Sischy and Sandback arrive with a vague, unrepentant story about a distrait taxi-driver. Sandback is a woman in her forties—a calm, soft-spoken, somewhat mysterious woman, with the air of a natural consoler about her, though at present she herself is in need of consolation, because of a new, profoundly regretted punk haircut. Both women are very animated with Samaras. I am struck by the change in Sischy’s demeanor—how much lighter she is here. With me, she has always been rather serious and subdued. Now there is a lot of banter and laughter and kidding. The purpose of the visit is to make a selection from among Samaras’s new acrylic paintings for an eight-page spread in the Summer issue of Artforum. The new paintings are a large collective portrait of the art world—a taxonomy of the dealers, curators, collectors, critics, artists, artists’ wives, and failed artists who inhabit it. The paintings are all on thirty-six-by-twenty-four-inch canvas boards, and all are horribly grinning skulls. The groups are distinguished from one another largely by color and style of brushstrokes, so that each is unpleasant in a slightly different way. The dealer skulls, for example, are done in slashing, sketchy, bright colors on a black background, the critics are done in a bleary gray-and-white, and the collectors are in thick, vividly colored strokes and have been given two mouths. During the two hours it takes to make the selection and agree on how to lay out the spread, Samaras serves tea and coffee and offers expensive chocolates; when Sischy says no to the chocolates because she is on a diet, he brings out three grapefruits, deftly peels them, cuts them into artful slices, and serves them in bowls with spoons, all with the sad, ironic air of one doing an avant-garde performance piece that may be beyond the grasp of the audience. The joshing and kidding continue as Samaras, Sischy, and Sandback regard the paintings that Samaras has spread out, though there is a tension beneath the surface. Sischy and Sandback will do everything to please the artist, up to a point, and Samaras, for whom it is extremely advantageous to be shown in Artforum, knows he must gauge where that point is and not push beyond it. However, as the afternoon wears on, the sense of cautious negotiation gives way to a rhythm of work, to a tide of interest in the task at hand, into which all three are drawn—and into which even I, who have no vested interest in the project whatever and was initially rather repelled by the paintings, now find myself drawn.
At Samaras’s, Sischy behaves as if she had all the time in the world to spend on the project, but in fact she is almost calamitously behind schedule. There are only eight days left before the Summer issue of the magazine goes to the printer, and some of the writing that is going to appear in it has yet to be committed to paper. Thomas McEvilley, a contributing editor, has not yet finished a piece on Conceptual art, and Rene Ricard, a poet and a regular contributor, is still working on an article about an unknown figurative painter named Bill Rice, whose chief subject is homosexual black men. The unconventional art criticism of Ricard has been the cause of much of the grumbling among the older art-world intelligentsia about the new Artforum’s lack of seriousness. Here is an example of it, from Ricard’s first contribution to the magazine—entitled “Not About Julian Schnabel”—in the Summer, 1981, issue:
Ricard is thirty-nine years old, has published a book of poems that inevitably bring the verse of Frank O’Hara to mind in their emotional immediacy (though their descriptions of very rough homosexual sex are beyond anything O’Hara dared or cared to render), and at an early age was a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory. He lives in a very bad, brutish tenement on East Twelfth Street, in an apartment that he keeps in a condition of aggressive squalor and disorder. He has no telephone, and it is unclear what he does to support himself. It is not his writing. Sischy has spoken to me about the gross financial inequalities of today’s art world between the artists who have made it and the ones who haven’t. “As for those of us who work in a reporting or critical way, our lives are a sort of joke in comparison to what we’re dealing with,” she added. “I’m lucky. I happen to live with someone who owns her own house. I’m in comfortable circumstances. But I know that most of our writers have nothing, and when I took this job I made it clear that I hoped to reach a point where writing about art would be taken seriously enough so that maybe we could provide some income for the writer. Our fee is now up to eight hundred dollars for a piece—and a writer may work for a year or more to earn it. So whenever I’m out with a writer the least I can do is make sure that there’s a decent meal. It’s crazy, but that’s the level it’s on.”
For the past three days, Sischy has been going to Ricard’s place in the evenings to work with him on his piece about Bill Rice, staying until two or three in the morning and somehow getting it out of him. On the day it is finished, I join her and Ricard for dinner at an East Village restaurant called Evelyne’s. Ricard has brought along a friend named George Condo, an agreeable and short young artist, who is wearing a white shirt and a red crew-neck sweater under a dark suit that is two or three sizes too big for him, to indicate that he is not an Ivy League college student but an artist. Condo does luridly expressionistic paintings of heads on long necks, which are enjoying a vogue in Europe. Ricard is dressed in a gray sweatshirt over jeans; he is thin and wiry, his brow is deeply lined, his eyes are frightened, and his mouth is petulant. His voice is high-pitched, and in it there is spite, self-pity, self-parody, seduction, false innocence, anxiety. As he talks, he gesticulates wildly and reaches out to touch and stroke you. He dominates the conversation, but, unlike most people who are nakedly interested in themselves, he is also aware of what is going on with others, though in a specialized way. Certain things capture his interest: he comments on people’s looks and clothes and mannerisms. When a woman at the next table takes out a compact and puts on lipstick, he says, “That’s my favorite gesture in the world. I love it. It’s so twenties. Isn’t it the twenties?” A beautiful and elegant young woman wearing a pristine white linen suit, whom Ricard knows (and, bafflingly, introduces as “someone I was engaged to eight years ago”), joins our table, as does, when he arrives, the good-looking man—a curator of a small museum in Colorado—she has been waiting for at the bar. After introductions are made, the curator asks Sischy what she does. She replies, “I work in the editorial department of Artforum magazine.” After the curator and the young woman have left for the Danceteria discothèque, Ricard turns exasperatedly on Sischy and says, “Why did you say that to him?” He does a mincing parody of Sischy saying “I work in the editorial department of Artforum magazine,” and goes on, “Why didn’t you say, ‘I am Ingrid Sischy, the editor of Artforum magazine. I’m this big deal. I’m this powerful person. I’m the whole thing’? Telling him ‘I work in the editorial department’! Come on!” Sischy quietly glares at Ricard, like the older sister of a child who is doing something embarrassing.
