1

“Criticism is in Crisis”—we hear it repeated like a mantra. I could rehearse the warnings and arguments for you here: the collapse of academia, the triumph of artificial intelligence, close reading as method of care, close reading as ne plus ultra, the problem of authority, the problem of historical and material contexts, the critic’s social duty. There have been a number of excellent articles that already do this, and many bad ones too. I’m not going to repeat any of these arguments. You’ve heard them already.

2

I do want to rehearse the form of a rectangle, a quadrilateral geometric entity with two sets of sides of equal length. Construct one in your head. Now take the fourth side and put it away and then arrange the three remaining sides on a picture plane of colored canvas. Congratulations: you’re Robert Motherwell. It’s 1968. America is in crisis. You have a renewed sense of mortality and the delicate balance of being. You paint a series called Open, which is all rectangles, rectangles missing one side, staged on colored planes.

3

It’s 2025. America is in crisis. Criticism is. I have a renewed sense of mortality and the delicate balance of being. I sit on top of my duvet and look at Robert Motherwell rectangles like I’m falling off the edge of the picture plane where the rectangle isn’t bounded, where the space theoretically extends infinitely into paint or void. I feel like a faun just getting its legs.

4

The Jerome Robbins version of the ballet Afternoon of a Faun was created on Tanaquil Le Clercq in 1953. Shortly after, in 1956, she was paralyzed by polio and would never dance it again. It is set in a dance studio instead of a Greek grove, a sort of modern reflexiveness that would come to characterize many works of new American ballet in the 20th century. I think about Tanaquil Le Clercq as I struggle to extend my leg in the same slow développé that Robbins uses opening up my leg high to the side, using my nocturnal window and the blinking lights of Brooklyn as a mirror, a canvas. When Afternoon of a Faun is performed, there is no studio and no window: the audience is the mirror.

5

When Afternoon of a Faun is performed, there is no studio and no window: the audience is the mirror.

6

The Secretary of Health in America has just announced he doesn’t believe the vaccine that prevents polio, prevents polio.

7

I think the missing fourth line of every open Motherwell rectangle might be the audience as mirror. Open Study 1 from 1967, which is charcoal and acrylic on canvas board, a sort of tanned leather, is actually two adjoined parallel rectangles, both open at their top ends. By Open Study 6, only one year later, which is charcoal and acrylic on paper, there is only one rectangle on white ground. The rectangle’s color is the grey of grey Marley floors in dance studios.

8

The last time I think the world felt this uncertain, like I was just getting my legs under me, I was seventeen years old. The only Motherwell I knew was early expressionist Motherwell and I don’t think I particularly liked him. I didn’t dance, then. I had a postcard of Susan Sontag taped to my teenage mirror. I loved this song, by Broken Social Scene, recorded a few years earlier, in 2002: Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl. It had this chorus that I wanted to be about me, that every seventeen-year-old girl probably wants to be about her: Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.

9

That chorus is a rectangle. Park That Car (side 1), Drop That Phone (side 2), Sleep On The Floor (side 3), Dream About Me (side 4). In Motherwell’s rectangles, all of them, the fourth side, the one that says “Dream About Me”, is missing. The song became a hit again recently, and Maggie Rogers did a cover version. I listen to it on loop on the subway.

10

The faun in Jerome Robbins’ Afternoon opens the scene sleeping on the floor. It is unclear if the woman dancer is his dream, or wanders into it, or maybe the whole thing is the audience’s dream.

11

The truth is most people don’t drop their phones, or pick them up, let alone dream about us critics. And I don’t see very many critics dreaming either. What I do see is a rise in younger literary circles of explicitly right-wing attitudes both online, and in New York City. This is the final throes of the Dimes Square scene and its neo-Romanticism that hews the other way, away from the expansive imaginary, towards a claustrophobic fascist reactionary. It is anything but a Motherwell rectangle; its bounds are hard and theoretically uninteresting. The mirror is just a mirror for the shock-value, attention-seeking self. It is a Romanticism that easily turns into propaganda, not one that rejects easy resolution. The choice of refusal is far more interesting, and more humane. Maybe now, in crisis, it is more possible to imagine otherwise.

12

Some people think that considering historical and material conditions as part of criticism means not knowing how to feel. I want to push back on this assumption, to make a criticism that enchants while keeping these things in mind. What does a contrary neo-Romantic criticism that holds on to these claims yet still says “Dream About Me” look like? I think the refusal to easy resolution works well with this, binds to feeling in novel and unexpected ways. What is enchantment with integrity of context?

