Leather ankle boots, newspaper cuttings, card
17 × 45.7 × 45.7 cm, size ten boots
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz
The theme of The Critic's Boots from Brian O'Doherty's early work is O'Doherty's inner tug-of-war as an artist and intellectual, an element that continues to characterise and keep his work alive today. The Critic's Boots reflects a moment in O'Doherty's career and is a self-portrait as an art critic. In his theoretical writings he explored the relationship between viewer-oriented aesthetics and the artist's needs in terms of production aesthetics. The work consists of a pair of size-44 leather Chelsea boots on a base board; both the boots and the flat base are completely covered with newspaper cuttings of exhibition reviews that O'Doherty wrote for the New York Times. He wore the boots while working as an art critic in New York. This piece anticipated the artist's farewell to daily journalism, that he enacted in 1967 with Object and Idea. A New York Journal, 1961–67, a collection of his writings. O'Doherty was an astute observer and his articles not only reflect the sense of new departures but also draw attention to the animosities and conflicts within the small New York art scene, at the centre of which he operated. The topics of his articles are indicative of the rapid growth that was just beginning, the artistic practices that were undergoing radical change, and the increasing wealth of opportunities available to artists in the city. O'Doherty describes the implosion of aesthetic criteria and the ephemeral nature of trends and careers in art. The goal conflicts that arose from his dual role as artist and art critic initially hampered O'Doherty as an artist but at the same time had an interesting and positive effect on his work. To reflect on the aesthetic is one of the core tasks of art critics but may also be a theme of artistic work itself, as evidenced by The Critic's Boots.
Roman Kurzmeyer
"Artist and writer are separated by a river of words beyond which... is a zone of silence where visual art resides. But language, in our culture, is the instrument by which we socialize the visual... Art resists this process by inducing language to mirror itself... But in a generation most artwriting exposes its conventions as masses of words are transported to some esthetic landfill. The artwork survives the verbal masks we lay upon it, and we must always work to recover its inscrutable face."
Brian O'Doherty, American Masters: The Voice and the Myth, New York: Universe Books, 1988, 285.