The dinner arrives, which Ricard eats hungrily. He tells, as if for the first time, the story he told in “Not About Julian Schnabel” concerning the “exclusive” he lost at the hands of Mary Boone. He says that everyone he has ever written about has become a millionaire. “That’s why everybody wants a Rene Ricard writeup,” he explains. “It’s like magic.” Sischy looks pained. Condo politely suppresses a yawn. Ricard goes on to tell about an auction in New Jersey the previous day where two Picabias went for two hundred and three hundred dollars, respectively. “You made me miss that auction,” he says to Sischy accusingly, and then, to me, “She made me stay here and work on my piece.” I ask Sischy if it is true about the Picabias. She replies, “Whatever Rene says is true.” But I remember a poem of his about malevolence—a litany of such acts of bad faith as
The last line is “I made a lot of this up, but a lot of it is true.”
During coffee, the conversation turns to Henry James, because Ricard has paraphrased a line from “The Portrait of a Lady” in the Bill Rice piece but cannot remember where in the novel it appears. Nor does he care. But Sischy is adamant about finding the line, so the paraphrase can be checked, and though I don’t recognize the allusion, I offer to look for it in my copy of the novel at home. Condo politely yawns again. Ricard says that he admires James, but feels constrained to add, “I would never write fiction. It’s lying.” Sischy listens but does not join in the conversation. She once told me that she wasn’t bookish. “Everyone I’ve ever been close to and loved and lived with has been a person who reads all the time,” she said. “It would be very nice if I could say the same about myself. But the truth is I’ve never in my life been a reader.” Among the things that she had not read, she astonishingly confessed, was the old Artforum itself. Until she became editor, seven years ago, she would buy the magazine but not read it. “Even now, if I wasn’t forced to edit them I probably wouldn’t read some of the things we publish,” she said. This confession followed a confession of my own about finding much of the magazine unreadable. Sischy was sympathetic. “It’s always been a problem, this troublesome writing we print,” she said. “The bigger question is: How does one write about art? That’s what the magazine has been struggling with—probably quite disastrously, in the end—for twenty-two years. How does one write about something that is basically mute? Any cliché about Artforum is always about its problem with writing. That is probably why I was brought in as editor—because I found much of Artforum unreadable myself. I never used to read the magazine, and when I look back I must have been mad to take on the job of editing this thing I couldn’t read. It was like a penance for all those years of not reading it. And I still have the problem, which may be why the magazine is so damn nervous inside itself. That’s why you see so many different kinds of writing in it. An object lesson I keep before me all the time is that of my mother, who picks up Artforum, who is completely brilliant, sophisticated, and complex, who wants to understand—and then closes it.”
There is one contributor to the Summer issue about whom Sischy can feel easy, whose article will come in exactly on time, will not require all-night editing, and will never be anything less than a piece of workmanlike prose. This is Carter Ratcliff, who, like Ricard, is identified as a poet at the end of his articles in Artforum but is as far from the flamboyant Ricard as one can get. Ratcliff is cool, detached, impassive, reserved, rational, elliptical, grudgingly kind, pale—a sort of Alan Ladd of art criticism. He has written about art for over fifteen years, has published five book-length critical studies, five monographs, and two books of verse, and has taught modern art and criticism at Pratt, the School of Visual Arts, and Hunter. He is forty-five years old. His loft, on Beaver Street, is as clear and clean and uncluttered as the man. When I visit it, a few days after the dinner with Ricard, it has the appearance of a place that someone has just moved into and hasn’t furnished yet, but Ratcliff mentions that he and his wife have lived there for a year. There is a new, highly polished light wood floor, two off-white sofas facing each other across a pale wood coffee table, a dining table and chairs at a remove, and nothing else. Ratcliff’s study, filled with books and papers, looks more inhabited. Ratcliff offers no refreshment, and we sit and talk, facing each other on the two sofas.
Ratcliff writes for Art in America as well as for Artforum, and I ask him whether there is any difference in the way he writes for each. He says, “Yes. My tone for Artforum is less formal. At Art in America, there is an ideal of responsible, properly organized, moderately political writing with a moderate tone—a kind of standard essay style that has survived into the present and that Ingrid simply isn’t interested in. I find it annoying sometimes, but its influence isn’t all bad. I think, for example, that the Frank Stella piece I wrote for Art in America was far more convincing than the piece I did on Andy Warhol for Artforum, because I took more care to argue points in the Stella piece, whereas in the Warhol piece I felt freer to simply make assertions, or argue from an attitude, or have prejudices—as opposed to substantiating everything in a responsible manner. I’m not sure that in a collection of my pieces one could tell which article was written for which magazine. Maybe one could. But when I’m writing for Artforum I feel free to write in a way that is more direct and more responsible to what I feel and less responsible to some standard of rationality.”
I ask, “Does this sense of permission to write more freely and less responsibly come from Ingrid directly, or do you get it from reading people like Ricard in the magazine and feeling, Well, if they can write like that so can I?”
