Uncommon criticism: Reading Ivan Vladislavić’s collected work as art criticism

Abstract

Johannesburg author, essayist, and editor Ivan Vladislavić has a longstanding interest in art, an interest richly recorded in his literary corpus. Since publishing his debut work of fiction, Missing Persons (1989), Vladislavić has repeatedly dwelled on artworks in his fiction and non-fiction writing. His literary corpus is studded with descriptions of paintings, sculptures, photographs, ceremonial statues, murals, and other, more obscure pieces of urban flotsam given their own artistic agency in his fecund imagination. This article discusses his interest and entanglement in art from a threefold perspective: thematically, biographically, and theoretically. It argues that the art world has consistently functioned as a laboratory for the author to refine his thoughts, albeit as a literary writer, not an art critic. While Vladislavić does not identify as an art critic, this article argues that his writing on art and broader literary output represent a valuable critical resource and an important intervention in fervid and unresolved debates around the definition of art criticism. The article begins by identifying thematic constellations that recur throughout Vladislavić’s work, placing these in conversation with salient aspects of the author’s early professional biography. It concludes by proposing that Vladislavić’s oeuvre can be read as a historically mindful, crisis-orientated form of art criticism.

Throughout his career, the author, essayist, and editor Ivan Vladislavić has shown a pronounced interest in art. Since publishing his debut work, Missing Persons (1989), a collection of 11 short fictions marked by their acute observations and experimental style, Vladislavić has repeatedly dwelled on artworks: on paintings, sculptures, photographs, ceremonial statues, murals, and other, more obscure pieces of urban flotsam given their own artistic agency in his fecund imagination. It is an enduring preoccupation, one that surfaces again in his recent collection, 101 Detectives (2015), which includes a short fiction, “Mountain Landscape”, about the nationalist landscape painter J. H. Pierneef. Vladislavić, however, does not identify as an art critic. “I’m a writer”, he unpretentiously states in Portrait with Keys (2006), a series of loosely autobiographical sketches and vignettes about living and working in Johannesburg. “I’m walking around with my eyes wide open, taking everything in like a vacuum cleaner, coughing bits of it on paper” (2006: 26). Notwithstanding his stated identification, it is my contention here that Vladislavić’s literary corpus, which often consciously breaches the “frontier between ‘critical’ and ‘creative’ writing” (Eagleton, 2005/1984: 108), can be read as a historically mindful, crisis-orientated form of art criticism. The fluid and still-unresolved arguments around what constitutes art criticism as a practice form are an important context to my argument, which aims to coherently articulate his longstanding interest in art from a threefold perspective: thematically, biographically, and theoretically.

Rather than being a marginal aspect of his writing, art — and the ideas that flourish around it — is a cornerstone of Vladislavić’s project as a writer and editor. With the exception of a 2008 essay by Sally-Ann Murray (2011) and occasional questions around the subject in published interviews, Vladislavić’s interest in art remains largely overlooked, both by literary scholars and art historians. This article addresses the omission. Vladislavić has described himself as being comfortable in both “the literary world and the art world” (Miller, 2006: 123). While he largely avoids making evaluative pronouncements when writing about art, a modality held by many scholars to be central to a working definition of art criticism, his literary corpus is nonetheless consistent with a broad category of “creative writing” (Elkins, 2003: 8) and “promiscuous” (Bernstein, 2009: 146) art criticism that uses literary, essayistic, non-discursive, and experimental strategies to either comment on or thicken the experience of art. In particular, it is his ambition to intellectually spar with art — rather than merely describe it — that distinguishes Vladislavić’s engagement with art. This article aims to foreground this aspect of his creative practice, highlighting the manner in which the art world has consistently functioned as a laboratory for him to refine his thoughts, albeit as a literary writer, not an art critic.

Vladislavić’s writing, which routinely grapples with the ideological structuring of South Africa, offers a necessary palliative against readings of South African art that rely solely on history and identity as interpretive frames. Characterized by its imaginative generosity and literary playfulness, Vladislavić’s rigorously-formulated work is capable of yielding rich critical insights into life and culture during a period of intense social and political transition. It is important to reiterate what is plain and obvious about Vladislavić: he is neither a reporter nor a critic in any conventional sense. Yet, his method as a writer preoccupied with the physical and sensate world of South Africa has seen him draw on these journalistic practices to enrich his literary work. This approach, while generative, poses the risk of over-emphasis. Vladislavić’s corpus is marked by an immanent rather than overt criticality. This criticality is largely subsumed by the imperatives of narrative and imagination. In the manner of the narrator of his short story “Flashback Hotel” (in Missing Persons), Vladislavić “mingles” (1989: 13) ¹ with the ostensibly familiar and verifiable aspects of South African life, notably its urban infrastructure and material culture. “I pretended to be a reporter so that I could gauge public opinion”, continues the first-person narrator of “Flashback Hotel”: “[s]ardonically, with a wry smile” (13).

