The Grammarian and the Desire Path

A real-life art parable.

Whenever I get a chance to speak to curatorial students, I like to share a historical anecdote involving the teaching of Latin grammar in the early Middle Ages.

One of the most delightful, aside from important, books ever written about the history of the Spanish language is Antonio Alatorre’s Los Mil Años de la Lengua Española. Alatorre was a towering Mexican philologist and literary scholar who contributed much to the study of baroque poetry and criticism; it is however his aforementioned survey, written in an accessible way for the non-specialist, that made him most famous.

In his book Alatorre tells the story of the birth of the Spanish language, full of fascinating historical data. One of the sections that I remember most often pertains to the very moment when the language was still considered vulgar Latin. The collapsing Roman empire, around the 6th century, had imposed Latin pretty much all over Europe and Northern Africa. Starting around that time, various grammarians and linguists emerged, trying to preserve the language of Virgil and promoting the works of what we now call the classics. However, as Alatorre notes, there was a divergence already between learned Latin and the Latin that was spoken in the cities and villages of Europe. The Latin scholars of the time thus endeavored to create several manuals to teach the proper use of the language.

Elio Donato

Amongst them the most important was Elio Donato’s Ars Grammatica, to which there was also an added set of supplementary appendices that were specifically designed for the region where the book was being used. Of those, one used in  the Iberian peninsula was the Appendix Probi (falsely attributed, according to Alatorre, to a scholar named Valerio Probo). This was the very first book in the world where anyone could read Spanish words. Probo (or whoever the author was) included a whole list of correct Latin phrases while adding the incorrect version with the formula: “do not say it this way, here is the correct manner to say it”. Except that, as Alatorre notes, every phrase that Probo was describing as the incorrect way of speaking was an actual Spanish phrase in its infancy (or what we would now consider correct Spanish). So in an indirect way, by means of censorship, Probo unsuspectingly published the first Spanish language manual (additionally, it is deliciously ironic that the name “Probo” comes from the Latin “probare” which means to test; in a way his own language test standards were turned against him).

I find the story interesting for various reasons. First, at the most basic level, it exemplifies how living language is ungovernable. We see it today with the Real Academia de la Lengua Española, the “official” academic arbiter for the use of Spanish in the world. The REA is respected but also reviled due to the draconian rules that it often makes about Spanish, and it is generally seen as being behind the times,  establishing regulations that appear to show little awareness to actual contemporary need or usage. The word “fútbol”, for example, took decades (if not nearly a century) before it was officially accepted as part of the RAE dictionary (the native term, barely in usage now, is “balonpié”).

The story of Probo’s appendix also helps us make an argument about how culture (of which the spoken language is only one component) is also shaped not through decree or academic rules. Instead, to put it in the most cliché way, it makes its road by walking. And when one attempts to redirect it artificially, desire paths emerge. Desire paths  (a term attributed to Gaston Bachelard), is the name given to shortcuts that people take instead of walking through a longer constructed public path. A headache for urban designers, they often serve as evidence of the disconnect between design and actual usage. A design is conceived by one or a handful of people, but it is likely to be used by thousands or millions, who might then adapt it to suit their needs if it doesn’t work for them as originally designed. As James Surowiecki once wrote in “The Wisdom of Crowds”: “the more power you give a single individual in the face of complexity and uncertainty, the more likely it is that bad decisions will get made.”

At this point you might be wondering what, if anything, all this has to do with curating. The answer is that this story serves us, I believe, as a parable about what historical perspectives, as well as the experience of art in real time, allow us to understand about it.

One of the many ways to map the facets of the curatorial profession would be to break it down into two predominant roles— roles that, for lack of better terminology, I will describe as the surveyor and the connoisseur.

The surveyor is more tied to the present: they try to understand the current lay of the land and show it in their resulting research. The connoisseur, in contrast, understands history and draws from it to generate their arguments, working from well-established, time-tested facts and values. The surveyor is closer to a journalist, while the connoisseur is closer to a historian. Both can bring new insights of old and new problems. As you might already see, under this description, the surveyor is closer to a contemporary art curator, and the connoisseur is closer to an art historian and/or curator of earlier art historical periods.