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“Both are true,” Ratcliff says. “Just from reading the magazine, one gets the sense that Ingrid is encouraging individual voices. But, also, when Ingrid is talking over a project with you, or going over a text, often what she wants you to leave out is art-historical substantiation of a point, or an extended description. I’m fascinated by that absurdity—trying to describe what a painting is like. Both the description of art and the invocation of historical evidence are a kind of striving for proof: not direct proof but an attempt to impart an air of scientific rationality to one’s writing—you know, all the apparatus of sounding as though you knew what you were talking about. But Ingrid is not interested in that. She’s interested in an assertion of a point of view and in a tone of voice and in one’s feeling about things. When we were going over the Warhol piece, I remember her saying it was too smooth. She was afraid that people wouldn’t get the point. What she wanted to do in the editing was to leave things out and have it be a little choppier—to sort of wake up the reader, to have him make more leaps. I think she sees art writing as something declamatory and gestural; her ideal is not that of the well-wrought essay. She has a feeling that art-world readers need to be jolted, that they’re not literary readers. I don’t think she sees this as a fault on the part of art-world readers or writers. It’s just that that’s the way it is—it’s basically a visual world, with visual concerns. Her own orientation is visual, and that strongly affects her idea of what is acceptable as a piece of writing. In a certain way, I think that Rene Ricard is the writer closest to Ingrid’s vision of the magazine. I think she feels that Artforum’s function is to be on the spot when something newly pertinent pops up, and I think she feels that you can’t, on the spot, come up with a considered argument about anything new. You can only say things that point in interesting ways. You can only strike illuminating postures in the vicinity of things. The sorts of things that she’s interested in are not yet subjects for the responsible treatment they will eventually get in other magazines. She feels that Art in America is the magazine that stands off a little to the side and tries to get a rational view of things, while Artforum is more on the spot. She feels that it’s not a problem if something sounds silly—that Artforum is a place where this kind of risk can be taken, where this kind of irresponsibility is possible. When everything is new and in flux, the writing should reflect that. It’s not that she cultivates irrationality for its own sake; it’s that she tries to deal with things very intensely and fully, still leaving them in their immediate state.
“I don’t do that myself, so it’s presumably not the only thing she’s interested in. But it’s what is at the center of the magazine. Rene Ricard and Edit deAk [another unconventional critic and a contributing editor of Artforum, now on leave of absence] really keep track of the art world. They really know what’s going on. There are other people who keep obsessive track of that world, but only within the framework of that tiny world itself, and they’re very boring. Rene Ricard and Edit deAk, in their strange ways, are connected to many other worlds as well—a bewildering variety of them, especially in Ricard’s case—and that’s where their criticality comes in: from being outside. Ricard lives in a very strange world, with all kinds of very strange people. He is an ex-Warhol person, and his world is one I don’t know very much about. He seems to have a strong art-historical background. And also—it’s all very eccentric—he is involved with the side of the art world that has to do with collecting. All his personalities are available at once, so you get this strange refraction. What holds it all together, it seems, is the sort of ecstatic, fanlike involvement he has with one thing or another from moment to moment, so that his obsessions kind of recapitulate the whole art world. He’s impossible, he’s hopeless. He is someone who is always connected to someone else. There used to be Warhol; now there’s Ingrid.”
“He’s supposed to be an important figure in the art world,” I say. “But I find his significance elusive.”
“Yes, very. Because you can’t ever find the center of a Rene Ricard article. I’m not sure I know what he’s talking about a lot of the time. He’s this kind of gestural presence—the spirit of the new painting. And it’s not just a question of someone coming along and saying that the new painting is great, because others have done that, and they don’t occupy Ricard’s position. These gestures he makes in the vicinity of the new painting seem to reflect something about it, seem to illuminate it in some way. He’s a kind of messenger figure: he’s bringing us news about the new painting, assuring us of its significance, or at least making a very strong claim for it. I think he’s important, because if there hadn’t been this irrational love that he, and maybe deAk, expressed for the new painting—and by ‘irrational’ I mean a love based not on argument and sober judgment but just on this really flamboyant embrace—then people’s suspicions that the new painting is empty and calculating and manipulative might be stronger. I am almost swayed by Rene Ricard. I don’t know him, and I don’t pay all that much attention to him. But I do pause at the spectacle of his mad love for this new painting. I don’t quite see it—I mean, I think that in many ways Schnabel’s painting is banal and predictable—but the presence of Rene Ricard calls my judgment into question in some way.
“The other thing I think is important about Ricard is that he represents a kind of sordidness that it’s important for the art world to believe that it is still capable of. The art world is supposed to be alienated, to be on the periphery—and it’s not. In fact, it’s very much integrated into the mainstream of culture. It’s not that most people like art; rather, it’s that the art world has found a secure place in ordinary life—which goes against all the avant-garde’s claims to being adventurous and in opposition. At a time when artists bring in architects to design their lofts, a flaky character like Ricard is very important. He makes it more believable that art is odd and weird and challenging.”
Thomas Lawson is another of Sischy’s more dependable and quiet writers—personally quiet, that is. His writing is tough, sharp, hard-hitting, very cold-eyed. In the November, 1984, issue of Artforum, Lawson published a short article ironically entitled “Hilton Kramer: An Appreciation,” which had nothing good to say about Kramer. In one of its milder passages, Lawson wrote:
Lawson is a calm, fresh-faced, somewhat burly thirty-five-year-old Scotsman with a very level gaze, who came to New York in 1975 to pursue a career as an artist. During a conversation with him, I ask how he got into art criticism, and he replies, “Desperation. When I first arrived here, there was apparently no space for younger artists. There was a real doctrinaire thing going on. Every gallery was selling and every magazine was covering something called Post-Minimalism. Post-Minimalism was very systematic and black and low-performance, which was fine, but it was the only game in town. I began to meet other younger artists who had also just arrived and were also dissatisfied; the connective tissue between us was an interest in mass media. We felt that TV and the movies and advertising presented a problem and a challenge to visual artists that these Post-Minimalists were avoiding. What we did, first of all, was to perversely deny ourselves originality of any kind—and this denial runs the gamut of all young artists working today. Even artists who are not directly involved in appropriating mass-media imagery—Julian Schnabel, for instance—refuse to accept the idea that you have to invent. There is something melancholy about our work. If Pop Art represented a kind of optimistic acceptance of mass culture, ours is a kind of melancholic acceptance. We never had coherence as a movement. For some reason, this generation has a particularly high incidence of extreme individualism and of paranoia about one’s peers. So there has never been much of a group. This all took place after ‘the death of painting.’ We had all been schooled in the idea that painting was finished, and the second perverse thing we did was to decide to paint. Since there’s a deadness to mass-media imagery, there was a fittingness to our decision to work in a medium that we didn’t have all that much conviction about. But, interestingly, once you start working in it you become more and more convinced by it. All these years later, painting actually seems interesting in itself, rather than a mere perverse challenge.
