CHARLES HARRISON is a critic and art historian living in England. Since 1970 he has been associated with the collaborative artistic practice Art & Language, whose journal Art-Language he has edited.  Currently Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the Open University, Harrison began writing for Studio International more than forty years ago, and is recognized as one of the most respected theorists of modern art and culture working today. He has edited or authored more than a dozen books, among them Essays on Art & Language (Oxford, 1991, and Cambridge, Mass., 2001), Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art & Language (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), and most recently, Painting the Difference: Sex and Spectator in Modern Art (Chicago, 2005).   Christopher Heuer and Matthew Jesse Jackson conducted an electronic exchange with Harrison following publication of the last of these.

Art & Language Dialectical Materialism (Dark Green), 1975 Photostat, dimensions variable Collection Charles Harrison

Heuer: Charles, the question of "difficulty" comes up throughout Painting the Difference,   in your description of artists' working processes (e.g. Degas' monotypes), in certain receptions of post-war American abstraction, and most personally, in your account of what you see increasingly lacking in art criticism. At one point you lament certain writers' tendency to avoid nothing less than "the difficult enterprise" of description. The book, at least as I see it, offers a corrective to  this development in its very form, consisting as it does of (among other things) a scrupulous set of accounts of individual works, and an eye on the minutiae of their production - in sum a collective argument for, well, specificity. Given the current ideological moment's overt hostility to notions like, say, "difficulty," are you at all optimistic about art criticism, or about the writing of this kind of art history? I ask this question, of course,  against the backdrop of Art & Language, which has its own reputation for "difficulty," and whose long-standing approach to the institutionalization of the avant-garde (and more recently, the institutionalization of "avant-garde" art criticism) - would seem to raise any number of related issues...

Harrison: I certainly wouldn’t want to defend difficulty for its own sake. But in a world in which what seems to be expected is instant ease of transmission, it seems important to stress both that the work of critical cultural production tends to require a degree of exertion, and that a matching concentration may be required to recover what’s of value in art – as in much else. The enterprise of description is linked to this, since it is through description – and, I believe, only through description – that we gain an understanding of what that exertion entails. What I mean by description is some adequate representation, whether articulated or not, that is checkable against the produced properties of the work in question. While there may be no such thing as a fully objective account of a work of art, it remains the case that interpretations are always open to being falsified if the readings they produce can be shown to fail as descriptions in this sense. Of course, as problems are encountered in generating descriptive accounts, those accounts tend to become interpretative and value-impregnating – as it were involuntarily. It is through this process that the real historical character of artistic work is recovered. But it is precisely for this reason that I distrust those kinds of description that are the mere creatures of historical and cultural generalisations. As I understand it, what’s meant by closure is a refusal to persist with the enterprise of description beyond the point at which the results are of service to a particular theory or set of assumptions. For some while now (over thirty years) that kind of refusal has found spurious justification in the reaction against modernist ‘formalism’ (which is to say its emphasis on descriptive analysis), and in the critique of those claims to disinterest that lay at the heart of modernist criticism. It is a consequence of the resulting prevalence of institutional theories of art that individual works are typically treated as kinds of signpost directing attention back into the culture. Under this regime, the writer who once identifies the indicated direction need do no further descriptive work, but can go on to generate limitless copy on the analysis of cultural context. In so far as the ensuing art history and criticism have been generative of critical judgements on specific works, those works have generally been made to appear quite unresistant to the tendency of the art history and criticism in question – and thus of little interest in themselves, at least as the objects of the writing.

Art & Language Index: The Studio at 3 Wesley Place; Drawing (i), 1981-2 Pencil, ink, watercolor and collage on paper 76 x 162 cm Collection Tate, London

As regards the practice of Art & Language, however, it can be said that the objects that practice has generated – whether textual or pictorial or whatever – have generally been difficult to describe, and often contradictory in their apparent direction. They are consequently frustrating of attempts to escape from their internal detail into the vocabulary of cultural topicalisations. This may not have been good for business, but it has certainly been good for me. The need to confront the difficulties in question has remained central to my education as a writer on art over the course of nearly forty years.