Humour, deception, avoidance, conceptual game-playing, and an undertone of persistent white melancholy are hallmarks of Vladislavić’s “allusive and elusive” (Gaylard and Titlestad, 2006: 6) literary style. Collectively, these stylistic attributes and preoccupations would be fatal for a positivist critic, amounting to what cultural critic Diedrich Diedrichsen has described as a “false consciousness or ideology” (2010: 85) for its abrogation of judgement. Despite favouring ambiguity, obliquity, and verbal play, Vladislavić’s literary corpus, I nonetheless argue, has the capacity to reframe traditional definitions of art criticism: not because this is an explicit ambition of the author, but as a consequence of his sustained focus on art, in particular through a set of thematic constellations that recur throughout his writing. These constellations orient his longstanding investment in art as a source of ideas, and also paid work. Identifying these constellations is an exercise in literary criticism. It is however my contention in this article that Vladislavić’s corpus of writing offers a valuable critical resource for thinking about art. In order to fully develop my argument, this essay recovers salient aspects of Vladislavić’s biography, foregrounding the prominent role the art world played in his early development as a writer. This personal history is then placed in conversation with fervid and unresolved debates around the definition of art criticism.

The scope of the latter enquiry is speculative and has an epistemological bearing. Can fiction, a literary activity driven by the imagination rather than any stated fidelity to facts, propose meaningful insights relevant to art objects and cultural debates? To simplify, can fiction perform the role of criticism? These are parasitical questions, in the sense that they are based on a broad reading of Vladislavić’s corpus; they are not questions that directly engage the writer. Yet there is a relationship between Vladislavić’s resourceful, art-interested corpus of writing, and meta-textual arguments concerning the definition and form of art criticism. Despite the allusive styling of his critical insights, Vladislavić’s corpus, I argue, is useful and has critical application in negotiating recent South African art and cultural history. While Vladislavić’s writing may not present itself in the form of traditional expository criticism, it can be read as a criticism of potentialities, and indeed functions as a criticism unimpeded by “a narrow-minded notion of truth content” (Adorno, 2004: 178).

Thematic keys: Parsing Vladislavić’s abiding preoccupations

In almost three decades since Missing Persons (1989) first appeared, Vladislavić’s interest in the phenomenology of the everyday — be it monuments and statues, walls and bricks, museum objects and late-apartheid media culture — has matured into an abiding set of preoccupations informed by his parallel interest in visual art and the abstract thinking that often informs it. “It was an extraordinary brick”, gushes the unnamed narrator of “Journal of a Wall” in Missing Persons, shortly after pilfering a brick from his neighbour’s front yard (32). Bricks are adaptable conveniences for Vladislavić: they function as physical markers of place, metonyms of ideology, and instruments of violence. “A passer-by had flung a brick through the plate-glass window and snatched some goods from the display”, he writes in Portrait with Keys of the residue of a theft from a shop near his former home in Troyeville.

The brick was still lying there among the dusty satin drapes, chrome-plated pedestals and handwritten price-tags. It was a wonderful brick, a model brick, with three round holes through it the size of one-rand coins, filled with chips of broken glass. (2006: 52)

The passage reads like a deadpan description of South African artist Kendell Geers’s work Title Withheld (Brick) (1994–96), a situational installation composed of brick projectile and broken window. Much like documentary photographer David Goldblatt, whose oeuvre contains numerous photographs of bricks and walls, Vladislavić routinely dwells on what is visible and particular in the South African landscape as a means of addressing the “ideological structuring” (Dubow, 1998: 23) of the built environment.

This micro-scale attention to the architectural form of white South Africa is matched by a recurring interest in the encompassing view offered by maps and cartography. In recent years, notably since the publication of his novel Double Negative (2010), which grew out of a joint publishing project with Goldblatt, Vladislavić has also written more concertedly about photography, both in fiction and essays. Photography, with its “factitious insistence” (Rexer, 2013: 9) and fidelity to an observable reality, is not an uncomplicated art form for an author whose early writings were formally inventive and fantastical. The experimental character of Vladislavić’s early fictions, many written during a period of bohemian questioning and with a consciousness of censorship, point to a further thematic interest: conceptual art. In 2005, Vladislavić produced his first sustained piece of art criticism, a book-length study of the Johannesburg conceptual artist and sculptor Willem Boshoff. While Vladislavić deploys description, contextualization, classification, elucidation, interpretation, and analysis, all hallmarks of formal art criticism (Carroll, 2009: 17), he also debunks some of its modalities in Willem Boshoff. The artist monograph sees Vladislavić treat Boshoff as a peer rather than as a subject. “What’s important”, Vladislavić appreciatively quotes Boshoff, “is to look for someone to play with” (2005: 15).