“Anyway, I started writing reviews for Art in America because I was so irritated with the situation. And soon I got a little name for myself as someone who could write quite acerbically about older art, who would throw a negative light on what was being shown, and who was something of a participant-champion of the new art. But then I had a falling out with Art in America, though not to the point of exchanging words. David Salle and Cindy Sherman had shows that I desperately wanted to write about but wasn’t allowed to, and I began to feel used, I began to feel like a hired gun. I’m really quite good at cutting away the pretensions that accrue around a body of work, and I had done this to some established artists, which was obviously what they liked at Art in America. But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to base a career on. My whole intention had been to be more constructive, and suddenly, with these two shows I wanted to do, I found myself being denied the opportunity. There had been a misperception at Art in America of my relations with Sherman and Salle—with whom I was neither friendly nor unfriendly. I do have sympathy for their work—I don’t see anything wrong with that. I’m an advocate of partisan criticism. Most art writing is from an insider point of view; there is very little that has an Olympian distance. I remember once reading something about Harold Schonberg, the music critic of the Times—about a deadly, life-denying thing he did. He forbade himself any personal contact with musicians, on the ground that it might influence his judgment. He wouldn’t even let his wife, who was a musician, have anything to do with them. Apart from the horror of that on the human level, I think it’s just crazy. You learn so much by knowing what in fact musicians and artists are actually thinking about and talking about, instead of pretending to drop in from the sky.”
Of his work with Sischy, Lawson says, “She’s almost chameleonlike. When I talk to her, we appear to be in complete agreement. But then an issue of Artforum comes out and—” Lawson gestures his feeling of betrayal. He goes on to describe a strange evening he once spent at the old Artforum office, on Mulberry Street (it recently moved to Bleecker Street), working with Sischy late into the night on an article about to go to press, and being acutely conscious of the presence of Rene Ricard in another room. Sischy was like a doctor going back and forth between patients in cubicles. “She would spend half an hour with me, and be extremely helpful and sympathetic, and then she’d get up and say, ‘I have to go and see how Rene is doing,’ and presumably she’d be equally helpful and sympathetic to him,” Lawson says. “There was no communication between Rene and me. We can barely talk to each other anyway, we’re so opposed in our opinions and our life styles. But Ingrid could move back and forth between us all night with ease. The Feast of San Gennaro was going on that night, and all that fairground noise outside—the firecrackers and the hawkers and the venders—only accentuated the feeling of unreality which that night with Rene had for me.”
For the past seven years, Lawson has been publishing a small art magazine of his own, called Real Life, with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, which reflects, in its unpretentious format and its radical critical content, the no-frills avant-gardism of its editor. The following excerpt from an interview by Rex Reason with Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, the directors of the Nature Morte Gallery, in the East Village, gives some sense of Real Life’s tone:
After her three nights of ministering to Ricard at his place on Twelfth Street, Sischy begins a similar series of vigils with Thomas McEvilley at his place, on Clinton Street, near Houston. I attend one of these sessions, which begins in the late afternoon and goes on until two or three in the morning. (I do not last the course.) McEvilley is a thin, bearded man of forty-seven, harried-looking but cheerful, who wears old corduroys during the day and in the evening often appears in a dashing white suit that he bought in a secondhand-clothing store. As I look around his place, I am struck by its peculiar combination of poverty and electronics, which speaks of our coming predicament with a kind of satiric authority. The apartment is a former ground-floor shop, and McEvilley has painted over the show window jutting out into the street, both for privacy and in order to have more wall space for books: the tiny room is entirely lined with books in cheap commercial cases. It has a lairlike aspect. There is an orange shag rug on the floor, and the furniture is four chairs of the sort you see thrown out on the street. But on a huge desk near the ex-window is a word processor; classical music is playing from an advanced stereo system; and there is an electric coffeemaker on a rickety side table, in which McEvilley’s girlfriend, Maura Sheehan, prepared an odd herbal drink before leaving for her studio—an identical space across the hall—where she is painting classical Greek-vase motifs on cracked automobile windshields.
McEvilly, as he once told me, sort of drifted into art criticism. He is a classicist by training (he has a Ph.D. in Greek and Latin) and some years ago shifted from the Classics Department of the University of St. Thomas to the Art and Art History Department of Rice University, in Houston, to which he actually commutes from New York during part of the school year. His controversial critique of the Museum of Modern Art’s big primitivism show appeared in the November, 1984, issue of Artforum; before that he had done pieces on the Conceptual artists Yves Klein, Marina Abramović and Ulay, and James Lee Byars, as well as an article called “Art in the Dark,” about extreme types of performance artists, among them people who subject themselves to very unpleasant ordeals, such as spending five days and nights in a two-by-three-foot locker without food, or sitting on a shelf in a gallery for twenty-two days. McEvilley said that he had dabbled in the genre himself, “but strictly as ordeal, not in an art context.” He told me that he had spent a year sleeping only four hours a night—a notion he had got from Buddhist monks—and that he had also experimented with fasting, vegetarianism, and meditation. However, one day he had caught himself feeling superior to other people because of these activities, and had decided to curb them.