Heuer: Speaking of internal detail (and you as a writer) didn't you just author a chapter on Renaissance printmaking [in Making Renaissance Art, 2007]? How did this come about?

Harrison: That's much easier to answer. The book in which the chapter appears is one of four that compose a new Open University course on Renaissance Art. I joined the course team out of interest, and I volunteered a contribution on prints partly with a view to some self-education. I've been a very amateurish collector of prints for a long time. Years ago, when I was a student, I found an early impression of Marcantonio Raimondi's engraving of The Angel appearing to Joachim, made after Dürer's woodcut. It hangs over my desk as I write. The chapter was written as a teaching text, and I started it with a close comparison of the engraving and the woodcut, as a means to introduce the virtues and differences of the two main print media - and the ways in which they served the development and exchange of pictorial imagery in the Renaissance. Getting out of the modern can sometimes feel like being on vacation.

Heuer: Vacation or no, earlier art - particularly "early modern" art - often seems to figure heavily in your writing on more contemporary developments, more so than with other critics. I'm thinking not just of Painting the Difference (which opens with a discussion of Titian and Sophonisba Anguissola) but also of your earlier work on landscape painting. Is this a function of your teaching? Institutional structures being what they are (and I'm speaking just about the US) this kind of rigorous, cross-epoch analysis seems to be becoming rarer and rarer.

Harrison: I guess I've always looked at a lot of stuff. I'm rarely happier than with a large museum at my disposal. At the point when I switched from undergraduate study of literature to art history I had it in mind to be a medievalist: a fascination with Arthurian and related poetry got transferred to an enthusiasm for French romanesque sculpture. That and Raphael's Stanze (another undergraduate subject) are still kinds of markers for me of how good art can be at first hand. I do try to keep a larger history in mind when I'm teaching, and I relish any opportunity to draw from a wide field of examples. Each year for the past 30 I've taught on a specialised modern-art summer school run by the Open University, but where possible I've combined that with working on introductory courses in the Humanities, where there's a much wider survey. And this year I got to work on a broadly-based introductory course using the British Museum - with the global art and culture of some 5000 years to play with. My teaching may not have been very rigorous, but I had a great time. I've no patience with antiquarians, but I do think that art indifferent to history tends to show it. Abstract art was the great adventure of the twentieth century and I've always wanted students to see how good it can be, but - if we're honest - how much abstract painting matches up to the best figurative art of, say, the seventeenth century? A very small minority, I’d say. I know that such comparisons are a bit unreal - ahistorical, essentialistic and so on - but it does matter that our art be as good as we are able to make it (isn’t that what ‘art’ really means?) - and the cultures of the past offer diverse instances of what it has been possible for humans to achieve. It used to be the case that the market offered a kind of crude index of the relativities in question. It may be of interest that in recent years the market has often seemed to have settled for less - or to settle on less.

Art & Language Homes from Homes I, 2000-2001 114 panels, multiple media and mixed media, 38 in composite installation, 181.6 x 424.5cm, 76 distributed variably Composite part shown in studio installation Collection Centre d'art et de culture, Georges Pompidou, Paris

Heuer: A professionalized artworld now less-than-interested in actual professionalism, perhaps?

Harrison: Yes, though one has to acknowledge that professions get redefined - or rather the relevant competences do - and if the world changes around you there's not much future in sitting there moaning in whatever bit of ground you've managed to cling on to.