The bulk of Vladislavić’s literary output, which is significant in both scale and ambition, is, however, comprised of fictional and essayistic writing. The epistemic vehicles through which Vladislavić typically imparts his insights about art — the short story, the novel, the essay — elide the duties of orthodox expository criticism. Even when Vladislavić uses traditional expository techniques, as in his analysis of Boshoff’s sculptures and poetry, or in a recent essay appearing in The Loss Library & Other Unfinished Stories (2011b) about a photo portraying Swiss writer Robert Walser lying dead in the snow, his analysis and interpretation is often partial and subsumed by the demands of narrative. Vladislavić’s primary concern is the literary imagination, how it perambulates, is easily sidetracked, and ultimately derives pleasure from the unexpected, incomplete, and moribund in the everyday.

Vladislavić declared his interest in the form and function of memory and place-making in an early sequence of playful and experimental short fictions: “We Came to the Monument” (collected in Missing Persons), “Courage”, “The Whites Only Bench”, and “Propaganda by Monuments” (the latter three stories collected in Propaganda by Monuments, 1996). These works are all, in some way, occupied with statues and memorials. In each, Vladislavić demonstrates his preference for imaginatively translating historical events and facts, rather than journalistically essaying them in a realist manner. While the product of a definite historical moment, the end of high apartheid, his stories are also remarkably prescient, particularly in relation to current debates around public memorials and the role of apartheid memory, signalled most prominently by the removal of artist Marion Walgate’s bronze statue depicting British imperialist and colonial politician Cecil John Rhodes from its pedestal on the campus of the University of Cape Town in April 2015 (see McKaiser, 2015, and Coovadia, 2015). Vladislavić is a writer deeply occupied with social upheaval and the quandaries that come with it. The irresolution portended in his early work, particularly around symbols of cultural and national identity, point to an uncertainty and insecurity that endure as ontological markers in his later work. For purposes of brevity, I will limit my analysis here to his interest in statues.

“I lived in the city once” (69), offers a fleet-footed statue in “We Came to the Monument” in Missing Persons. Once set on a pedestal at a busy intersection in an unnamed town that is very likely Pretoria, this unnamed statue is plagued by nightmares: a crowd carrying “ropes and crowbars and hammers” (72) want to topple him. When the town is devastated by conflict, the statue flees to a monument that bears striking resemblances to the Voortrekker Monument, a key Afrikaner landmark that Vladislavić often visited in his childhood to participate in an annual boxed-car derby (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). Initially, the unnamed statue, one of two interchanging narrators in a fiction that reveals Vladislavić’s youthful preference for American and European avant-gardist literary strategies, adopts the pose of a sentinel at his new home. When a group of white refugees led by a man named Steenkamp arrive, the statue flees indoors and hides, quite literally, in a frieze portraying a peace treaty signed between Steenkamp’s people and their “enemy” (79). ² “I found myself in a corner, among the vanquished”, discloses the statue (80), referring to his frozen pose, back turned, amongst the kneeling enemy. In the actual Voortrekker Monument frieze Vladislavić draws upon in this passage — a rare example of ekphrastic description in his work — the enemy are members of Zulu king Dingane kaSenzangakhona’s military entourage.

Grafted onto this farcical plot is the author’s meta-critical concern with white history, in particular the use of architecture and sculpture to monumentalize its values and accomplishments. Early in the narrative of “We Came to the Monument”, the statue declares: “I am only surface. There is no more to me than meets the eye” (69). He adds: “The people paid no attention. There were no tour busses full of pilgrims. The people knew that a statue is only a statue” (73). Of course, Vladislavić is being provocative. In Propaganda by Monuments (1996) Vladislavić further extends his engagement with ceremonial sculptures, both in the title story, which draws parallels between post-Soviet Russia and post-apartheid South Africa, and “Courage”, a story of a sculptor who, despatched to a rural town to find and portray a hero, chooses a man named Kumbuza, the town drunk.

In a 2008 essay published in a catalogue accompanying artist William Kentridge’s exhibition of large-scale tapestries at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vladislavić, writing in an expository mode, directly engages the role public memorials and place names have in the making of home and country:

The values engraved on place-names are still felt, and plans to rename colonial cities like Pretoria have proved controversial. While most black South Africans regard renaming as the justifiable restoration of a suppressed indigenous history, many whites see it as a negation of their place in the contemporary society. People may feel the loss of symbols more acutely than the loss of direct political power or economic status. (2008a: 100–101)

Vladislavić rarely addresses his subject matter in such explicit terms in his fictions. Although a skilful essayist possessed with a reflexive intelligence, Vladislavić’s preferred method, indeed his métier, is fiction, not expository criticism where judgement is explicitly declared. His key raw material is the imagination, which he applies to the dilemmas and ethical complications of late- and post-apartheid life. However, Vladislavić’s long-held resistance to writing in an openly discursive or analytical mode bears further scrutiny.