McEvilley began writing for Sischy’s Artforum in 1981. “In the seventies, I couldn’t stand the magazine,” McEvilley said. “It was promoting Minimal art in overwhelming doses, and it had forced reductionist art modes on everybody with its aggressive ideological stance. Its power was undeniable—everyone knew the term Artforum Mafia, and used it.” (A disaffected member of the Family—Max Kozloff, the critic and editor, now turned photographer—once spoke to me in a similar vein about the old Artforum. “The magazine was looked upon with a kind of delirious bitterness,” he said. “It solaced the readership to know that there were people of such self-confidence and commitment at the helm, rendering such zippy and righteous judgments right and left. But if you were an artist they were not interested in—and they were interested in a very few artists, about whom they wrote repeatedly—then you found this a repellent phenomenon. You were put off by this camarilla of kingmakers and bullyboys—or, as the case may be, bullywomen—who wrote in a hermetic language that they were partially inventing, and who took themselves with ultra-seriousness. They used to say that Artforum was like Listerine: it tasted terrible, but it was good for you.”)
McEvilley went on to speak of Sischy’s ideological suppleness. “She’s very sensitive to the Frankfurt school’s perspective on the social function of art, and she wants to maintain that perspective in the magazine. But she has gone far beyond what I see as the naïve hostility of the old regime to the art market—a hostility that I myself used to share, I should add. I came to the magazine with a poet’s or a scholar’s or a philosopher’s antagonism to the market process. But Ingrid has pointed out to me very intelligently that in the past fifteen years, as the major New York museums have withdrawn from what is happening in art, serious dealers have become terribly important. They are the people who nurture contemporary art and bring it to us.”
Now I sit in a corner of McEvilley’s living room diligently jotting down snatches of the inscrutable dialogue going on between him and Sischy at the desk, punctuated by long silences while McEvilley works at the word processor.
“Is the idea that self-sameness is the only reality? I don’t think so.”
“Can I get rid of it?”
“Let’s see. Later it becomes clear that . . . O.K., let’s take the sentence out.”
“O.K.”
“ ‘Preëmptively.’ What do you mean, ‘preëmptively’?”
McEvilley goes to the word processor and unknots a sentence. Sischy looks it over. “It now reads as if Beuys is mad because Duchamp got there first.”
The telephone rings. McEvilley picks it up and hands it to Sischy. It is Ricard. Sischy speaks to him in a motherly way. She explains, as if speaking to a child, that she is busy at the moment. “Rene, you knew I was going to be working with Tom.” She listens to him talk at length, occasionally interjecting a “Great!” or a “Beautiful!” As soon as she can, she ends the conversation and returns to the manuscript.
“Is Rene O.K.?” McEvilley asks.
“Yes.”
“I thought he looked a little freaked the other day.”
“Maybe he didn’t have enough sleep,” Sischy says, with the dryness that I have come to recognize as her characteristic response to an invitation to be indiscreet.
A few days later, I run into Ricard himself at the recently opened Palladium discothèque. The place is the creation of the former owners of Studio 54, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who, after finishing jail sentences for tax evasion, hired the eminent advanced Japanese architect Arata Isozaki to turn the old Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street, into a state-of-the-art discothèque, and the result is now being hailed as an improbable triumph of architecture, art, and chic by the city’s architecture critics, art critics, and arbiters of chic. The young artists who have done paintings on the walls and ceilings of the Palladium’s various rooms and corridors—Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—are receiving renewed, wondering notice as nouveau-riche media stars from a press apparently still haunted by the idea of a revolutionary, marginal avant-garde; and the Palladium itself is being viewed as a kind of metaphor for the current state of art—the implosion of high and low culture into ever more grungily demotic and sleekly marketable forms. On this night, the Palladium has been turned over to a party for Keith Haring, and it is filled with beautifully and/or weirdly dressed people from the art world and its periphery. I come upon Ricard in a room that is apart from the discothèque proper, called the Mike Todd Room, which has a large bar, small marble-topped tables, and wire-back chairs, and is where the celebrities of the art world like to congregate. Ricard, resplendent in a white sharkskin suit, is sitting at one of the tables, in a state of high, almost incandescent excitement. As I glimpse him, I recall a passage, in a recent Art in America article on Watteau by the art historian Linda Nochlin, about the painting of the clown Gilles in the Louvre:
Ricard beckons me to sit with him, gives orders for drinks to a passing waiter, and points out celebrities as they go by. “Isn’t she pretty,” he says of Marisol. Of another well-known artist he says, “He’s a closet queen,” adding, “I’m no closet queen.” The poet Allen Ginsberg pauses at the table to chat with Ricard, and after he leaves Ricard grumbles about what he took to be a piece of prospective schnoring on Ginsberg’s part when he looked longingly at our drinks. Several times, I get up to leave, and each time Ricard clamps a hand on my arm. “So, what I was about to say,” he begins, and I am obliged to stay. I ask him whether he has been writing poetry, and he replies, “The manuscript of my new poems is in Julian Schnabel’s safe. If you want to read them, go to Julian’s house, get the manuscript, strap it to your person, and have it Xeroxed.” As Ricard speaks, he keeps scanning the crowd for people he knows. I counter-propose that Ricard himself go to Schnabel’s house and get the poems out of the safe. “Or are you too busy?” “I have too much to do, and I have nothing to do,” he replies. I laugh, and once again get up to leave, and once again I am prevented from doing so by Ricard’s desperate clutch. I don’t know why he wants me to stay—and I don’t know why I do stay. I only know that I am drawn to this Factory-made Myshkin; he is an oddly familiar, possibly anachronistic figure. In his “Not About Julian Schnabel,” Ricard wrote about a kind of line that “just gets tuckered out after a while,” adding, “The beautiful charcoal smudges and style we can follow from Matisse through de Kooning to Rivers, Serra, and, in its ultimate decadence, to Susan Rothenberg are perfect illustrations.” He went on, “Judy Rifka told me that when she was in art school all her teachers drew that way. That was the way you were taught, and no matter how lousy the drawing was it always looked pretty good, like ‘art.’ ” The conventional bohemianism that Ricard embodies may be going the way of the art line he so tellingly describes.
