Review: Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, edited by Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston

A meme I've posted in my college classroom declares: "Build up what you love instead of tearing down what you hate." It reminds my students that criticism—contrary to our colloquial usage—can be positive. The word "criticism" derives from the Greek word kritikos—being able to discern or judge something's value, and it is true that in English parlance it often conjures up associations of censure or harsh judgment. But criticism can also be an act of love. In my early years of writing criticism, I was terrified of seeming judgmental. I was so enamored of the creative process, and so honored to discuss it, that I avoided being negative to the point of sounding like a benign, albeit lyrical, cheerleader. As I grew to believe that artists and the institutions exhibiting them had a social responsibility, I was willing to be more exacting. When you truly love something, you want it to flourish, and that necessitates both nurturance and truth. In Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, editors Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston have compiled a set of essays and conversations that are rigorously honest about this and similar struggles writers face. Although Track Changes is ostensibly a guide for writing art criticism in general, it functions more as a wide-ranging set of reflections on how contemporary critics endeavor to balance political solidarity, pressing social concerns, and their own professional accountability. As a whole, it's a paean to the process of building up what you love when the rest of the world seems intent on tearing it down.In her introduction, Dayal relates that Track Changes evolved as a collective response to the accusation that art critics who see themselves as historically underrepresented in the mostly "white, male, heterosexual, cisgender" art world must have an agenda (12). Such a charge is typically a veiled insinuation of bias and a corresponding lack of critical objectivity. But as Dayal asserts, criticism has never been objective, nor should it ever be neutral. Indeed, a writer's commitment to a set of ideological or political concerns allows them to engage in reparative decision making that can help redress inequities and foreground social issues that might otherwise go unseen. Ergo, as Dayal writes, if an agenda can be thought of as a plan, and that plan helps a writer set parameters and in turn promote one's cause, it's a great starting point.A short opening chapter, meant to serve as "A Brief Practical Guide to the Editorial Process," addresses such basic questions as how a novice writer might decide where to pitch an article or determine and negotiate their rates. This in turn is followed by four major chapters: "Pitching and Commissioning"; "Writing" (which is further subdivided into three subsections: "Critique and Positions," "Form, Style, and Voice," and "Language and Vocabulary"); "Editing and Publishing"; and "Reading and Reflecting." The titles suggest a pragmatic focus, but the four guiding questions found on each section's opening pages are primarily conceptual and ethical, such as "How does authority factor into the act of critique?," or "How can a writer's language support access, inclusion, and education?," or my personal favorite, "Can critique be a form of care?" Given that all of the writers consider themselves members of, or allies with, one or more historically marginalized groups, their concerns tend to be shared, and therefore carry over from one piece to the next. This compounding effect is helpful, as it amplifies the multiple calls for collectivity, and allows readers to discern natural affinities.The "agendas" in this text are predominately feminist, but many center issues of race, and a number converge these two allegiances, while a few address sexuality or disability. The sincerity of these critics and their love for their causes is beyond question; their writing is by turns passionate, hopeful, angry, mournful, and urgent. I was most struck by Yves Jeffcoat's weighty observation in the essay "Write Heavy, Write Slow" that BIPOC writers who choose to center their identities may subject themselves to "exhaustion, existential questioning, guilt, traumatization, overload, and other problems" (58) and many readers will appreciate her counsel about how to care for themselves when delving into difficult research topics. Amy Fung's experimental essay "How to Review Art as a Feminist and Other Speculative Intents" alternates between pragmatism and poetry. Her more elliptical exhortations remind one that feminist writing was never meant to mimic what oppressed it, but that dissenting altogether may render us mute. She wisely implores one to consider: "How will we engage?" Equally heartfelt objections about the limits of language are seen in Lindsay Preston Zappas's "The Languages of All-Women Exhibitions," which examines the curatorial tendency to promote all-women exhibitions in the hyperbolic, hypersexual parlance of the market. Even as Zappas recognizes the need for single-sex shows, she is frustrated by the way institutions sell second-wave female artists using the stereotype of the "brash and wild feminist," perpetuating sexist tropes even as it attracts crowds. I recall seeing a poster for an all-woman exhibition at Deitch Projects in New York City in 2007, titled Womanizer, which used the notorious woman in a meat-grinder cover from Hustler magazine as its promotional image, and thinking, à la Zappas's thesis, that it was simply feeding the misogynistic beast.1The candor of a number of the authors regarding tacit cultural expectations of solidarity is notable. Among these are Merray Gerges ("What's Your Flavor? On Being a Critic of Color in February") and Annie Godfrey Larmon ("Dirt is Clean When There Is a Volume"), who squarely present the problems that arise when a critic is expected to unreservedly celebrate an artist's work merely because both are members of the same oppressed group. Gerges bluntly asks if critics of color are expected to represent—and if so, does that "inform whether they sugarcoat or critique bluntly?" (47). Likewise, must they always be the "mediator to white, uniformed audiences?" (48). Gerges's grievances are legitimate, and her observation that when you answer the editor's call during Black History Month your "visibility comes at a price" (50) reminded me of the 1995 Guerrilla Girls poster "Top Ten Signs That You're an Art World Token." One of the ten signs is "Your busiest months are February (Black History Month), March (Women's History), April (Asian-American Awareness), June (Stonewall Anniversary), and September (Latino Heritage)." That nearly thirty years later tokenism remains an issue suggests that the institutions and the elites who head them are still running the game. In a similar vein, Godfrey Larmon relates her frustration that concerns about being a woman artist are reductive, that in the wake of intersectional theory she should have moved on to "more nuanced questions of identity" (74). But Godfrey Larmon quotes artist and author Hannah Black to remind us that establishing "meaningful collectivity—without elision, domination, or uninflected hierarchy—against a capitalist class capable of extreme acts of violence and mass control" is very difficult (81). This is one of the few instances within Track Changes where a writer calls attention to the truth any socially cognizant person must acknowledge: as long as we grovel for a seat at this capitalist class's determining institutions, we will be subjected to their divide-and-conquer tactics and forced to be content with the meager spoils they ceremoniously (but not meaningfully) dole out between us. Tokenism only pays off in the short term, and your "agenda" can always be used against you as long as the powers that be control your paycheck. Identity politics are also deterministic, shortchanging an artist's (and critic's) ability to explore more individual—and universal—themes. As Black states in the same Artforum essay from which Godfrey Larmon took her quote: "It is difficult to live the multiple valences projected onto you by identity champions and identity critics: both to be a miraculous body, capable of absolving white and misogynist institutions just by your presence, and to have this miraculous power ascribed to a narcissistic desire for difference."2For a socially conscientious text, the paucity of critique regarding economic disparity in an increasingly cruel system and how poverty functions as the most intractable barrier to artworld success was disappointing. Reading Dayal's introduction, where she states that "those underrepresented in the field—whether because of class, race, education, or geography" (18) need to rely on each other—and stresses the need to work "toward unionization" (20), I was hopeful that this text might actually focus on class, as well as gender and race. Poor artists have little time, not to mention emotional bandwidth, to make work at all (even aside from the problem of not being able to afford art supplies). I have long been a fan of Ben Davis, whose 2013 book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, explores these issues. At the end of his manifesto, Davis declares that art's full potential to change society for the better will remain unrealized if we continue to ignore the conditions class determines: "In the absence of such a perspective…its representatives will turn in circles, responding to the same problems without ever arriving at a solution."3 The words "solidarity" and "collectivity" appear frequently in Track Changes, but without the recognition that these terms are rooted in class struggle and foreground an economic interdependence, we in the art world will indeed turn in circles around race and gender, waiting for our designated month to be allowed to speak.