What is striking about Vladislavić’s serial interest in bricks, walls, statues, monuments, maps, photography, and more traditional painted and plastic arts is his general tendency to avoid ekphrasis, what W. J. T. Mitchell has characterized as “an attempt to repress or ‘take dominion’ over language’s graphic Other” (1995: 173). Although deeply interested in artworks, Vladislavić is not singularly interested in recomposing a visual image in words: description is not the sole imperative of the encounter. This is a purposeful decision on the author’s part. Responding to a query about his sustained interest in visual art, in 2012 Vladislavić explained that his stories grew out of his “own ideas and concerns”, but with the aim of seeing how “working in close proximity to another imaginative world would reshape and reinvigorate my own” (Steyn, 2012: n.p.). Vladislavić is, however, emphatic that his fictions have an “independent life” (Steyn, 2012: n.p.). His words do not require accessory images or plates to illustrate their meaning. In this 2012 interview, Vladislavić nonetheless conceded that his fictional output (as distinct from his obviously expository pieces of art writing) might possess a latent capacity to “comment”. He further added, “hopefully this commentary in fiction has some value precisely because it is sympathetically enmeshed with its subject” (Steyn, 2012: n.p.). The words “sympathetically enmeshed” are key. They point to an entanglement in the material world of art that is biographical as much as purely literary. In the following section I will parse this entanglement, highlighting salient biographical moments that establish connections between his literary practice and interest in art.

Google him: Knock yourself out

In his well-known appreciation of the tennis player Roger Federer, author David Foster Wallace remarked that, journalistically speaking, there was “no hot news” to offer about Federer, that anything one wanted to know was “all just a Google search away” (2006: 647). Vladislavić deployed a similar conceit when he obliquely wrote about David Goldblatt in the novel Double Negative. Unlike Wallace, though, Vladislavić’s book-length portrait of this prominent South African documentary photographer arrived couched as fiction. Double Negative is not a fictionalized biography of Goldblatt. The small, stooped man with blue eyes who since 1963 has been preoccupied with visually recording Johannesburg is never explicitly invited into the constructed world of Vladislavić’s novel. Goldblatt is only evoked and hinted at, like an ancestral spirit, leaving the reader to imagine the extent of the gap between the real photographer and Auerbach, a small, bony photographer who wears khaki shorts and combat boots. “If you want to find out about Saul Auerbach”, offers Neville Lister, Double Negative’s protagonist, “go ahead and google him. He has three pages on Wikipedia and gets a mention on dozens of photography sites” (2010: 25). Lister, who still remembers research as once requiring trips to libraries and newspaper archives, adds: “You could become an expert on Auerbach without getting up from your desk” (2010: 26). The same is increasingly true of Vladislavić, particularly since winning a number of prestigious literary awards in the 2000s. ³

Born in Pretoria in 1957, into a family of mixed Croatian, English, Irish, and German ancestry, Vladislavić has rehearsed numerous aspects of his upbringing, graduate studies in Johannesburg, and early career as a social studies editor at Ravan Press in interviews and occasional writings. It nonetheless bears revisiting his biography, particularly the years following his decision to study English literature and Afrikaans at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 1975 — not to enumerate facts, as literary biographer Jonathan Bate has written, but to highlight those “outer circumstances and transformative moments” that shape the inner life of a literary figure in “significant ways” (2015: 24). Vladislavić made numerous formative friendships with a bohemian circle while at university. They included Lulu Davis, a niece of the writer and editor Lionel Abrahams, whose Circle of Eight writing group Vladislavić would later join; future Weekly Mail art critic Ivor Powell, who in 1977 moved into the communal house in Yeoville where Vladislavić stayed; and Chas Unwin, ⁴ a theatre director, journalist, and painter whose experimental play, My Brother Parks (1985), was directed by Vladislavić’s current life partner, Minky Schlesinger. During his four years at university Vladislavić also befriended numerous artists, including Jeff Lok, Neil Goedhals, ⁵ and Joachim Schönfeldt, with whom he later collaborated, in 2004, to produce a series of experimental narratives (Schönfeldt, Oliphant and Vladislavić, 2004) that informed his novel in four parts, The Exploded View (2004).

