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Response: proximal but divided.

Article Excerpt
Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.

--Andy Warhol

"The whale and the polar bear, it has been said, cannot wage war on each other, for since each is confined to his own element they cannot meet." (1) This metaphor was put on the table by Sigmund Freud in 1914, near the conclusion of his famous case study of the "Wolf Man." Noting an unfortunate incommensurability when it came to conversations between psychoanalysts and psychologists (resistant to psychoanalytic postulates), Freud described the rift by calling up the image of two formidable beasts occupying proximal yet deeply divided terrain. While it would be unwise to mark too totalizing a resemblance between psychoanalysis and contemporary art history, nonetheless as a critic I find it tempting to borrow this delicious phrase for my own purposes. (2) For while this assembly of essays calls up a number of distinct questions, I was struck by the kind of polar-bear/whale standoffs that were described; first, the art historian circling the unrelenting artist whose sole task seems to be the obfuscation of his or her vital, clandestine information; second, the shaky lines between art history and art criticism, which are suggested as doing different and often opposed kinds of work; third, the "real" or "meaty" data vs. the stuff of lures and lore--all that nostalgic or self-mythologizing rumination by the artist that might be deemed by "proper" art history to be too personal, too subjective, self-promotional, off-topic; finally, and perhaps the worst incursion of all, the same as evidenced by the art historian or art critic who asserts his or her presence or importance in an artist's narrative, breaching some rule of transparency or objectivity by acknowledging point of view, investment, loyalty, enthusiasm, and the like.

Suzanne Hudson suggests ways in which she and Anne Byrd conceived this forum to address the symptoms (my word, not hers) that arise from such tensions; Hudson also asks how we...