Another Fine Mess: Sally O'Reilly Ponders Themed Group Shows

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HOW GLORIOUS TO HAVE TRANSPORT LAID ON, IN THE FORM OF ART, TO CARRY US TO ALL CORNERS OF THE AESTHETIC, SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, EPISTEMOLOGICAL, FANTASTICAL AND ABSURDIST UNIVERSES. In any one exhibition we might be invited to think about Albanian Communist Party rallies, the camouflage tactics of stick insects and the intensity of a wall, in genres that might run from autobiography to poetry to pedagogy. For the writer or curator a limber approach to this heterogeneous thing called art is at once invigorating and exhausting. It invariably mutates into impostor syndrome on a regular basis, as art generally has a very casual relationship to epistemology. The artist, on encountering an image, document or idea, does not necessarily worry about its authority, veracity or authenticity, but values its interestingness and malleability. And critics are more drawn to what artists do with the scraps or swathes of knowledge they possess, generally favouring mensuration over facticity.

While this liberates us from traditional modes of history and knowledge, it not only leaves us somewhat adrift, but can also have a diluting or flattening effect, as James Elkins wrote in an article in Frieze magazine (Issue 118): 'Visual studies was to provide serious political critique, an analysis of the operator, a renewed interest in the gaze, a rethinking of post-colonial theory, a genuinely international scope, a reach beyond the art world and beyond the narrow precincts of the humanities. But that promise has been dissipated, and the field remains a collage of special-interest studies that fail to cohere into a larger project or extend beyond the familiar confines of fine art and mass media.' The upshot of Elkins' beef is that 'the art world is a productive mess, and that's fine if you are not interested in saying what the art means', by which we can surmise that this is not fine with Elkins. What …