Comments on: Theory Free…Not http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/theory-freenot/ By Deborah Barlow Fri, 18 Dec 2009 03:38:25 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 By: Elatia Harris http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/theory-freenot/#comment-971 Elatia Harris Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:00:29 +0000 http://slowmuse.wordpress.com/2007/12/19/theory-freenot/#comment-971 For my painting career, I tried to remain outside theory while including it in my awareness. I didn't want the pigeon-holes for myself, and wondered why anyone would tolerate them. This is quite different from failing to value consistency or vision, and it also never left me feeling at an emotional disadvantage when I painted or thought about painting. After all, if you cannot or will not say what you are as a painter or how you are affiliated with other painters doing work like yours, then you are trusting your instincts, and instincts tend to be rather unfriendly to theory. But I have to look at where all this got me -- all this rejecting of -isms and refusing to be an -ist. I created a great deal of confusion in the minds of viewers -- critics and other intellectuals, friends, gallerists, potential clients. I seemed never to represent any "flavor of the month" they could believe in, or to be a part of what they could understand as the coming thing. And I misunderstood how much the classification mania of the art establishment drove the career progress an artist could make. Perhaps one can't ever truly be outside the system -- only irrelevant to it. Post-modernism engineered a slow breakdown of these taxonomies, but then became, itself, theory-ridden. I saw the way I negotiated all that as the price of being authentic, and even from this distance I still see it that way. Authentic, yes. Intelligent, no. For my painting career, I tried to remain outside theory while including it in my awareness. I didn’t want the pigeon-holes for myself, and wondered why anyone would tolerate them. This is quite different from failing to value consistency or vision, and it also never left me feeling at an emotional disadvantage when I painted or thought about painting. After all, if you cannot or will not say what you are as a painter or how you are affiliated with other painters doing work like yours, then you are trusting your instincts, and instincts tend to be rather unfriendly to theory.

But I have to look at where all this got me — all this rejecting of -isms and refusing to be an -ist. I created a great deal of confusion in the minds of viewers — critics and other intellectuals, friends, gallerists, potential clients. I seemed never to represent any “flavor of the month” they could believe in, or to be a part of what they could understand as the coming thing. And I misunderstood how much the classification mania of the art establishment drove the career progress an artist could make. Perhaps one can’t ever truly be outside the system — only irrelevant to it. Post-modernism engineered a slow breakdown of these taxonomies, but then became, itself, theory-ridden.

I saw the way I negotiated all that as the price of being authentic, and even from this distance I still see it that way. Authentic, yes. Intelligent, no.

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