Lok, who together with Powell and Schönfeldt was a member of Possession Arts, a loose configuration of artists working in performance art, figures repeatedly in Vladislavić’s biography. For instance, Lok and Vladislavić collaborated on a sculptural installation entitled The Big Shy, a cabinet in which the heads of three prime ministers rested on stalk-like supports (Steyn, 2012: n.p.). The figurative orientation of this unfinished work is consistent with Vladislavić’s early fictional interest in statesmen and ceremonial statues. Lok, who with Schönfeldt was a model for sculptor Jane Alexander’s iconic trio of metonymic figures, Butcher Boys (1985/86), also provided the cover illustration for Vladislavić’s debut book, Missing Persons. He is discussed at length in Portrait with Keys. Vladislavić details Lok’s scheme to construct a wall of remembrance made of resin bricks. His droll advice to Lok on how to describe this project highlights Vladislavic’s circumspection and ironic reserve towards art:

“Calling it an art work will create the wrong impressions,” I said to Jeff. “People are so ill-disposed towards art. Let’s make it a public works project.” (2006: 48)

In a 2012 interview, Vladislavić plumbs this cultural antipathy further: “The art world seems to attract more than its share of charlatans and fools”, Vladislavić states, “but perhaps they’re just more visible than in the literary world or the music world or anywhere else” (Steyn, 2012: n.p.). In Vladislavić’s oeuvre, and especially in his novels The Exploded View and Double Negative, the art world operates as a stand-in for the literary world.

In the international context of what Pascale Casanova (2004) calls “the world republic of letters”, Vladislavić is not unique in his complicated engagement with art from the vantage of a fiction writer. British writers John Berger, J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, and Tom McCarthy have demonstrated a similar investment in the art world, which, at its most optimistic, is a welcoming home to speculative thinking and literary experiment. American author Don DeLillo has demonstrated a similar interest, producing a number of fictions populated by artists and furnished with art. In South Africa, Nadine Gordimer frequently wrote about art, however as an undergraduate student Vladislavić was sceptical about the nature of her engagement: “She felt like she belonged in a different tradition to Donald Barthelme, John Barth or Kurt Vonnegut, who felt in the same game as John Miles or Breyten Breytenbach” (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.).

By contrast, Miles, a progressive fiction writer, editor, and teacher in the Department of Afrikaans & Nederlands at Wits, was an important early influence on Vladislavić, notably through his experimental fictions influenced by the French avant-garde and work as an Afrikaans literary editor. ⁶ “To study Afrikaans under a novelist I really admired was amazing”, Vladislavić has said (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). Vladislavić was frequently challenged by associates for his decision to study Afrikaans, particularly after the 1976 black student rebellion, prompted in part by their refusal to receive school instruction in Afrikaans. Yet he continues to defend his decision: “It was such an antidote to the English course, which was so orientated towards the great tradition” (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). After his university studies Vladislavić did two years compulsory military service in the South African Defence Force, serving time in Kroonstad and Pretoria, following which he returned to Johannesburg. This period is marked by a more concerted encounter with art.

In 1982 Vladislavić travelled abroad for 18 months with a lover, a former art student at Wits. He initially spent time in London, later travelling to Europe for four months, and then on to the United States, where he spent the bulk of his time. While travelling in the Netherlands, Vladislavić’s partner suggested they visit the seventh edition of documenta, an international exhibition of contemporary art held every five years in the German town of Kassel. Vladislavić has described his encounters at this exhibition as having a “very formative” influence (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). Curated by Dutch artistic director Rudi Fuchs, documenta 7 is today remembered for its tempered political mood and modernist focus on autonomous art objects. Despite the emergence of conceptual and performance art practices in the 1960s and 1970s, Fuchs selected mostly paintings and sculptures. Staying in a nearby campsite, Vladislavić spent a week “obsessively” (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.) viewing every work on the sprawling exhibition:

It made an incredible impression on me. It is very vivid in my memory to this day. It was my first real exposure to visual art on that scale. I hadn’t been abroad before and arrived there having spent some time in London only, seeing galleries and museums. It was my first intense exposure to contemporary art, to the real thing as opposed to looking at pictures in books and magazines. (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.)

One work in particular impressed Vladislavić. As part of his participation in documenta 7, German sculptor Joseph Beuys invited citizens of Kassel to plant 7,000 oak trees throughout the city. A mound of basalt stone placed outside a local museum visually registered the progress of the work, which was only completed in 1987: one stone for each tree planted. “It seems so ordinary a part of contemporary art making now, but it was so radical at the time to involve communities, to ask them where they wanted the trees to go”, remarked Vladislavić (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). His receptiveness to Beuys’ social sculpture partly owes to the artistic and intellectual climate in Johannesburg in the early 1980s. Social art practices were commonplace, as was the phenomenon of “people’s parks”, landscaped environments in townships authored by residents (Sack, 1989). Two of Vladislavić’s close associates, Powell and Goedhals, were also committed fans of Beuys’ work — “Beuysians”, as was the designation.

Unlike his colleagues, though, Vladislavić visited Kassel as a member of the lay public, not a critic: “I didn’t know enough about art to be critical of it” (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). His preferences were also intuitive rather than analytical. He was intrigued by American sculptor Claes Oldenburg’s works, in particular an oversize pin seemingly pushed through the outside of a building into an interior corridor: “That was more my kind of taste in those years. I loved that pop thing because I could immediately access it, whereas what Beuys was up to and some of the conceptual artists really flummoxed me” (O’Toole 2012: n.p.). Vladislavić has since greatly refined his understanding of art, not to gain professional expertise, but as a consequence of his enduring entanglement with the world of art and artists.

