Maria Fusco’s GIVE UP ART is a disappointing book — in retrospect. I read it twice in 2021, hoping it would live up to the fantasy I held for Fusco, whom I first came across as the enigmatic editor of The Happy Hypocrite, what Kaleidoscope  Magazine described as being “cloaked in the aura of legend and  celebrated as one of the last bastions of experimentation”. But auras are something that institutions want to commandeer, where they burn brightly for a while, before becoming another instrument in the institution. The Happy Hypocrite proffered an alternative for writing on art, and like all alternatives, probably manifested out of the frustration and limitations of not being accepted by the mainstream.

On reading GIVE UP ART I wrote and posted an unpublished letter (pasted below this text) to Maria Fusco, dripping with memetic and prolix descriptions that avoid what Rancière calls the critical and meaningful “excursions” of the word. So it is in retrospect I return to GIVE UP ART in the context of a question I have for myself and the artists in the local art scene: How much time and energy should you give an art scene before you give up on the art scene? (I am emphasising “art scene” not “art” here because the word “art” — in GIVE UP ART — encapsulates or threads two parallel worlds, the private world of the artist’s studio, and the public world of exhibiting and promoting.)

Let me explain.

Maria Fusco’s proclamation GIVE UP ART is something artists recite to themselves all the time (I’m reciting it right now as I write this). Sometimes give up art comes dressed as a promise, but most of the time, a threat. But what does the artist mean by their promises and threats to give up art?

I feel it’s not art the artist is promising or threatening to give up here, art as in the bare making and doing of things in the studio. Whereas ART in GIVE UP ART is a standin for everything outside the pleasures and obsessions of the artist’s studio. Everything that promises more than the act of making and doing. Everything that promises a public and a way to sustain a life and career as an artist in the eyes of a public.

Those artists that promise or threaten to GIVE UP ART are talking about the pursuit of art outside the studio. And yet is it possible or healthy to separate private and public in the work and life of an artist? Isn’t art activated by the outside? And this dependency on the outside is both the promise of more, and the threat of nothing?

The picture of the button-sized badge on the front cover of Maria Fusco’s book is another stand-in, a punkish-pukish self-portrait. The book is dust-jacketed in two self-portraits, one a metaphor (the badge), the other a full-page glam head. The metaphor of the badge doesn’t exactly offset the glamour of the head shot. In a sense it compounds the issue I have for books that are too self-consciously complicated about the setting in which the words are protectively cradled. As if words could never survive in the prosaic world of arbitrariness and distraction. The button badge is a badge of honour. The wearer of the badge who proclaims GIVE UP ART is resisting its tug on their shirt in their daily routine of being an artist. The badge is a reminder that art is — in Deleuze’s word — “resistance”, or at least the thug of resistance on your T-shirt or leather jacket.

My promise and threat to give up art is chronic. Weirdly I gave up my making and doing art in the studio over 10 years ago before the birth of my son. And yet I didn’t give up on the art I have located here outside the studio as an empty promise and threat, named the artworld. I have worn Fusco’s badge, but the needle has pricked too hard and too persistently. To give up art, metaphorically, is not not a form of resistance. What such a badge represents to me, as an art critic, is a meta standin for real resistance, real criticism. To wear a badge that proclaims GIVE UP ART is fashionable resistance a la Urban Outfitters.

Fusco’s book title is meta in all the ways meta exists in the artworld. Sometimes I think the artworld is meta in every conceivable way, in the way it takes risks without the risk. Especially in how it inhabits the world as a reclusive reflection of the hurts of the artist and the whims of the rich. The artworld (spelt one word, the way I have always spelt it) exists as distance, denial or avoidance of the real world. The artworld is nothing but a fantasy. Something that promises the threat of the promise.

If the artworld is so bad, why is it so hard to GIVE UP ART? I think when you become aware of the artworld, after exiting the privacy of your bedroom to reveal the drawing hidden under the crook of your elbow, it becomes a horizon of promise to aim for, even though the waves are rare, high, short-lived and crushing. Ignorance is bliss is defining and determinant in an artist's work and life. In the Jean-Michel Basquiat documentary The Radiant Child (2010), a contemporary of Basquiat’s blames the market rise of the artist in the 1980s, for poisoning his brain of the promise of more than the No Wave bohemian dereliction of the New York artist’s 1970’s lifeworld could ever promise.

I came out from under the crook of my arm immediately after my MFA. I rode the wave and got off before it crashed. I enjoyed it. But the Irish art circuit is acute, hairpin corners that turn back on themselves, so you end up reversing down the road you whence came. Awareness can’t be unseen. And when you avert your eyes and contact from what was seen, what was seen becomes fantasy, the most insidious eye.