Problems arise when a surveyor attempts to speak like a connoisseur, trying to establish definitive truths about something that is alive and in motion ( i.e. contemporary art practice).

Contemporary culture, and by extension, contemporary art, are often unpredictable and largely undefinable through precepts of rules: we need the distance of time to speak of the present, and not doing so might be arrogant and misguided. Yet we do it more often than we should, sometimes even with moral authority, and it can eventually backfire.

Installation view of the Degenerate Art exhibition at the Neue Galerie in New York — with official Nazi art on the left and modern art (Max Beckmann) on the right

In art we have many examples of regimentations and condemnations of forms of art that indirectly validated those very forms due to hubris, ignorance, superciliousness, or a combination of all of the above. When the Nazis presented the “Degenerate Art” exhibition, they might have become yet another example of “Probo’s law”: by displaying the art that they wanted to be forbidden and derided, they indirectly presented one of the first surveys of avant-garde art.  Religious censorship, of course, often acts as another form of indirect endorsement.

But aside from authoritarian regimes and theocracies, and in a much more benign way, academia in general  and art history in particular also and often have to face their own Probo-like problems. The story of modern art pretty much starts with a Probo-like incident: the rejected artworks of the 1863  Paris Salon that, by exclusion, produced the Salon des Refusés.  One of the most famous  examples in post-war art might be Michael Fried’s famous 1967 essay Art and Objecthood which criticized minimalism as a “theatrical” practice but indirectly cemented its reputation  (Fried did not see the inexorable desire path being created at the moment,  favoring repetition, gradual variation, and stripping forms to the very essential components).

The list is long, and it would be wonderful to assemble an anthology of these examples.

It is an oversimplification to say that artists are natural contrarians who will do the exact opposite of what the accepted rules are just because of being the status quo or academia. While this is sometimes true, the statement fails to understand that the motivations often have less to do with prohibitions and more to do with larger socio-cultural and economic phenomena. Those conditions result in the creation of artistic desire paths, made out of need or out of instinctive response to something that artists feel is missing. This is where curators are needed to play the role of surveyor, making sense of that present and laying out the cultural landscape for us to better appreciate it. Then, decades from then the curatorial connoisseur will be able to chronicle and describe that moment from their own present, after those drafts of curatorial journalism have provided enough evidence to create a historical record.

Certainly every curator is and should be both an observer of the present and an informed expert of the past (immediate or otherwise). And speaking with confidence about art is a professional requirement in order to attain status. But we all need to be cautious about speaking with professorial certainty about the present, let alone try to make predictions or establish rules as to what art “should be”—as we will almost certainly be wrong.

Years ago I was at a small dinner party in Chicago, at the house of an artist friend. One of the attendees, a curator friend, was speaking about his selection process for an exhibition, based in conversations with artists. At some point he made a reference to an artist being unable to make the “right” pieces.

His comment irked me somehow and— something that I rarely ever do— I challenged him on it. What did he mean that there were “right” and “wrong” pieces? “Right” according to what and whose criteria? And, how could he be so sure of those seemingly fixed categories of right and wrong?

I don’t remember the full exchange but suffice to say that my curator friend did not appreciate my objection. That was the last conversation we ever had.

Interestingly, I have never forgotten that small comment of curatorial surety, and it has continued to bother me every now and then. In retrospect, I now realize that I was having dinner with a “Probo”. I would love one day to organize an exhibition with the works that he said were “the wrong ones”.

Lastly, the irony that I am here writing about “how we should not speak” or act is not lost on me.  If history is any guide, I might well be behaving like a Probo myself and thus only making a rule that might well be walked over by a dominant desire path of the future. But even then, I suppose, I shall lose no sleep knowing that Probos also contribute, by their own provocative antagonism, to the advancement of culture.

Written on a wall in Paris, May 1968 (it is forbidden to forbid)