Shunning slick: Vladislavić as editor and essayist

Rather than simply forming an anecdotal aspect of his biography, the ephemeral but ideas-rich art world has been a cornerstone of Vladislavić’s development as a writer. His ongoing work as an editor has played a crucial role in refining this understanding. Vladislavić came to editing in 1984, following a short-lived job as a copywriter at a Johannesburg-based advertising agency. Aware of Vladislavić’s unhappiness with his commercial writing job, Lionel Abrahams recommended him to publisher Mike Kirkwood at Ravan Press, a leftist publishing house founded in 1972 by Beyers Naudé, Danie van Zyl, and Peter Randall.

Vladislavić’s only previous experience with publishing was with placing his short stories in literary magazines like Stet and Sesame (1982–92). He was, however, quickly persuaded by the scope and potential of his new job as social studies editor:

It gave me a route out of this tacky advertising world into something that felt really connected and important […] The work had an incredible immediacy to it. I never for a day thought what I was doing didn’t have a purpose. (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.)

One of his first books as editor at Ravan was The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of H. I. E. Dhlomo (1985) by Tim Couzens. Vladislavić’s tenure as a full-time editor at Ravan coincided with a great flourishing of revisionist histories, notably Charles van Onselen’s Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886–1914: The New Babylon and The New Nineveh (1982a and 1982b, respectively), published in two volumes by Ravan. The scope of the writing he edited intrigued him: “I read a whole lot of material I wouldn’t otherwise have done. It really woke me up in a lot of ways” (O’Toole, 2012: n.p.). Although employed as a copy-editor, Vladislavić’s tenure at Ravan Press later extended to working, in an assistant capacity, on the cultural magazine Staffrider (1978–93). Vladislavić rarely edited fiction contributions, even when jointly editing the journal with Andries Walter Oliphant (between 1988 and 1990). Of note, Vladislavić’s stint as joint editor of Staffrider coincided with the publication of texts debating issues of collectivist purpose and the autonomy of art, power relations in photography, and the politics of the everyday.

Vladislavić became a freelance editor two years after the publication of Missing Persons. He gained a considerable reputation, editing Antjie Krog’s Country of My Skull (1998), Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands (2002), and further books by Couzens, amongst others. More directly relevant to my argument, he also edited a number of important books foregrounding avant-garde cultural practices, including blank ______ (Judin and Vladislavić, 1998), a multi-author volume containing textual and visual essays on South African architectural history and the built environment. Vladislavić has also edited two books by the painter Cyril Coetzee, including T’kama-Adamastor (2000), which documents Coetzee’s large-scale tableau painting depicting the arrival of Portuguese seafarers in the Cape, as seen by the Khoi. More recently, Vladislavić has edited two photographic monographs by Johannesburg photographer Mikhael Subotzky (Subotzky, 2012; Subotzky and Waterhouse, 2014). Similar to blank ______, Ponte City (2014) challenges orthodox book design conventions. Presented in a box containing a hardbound photobook and various short texts, Vladislavić also contributed three essays, “Flow”, “Flat 3607”, and “Out the Windows”, which are consistent with his style in Portrait with Keys.

Since the publication of Portrait with Keys, which more openly identified Vladislavić as an art-interested writer, he has written numerous essays and fictions for artists. “It’s an approach I was drawn into rather than something I theorized or thought through beforehand. It started with artists approaching me to write for their exhibition catalogues”, he elaborated in an interview (Kitamura, 2016: n.p.). These occasional writings, which have become more regular over time, are diverse in style and content. They include plainly discursive non-fiction essays, such as for Kentridge, but also a growing archive of elliptical essays. Of note here is his essay “Modderfontein Road” (2008b), which appears in the catalogue Home Lands — Land Marks (2008b). Commissioned by art historian Tamar Garb, this essay variously discusses a dual-carriageway road in Johannesburg, suburban architecture, and Vladislavić’s interest in French novelist Georges Perec. “In his writing Perec is always trying to seize space, to grab it by its surface detail and subdue it, precisely because his world had proved so unstable and impermanent”, writes Vladislavić (2008b: 158). Vladislavić’s insight is easily repurposed to make sense of his own obsessions, in particular his interest in the material vestiges of white minority rule that populate his early fictions.

In some instances, Vladislavić’s occasional writings about art have returned him to the play and experiment that was a fulcrum of his early practice. For instance, in 2011 the photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin commissioned Vladislavić to write a pseudonymous text for an exhibition in Krakow. In the accompanying catalogue Vladislavić’s short story is credited to Neville Lister, who is listed as a commercial photographer specializing in “mainly advertising: ‘nation-buildings epics’, magazine features, property portfolios” (Vladislavić, 2011a: 91). Vladislavić’s story, which was untitled, has since been updated and appears in his short story collection 101 Detectives (2015), under the title “Dead Letters”. As should be clear, the laboratory function of temporal events like exhibitions have presented Vladislavić with an accommodating public forum to refine his thoughts as a writer.

