Oh, the irony…

At the end of the summer of 2007 I was at my wits end. Heartbroken, confused, and suffering from profound spiritual anguish, I spent a lot of time sweating in front of the computer.   Full of inarticulate rage that could be directed towards nobody in particular, I focused on a crappy review that I had read on a website. Pretty pathetic, but in so doing, I was able to find my own voice, stuttering though it may be.  The ironic part is that I accuse the writer of being pretentious, and now I’m no different.  Oh the foolish cockiness of youth in its last feeble flush…

When I wrote this, I didn’t know Neckface that well, and, even more dangerously, I didn’t know the reviewer I was writing about. I got to know both of them much better after this. One comes to my weekly drawing salon sometimes, and the other would most likely stab me if he saw me. I leave it up to you guys to figure out which is which, and as far as I’m concerned it is water long under the bridge.  Since this is a blog about my art-writing, I have to include it, and I stand by what I said.

DAVID GREENGERG AND MANNERIST ART CRITICISM IN THE 21ST CENTURY

By Ted Barrow, 2007

Neckface, after Albrecht Durer

“At one time it is the deepening and spiritualizing of religious experience and the vision of a new spiritual content in life; at another an exaggerated intellectualism consciously and deliberately deforming reality…sometimes, however, it is a fastidious and affected Epicureanism, translating everything into subtlety and elegance, which leads to the abandonment of classical forms. But the artistic solution is always a derivative, a structure dependent in the final analysis on classicism, and originating in a cultural, not a natural experience…We are dealing here, in other words, with a completely self-conscious style, which bases its forms not so much on the particular object as on the art of the preceding epoch…” (Arnold Hauser The Social History of Art, vol. 2, p. 100)

Ok, admittedly I’m a bit out of the loop. For the last few months, whenever I condescend to check glob.anewyorkthing.com, I’ve said to myself, “why, all of a sudden, does this site suck so much? Who the fuck are all these hood-rats and dumb kids out in the Hamptons, what the fuck do all these essays, and “old NY street-character” -type pieces have anything to do with what I would find even remotely interesting? Where are the tits? Where’s the blood? Where’s the raw charisma? Oh, and where the fuck is A-ron?
Like I said, I’m out of the loop. I didn’t know that through some shake-up at the store, the blog that I had come to know and make feeble attempts at cool-hunting at had moved to nyglob.com.. The way that I see it, checking the site, either one, is like everyone’s dirty secret. I’m not gonna ask one of my friends what happened to A-ron’s blog, because to me that question is kind of on the same level as asking your friends which finger they use to jam up their own asses while masturbating to snuff films. It’s a dirty secret, which explains why I was a bit out of the loop on this big change.

So there I was, proverbial left index finger up my own ass, boredly scrolling down picture after picture of multi-colored hats on Harlem’s finest—or whatever—when I stumble upon a gem of an essay bearing the august banner of a title, “Neck Face & Mannerist Graffiti Art in the 21st Century”. Wow. I was floored. The author was the esteemed David Greenberg. I encourage you all to check out his page at myspace.com/poetdavidgreenberg.

When I read his essay, however, on the former blog of the anything store, I thought ah, what a perfect Mannerist art critic. According to his Myspace page, he is a poet, curator, art critic, band member, freelancer, and general dude on the street in the know. A casual scroll through his pictures is an advanced seminar in photo-beaming. I could, and probably will, do a separate essay on all of the rules of subtlety and tact that are broken with each of the photos and their captions, but for my purposes right now, I’ll leave that to some later date. My particular favorite is the one shot by Brooke Dillon and has Allen Ginsberg standing on a bed, naked, with David Greenberg shining a light up his ass—literally. There are plenty more like this, at least thematically.

