1986

Donald Kuspit

Symposium of Art and Politics.
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. 1986

Extracts from the text published by Northeastern University’s Irish Studies Program. 1986.

“Hawkesworth’s Sower at night reminds me of Soutine. It conveys a sense of somethinkg organic in extreme distress, for unclear reasons. It is about the uncanniness of suffering. It’s title sells it short…

What I am interested in is how the tragic sensibility–however one wants to define it, whether in teems of the old idea of tragic conflict or the new idea kof tragic absence of empathy–is articulated in art. For me, this is the art issue of the eighties. It is a humanistic issue: art is once again engaged with trying to say what it is to be human…

The art in this exhibition is existentially and humanistically oriented. It is concerned to articulate a tragic sensibility. It wants to remind us that this is not the best of all possible human worlds…

There are no institutions in out world which articulate, even incoherently, our underlying sense of tragedy. No world leader has a strong tragic sense of life. It remains art’s responsibility to make the latent tragic sense of life in its particular contemporary form manifest.”