In a 2016 interview, Vladislavić spoke at length about the way his longstanding proximity to art has impacted his literary practice:

It gets me out of my habitual patterns as a writer and prompts me to find other ways of thinking and writing. I guess it’s a bit like the language games that the OuLiPo writers engaged in, creating a constraint of some sort and then writing against that constraint just to see what the outcome would be. Some of those constraints — like never using the letter e — I would find tedious for writing a novel, but having a set of visual references works if you treat that material with a particular kind of intense scrutiny; it does feed into the work and change it fundamentally. (Kitamura, 2016: n.p.)

Vladislavić’s emphasis here is on how his engagement with art feeds his practice as a writer; however, he does not dwell on what this scrutiny might yield, especially — although not exclusively — for art-interested readers. Art is a prompt to thinking and writing differently for Vladislavić. Read in isolation, his statement might suggest a contingent, even dilettantish, approach to art, one motivated by personal necessity rather than committed and dispassionate enquiry. But, as I have attempted to suggest in my analysis of his biography and select writings, Vladislavić’s commitment to art as practice is longstanding and his writing about it rigorous. But, can this aggregated body of writing, much of it marked by its contingent focus and impressionistic flourishes, be read as a form of art criticism? Can fiction perform the role of art criticism? This enquiry keys into larger historical debates around the form and orientation of art criticism, which I will address in relation to Vladislavić and his writing about art.

Vladislavić and the late-capitalist critic

In his Grove Dictionary of Art entry on art criticism, James Elkins writes: “There is no single account of art criticism that is not counterintuitive, anachronistic, ethnocentric, artificial or naïve” (1996: n.p.). Art criticism’s resistance to clear and succinct definition necessarily complicates its study. In his synoptic overview Elkins prefaces his historical analysis by stating that art criticism exists in “nearly meaningless dispersion”, and gains coherence as authors acknowledge the “disparate influences of conflicting definitions, and demonstrate where they harmonise or chafe with one another” (1996: n.p.). In his book-length essay What Happened to Art Criticism?, Elkins, an art historian and positivist critic who has clearly and consistently mapped the theoretical uncertainties around art criticism as a discipline, concedes that its contemporary lack of coherence owes largely to the fact that art criticism was “never well-formed in the first place” (2003: 59). It is an insight particularly true in South Africa where a durable publishing ecology for art criticism is also lacking. Elkins further states, revealingly I think, that art criticism has “long been a mongrel among academic pursuits, borrowing whatever it needed from other fields” (2003: 59).

This homelessness is often paired with formlessness. Much art criticism is characterized by a lack of intellectual containment and theoretical promiscuity. This is, however, by no means a contemporary condition. Walter Benjamin, commenting on Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism, noted that the French poet emerged “from the very first moment with his own code, precepts and taboos” (1992: 67). Since its early modernist beginnings, at least in its western form, the practice of art criticism has nonetheless generated a loose set of governing ideas. It is widely understood that art criticism is a discursive practice concerned with describing, commenting, and adjudicating on a visual referent framed as “art”, most often in a text-based form. Both Elkins (1996) and Noël Carroll (2009) have emphasized that art criticism is a written discourse grounded in evaluation. It may additionally express aesthetic judgement, although this is increasingly not regarded as a defining imperative or value (Elkins, 2003: 12). Despite loose agreement about the role of evaluation, art criticism claims no consistent historical form, in part due to the fact that it has been produced by a diverse cast of protagonists working in a range of media contexts and disciplinary environments that cater to a broad variety of audiences, from lay spectators to art-market specialists and scholars.

Consequently, art criticism has taken on a variety of formal attributes that complicate its definition. Journalistic art criticism, which typically appears in newspapers and magazines, in printed formats and online, is characterized by informational and juridical imperatives, while academic or institutional art criticism, which is circulated in journals and non-fiction books, is distinguishable by its insistence on historical criteria and theoretical praxis. Although noticeably different in tone and style, both journalistic and academic art criticism pursue evaluative ends, albeit with varying degrees of amplitude. However, this crude taxonomy overlooks an entire body of writing about art that eschews evaluation almost entirely. This writing aims to elicit and unlock art practices, without exposition or judgement as the primary aim. Described variously as “creative criticism” by the novelist and critic Geoff Dyer (Lethem, 2011: n.p.); “poetic art criticism” (2003: 50) and “non-linear writing” (2010: 161) by Elkins; and “belle-lettristic” and “fustian writing” by critic and historian Hal Foster (2002: 108), this inconclusively named category of writing most commonly appears in magazines, journals, exhibition catalogues, and books, all familiar habitats for Vladislavić’s output.