Ireceive an acute sense of the newer bohemianism during two visits I pay to the artist Sherrie Levine—first, to her studio, in Little Italy, and then to her apartment, a few blocks away. The studio, on the second floor of a small, run-down commercial building, is a twelve-by-seven-foot room that has nothing in it but a table, four chairs, and a fan. If you know Levine’s work, the studio is not a surprise but a kind of inevitability. She is a Conceptual artist, and the Conception for which she first became known, in the early eighties, is a series of twenty-one photographs entitled “After Walker Evans.” The photographs bear an uncanny likeness to the famous Farm Security Administration photographs that Evans took of tenant-farmer families in Hale County, Alabama; in fact, they are those photographs. Levine wrote away for copies of the Evans photographs to the Library of Congress, which owns the negatives; had them recopied at a commercial lab; and then—following Duchamp—made them her own work simply by signing them. If Duchamp’s signed urinals and snow shovels and bicycle wheels redefined art as whatever somebody designates as art, Levine absurdly extended the world of objects that are potential Readymades to include already designated works of art. “After Walker Evans” was succeeded by an “After J. M. W. Turner” series, which was exhibited in London in 1984; it consisted of twenty color reproductions of paintings by Turner which Levine had cut out of an art book, signed, and had matted and framed. When I visit Levine in her studio, she is engaged in a third technique of appropriation: she is tracing reproductions of drawings and paintings by Matisse, Schiele, Léger, and Morandi, and then adding washes of watercolor.
Levine is a pleasant, unmannered woman in her late thirties, with dark, wavy hair, wearing a denim shirt and a gathered skirt, who delivers difficult explanations of her work with such an air of directness and naturalness as to almost cause one to feel that what she is saying is self-evident. Distinguishing between the rephotographed works and the cutout works, she says, “I used to think that the cutout things were the more extreme, but now I think that the rephotographed things are more transgressional. They’re more mine. Ultimately, though, all my work is a feminist statement. It deals with the difficulty of being a woman who is trying to create images that are not a product of the expectations of male desire, in a culture that is primarily a celebration of male desire. What I do is to come at the problem through the back door; I appropriate images of male desire as a way of not being co-opted by that desire. I appropriate only the great modern male masters, and I choose only works that I love and value.”
We are talking in Levine’s apartment, on the fifth floor of an untended tenement—a single long room of bare-boned plainness, where she lives alone, with her cat. There is a bathtub in the kitchen area, and the sparse furniture has a bleak, cast-off character. We sit at the far end of the room, near the windows, in an area of incongruous conventional decorativeness—at a pale wood table, on which a vase of flowers and a spread of bread and cheese and Granny apples has been pleasingly set out. The walls of the room are painted a dull gold. “When I moved in, I painted the walls this way, under the mistaken idea that it would make the place less depressing,” Levine says. “It looks more depressing.”
“I have heard your work described as melancholy, as a sort of depressed expression of the feeling that there is nothing left to do,” I say.
“I wouldn’t deny that there is a sadness in the work,” Levine says, “though I don’t think that’s all there is.”
“Do you feel that at another time you might have been doing work of your own instead of appropriating the work of others?”
“Or not working at all. I might have been raising babies. I don’t have any feeling of destiny about doing this, but it’s a choice I’ve made. I’ve been an artist since I was a very young child. My mother gave me crayons to keep me quiet. It was an activity that has always emotionally sustained me. I enjoy the solitude of it. There was a period in which I considered becoming a filmmaker—I was very tempted, because in some ways movies are my first love—but then I realized that the communal activity of filmmaking was very different from the solitary activity of making a painting.”
“With the tracing and painting you’re doing now, you seem to be working your way back into conventional art-making.”
“Well, I never thought that what I was doing was anything but that. That’s the irony. I have always regarded my work as conventional art objects. They are always presented that way—matted and framed. I have never considered myself anything but a gallery artist. Several years ago, some friends of mine were in Holland, and they were really excited because they saw this show and thought it was my show, and then realized that it was a Walker Evans show. Or sometimes I’m looking through a magazine, and I think, Oh, great, they’ve reproduced an image of mine, only to see that it’s a real Matisse, not one of my appropriations. When I first started doing the appropriative work, a lot of the criticism written about it—much of it in October—was based on ideas of the Frankfurt school of philosophy, but somehow I felt that these sociological explanations coming out of Marx were insufficient. I had the intuition that if I started reading psychoanalytic theory I might find more satisfying explanations. Appropriating art is not all that different from wanting to appropriate your father’s wife or your mother’s husband. It’s the same psychological mechanism: the Freudian idea that desire is triangular—you desire what the other desires.”
“Are you able to support yourself from your work?”
“For the past few years, I have been. But it’s been a long time coming. I’m thirty-nine years old. Previously, I did waitressing, commercial art, some teaching. At that time, my support systems were critical rather than financial. October was the earliest of these systems.” Levine goes to a ramshackle metal cabinet and brings out some Xeroxes of writings about her work which appeared in October and elsewhere, along with some statements that she wrote herself to accompany exhibitions of her work. The statements are stiff and portentous. When, later in the conversation, Levine remarks that she is attracted to the painters of the sublime but can’t conceive of herself doing such work, because “I just can’t take myself that seriously,” I tell her of my sense of the discrepancy between herself and the forbidding writer of the statements, who seems able to take herself very seriously.
Levine says, “I know. Many people have said they were surprised when they met me—how different I was from the writer of those statements. The tone of those things isn’t right. I guess I get intimidated when I’m faced with writing.” One of Levine’s early statements—quoted in part by Douglas Crimp in a 1980 article in October—has an arrestingly different character:
The surprise of this passage is followed by an even more astonishing revelation by Crimp: “Not only do we recognize this as a description of something we already know—the primal scene—but our recognition might extend even further, to the Moravia novel from which it has been lifted. For Levine’s autobiographical statement is only a string of quotations pilfered from others.”
