Debutante Ball
When I was a resident of New York in the 1990s, the art reviews by Peter Schjeldahl (1942-2022), in The Village Voice were required reading. They were eagerly awaited -like weekly episodes of a TV drama. Everybody, but everybody, tuned-in.
What Peter Schjeldahl was not was glib. He didn't dispense with his subject by a witty turn of phrase. He fretted over it, worried about it, as if pulling at a loose thread. Where is this art review going? I still puzzle over one such knotty conundrum.
An exceptional class of artists had emerged from Yale Graduate School of Fine Art. They were making the rounds of the art gallery circuit -and published reviews. Schjeldahl considered the group as a group, even after graduation, and pursuing separate careers. They seemed to have an essence in common, an "-ism."
He tried heroically to prove it. I couldn't see it, myself, but followed his train-of-thought with great interest. What these artists had in common - besides the same college class - was what I interpreted as, and what may be denoted by, the French word dégagé.
Schjeldahl may not have actually written dégagé. I can be filling-in a wide gap in memory. It is "the persistence of memory" syndrome -to borrow a phrase by Dalí. If Schjeldahl had used the word, I recall that he failed to grasp its implications and, yet, he used it correctly.
In addition to the literary and figurative connotations of dégagé, it is a technical term in ballet. Now, I feel confident Schjeldahl didn't make that connection, or, if he did, that he would have been willing to articulate it. As an aside, it would have been too effete for Schjeldahl's bare knuckles style of journalism.
Let's just say that, like a stage mentalist, he picked-up on it, and by playing the charade game of association, pinpointed the pretensions of the Yale grads. What Schjeldahl tried to express was that the group, by its apparent coordination, may be compared to a performing troupe.
I wish we could talk. I feel confident Schjeldahl would have validated my deduction. Consider Picasso's acrobats and harlequins (known in France as saltimbanques), of his Rose Period (1904–1906). It is a natural as a subject of art. It established Picasso.
Further, as Picasso's circus folk were painted in the style of Mannerism, with emaciated, elongated limbs and digits, in angular, ungainly poses, the Yale "troupe" accordingly identifies with Picasso's saltimbanques, indeed performing the "Saltimbanque" -as by script.
I am deliberately withholding visual reference to the Yale artists and their work. This is addressed to the mind (not the senses). Visually, the typical example of the Yale group's style could be described simply as Mannerism, as distorted realism for expressive effect. Imagine an erotic subject thus visually distorted, while, at once "distorting" (so to speak) the boundaries of taste. The natural erotic response is thereby subverted—perverted—and not alluring.
As strategy it worked on Schjeldahl. I don't intend to be crude. Let me be quick to admit that the foregoing is my notion (not Schjeldahl's). Schjeldahl was a critic (not a hermeneuticist). What nettled Schjeldahl was not the ad hoc coordination of Yale artists, so much as the tendency of the typical individual contemporary artist to act like a Prima Donna.
Schjeldahl, I maintain, considered contemporary artists as a class, dégagé -in the alternate senses of nonchalant, disinterested, casual, etc. He thought they affected too much self-confidence - were too cocky - for his liking. Nobody likes arrogance. We agree about one thing. We both hate it!