A compendium of twelve essays written over the last three decades, Charles Harrison’s Since 1950: Art and Its Criticism offers a punchy yet partial picture of the critic and historian’s take on visual art at the end of the twentieth century. Sadly, this volume must also serve as the coda to the author’s career as curator, researcher, teacher, and longtime collaborator with Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden in the collective art practice of Art & Language. After a long struggle with cancer, Charles Harrison died on 6 August 2009 at the age of 67.

Presenting much more than an introduction to art and criticism of the last sixty years, Since 1950 sketches out the patterns of interpretation, the juxtapositional logics, the thinking-with-images, and the powers of observation that made Harrison one of the most subtly influential critics in the contemporary art world. Often resembling Vince Lombardi’s football coaching more than the teleologies of Clement Greenberg’s late art writing, Harrison’s essays remain true to the early postwar criticism that initially inspired him, treating visual art as a field of contestation, a place in which ideas get thrown about, experiences outrun descriptions, and all of the players should expect to get knocked down—then snap back to their feet for the next scrum. In Harrison’s view, art is trouble, and when it ceases to be troubled and troubling, when it simply “functions as a vivid signpost, directing attention to significant aspects of the social and cultural world,” then the artwork is no longer worth the critical effort (138). If for Lombardi, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” then for Harrison—though he would never phrase it this way—“The artwork is not everything; it’s the only thing.”

Being aware of art’s possibility, according to Harrison, is the most obdurate challenge to the critic. Anyone can like or dislike a work of art—or treat the work as, in Harrison’s words, “Cultural Studies . . . practiced at the level of illustrative vignette” (146). Anyone can play the game of criticism—and many do—but very few push critical thought into uncomfortable, productive spaces, zones in which narrating the possible descriptions of a work’s achievement, explaining how a judgment could appear, is always more satisfying than rendering a verdict. At its most dexterous, Harrison’s thinking aims for absolute clarity while simultaneously groping for the dimly lit edges of interpretive obscurity. Honing in on those moments when his own capacities reach some previously unperceived limit, a phantom threshold that transforms rhetorical possibility, Harrison is a connoisseur of the ineffable, though he detests the stage-managed pathos the word inevitably implies.

Since 1950 tracks the ways that art is viewed and interpreted. Art publications tend to frame such questions as one of contrasting alternatives: experience versus history, or, as Harrison sometimes puts it, appreciation versus learning. Yet in a move no doubt influenced by his own roles as a confederate of artists and a professional art historian at the Open University, Harrison demonstrates that those old dyads no longer hold true (if they ever really did). In an environment awash with images as never before, these essays ponder the sustained lure of art objects, yet at the same time they reject the apparent cultural conservatism that is the baggage of this mindset.

Many readers’ expectations will be frustrated. Points of reference stray far from the mainstream concerns of the contemporary art world, and Harrison displays a perverse fondness for “Englishness” coupled with “Modernism,” a combination not known to make many hearts soar. In Britain, where a tradition of class-based “aestheticism” (Clive Bell is often cited in Harrison’s writings) has long coexisted with strong and aggressively public collections of art as well as a hyper-popular conception of the artist’s role in society (witness the Turner Prize, the YBA phenomenon, and the Saatchification of culture), Harrison argues that the vectors of modernism received a distinctive reconstitution in the second half of the twentieth century. This is one of the book’s main themes. As one would expect, Art & Language’s multimedia Conceptual art plays a dominant role in this transvaluation of modernist values, but the essays linger over the production of many other (generally British, white, and male) artists, including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Roger Hilton, Anthony Caro, and Morris Louis.

Although Since 1950 is suited for a reader looking for a straightforward guide to writing about contemporary and modern art, there is a radicality in the text that subsists in its form. Extrapolating an argument for a rigorous looking, Harrison maintains that the artwork must be difficult for everyone (for makers and commentators above all). This should be a commonplace, yet in an atmosphere in which advertisement, publicity, and scattershot, internet-based “research” trump almost everything, one cannot be so sure. Or as Harrison puts it elsewhere in characteristically non-nonsense phrasing: “That art may be like nothing else in our experience is one of the most important reasons we have for bothering with it” (Charles Harrison, An Introduction to Art, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, 40). Certainly, there is something peculiar about trudging through the MoMA lobby, ascending the escalator, then standing in front of (say) Jackson Pollock’s Full Fathom Five (1947) which cannot be explained fully through historicizing circumspection; yet such spectatorial unease should also not be chalked up to some nebulous, mystical catchall, something like “Aura” or “Presence.” This “something peculiar” (whatever it is) is a complex topic, and it is difficult to get at without devolving into fulsome lyricism or pop psychology, but Harrison does his best to be utterly unabashed in his commitment to “works of quality” (paintings and drawings, mostly) and the disquiet they occasion. Anyone who was fortunate enough to stand in front of an artwork with Harrison, to listen to him think in words, can attest to his embrace of such unease. Little surprise, then, that his prose frequently prods readers to imagine the very personal scenario of an author confronting someone else’s creation.

Obviously, traditionalism lurks here, yet these texts emphatically reject any coherent orthodoxy. Instead, the reader ends up traveling in a dozen odd directions at once, sometimes toward soliloquies on stained glass windows in Oxfordshire chapels, at others toward observations on the ontology of lip-synching in the work of the German performance collective, the Jackson Pollock Bar. Harrison argues that criticism must do more than crank the wheel of self-importance, that it needs to subject itself to withering self-criticism—in other words, to the kinds of attentiveness that once defined the modernist sensibility in visual art. For Harrison, “art and its criticism” must be intertwined within one overriding ambition: to discover the words that will do justice to an artwork without worrying about confirming or denying the rightness of any particular worldview. This openness to the perspective-less perspective must be understood as the heart of Harrison’s project. Decorative art criticism—deploying the critical act to flesh out the piquant corners of one’s special view of the world—is not only a callow exercise, for Harrison, it is merely an exercise, and a thoroughly boring—as well as potentially embarrassing—one at that. In varied manners, the essays argue that the twin capacities to appreciate the “problems of representation” within an artwork, while restraining the corollary urge toward sentimental reflections on such problems, define the critical undertaking. The process must be pursued in earnest and it must seek to undo itself, or else it would have been better to have walked away, to have done nothing at all.