Book Review: OPEN QUESTIONS Helen Molesworth

Words and photography Claire Summers

HELEN MOLESWORTH IS, FIRST AND BEFORE anything else, a viewer. And by her own definition, viewers must stand curious in front of works of art. Such is the case in Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art, recently published by Phaidon and compiling 24 essays written by Molesworth over three decades.

THIS TOME DOES PRECISELY WHAT its title suggests: it poses questions, often and in great number. The question is Molesworth’s primary motif. She deploys them liberally, puncturing the page with proposition. She asks: What is criticism? (in Why Is the Sky Blue and Other Questions Regarding Writing) What forms of history can feminism offer in the space of the museum? (in How to Install Art as a Feminist) Is individuality “private” and equality “public”? (in Lari Pittman: Décor, The Decorative, Decorum). Molesworth never postures that she has absolute answers to the questions she lays down. Rather, it is apparent that she takes great satisfaction in proposing only possible answers. It is precisely this absence of absolutes and this flirting with possibility that categorises Molesworth’s questions as open ones.

I appreciate Molesworth’s questions for the same reason I value text-based works, where words function as both form and content. Text-based works, for me, provoke thought patterns in a very directional manner, as opposed to say a more swelling and swooning feeling I experience standing before a great (or even simply good) painting. Molesworth’s mode of questions functions much to the same effect, proposing directions and send the reader skipping merrily along to find where they lead. In House Work and Art Work, Molesworth references artist Martha Rosler in conversation with art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Rosler states: “My work is a sketch, a line of thinking, a possibility.”

Excising it from the context in which it appears, this quote feels most apt for describing Open Questions on the whole.

We encounter Marcel Duchamp, on whom Molesworth wrote her PHD dissertation, repeatedly throughout these essays, either in great detail or as a passing reference. In Work Ethic, Molesworth traces the relationship of the artist to the work of being an artist, referencing the manner in which Duchamp’s pioneering of the ‘readymade’ altered the labour of artmaking. She states: “Far from destroying art, Duchamp’s profound challenge ultimately served to create an enormous field of aesthetic possibilities.” Through reclamation and redistribution of purpose, Duchamp’s readymades expanded the realm of materiality, a shift that Molesworth cites as ones that moved art into “…a realm of ideas.” Molesworth’s questioning function in much the same way: they expand the realm of ideas, the limits of what is possible, simply by the act of asking without relying on a question-answer binary.

To me, an enduring devotee to the painting and its power, Molesworth is at her finest in the final essays gathered together under the title After All This, It Turns Out I Really Love Painting. Her descriptions of life’s minutiae in Dike Blair: Hook and Eye are grimy but profound; her humility in Noah Davis: The Forest and the Trees is candid if not casual. But Molesworth is at her most evocative, most instinctive, in Lisa Yuskavage: Meissen v. Hummel. In this essay, a piece that Molesworth declares in the text’s post-script as one of her first written from a post-institutional position and her most “explicitly queer”, we see a writer freed. Yuskavage’s paintings are unabashedly erotic, and Molesworth writes about them as if in the midst of a full body blood rush: “Yuskavage’s work opens up the rich minefield of desires formed when you didn’t have much agency over your life, when you weren’t in control of your own visual field, desires formed long before you had any language of describing them.” Here, the words feel as if they run over the page at a clip, coming fast and instinctual.

In essays published in her early career, there is a sense that Molesworth feels a need to show that she knows her stuff; the later essays express a need to show that she knows herself. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the way Molesworth writes is her offering of her own point of view–it’s the presence of the ‘I’ that holds us so closely to the text, vesting something of ourselves in the pursuit for each question’s conceivable reply. Molesworth’s essays are proof of her most important claim: that art and life are inextricably linked. Each of the essays in this compilation refer back to this on repeat, each one laced with a hair-raising urgency. Through its examination of the lives of artists, of critical thinking in art, of the modus operandi of institutional halls, Open Questions offers an intimate examination of Molesworth’s own life and the ways in which art is the realm of the personal for her. Everything is intimate, even when it’s intellectual. Her queerness, her politics, her tastes, her expertise, her vulnerabilities are all interwoven into the manner in which she looks at art or the systems that uphold and propel it. This intimacy with which we glimpse Molesworth’s own inner life is most acute in two places: in the overarching forewords of each section and in the brief postscripts on a select number of essays, all penned by Molesworth in the present. In this way, we witness Molesworth in a state of reflection, in conversation with the writer, curator or thinker she used to be. In an interview promoting the book’s launch with podcast The Art Angle, Molesworth said, “I’m not rewriting history, but annotating it,” and it is in these annotations that we experience her interiority most profoundly.

Increasingly, I find that there is great hazard in looking to anyone for answers. Yet, from reading Open Questions, I have found that there is comfort in looking to someone for questions. Answers purport to be a final destination, where questions offer a rolling encounter with the way we think and feel or are capable of thinking and feeling. Molesworth gave me her questions, to which I have added my own. This cycle will never be complete, but that’s the whole point. ■