Note to Self: Write Like Schjeldahl

I want to be Peter Schjeldahl when I grow up.

I joined Medium to practice art writing beyond what my graduate school academic training had taught me. I was a writer before I got interested in art — at least, that’s how I fancied myself. But somewhere along the way I stopped really being able to call myself a writer, after all, the only thing I was writing was academic. I was still a reader though, and that’s how I encountered Peter Schjeldahl (1942–2022). My first experience with Schjeldahl’s criticism was the book Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988–2018. It changed everything I thought I knew about art criticism.

You’ll be seeing a lot of articles about Peter Schjeldahl since he died on October 21st of this year. He has been writing journalism since the 1960s and his art criticism has appeared in ARTnews, The Village Voice, 7 Days, and, most famously, The New Yorker. Schjeldahl’s background is as a poet, and his love for the craft of writing, shines through all he does.

Art writing has a bad problem with incoherence. And jargon. And tedium. And meanness. And, frankly, nonsense.

In Peter Schjeldahl’s writing you will find someone with unrelenting enthusiasm, wit, and grace. They’re admirable qualities I think anyone in the arts could aspire to. I want to be Peter Schjeldahl when I grow up — or, anyway, when I get better at writing. Here’s what I’m trying to learn:

Schjeldahl As Creator

There is an oddly prevalent idea out there that critics don’t make anything, they just tear down people who actually put the effort into making things. It can certainly feel that way if you’re the one getting criticized for something you’ve poured your heart and soul into.

As Schjeldahl knew, good critics do make things: “Criticism at best is a performing art, a minor, lively art like musicals or stand-up comedy. It makes something out of something, unlike the major arts that make something out of nothing.”

A good essay of criticism is a work of art in its own right, and Schjeldahl does this marvelously. I devoured two books of Schjeldahl’s art criticism (the second book was The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978–1990) and many of these essays were about art exhibitions I had never seen before. I didn’t need to, I was here for Schjeldahl.

Besides, you have not lived until you’ve read Schjeldahl’s casting of art stars on a baseball team.

Cindy Sherman, third base: middling range but super quickness, Gold Glove, hasn’t missed a ball hit her way in two seasons…disciplined hitter, pulls inside pitch for distance…selfless player, cinch to sac bunt or hit behind runner.

[…]

General Managers: Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns.

Manager: Leo Castelli

Coaching Staff: Louise Bourgeois, Ellsworth Kelly, Malcolm Morley, Richard Serra, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol.

It’s a scream.

Schjeldahl as Art Lover

There’s no sense of Schjeldahl trying to fake objectivity. He can love something with abandon, and reading his work we get a sense that this is a man truly in awe of art. He loves artists, the capability of art, looking at art, writing about art, and he’ll defend it, if necessary.

But I also love that Schjeldahl doesn’t try to over intellectualize his love of art. Take this from a review of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1989 Warhol show in 7 Days:

“On an occasion so gaga that it begs for curmudgeonly demurral, I’m just another happy face in the crowd. I love the show. I love Warhol, with a fan’s abandon. The feeling isn’t so much a warm pace in my heart, an organ not notably engaged by this artist, as a flat spot among the folds of my brain, from where they got run over in the sixties.”

I can’t help but think that it’s a response Warhol would have been pleased with.

Or how about this reflection on Willem de Kooning?

“It’s humiliating how overqualified de Kooning is for the uses of this half-century […] It’s like badly needing a screwdriver and going to the toolbox only to find it — damn! — filled with the crown jewels. De Kooning is unplugged from art of the last three decades as the soul is unplugged from the self is unplugged from the body is unplugged from paradise, and the parts lie around where anyone can ignore them.”

Even in an art world obsessed by de Kooning, this might be one of the most ringing endorsements of his work I’ve ever read.

Schjeldahl As Hater

Of course, he doesn’t love every piece of art, that’s not what I’m getting at, but I don’t think his criticism is ever mean-spirited. He was a poet first, and with the poet’s sensitivity he remembers that what he is seeing is the result of someone’s protracted work: “I try to remember that I am just visiting where the artist has to live. But if I would be sorry to have done what the artist is doing, I say so.”