13

“What better way to spend one’s life,” wrote Motherwell in a letter to the poet Frank O’Hara, “than to have, as one’s primary task, the insistence on the integrity of feeling?”

14

Artists might get the luxury of saying this but not critics, or if we say it, we couple integrity with consideration, a closeness to the thing, and to its frames in time and material that become inseparable. We have to do all this, and—because criticism is itself a literary art of the second order—render the enchantment, dance in the grove and mesmerize, or we fall off the edge of the open plane and never find our legs. In a potentially post-literate world—post-literate by fate or design—who will read criticism, us? Who is the mirror, the fourth line of the wall, the audience? Will we write mostly, merely for other critics? Maybe we do so already.

15

A critical enchantment includes close reading and looking, but is not only those things. In the recording of Tanaquil Le Clercq and Jacques d’Amboise dancing Afternoon of a Faun before she was paralyzed, his black ballet slippers do not have ribbons or elastic. This is to make them look more like a faun’s hooves. Whereas Le Clercq, who wears a modern homage to a Greek tunic, is given pointe shoes, purely human appendages, all artifice, no nature. Though Motherwell is so invested in the primacy of feeling, in Open No. 161 in Beige and Black from 1970, you’re almost looking at a Malevich, a tiny horizontal rectangle crowded up at the top of the canvas, all formal proposition, frozen gesture to Formalism’s shadow.

16

My ballet teacher, the choreographer Julia Gleich, told me a story about the Laban Dance Centre in London. In keeping with the Laban philosophy of orientation in dance, the building was constructed with no right angles. In reality, this made it very difficult for the dancers to orient themselves within the studio. Which is to say, theoretical undergirding isn’t everything, and can quickly backfire when forced.

17

A faun is, in and of itself, an enchantment; part goat, part man. They live in the groves of Silenus, and are gentler than Satyrs. The Barberini Faun, carved in marble around the 2nd century BC, is now in the Glyptothek in Munich. Asleep on its own marble floor, parked half upright, legs provocatively splayed, no one knows what it dreams about.

18

I do have an integrity of feeling when I look at the Motherwell Open Rectangles. They move me deeply without my knowing entirely what their meaning resolves into. I love Red Open #3 from 1976, now in the Cranbrook Art Museum. It’s seven feet tall and crimson with a long, thin set rectangle unevenly bisected in white paint. Part of what Motherwell wanted for the series was a sense of air and possibility he attributed to Zen influences on his own work. I am fully aware of this, and yet I feel, in looking at it closely, a sense of danger. Is this because Motherwell’s intention fails? Because my own reading does?

19

Maybe neither fails. Maybe part of possibility is a sense of danger. Does the faun, in the lexical sense of a newborn deer, feel safe wobbling on its legs? It doesn’t. In dance, a mirror in the studio is what you use to see what you’re doing wrong and make corrections. When there is no mirror, or the audience is the mirror, there is a sense of danger because you can leave no mistakes to correct.

20

High-wire criticism, criticism as enchantment, strikes me as a similar performance. You can’t trust that the mirror will be there so that you can correct yourself instantly. Do I want you to dream about me? Fine—but I have to make you drop that phone first, catch your breath in your throat. A close friend of Motherwell’s died in 1965, which is part of why he pivoted his whole practice and began the Open series. In this sense, it’s late work, confident, but also work that sees its own mortal engine.

21

How do you dare like late work when it’s still relatively early in your life, even if you’re not a seventeen-year-old girl anymore? What if it’s the world that’s late instead of you? It’s always ending on the internet, these days. It is not slow and quiet here like the sacred groves of Silenus. Criticism must meet the demands of attention of a rolling apocalypse.

22

So the world’s ending. So we live in constant onslaughts of both uncaring and atrocity. So it’s 1953 and you’re going to get polio and never dance again in 1956. So dance like it. Write like it. Write like they’re going to black out all the mirrors and stage lights. Let’s do this by feel, all sweat and gravity, metatarsal bone against satin shoe pressing into the floor, cloven foot balancing on the edge of the rectangle that juts into the open void.

23

You don’t get to wimp out, you don’t get to be boring, or apolitical, or vague, or cater to temporary whims. By nature the avant-garde is none of these things. Enchantment isn’t either; it has a whiff of the dangerous. Silenus is given the gift of prophetic ecstasy, and it is from Silenus that Schopenhauer plucks the maxim that it is better never to be born at all. The problem with being late is that of course, you’re already born, you already were a seventeen-year-old girl, and you can’t make any god or thinker take it back. Fauns can live in Silenus’ arcadias—timeless, placid, drunk— and never die. I live in New York City, which is always timely, never placid, and only sometimes drunk. I am stuck figuring out how to live in the late world with my métier: criticism.

