Obfuscating Art

Many people have apparently been criticizing the Whitney Biennial for meaningless and unreadable text.  But the examples this article gives seem clear enough to me:

"Bove's 'settings' draw on the style, and substance, of certain time-specific materials to resuscitate their referential possibilities, to pull them out of historical stasis and return them to active symbolic duty, where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings."

Certain artifacts from a given period of history are so commonly encountered that they lose much of their meaning: e.g. Dorothea Lange's photos of Depression-era farm workers.  Does anyone look at "Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children." and see it as a meaningful object, part of a network of other meaningful objects, anymore? I'd say it's mostly just used as shorthand for "The Depression."  So by combining such images/objects in interesting ways, an artist might allow them to be seen again as complex and meaningful.  Meanings that were "latent" in the image/object can again become evident when it is perceived outside its common context.

 ". . . invents puzzles out of nonsequiturs to seek congruence in seemingly incongruous situations, whether visual or spatial . . . inhabits those interstitial spaces between understanding and confusion."

Is florid, but I think relatively clear. The artist creates absurd juxtapositions of things which are confusing, but hint at meaning.  The meaning never becomes fixed or obvious, but remains tentative and provisional. Is it this? Maybe this? The viewer is encouraged to participate in discovering or constructing the sense of a piece.

So were those bad examples? Or are the critics being philistines?  Or am I more generous to obscure language than most people?

This whole kerfluffle reminds me of that award for bad philosophical writing a few years ago. Judith Butler's "winning" passage...

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

...is complex, sure, but I don't think it's unclear.  It uses jargon, but it uses it to avoid being six times as long.  There's a LOT of information in that very short paragraph. In texts written for other scholars in a given field, jargon is perfectly acceptable--even necessary. Professional shorthand makes for more readable texts, by reducing length and distilling meaning.

There's something to be said for encouraging clarity, especially in an educational context. But to sacrifice complexity for clarity is to aim discourse at the lowest common denominator.  And to expect high-level professional communication to be immediately understandable by a non-professional is ridiculous.

One shouldn't have to work to understand sentences. Clarity of structure and grammar is always desirable. And it's certainly tempting, as a writer, to try and hide one's own confusion by writing obscurely; this is something any critical reader of difficult texts should be aware of.

 But there's absolutely nothing wrong with having to work to understand complex concepts, and in many cases complex concepts can only be efficiently expressed using complex sentences.

Do we really want all academic writing to read like Dr. Phil? That would be more of a tragedy that a few overzealous writers turning out impenetrable prose.