I don’t always agree with Schjeldahl, but who has ever encountered a critic they’ve agreed with 100% of the time? In my case he called Francis Bacon “my least favorite great painter of the twentieth century” in a New Yorker article from 2009. I think Francis Bacon might be one of the best painters of the twentieth century, and certainly one of my personal favorites. But he is never unfair in his assessment.

Well, at least I don’t think so. Artist Richard Serra famously said that Schjeldahl’s criticism of Serra’s Tilted Arc smacked of “fascism.” But at risk of attracting Serra’s ire myself (if you’re reading this, sir, I loved your 2016 show at MASSMoCa), I’m on Schjeldahl’s side here:

“There is something new this week on the plaza of the Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan: nothing. It’s worth a visit. You may never in your life see anything more not there — quintessence of gone, Absence City — than Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc now that it has been lumbered off in pieces to a Brooklyn warehouse, leaving a slab of sparkling vacancy twelve feet high and a hundred and twenty feet long. You may or may not feel, as I do, sweet relief, like that of a kid when the school bully moves away.”

Schjeldahl as Moralist

As a lover of art, Schjeldahl also has a lot to say about the more pernicious aspects of the art world. Nobody is quite beyond his notice. An artist can be critiqued making artworks “like a treatise on the physics of baby-holding”, a show for being conceived of “on the Planet of the Scholars”, writers for trotting out “the pathetic fallacy of attributing conscious actions to artworks.”

Take this, from a from a note about art auctions in 7 Days from November 22, 1990:

“Money and contemporary art got married in the nineteen-eighties. The couple was obnoxious and happy. Money brought the allure of power to the match, and art brought the power of allure. […] Like all leading couples, art and money understood their responsibility to model style and manners for society’s improvement. Their style was nakedness, and their custom was to fuck in public.”

Or this, from a review of a show of Félix González-Torres:

“So delicate is the pitch of Gonzalez-Torres’s communication that curatorial intrusions grate more than usual. Why do artists put up with it? Only artists and zoo animals, that I can think of, regularly suffer the indignity of being bracketed with officious verbiage in on-site labels. Both should bite their keepers.”

Schjeldahl loves art enough to defend it from nonsense, both from artists and from art world folks. May we all have such dedicated defenders.

Schjeldahl As Teacher

And if you don’t know anything about art, you’ll learn a lot from Schjeldahl’s criticism. He explains art concepts with an enormous amount of grace, you hardly feel like you’re being taught anything. Take this, from a discussion of modernist Arshile Gorky in the New Yorker:

“The safest and loneliest place in the world, for a devotee of modern art, is within arm’s length of any first-rate painting by Arshile Gorky, the subject of a galbanically moving retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In that zone, where the artist’s decisions register kinesthetically, it is hard to doubt the value of the modernist adventure: a bet on the adequacy of sheer form, in the right hands, to compensate for a lost faith in established orders of civilization.”

Where else has there been such a succinct and elegant statement about the end-goal of modernism?

Or even a simple sentence that sums up an entire field of inquiry, like about art forgeries: “Fakes are contemporary portraits of past styles.”

I want to teach like this. Someday I will.

Schjeldahl as Outsider

Okay, is Schjeldahl an art outsider? No, not anymore, obviously. But Schjeldahl is not what I would call an Art Historian, and that is a good thing. Schjeldahl does not write academic waffle, and frequently he writes for non-art lovers, connecting the experience of good art to the spiritual, the sexual, the vital. Take this from a review of Gustav Courbet:

“Courbet painted in ways that inculcate a restless disgust with the merely aesthetic. You want to run out and start a riot, milk a cow, have sex, eat an apple, die — anything but stand around abrading your nerves with the angel-grit of “fine” art.”

You might not know anything about Courbet, but we can all relate to the feeling of vitality he evokes. I’m currently up to my eyes in academic writing and the art world, I’m trying to make it a practice to relate art to people who actually go outside and touch grass. It’s hard work and slow going, and there’s frequently a lot of push back. Schjeldahl shows the way in his work.

If you’ve been unimpressed by the art world before, take Schjeldahl by the hand. He will show you miracles.

Rest in Peace, Mr. Schjeldahl. Thank you for everything.

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