Jackson: This is more enjoyable than I might have expected. I feel as if it's an Art Historical “2001” and Charles gets to play HAL. Charles, your response to Christopher’s question about difficulty illuminates one direction of your work - toward an intense concentration on the art object's internal complexity - yet, I've always been struck by your commitment to projects that make complex theoretical writing available to a broad public. Whether you are in Berlin, Paris or New York, the bookstores offer Art in Theory as the definitive compendium of writing on art in the twentieth century – and the Open University series has become a standard text for modern art surveys.  Is there a kind of contradiction at work here? I can imagine a certain kind of art historian who might say that descriptive precision is all well and good, but maintaining an allegiance to resistant discursive complexity – at all levels of instruction -- is equally critical (something that the Art Since 1900 survey, for example, might imagine itself as doing). In other words, do the contextualized, necessarily edited and sometimes fragmentary texts in Art in Theory lose some of the very qualities that you most value in artworks? One could even say that these texts are rendered much more pliable for mobilization in projects of bland cultural contextualization. Am I comparing apples and oranges?

Harrison: Well, we all know what happened to HAL. He had his plugs pulled out one by one and lapsed into a pathetic incoherence. Hmm. I don't think that allegiance to 'resistant discursive complexity' should ever mean either that one celebrates difficulty for its own sake or that one puts up or maintains barriers against those who might want to be able to join the discourse - and I'd hope that that number might always include some of the people one gets to teach. One of the points about description is that it's a way of showing someone else what is there to be seen, so that they can at least get started. I don't see a contradiction - merely a different kind of answer to a different problem. The aim of the Art in Theory anthologies was not to mediate - though of course you can't help mediating to some extent - but rather to put a wide range of texts into people's hands. Yes you edit. Some of the texts we excerpted in the 1648-1815 volume came from two-, three-, or four-volume works. One of Diderot's Salons runs to some 400 pages. What do you do? Put the lot in and leave out everything else? I get pissed off with people who moan about the editing and only want complete texts. They're always specialist academics who probably have the texts to hand on their personal shelves - the ones they know about anyway. In fact in each of the three Art in Theory books the original source is given for every text, so is the location and extent of the edit. I'd be quite happy - though very surprised - if someone just used the books as a means to locate the original texts. In any case, I don't think that what you lose by reading just one passage from a long theoretical text is generally much like what you lose by failing adequately to attend to an individual art work.

OK, I've been involved with an artistic practice that has produced difficult works in textual form, and it's certainly the case that one of the motives behind that production was to get people to pay attention or else keep quiet. But Art & Language has always been an advocate of irresponsible or insurgent reading. And one of my reasons for involvement in the Art in Theory project was to equip students to become better read than their betters. As for bland cultural contextualization, that's going to continue whatever one does – but it does tend to be harder to get away with the more the diversity of the materials on offer has to be taken into account.

Art & Language No Secret Painting X, 2007 Painting and text I Painting 58.7 x 58.2 cm; text 91.2 x 68.7 cm Collection Lisson Gallery, London

Heuer: I think this is a crucial distinction - anthologizing and editing itself are of course not good or bad per se, but can be done badly or well; one of the most interesting things I find about the Art in Theory books (besides their heft, and, as Matthew noted, their omnipresence) is the way they, strangely enough, effectively demystify much of the writing on art in the process of, what would seem to be tacitly eulogizing it. I'm thinking specifically of my little sub-field (Dutch art history) which is shot through with a kind of logocentrism while not really having any meaningful "source" texts whatsoever; until recently it was bland cultural contextualization which held the day for many historians of this area because everybody refused to make a judgment about, to clip and edit what few texts there were (and which, as writing, are dreadful.) It seems the Art in Theory comps aim for a unique kind of encylopedism, one rigorous but also detached from any blind passion for completeness.

Harrison: Heart-warming comments on the AiT anthologies, which my co-editors will be cheered to read.

Heuer: We’ll send an invoice. No, more seriously, since Matthew brought up Art since 1900, I wondered if I might ask about Art & Language's recent response (‘Voices Off’, in Critical Inquiry 33, 2006) to the "Octoberists'"  (its term), specifically their presentation of certain strands of 1960s/1970s minimalism -  as it relates to institutional critique. Correcting what they see as a mischaracterization of their own work, A & L here seem to be objecting to a conflation of means and ends, writing: "It would be false, however, to suggest that the technical aesthetics of minimalism were exhausted by its role in creating the conditions of institutional critique" (p. 125).  I wonder if you could say more about this.