Formally heterogeneous, this category of writing can and has manifested as poetry, short stories, novels, reportage, and essays. Naming this formless category of non-evaluative writing has become an academic pursuit in itself. In a 1989 interview, shortly after commenting on the “rigorous distinction” between literature and literary criticism, French theorist Jacques Derrida admitted to the need to better appreciate and understand criticism that offers “an inventive experience” of a primary text. “I don’t know what name to give it”, conceded Derrida, “that’s the problem, we must invent one for those ‘critical’ interventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits” (1991: 53). More recently, Foster has highlighted the need for “alternative modes of engagement that do not oppose aesthetic experience and critical reflection” (2015: 122). Various fashionable terms have been deployed to name this supple and definition-resistant writing, including “new journalism”, “faction”, “creative non-fiction”, and “ficto-criticism”. Naming this writing is perhaps less significant than identifying its epistemological compass. Negotiating the threshold space between hard facts and subjective opinions, this “enacted criticism”, as George Steiner has described it (1989: 20), eschews ritualized hermeneutics — or what cultural critic Diedrich Diedrichsen objectively describes as the “discursive habits” (2010: 85) and “traditional rules” (2010: 89) of art criticism — in favour of presenting more complicated and furtive readings of events, actions, things, and people. Largely overlooked in South African art critical discourse, this category of creative-critical writing, of which Vladislavić is a key practitioner, possesses a latent criticality that merits further exploration.

There is an important historical context to this proposition. The end of white minority rule and transition to non-racial democratic governance in 1994 heralded a period of optimism for writers, intellectuals, and journalists after many decades of censorship. In 1996, the right to freedom of expression was enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. Since 1996, writes literary historian Peter McDonald,

literature’s destiny in South Africa has been tied not just to a properly autonomous and still significantly transnational book trade, but to the chance of a multilingual constitutional democracy, of a unitary state with a strong internationalist orientation, of a reclaimed liberalism, and of a rights-based multi- or interculturalism. (2009: 347)

In the same year that “freedom of the press and other media” (Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996: s. 16.1.a) and “freedom of artistic creativity” (s. 16.1.c) were constitutionally protected as “the rights of all people” in South Africa, art historian Olu Oguibe delivered a speech in London that dwelled on the possibilities of a post-apartheid art criticism. The institution of criticism, he stated, “develops, inevitably, as both the foundation and an extension, of the republican spirit” (1996: 100). Speculating on the possibilities for public debate in the newly democratic society, Oguibe offered that the “institution and consolidation of a true republican environment where neither criticism nor its critique is prohibited” were essential to “serious art criticism” (1996: 103). Oguibe’s observations were necessarily conditional: the apparatuses of criticism, he noted, largely remained “in the hands of a particular group and class” (1996: 103). Oguibe’s comments are useful in that they reorientate an overly formalist debate (What does art criticism look like?) to encompass larger ideological considerations (Who is it being written for?).

This line of reasoning necessarily troubles my argument around Vladislavić’s writing as art criticism. Can a white writer, someone who consciously writes in a high literary mode and purposefully adopts linguistic complexity, necessarily embody the republican potential wished for by Oguibe? Does Vladislavić’s corpus reiterate the bourgeois hegemony of contemporary criticism, which in South Africa has long been affiliated to English, American, and European precedents through colonial contact? Can a practice that resists being named criticism, preferring instead the generic designation writing, be construed as democratic in Oguibe’s sense in that it widens “public expectation and understanding of art” (1996: 103)? My own view is yes, if we can accept that labelling Vladislavić’s art-interested writing as art criticism is far less important than identifying its generative potential and yield. As discussed in the first section of this article, Vladislavić’s writings record the difficult process of clearly seeing and eloquently recording an encounter with a changeable South African world where history continues to exert itself on the present. But can this work — of stilling and amplifying an encounter with art, of verbally distilling it — really be construed as criticism?

Amongst its many functions, the practice of criticism centrally asserts the role of debate, of a “public sphere” (Foster, 2015: 122). This social aspect of criticism is key to its durability, arguably more so than its changeable form, which is contingent on the deforming pressures of changing media and broadening modes of public address. In this regard, I would argue that Vladislavić’s collected writings on art contribute to a “robust pluralism” of criticism, and are not simply another manifestation of what Foster describes as the “debilitating relativism” that typifies contemporary art criticism (2015: 115). Although not an art critic, art is central to Vladislavić’s practice as a writer; indeed, it is a central pillar of his nuanced and imaginative literary output. Vladislavić’s longstanding commitment to thinking and writing about art owes a great deal to his personal investment in the world of art and artists, a connectedness that has been largely overlooked in scholarly appreciations of his work. In properly accounting for this connectedness, it is important to recognize that his writings, while preoccupied with South Africa, a society in deep flux, also speak to worldly debates about the place and function of criticism in late-capitalist society.