So what are the alternatives to the art institution? There is always a sadness when artists not only become aware of a bigger world outside their studio, but also when they are picked up by the institution in all its various commercial and reputational economies. As an art critic, I have watched artists come and go and hang-on. In my experience, when artists get what they want from the international artworld, they invariably cut ties with the local art scene, unless they have a local institutional job (Isabelle Graw discusses this phenomenon in The Benefits of Friendship). When artists don’t get what they want from the local or international artworld, they get resentful and retreat into some regional backwater, or GIVE UP ART for good.

And yet I really think we can create alternatives, or at least start thinking alternatives that are not the accepted, unthinking kind. Being accepted is the worst style. Being alternative means being small but influential, critical but not mean-spirited, generous but selective, against but also for something. Art is not the commercial gallery, museum, art fair, art magazine, Instagram. Art is an attitude. Art is resistance. And art owes you nothing, in the end.

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Dear Maria Fusco.

Although I really couldn't afford it, as per the subtext of your inerasable and inductive essay… Incunabulum... I treated myself to a hardback copy of your most recent book GIVE UP ART: when did desire (or art) ever yield to the banality of responsibility? I’ve worn your book for the last week as a way to get to know it as a ‘thing’—in Susan Sontag’s terminal terminology. The glossy wraparound with two portraits of you, front and back, past and present; the arachnid knitted hardback; the yoke yellow dermis—sounds like Bataille. Thing is, I've had a fidelity for books as objects for as long as I can remember, certainly before I could read. I remember, the same way I can remember the worried palms of my mother’s hands, the book covers and bindings of my brother’s and sister’s copies of Animal Farm, The Old Man and the Sea and The Witches of Eastwick. Learning of the story behind the badge pictured on the cover of your book, an object from your childhood that has the aftershock of prescience considering where you have ended up on the back cover alongside James Elkins’ em-dash (note: not en dash) salute, gives this book the providence of autobiography, proffering a narrative beyond the content to layer another dermis, especially for those that value and treat art objects—if this is indeed Art as Martin Herbert blurbs (which I think it is)—as receptacles for lives that can be owned, worn, worn. The object that I acknowledged first on the cover as a badge that you might wear on one’s well-worn punk lapel is, beneath the patina of art criticism, a needle that threads you to the book’s contents. Two portraits, front and back, you the wearer and the wearable, is generous. Very generous. When I read Herbert’s phrasing of your phrasing as “angular” I thought of Dostoyevsky’s “cater-corner” and David Foster Wallace's “athwart”. But blurbs, always performative, don’t get to the muscle of your verbal gait. As I perused and palmed your book all this week I felt that I was always walking sideways into some of your sentences, slipping headlong into an entrance that was too narrow for the wide breadth of my shoulders, that interminable male Ego, a badge turned inward, beneath the skin, but the pin still visible as a piercing, forever chrome. I am still questioning the performativity of writing on art, not just yours, but all writing on art. Mine. You have made me dip into the dictionary a few times during this one. The list of words: Metaleptic, Theurgic, Utile, Ipseity, Titration, Incunabulum, Nosological. Maybe I have words that you don’t know? Or you don't care to know… truth and caring that Heideggerian romance. I'm not sure if I would borrow from this list. Why not! I see you used the academically self-conscious “apposite” once and the almost hardcore “apt” more than once. I have a thing about ‘apposite’--as an editor I've asked writers to drop it. My thing. At the moment, by my bedside, Vladimir Nabokov and Jack Kerouac are stacked seven-years high, presenting performance and experience as a double bind. Nabokov has made me trip and dip more than most, especially in the beginning; he's an unadulterated and unapproachable performer. Kerouac is the verbal equivalent of a rush of experience. For now I am at this fork; performance one way, experience the other. Two fingers that give me permission to either fuck or love. I am left with your shade-of-grey endnotes and your trysts and turns in the book shop. I leave you with one sentence by Kerouac (a gift I hope) wherein performance and experience merge towards the very end of On the Road. It was worth it! Don't you think? Here's to our own personal Pooh Bear!

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”

*Note: As my letter to Maria Fusco exemplifies, words are seductive things. In the reading of words, a formalism takes hold in the reader/writer that is transposed later onto the act of writing. Belle Lettre, beautiful word, beautifully said, says it all. It was the phrase art critics used at the moment, some 10 years ago, in defence and defiance against the wave of art writing that flooded the art world. James Elkins’ blurb on the back cover about the possibilities of nonfiction that Fusco practises is interesting. As the art academic par excellence, who writes with academic h-index purpose not belle lettre frivolity, Elkins’ praise can be read in many ways, two ways being that Fusco does something Elkins wishes he could do with words, or doesn’t wish he could do with words.