Harrison: I think this should be understood in the light of the article's ensuing argument. The tendency of Art since 1900 is to see Minimalism's supposed ushering in of institutional critique as consistent with a 'radical' opposition to the late high Modernism espoused by Greenberg and Fried, and to distinguish a progressive Conceptual Art in these terms from a reactionary Conceptual Art (including A & L) that is seen as still in thrall to Modernism. Our argument is: a) that Minimalism's specific attention to context and contingency entailed a constructive address to Modernist orthodoxy, and that this was in itself 'already' an effective kind of institutional critique; but that b) there is an aspect to Minimalism - and to some US post-Minimal Conceptual Art - that depends on a literal interpretation of the reductivist tendency in Modernist theory (which was always that theory's Achilles' heel); and c) that a consequent problem posed by Minimalism and its legacy was the risk that the baby of virtuality - for which Modernism had offered a robust defence - would be thrown out with the bathwater of immanent 'presence'. A motivating concern for Art & Language's early Conceptual Art was 'that the intellectual and imaginative space that virtuality had kept open would be closed down by a logically collapsing argument for literalism before that space had been thoroughly explored' ('Voices Off', p.127). We would certainly now see that concern as justified by subsequent events. Two reservations need to be entered. i) There is no thought that the strong wall-bound virtuality of early modernist painting can simply be recapitulated; we have to be thinking - in technical terms - of some kind of equivalence; which is to say that you can't just go on drawing the lines between the virtual and the literal or between 'art' and 'language' in one and the same place. ii) This was never and is not now just a short-term argument about how to get by in the coming season; there's no knowing how long might be entailed by the 'before' in the sentence quoted above.

Jackson: Besides challenging certain kinds of art history, the ‘Voices Off’ article lays out a compelling description of Art & Language’s activities.  I wonder if you could elaborate on some of the article’s key terms. You just deployed one of them -- “virtuality” -- which the article frequently juxtaposes with “literality.” Could you discuss the appearance of this term in Art & Language’s writings? “Virtuality” rings pleasantly in my ear, as a more flexible, less academic rendering of Modernist “conventionality.” Following this line of reasoning, I wonder if Art & Language’s practice has not been grounded from the start in the struggle to identify “ virtual spaces” -- zones that lend themselves to “more complex, less mechanical, less literal, and less sentimental” ('Voices Off', p.116) procedures of production and description? 

Harrison: In computing parlance a virtual space or surface is one not physically existing but made by software to appear so – and what follows, of course, is a vast market in interactive games. But the same resources are deployed in quite robust kinds of research and invention. We might think of virtuality by analogy with the way the picture plane functions in painting to avail certain kinds of engagement on the part of the spectator (if I may refer back to a topic I spent some words on in Painting the Difference). What this is is a virtual plane, marking the line of division between the world of the spectator’s present and the imagined, represented world of the picture. It is, as it were, the condition of possibility of certain kinds of transaction – social, sexual, historical and so forth - between the two; a technical instrument in the service of the realistic imagination. The picture plane may coincide with the literal surface of the picture, but it is conceptually distinct. Imagine a portrait where the painted figure points a finger out towards the spectator. If you could reach out in turn, the picture plane defines the point where your fingers would touch. In fact, of course, all you’d actually feel would be the literal surface of the canvas, and at that point the imaginative power of the representation would be suspended. But it’s important to note that you would not thereby be putting an end to a fiction. I suspect that a tendency to confuse the virtual with the fictional may have been responsible for some of the less justifiable claims made on behalf of ‘the Art of the Real’ in the later ‘60s and early ‘70s – Morris’s admonitions about painting’s ‘non-actual elusiveness, ’ and so on. The other side of that coin – of that confusion - is the more recent tendency of those who exploit on-line virtual worlds in order to ‘live’ fictional lives. The virtual ‘zones’ A & L has in mind are, on the contrary, conditions of the possibility of realistic inquiry and conjecture.

