Suzi Gablik

Suzi Gablik (born 1934) in New York, New York, is an American artist, a prolific and influential visionary author and art critic, and a professor of art history and art criticism.^[1] She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia^[2] and lived in London for almost twenty years.^[3] A prevailing theme for Gablik, enunciated in Has Modernism Failed? and quoted in the Kirkus Reviews article about her book, The Reenchantment of Art, states, "Since the enlightenment ... our view of what is real has been organized around the hegemony of a technical and materialist world view ... we no longer have any sense of having a soul."^[4]

Education and art training

In 1951, after a summer studying at Black Mountain College, she entered Hunter College where she studied with Robert Motherwell and received her BA in 1955.^[5] After working primarily as a painter, she had her first solo show in 1966. Later, she turned her attention to collage.

Work as art critic

Gablik has written articles for Art in America (for which she was the London correspondent for fifteen years),^[6] ARTnews (1962-1966),^[7] Times Literary Supplement,^[8][9] and The New Criterion,^[10] as well as for blogs.^[11] Chapters 2 and 5 (the final chapter) of her book Has Modernism Failed? (Thames & Hudson, 1982)^[12][13] are part of an online study guide about aesthetics. In her article "Deconstructing aesthetics: Toward a responsible art," which appeared in the New Art Examiner, she contended that "The national framework of aesthetics—which has favored an ontology of objectification, permanence, and egocentricity—has hardened into a presumption that is conserving and reinforcing a reluctance to make art which is inherently communicative and compassionately responsive."^[14]

Author

Gablik's first book was Pop Art Redefined, co-authored with art critic John Russell.^[15] Her other books include: Has Modernism Failed? (1982),^[16] The Reenchantment of Art (1992),^[4] Conversations Before the End of Time (1995),^[17] Living the Magical Life: An Oracle Adventure (2002),^[18][19][20] and Magritte (1970), about the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, written while living with the Magrittes.^[21]

Gablik’s The Reenchantment of Art announced her disenchantment with “the compulsive and oppressive consumeristic framework in which we do our work,” and argued that a re-connection to the primordial and to ritual might allow “for a return of soul.”^[22][23] Instead of traditional forms of religion, however, Gablik sought out contemporary art that she believed broke out of the Western framework, championing the work of artists such as Frank Gohlke, Gilah Yelin Hirsch, Nancy Holt, Dominique Mazeaud, Fern Shaffer and Otello Anderson, Starhawk, James Turrell and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in the book and in subsequent critical writing.^[24]

In addition to her critical articles, Gablik has conducted interviews with other artists, art critics or philosophers, such as Richard Shusterman.^[25][26] She has also written essays for exhibition catalogues of shows that she has curated.^[27]

Teaching

Gablik taught at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts and Washington and Lee University, and has lectured at many others. Between 1976–1979, she participated in US International Communications Agency lecture tours in India, Hungary, Pakistan, and countries of South Asia.^[28] She participated in a March 7, 2013 podcast on the subject of "Solastalgia and Creative Response" with Angelo Manno and Glenn Albrecht.^[29] She also gave a presentation at the Fall 1986 Mountain Lake Symposium on "Postmodernism and the Question of Meaning: For a New Spiritualism."^[30]

Biography

Gablik was born to Anthony J. Gablik and Geraldine Schwarz Gablik in New York, New York in 1934. She "hung out with Jasper Johns"^[31] and was an acquaintance of John Cage, Ad Reinhardt, Ray Johnson, and Robert Rauschenberg. In 2014, she donated a collection of her papers, lectures, notes, and other files to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.^[32]

References