Reviews are the oddest things. It boggles the mind that “Black Power,” a Hilton Als review of the film Moonlight, and “Agnes Martin, a Matter-of-Fact Mystic” by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl are approximately the same length, in the same magazine. Moonlight is a sprawling two-hour movie, spanning a child’s journey through adolescence to adulthood, full of color, motion, and noise. The Agnes Martin retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, on the other hand, is a subdued and esoteric group of paintings. Besides being examples of very different media, these two subjects serve as a stark juxtaposition of “popular” and “high” culture, as much of a contrast, funnily enough, as black  and white.

 

With the wildly disparate levels of stimulus inherent in these subjects, it’s impressive that these authors fit them both in the same 1500-word review format in the New Yorker. I think their keys to achieving this are adjusting the given context and in doing so developing very different relationships with the audience.

Als leads off with the deeply personal, confiding in us about his “anxious, closeted childhood” and  explaining the power this film holds for him as a queer black man. He grew up “in the era of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and AIDS,” never believing his story could be told on the silver screen until now. His repeated use of the first person enables intimacy and insight into his experience, which lends his discussion of the film extra weight. When he does include the viewer in his insights later on, he still includes himself using first-person plural: “Moonlight undoes our expectations as viewers…” He can focus more on his own reactions because he trusts his audience to be able to watch a film and get their own reading out of it. His job is to put his reading in conversation with yours. He achieves this by qualifying his readings: “Juan follows, entering through a blasted-out window, a symbol, perhaps, of the ruin left by the riots.” Something as simple as a “perhaps” invites the reader to really think about what he’s saying and agree or disagree.

For better or worse, Schjeldahl does not seem to trust his audience quite as much with the high-brow set of paintings by Martin at the Guggenheim. His use of second-person comes off as more prescriptive. After an admirable close-reading of a set of paintings that just look…… white, he follows with, “When you notice this [detail], the fields of paint seem to jiggle loose, and to hover. If you look long enough — the minute or so that Martin deemed sufficient for her works — your sensation-starved optic nerve may produce fugitive impressions of other colors.” Me? I notice this? His expectations would be easier to handle if they weren’t trying to force a religious experience (“secular pilgrimage”) on me. He attempts to teach my “heart” to be “ambushed by rushes of emotion,” but that’s not something you can force.

This lesser confidence in the viewer further manifests in the Martin review as an excess of biography. Citing a new biography of Agnes Martin by Nancy Princenthal, he outlines the artist’s entire life and career, making connections between her mental illness and the controlled, soothing geometric paintings she made. It was interesting to read as an art historian, because the field still debates the legitimacy of using biography to analyze work. This emphasis on biography was in stark contrast to the review by Als, who used more of his own biography than that of the filmmaker Barry Jenkins. The only bit of information deemed relevant to Als is that Jenkins “was raised in Liberty City,” the film’s setting, and therefore he “understands from the inside out.” Because again, the film will be able to speak for itself to its audience.

The more accessible nature of the film also enables Als to be more poetic and suggestive, skating over the rich scenes rather than plodding through an interpretation. One virtuosic description would lend itself wonderfully to spoken-word poetry.

“He’s a dope dealer, so there’s that, too. He may be a boss on the streets — his black do-rag is his crown — but he’s intelligent enough to know that he’s expendable, that real power doesn’t belong to men like him. Crack is spreading through the city like a fever.”

These kinds of poetic responses are enjoyable to read on their own, but again leave enough room for dialogue with the reader or film-viewer to think their own thoughts. Schjeldahl, in contrast, lets the reader be swept up in the narrative of Martin’s life, which is fascinating, but ultimately it doesn’t leave room for a Kantian “free play of imagination” above the facts.

Maybe I have been a little too hard on Peter Schjeldahl. In these pieces, I think of Als as a conversationalist and Schjeldahl as a coach, and I would definitely say there is room for both roles. I actually really appreciated the use of biography in the Martin review, because it does give the reader much more to grab hold of, beyond the white paintings described. Agnes Martin must have been a singular challenge to review. There is so little about her work alone for the popular New Yorker taste to invest in, so it makes sense to coach the reader through the experience of viewing in a way that feels rewarding, even spiritual, although for me it was a little heavy-handed. At the same time, there is something rewarding about being left to your own devices in Als’s piece after being given a prompt (or two including the film). While the authors have very different styles, the overlap occurs in their effective use of context: some media and artistic styles are just going to require more critical interpretation for a popular audience, despite the wise words of Susan Sontag.

The key as a reader is to be able to tell the difference between a genuine experience of pseudo-religious awe and one prescribed by the New Yorker.

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