Jackson: While we’re in territory that straddles your role as a member of Art & Language and your writing as an independent art historian, could you discuss the practical significance of this bifurcation? How do the two roles currently inform each other in your writing, your thinking? Are there precedents for your position?  

Harrison: It’s never – or very rarely – just ‘my thinking’ and often not just ‘my writing.’ I’ve been immensely fortunate in being able to draw – for nearly forty years now - on the shared critical and conversational resources that Art & Language represents. As an artistic practice, Art & Language is the work of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden. I aim to be the first and best informed critic of that work. In turn, for most of what I write, Michael and Mel are the first and sharpest readers of drafts, and often substantial contributors to the arguments of finished texts. Such thoughts as I may have about art or anything else are of course informed by whatever I personally may have looked at and read, but I rarely make much of that looking and reading without some reference to the work and conversation of the studio. While I might try to bring an art-historically informed eye to discussion of work in the studio, the changing character of that work has served continually to reanimate and to recomplicate my interest in the art of the past. That’s the main – and considerable - practical significance as regards work published under my own name.  (There are two prevalent and polar misconceptions about the character of our working relations. One is that I tell Michael and Mel what to paint, the other that they tell me what to write. Both are unimaginative and demeaning.)

For texts published in the name of Art & Language there are various modes of production: some go out – usually into art-world contexts - without any intervention from me; some are written by Michael and Mel and passed to me for an editorial polish; some are composed of written contributions from each of us; some – like ‘Voices Off’ – are based on transcripts of conversations, or arguments thought- and talked-through between us in the studio.

I don’t know about precedents. I think most artists have tended to need someone they can trust who will come and look at emerging work and talk about it – so that’s nothing new.  And apart from those academics who are scared of art – which I’m not - anyone who writes seriously about art must want to get close to the practice. For as long as I can remember I wanted that – to be close to the practice, not just any practice but avant-garde practice. (Put it down to youthful reading of Apollinaire - or not.) I was lucky to be part of the generation of the original Conceptual Art movement in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when the barriers between ‘art’ and ‘writing’ got tunnelled through from both sides – by some people at least. I first became involved with Art & Language by writing about the work, putting it in exhibitions, and finally offering my services as editor of the journal, Art-Language (out of an entirely mistaken sense of mission to sort out the typos and make it all more readable). But A & L doesn’t offer ‘executive’ roles. My commitment to the enterprise meant that I became part of the work – part of the strange critical project that A & L represents. I don’t really see myself as an artist – simply because that’s not how I make my living – but it’s with an eye to the idea of ‘art’ rather than, say, to ‘academic standards’, that I try to work, and my commitment to the practice is unabated.  

Heuer: I suspect there exists a body of criticism which would see being “close to the practice” as in fact a hindrance to writing seriously about contemporary art...

Harrison: I’m sure you’re right. But I can’t really see that it ever helps to be ignorant about how things are made – whatever it is that they may or may not be made from. Of course there’s this idea – often advanced by those with secure institutional backing or with other unacknowledged loyalties - that one should aim to be ‘objective’. I’ve published a couple of books of essays on Art & Language and there’s this sniffy kind of question that reviewers tend to ask: can I really write proper criticism from within the practice? I guess my answer would be, judge the criticism on its merits then address the question. I don’t pretend to objectivity, nor do I seek to conceal my association with the practice. But I’m quite happy for what I write to be tested for its adequacy against anyone else’s account of the work in question.

Christopher P. Heuer teaches art history at Princeton University.
Matthew Jesse Jackson is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Visual Arts and Art History at the University of Chicago.