp. 90-93

Jones, Amelia “Meaning, Identity, Embodiment: the uses of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology in Art History”, Art and Thought, Ed.s Arnold, Dana and Iverson, Marhearet. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, pp.71-90.

The texts; one written by an editor and writer for a contemporary art magazine, Craig Garrett, the other by art historian, critic and author, Amelia Jones, concern seemingly differing subjects.

Jones’ work, explores the way meaning is reached using the philosophical viewpoint of Merleau-Ponty’s, between the subjective nature of the interpreter and the possibility of non-subjective judgement. This argues for ‘a reciprocal interrelation between the viewer and the subject who is identified as its maker’. The idea that the spectator (critic) is more than involved with the view, because of their own subjectivity - as termed by Foucault the ‘author function’- is worth examining in respect to Garretts piece on the artist Hirschhorn which focuses on the controversy surrounding his use of ‘lofty subjects’ (of whom Foucault ironically is one).

As one critic espouses ‘(Hirschhorn) has dragged these writings out from the gold standard vault and mixed them with the dross of material reality in an act of supreme irreverence’. This reaction seems to concur with Jones’ ‘the contingent nature of subjective existence in the world’ - we only exist in relation to others.

Interestingly Hirschhorn is aware of this, when in answer to the statement that ‘he incorporates these historical thinkers in a parasitic fashion’ , he identifies that misunderstanding, incomprehension and inattention is unavoidable.

Artists work whose subject matter or ‘meaning’ is argued over are many, examples like those of photographer Diane Arbus, that she photographed "freaks" or, worse, made freaks of those she photographed , or Robert Mapplethorpe ‘reducing blacks and gays to objects of desire’ .

The nature of the controversy often comes to overshadow the artist. Garrett is pointedly more interested in the critical debate about Hirschhorns’s employment of philosophy, Jones’ in the arguments between thinkers and critics on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas.

Jones’ notes the impact of controversial criticism of the 1993 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, which she states ‘exemplify the tendency within the more conservative art critical establishment to paint those who address identity as somehow betraying the true meaning of the works . . . ‘

Charles Wright also on the 1993 Whitney said, ‘Popular media critics recognised the enemy and that enemy was themselves, a mythologically constructed ‘straight, white male’ – the pre-eminent protector of culture’.

One might argue in the case of Hirschhorn that little has changed.


Jones, Amelia. p. 73
Garrett, Craig. p. 90
supra p. 92
Jones, Amelia. p. 83
Garrett, Craig. p. 92
Baker, Kenneth, The Chronicle, October 19, 2003, http://articles.sfgate.com/2003-10-19/entertainment/17514404_1_elisabeth-sussman-guest-curator-first-modern-art
Haber, John. Attitude Adjustment, 1993. http://www.haberarts.com/whitny93.htm
Jones, Amelia. Notes p. 89
Wright, Charles A. “The Mythology of Difference: Vulgar Identity Politics at the Whitney”. Art, Activism and Oppositionality. Essays from Afterimage. Ed. Kester, Grant H. United States of America. Duke University Press. 1998. P 79.