Sherrie Levine’s bleak little conceits have stirred the imaginations of some of the art world’s most advanced thinkers. Rosalind Krauss, at the end of the extraordinary title essay of her book “The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths,” in which she magisterially makes her way (with a few French litter-bearers) through the thicket of the discourse on originality set in motion by Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” holds up Levine’s purloined photographs as a kind of master trope of postmodernism. Another theorist—the critic Benjamin H. D. Buchloh—in an Artforum article entitled “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” compliments Levine on being “the strongest negation within the gallery framework of the re-emergent dominance of the art commodity,” adding, “Her work, melancholic and complacent in defeat, threatens within its very structure, mode of operation, and status the current reaffirmation of individual expressive creativity and its implicit reaffirmation of private property and enterprise.” Buchloh goes on to say, “Baudelaire was wrong when he argued that the poetical was necessarily alien to female nature since melancholy was outside the female emotional experience. Enter the female dandy, whose disdain has been sharpened by the experience of phallocratic oppression, and whose sense of resistance to domination is therefore more acute than that of her male colleagues, if they still exist.”
Julian Schnabel is believed to be the richest artist working in New York today (there are waiting lists for his paintings), so I am not surprised to learn—when Sischy takes me on a visit to his studio on White Street—that this is only an auxiliary studio to the main one, on Twentieth Street. (There is a third studio at Schnabel’s country place, on Long Island.) Schnabel is a large, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five, with a fresh, clear, ruddy face, a direct gaze, and a natural, simple, friendly manner that inclines toward good-natured kidding. A pretty blond assistant meets us at the door and ushers us into a vast two-story loft, where Schnabel, who is wearing dark baggy trousers and a dark turtleneck sweater, awaits us. He leads us to one of two enormous paintings that are hanging loosely from beams high up, and explains that it is painted on a tarpaulin from a truck that he came across on a trip to Mexico the previous year; the truck had broken down on the highway, and Schnabel bought the tarp from the driver for seventy dollars. “That’s all I had on me—I would have given him more if I’d had it. I want you to look at those creases and folds, and at those patches.” Schnabel adjusts lights to bring out the textures of the weatherworn brown tarp, on which he has painted, in broad strokes of white paint, a monstrous sort of primitive beast-man, with a leering face, an exposed rib cage, and a pair of clawlike extremities; at the top left, the letters “AZ” have been painted twice in red. In the late seventies, Schnabel began to attract notice with his “plate” paintings—he would affix a thick encrustation of crockery to the canvas before starting to paint—and the creased and patched tarpaulin is evidently another expression of his disinclination to start with a blank canvas (or, in Lawson’s terms, to be original). An even more striking example of this refusal, which Schnabel shows us later at the main studio, is a series of paintings done on the stage sets of a Kabuki drama, which a friend sent him from Japan. These are six panels bearing delicately colored, stylized scenes of trees and flowers, over which, like a vandal, Schnabel has done brutish Expressionist drawings in thick, dark strokes. If Sherrie Levine’s reverent little thefts are “transgressional,” what are we to call Schnabel’s rude violations? As Schnabel directs a strong young assistant to turn the heavy Kabuki sets this way and that, he keeps up a line of easy, agreeable, anecdotal patter about his work. What he says doesn’t make too much sense; it isn’t “hard,” it’s just talk—one has to say something to people who come to one’s studio. Schnabel shows us an enormous amount of work—his output of the year—with the modestly pleased air of a successful entrepreneur. His energy and enterprise seem boundless; he tries all kinds of things in all kinds of figurative and abstract styles, and everything has a look of bigness and boldness and confidence. One work has a discrepant look of insignificance: it is a white shag rug on which a black-and-brown cross has been painted. I ask him about it, and he says something cheerfully vague about how the rug had been in a summer house he had rented, and had got stained, so he bought it from the owner.
I recall the first time I met Schnabel, at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s show of international contemporary painting, to which I had gone with Sischy: she and I were standing before a Schnabel abstraction—done on cowhide, with a pair of antlers sticking out of it—when Schnabel himself appeared. Positioning himself behind Sischy, with his hands on her shoulders, he gazed fondly at his work and said, “I bet you’re the only person at this opening who is having her back rubbed by the artist whose picture she is standing in front of.” Now, in the studio, he talks about the “objectness” of his work. I ask him if he is using the word in the sense in which Michael Fried used it in his famous essay “Art and Objecthood,” first published in Artforum in 1967. Fried’s difficult, profound meditation on the threat to art posed by what he called literalism (more commonly called Minimalism) is a sort of culminating aria, sung from the ground with the knife in the chest, of the enterprise known as formalist art criticism. It is an extraordinary performance—written in the driest, densest, most disdainful language, and yet permeated by an almost hysterical emotionality. As Fried’s argument develops, it becomes a kind of allegory of good and evil—good being modernist painting and sculpture, which seek to transcend or “defeat” their “objecthood” (the canvas and paint, or the stone, metal, or wood they are made of) and thus achieve the “presentness” of true art; and evil being literalist painting and sculpture, which embrace their objecthood and thus degenerate into the inartistic condition of “theatre.” Schnabel says he doesn’t know Fried’s essay, and asks me what it is about. After I tell him, he nods, and says with devastating carelessness, “All that is the language of another generation. We don’t use language like that today. We’re a different generation. We’re interested in different things.”