In his essay, Greenberg begins with a scant definition of Mannerism, the sort of thing you could cut and paste off of Wikipedia, that for now I will accept as being generally true. He then takes the time to opine intellectual, making the bold claim that ” I’ve always considered Michelangelo to be the first Mannerist, as opposed to a Renaissance artist—most art historians would probably vehemently disagree.” Oh, really? And what art historians would those be? Surely it wouldn’t be the teacher of my, or any other survey on western art offered for first year students across the country, where they directly state that both Michelangelo and Raphael, in their later work show very clear signs of “seeds of dissolution” (Hauser) to the rigidity of the Classicism of the High Renaissance. Shit, you can find this on Wikipedia. Look up Raphael’s late Transfiguration, 1520. This kind of showing off, touting off his own opinions on the history of art against the so-called rigid theories of those academic smarties at Artforum, for example, would make Greenberg seem like the renegade he would like to be seen as, IF he was saying anything new. The problem is, he isn’t. Nobody’s disagreeing with your ground-breaking theory about Michelangelo and Mannerism there, buddy, so what the fuck are you really saying?

Once he defines Mannerism, albeit loosely, Greenberg waxes nostalgic and name-droppy about his time with Neckface, Everyone should read about what an insider this guys is. I won’t contest that, just yet. What I must ask, however, is: what does this have to do with Mannerism? According to any definition, and I’ll just refer to the big hulking quote above this essay, Mannerism is defined by its derivative relationship to the art that came before it. It can be overly spiritual or intellectual, or overly stylized and artificial, when compared to the stoic rigidity and calm of the High Renaissance. A typical Cinqueccento deposition painted by a mannerist would be charged with an almost neurotic and perverse mood, gestures exaggerated, the actual meaning of the scene riding backseat to the solution of aesthetic and peculiar intellectual problems that the artist has set out for himself. Think of it as a rare Nike dunk colorway, the De La Soul ones, for example. Once the functional solution of the shoe has been reached in 1985, they are twisted and riffed upon in 2005 by adding colors and patterns that make the shoe a piece of frivolous and fetishistic art, and not a functional piece of athletic equipment. Get it? Good.

The same goes for painting. The devotional and astoundingly technically beautiful aspect of High Renaissance painting is twisted into something stylized and artificial in Mannerism. No less fun to look at, but appreciated for different reasons. What does this have to do with Greenberg’s opinion of Neckface?

Absolutely nothing. That’s the point.

Once Greenberg makes his high-falutin’ claim to Neckface’s place in the pantheon of western art, he doesn’t really back it up. The rest of the essay is about where Greenberg, the art critic at large, thinks Neckface should go with his art, the little run-in’s they’ve had, squawkety-squawk. He seems mad at Neckface for ignoring his “musings” on him, and attempting to wrestle one of his drawings back from Greenberg in his “mad little traveling art show”. He takes jabs at Tony Shafrazi, outs Sacer, and maintains his tone of the all-knowing sycophant. One particularly annoying description is when Greenberg describes “the last vestiges of IRAK crew.” Are we to understand IRAK as the High Renaissance of 21st century graffiti, and then Neckface as, say, Parmagianino? How pretentious.

All very fun to read, though. Kind of. Neckface isn’t the mannerist here, by any definition of the word, Greenberg is. Again, I refer to my definition upstairs, in which Hauser discusses the “exaggerated intellectualism consciously and deliberately deforming reality.” It is very clear that Greenberg considers himself to be an intellectual, a direct inheritor of the poetic tradition of the beats. He asserts this in his poetry and the photos he chooses of himself with other accolades, even in his photos and Myspace friends (I was not aware that Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg maintained their own Myspace pages) and maybe the critical tradition of Renee Ricard. I even smell a little Michael Musto in there, too. When I say that he is a Mannerist critic, I mean it in the most derivative sense of the word. Mannerism can mean both “manneristic” and “mannered”. I’m thinking mannered, as in overly-affected. Greenberg’s prose is stylized, his points nothing more than academic posturing that only inform us about what he thinks of himself. It’s like he’s saying, “Look at me! I’m an art-critic. Here’s an art-term that most of you wouldn’t know about! Now let me tell a story about myself for a while,.. Keep dreaming, Tony!” Keep dreaming indeed. His poetry is the very definition of a “self-conscious style”, more about linking themselves to the themes of past, more original poets: junkies and hustlers, banal imagery of unrequited love, than they are about explorations of those themes. His essays on art are distinctly artificial, saying very little about the art itself and the experience of it, and more about the personalities and people associated with it.

Maybe that’s the point, though. It is, after all, an academic essay on the anything blog website, and not Artforum. Being that that is the case, just admit it. Don’t take this high tone with us, it makes us feel stupid.

Neckface, after Gustave Courbet