24

In an Artforum issue from 1969, the art critic Rosalind Krauss called Motherwell’s Open paintings “torsion-without-motion.” She says they try to re-orient the viewer, making the canvas not just face front but, say, up or to the side, or extending into a développé.

25

Ironically, because she uses theory extensively, Krauss is one of the critics people often complain about being too intellectual for feeling. Theory is a dark magic, and with populism and sensibility as mantras, right and left can easily converge on its rejection.

26

I agree with Rosalind Krauss’ review of the Open series early in its conception. Krauss is a critic capable of seeing difficult things for what they are. When you ask for feeling, also ask if you’re really looking for an absence of difficulty. If theory scares you, ask why you’re pinning your fear on the idea of a framework for thinking. Can you tell a faun from a satyr? Only one of the two means danger, and do we aver danger in the best critical mode?

27

To claim that theory or criticism that invokes theoretical modes are intrinsically opposed to feeling is to embrace a false binary. “Theory” is a whipping boy for both the intellectually lazy, and the capable who see it as having become merely a cult of personality—which is an altogether different objection. Anyway, treating theory like it will summon the Bacchantes to kill you, all kid gloves and tentativeness, is over. At the end of the world, it’s gloves off.

28

Writing like the world is ending doesn’t mean abandoning historical or theoretical frameworks. Afternoon of the Faun, as staged by Robbins, is itself a meta-ballet, a ballet about the practice of ballet in the studio. It makes the postmodern reflexive turn, a thing we have language for precisely because we’ve theorized it extensively.

29

The 18th century German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann has a crazy theory about the Barberini Faun. In following the account of Byzantine Procopius, Winckelmann speculates that it fell off the edge, or rather, was pushed off of Hadrian’s Mausoleum to deter the invading Goths in Rome in 537 AD. That’s why it’s broken. The Goths are really only the end of the world if you’re Edward Gibbon. Late Antiquity otherwise has its own enchantments; fauns that sleep in hyperbolic curves, Desert Fathers strict as squares, the strictest version of the rectangle.

30

When I fall of the edge of Open 29, In Orange With Charcoal Line, an open rectangle that doesn’t even bother to finish the third side on the canvas, it’s like when I fall out of a turn in pointe shoes. Every pirouette is a bit of a risk, you could fall off your ankle, lose your balance, twist something, but you just have to go. Park that car, put the standing leg down firm, drop that phone and bring the arm up, sleep on the floor raise the turning leg sideways, out like a triangle. And then, if you’re lucky (although good technique helps), it all comes together, a pirouette on 1.5 inches of paste.

31

The orange polymer on Motherwell’s canvas is like the orange that deer hunters wear when shooting. I see dead faun, strung up from a tree by its hind legs. The same fear, probably, why I’m bad at pirouettes, it’s all very psychological. I think too much, psych myself out. Criticism is not quite the same, but what if we do it a little by feel too, a little bit more of reliance on muscle memory of how to look or read, how to nail the landing. It’s a certain uncertainty, hurling yourself at the mercy of gravity like the arc of history that hurls the Goths and the Romans together, eventually converged into the trajectory of the 16th century French court, which is the site of ballet’s invention in the first place.

32

I follow the charcoal line on the left beyond the orange canvas of Open 29. It’s undeniably vertical, shooting into the air, into the ozone thinning, into space and satellites wheeling in orbit, extended Archimedean dreams. The fact that I can actually see that extension, that infinite développé, in the eye of my mind, is a testament to feeling—but more importantly, feeling that comes from a rigorousness and depth of Motherwell’s practice and thought.

33

Are you open to it, to leaving the bounded plane, to jumping the last missing side of the rectangle of the known world of criticism in crisis? There is no sacred grove waiting here, but there is still the possibility of enchantment, back at the dried-up root of the spring, in the invisible mirror of the essay’s studio. It’s troubled and troubling, it’s late, and our legs are all new and wobbly. Even as our old histories curl back around themselves, we become always and instantaneously our own audiences. I’m not exactly sure how to be a critic now; I can’t put it in marble, make it hard and fast, hurl it off a wall, still sleeping, into a Glyptothek. But if I feel it out, get my balance, whip my head around to spot the turn, will you be at least a little taken? Will you spare me a line to try for my lost side? Will you dream about me?