CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

In and Out of the Museum: Klaus Ottmann’s Astonishing Philosophical Art Criticism

Image by Jessica Pamp.

Most genres of writing are governed by some principle of unity. The novel traditionally has a plot structure; historical writing tells the story of a place or a national culture; and biographies present the life of a noted person. Even anthologies with multiple authors usually have an organizing theme: recent writing about Nicholas Poussin, say, or French social history. Collections of single-author art writing are interesting case studies, for then that unifying structure often comes from the writer’s theorizing. What gathers together Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism, Roger Fry’s essays about painting, and Clement Greenberg’s writing for The Nation is, mostly, the development of their theorizing. Baudelaire contrasts the painting of his hero, Eugène Delacroix with the emerging modernism of Édouard Manet. And Fry and Greenberg define their conceptions of formalism. Reference to theorizing often unifies art writing. Arthur Danto’s numerous collections of his critical essays almost inevitably appeal to his canonical account of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. And readers of Michael Fried’s books on a myriad of old masters and modernists expect allusion to his contrast between the two modes of composition developed in his early, renowned critique of minimalism.

A study of these examples is a good way to identify by contrast what is highly distinctive about In and Out of the Museum. The artists Klaus Ottmann admires are very varied. And so he gives each of them a distinctive, individual focus. They include Wolfgang Laib, a radically self-sufficient figure who gathers elements such as milk, pollen, rice, beeswax, and marble; Christian Marclay, who does video assemblages; Frank Stella, the abstract painter whose later works are relief sculptors; James Lee Byars, whose performances developed his longtime experience of Indian and Japanese culture; the minimalist........

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