Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986-1993.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe knows the art of the '60s, '70s, and '80s as well as anyone; and he can be smart about the 19th century, too. As I read through his Beyond Piety, a collection of essays produced between 1986 and 1993, I found myself filling the book's generous margins with notes, even coherent paragraphs. Nothing unusual here: I like to write in books. More often than not, however, my notes had little to do with Gilbert-Rolfe's arguments.

I was straying from the text because it was itself straying. Gilbert-Rolfe's arguments, especially when he approaches a theoretical crux, often become caught up in secondary considerations and qualifications. This happens less when he's commenting mordantly on culture and criticism than when he's constructing a theory, although for him such distinctions, interestingly, are fine ones. The brevity of even the more ambitious of Gilbert-Rolfe's essays allows him little space to unwind the tangles his parenthetical remarks create. The complicated writing style - not at all pretentious, not tediously fashionable, just complicated - sometimes undoes his argument. Yet despite these drawbacks, there is unusual seriousness, astute judgment, and rare intelligence in Gilbert-Rolfe's criticism. The richness of his ideas stimulates thought after random thought in his reader. Hence, the meandering of my marginal notations - all in all, a good sign.

From essay to essay, the author's guiding realization emerges: art criticism has become as rigid as an official religion and, knowingly or not, it cannot but preserve the social dynamic as it finds it. Gilbert-Rolfe himself avoids art criticism's pieties - the sacrosanct, deterministic links between art, society, and history, including the link that is a nonlink, the much overworked idea of rupture and end (will we have yet another "end of painting," still another final crisis?). To the contrary, Gilbert-Rolfe takes a rogue esthetic pleasure in the material self-sufficiency of art. (Through his own paintings - for he is an artist as well as a critic - he seems to intellectualize the notion of self-sufficiency, while simultaneously experiencing the immediate, sensual pleasures of color and surface.)

Gilbert-Rolfe's antagonist, as he wages his elaborately staged critical battle, is "reason." With characteristic irony, he provides a two-sentence synopsis of reason's recent history, 18th century to the present: "The aristocracy's claim to power through blood was to be replaced by the bourgeoisie's claim to power through reason. Aside from the elimination of the aristocracy, this no longer sounds like a particularly good idea." Who is the contemporary hyperrational bourgeoisie? Within it, one would count virtually all art historians, any number of critics mired in academic and political self-consciousness (including writers for October), and finally, Marcel Duchamp, who reverted to a classical notion of the superiority of the intellect, while attempting to terminate sensuous painting. Gilbert-Rolfe presents Duchamp as if he and his art were reactionary. This perspective on Duchamp - far removed from received opinion and well worth considering - derives from Gilbert-Rolfe's reading of our cultural problems, not from stubborn resistance to innovation in the art world.

What's so wrong about art history? "The discipline's limits are to be found where it encounters ... the sensuous. The thickness of van Gogh's paint, his apparent will to present the insubstantial - light, air, darkness, and movement - as substance, or as concentrated experiences of materials [cannot be accommodated by] the methodologies of art historians." Art historians do not think beyond historical causes or, as Gilbert-Rolfe puts it, beyond the representation of "historical meaning ... not the object, but what produced the object," whether economics, ideology, or even philosophy.

Duchamp, who took the substance out of objects and converted objects into concepts, becomes the art historians' sanctified hero. If there is any politics to his action, it is, according to Gilbert-Rolfe, a simulation of the political, no more than an inane inaction, since it substitutes symbolic for real production. In fact, Gilbert-Rolfe can trace Duchamp's lineage down to the present, finalizing a Baudrillardian critique of self-consciously politicized art with this beautifully crafted, ironic, damning sentence: "To copyright anonymity ([Sherrie] Levine), negation ([Daniel] Buren), protest ([Hans] Haacke), this is all that capitalism asks of the left: be a good producer." If political art - that is, sanctioned and pious art - is misguided, where is its intelligent, sensuous counterpart? Gilbert-Rolfe finds it in Roni Horn's "deoriginated" double images, or Robert Irwin's pictorial "dissolution of boundaries."

These are original, inventive essays that contain passages of rhetorical and conceptual brilliance, and I wish Beyond Piety had been edited with greater diligence. In fact, it's marred by unfortunate lapses. Some of the material from chapter to chapter is redundant - chapters 12 and 13, both centered on Derrida, should either have been combined, or one of them eliminated. And when topical essays have been reprinted, it's no longer appropriate to state that "to sloganize" the thought of a major critical theorist is "inevitable in the space of a short review." The author's initial problem was not only space but time. Long after the fact, there is little value in reproducing the shortcomings of journalistic deadlines and space constraints. Gilbert Rolfe and his editors could have integrated certain sets of brief reviews into overarching essays, and converted slogan-length remarks into full critique. And - this is my final complaint - some double-checking (single-checking?) might have kept the author from missing out on certain facts. Among the misses: Camille Pissarro's race (he was not part black); Paul de Man's nationality (he was never Dutch); and the meaning of Island when you are in Iceland (it means, well, Iceland).

Richard Shiff is the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and director of the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas at Austin.