Edit deAk lives on Wooster Street, in a loft (clearly not designed by an architect) with a shabby, functional, and only slightly, and rather haphazardly, funky appearance. She herself is a striking, good-looking woman of thirty-eight, with shoulder-length bright-red hair worn in bangs, who dresses in vivid, interesting clothes that have a sense of quotation marks around them. She speaks with an East European accent in a low, melodious voice, and as she speaks she has a trick of moving her stiffened right hand up and down, in a tender chopping gesture. She likes to play Nabokovian games with language (her speech and writing are filled with terms like “ego beaver” and “tour de farce”), though when she did gallery reviewing for Artforum in the seventies, she curbed her Pninisms and confined herself to straight, opaque Artspeak. But now, under Sischy’s permissive reign, she denies herself very little and writes pieces entirely composed of epigrammatic, near-scrutable paragraphs, such as the following, which appeared in an article entitled “The Critic Sees Through the Cabbage Patch”:
During the seventies, deAk and Walter Robinson, an artist, co-edited a magazine named Art-Rite, a messy, impudent, sort of in-house organ of the New York avant-garde. Printed on newsprint, published irregularly, and run with an ironic sort of amateurism (“Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome, and you don’t even have to enclose a self-addressed and stamped envelope to get them back,” an editorial notice read), it observed the large and small movements of the advanced art scene of the seventies at a very close, somewhat blurring range. Although Sischy’s Artforum is more formal, more professional, more like a real magazine than Art-Rite ever approached being, it has never entirely abjured the samizdat quality of Art-Rite and the other rakish little magazines of the period, such as Heresies and Just Another Asshole, whose spirit Sischy immediately recognized as her own. Attempting to characterize this spirit, and not doing too badly, Rene Ricard once remarked, “Ingrid put cheapness into Artforum.” My own objective correlative for the special demotic strain that runs through Sischy’s magazine is the cover of the Summer, 1981, issue, which she herself conceived. Other Sischy covers have made a bigger stir—for example, a famous cover featuring a sulky model wearing a remarkable long black evening dress (by the Japanese designer Issey Miyake) whose bodice was a kind of rattan cage—but this one shows Sischy putting the cheapness into Artforum in a particularly artful way. At first sight, it looks like a work by a postmodern Conceptualist; in fact, it is an arrangement of twelve blue-and-white paper takeout coffee containers. Eleven of them show a lumpish discus thrower posed beside a Doric column that supports a bowl containing the Olympic Flame; the twelfth container, centrally placed, is turned to show its other side, which bears the message “It’s Our Pleasure to Serve You.” Ricard’s piece “Not About Julian Schnabel” appeared in that issue, and while Sischy was selecting the illustrations for it she was suddenly struck by the preposterous similarity between a Schnabel painting called “Blue Nude with Sword” and the picture on the coffee container she was drinking from; the cover was the result.
When I visit deAk in her loft, she brings out a bottle of wine and two glasses and says, “I always thought I did Art-Rite to defy the idea of art magazines. I spent the best years of my life doing it, for free. In my mind, it was a project to undermine art. Mine is an anarchistic, negative feeling. I don’t believe in anything until it is proven—and I don’t like proving. Artforum is a magazine that comes out every month. My mentality is not used to that. I spent my entire life not being anybody, defying schedules, not having a job. At a moment when you are what job you do, people are constantly saying to me ‘Who are you?’ and it’s a question I can’t answer.”
Another of deAk’s nonremunerative activities was serving on the board of Printed Matter, a publisher and distributor of avant-garde art books, which is where she met Sischy, then the director of the firm. “Ingrid sort of stabilized everything at Printed Matter,” deAk recalls. “She got it out of chaos, out of the bowels of the board. There’s no ‘no’ to her. When she was at Printed Matter, the two of us used to go and see if we could get corporate support for certain projects. I’ll never forget the time when we went to the Xerox Corporation, in Rochester. I got up that morning to dress, and I was scared to death. I didn’t know how you go in to see a corporation, so I put on the best dress I thought I had—all frills and shiny—and I looked like some kind of overdressed person who hadn’t gone home the night before. As for Ingrid, she was wearing this badly cut three-piece man’s blue suit. We were staying with Ingrid’s parents, and when Ingrid’s mother saw us coming down the stairs in the morning, ready to go on our executive trip, she just broke down laughing.
“Ingrid’s father is one of the three doctors I’ve met whom I actually think of as a human being. He considers the totality of a person. The mother is brilliant, kind of filigreed, and fast, but with a soft edge, never stabbing. They’re radical thinkers. Their ideology is really complex. They know so much. Their way of thinking is so much more contemporary than mine that I would have expected them to be weirdos, but they’re not. They’re completely regular people; they completely fit into society. They’re exquisitely civilized.
“I had written for Artforum for four or five years before Ingrid came, so I knew the other regimes, and they were very different. Ingrid centered the whole operation on herself. The previous editor didn’t. He was a very quiet person who sat at his desk, and the office was very quiet, and the manuscripts came in. He regarded the job as, sort of, ‘O.K., here is my desk, and here comes a manuscript, and I’ll take care of it.’ When Ingrid got into the office, there was no desk left unturned. She checked everything. The smallest note didn’t leave that office 64 without her checking it. She was even friends with the night cleaner. But when I say that she centered the whole operation on herself I don’t mean that she was building herself up. If you look at the jobs that Ingrid has had, they were always concerned with the projects of others. She’s just the opposite of a hustler. She’s not going to hold up a cue card and say, ‘This is what I am.’ She will not guide you to her. She will show you the irrigated areas of the Nile. Her achievement is like that of the Nile—the fertilization of a certain area of culture.”
Aweek after the Summer issue has gone to press, Sischy takes me to the fifth-floor studio—in a commercial walkup on Canal Street—of a pair of Russian-Jewish émigré artists named Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar, who collaborate on satiric paintings done in the style and employing the iconography of Socialist Realism. Melamid, a slight, thin, dark, quick man of around forty, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and jeans and running shoes, looks like any number of boyish New York Jewish or New York Italian men. Komar is fat, looks much older than Melamid but isn’t, has a dark beard and small, cunning green eyes and red lips—a minor character out of Gogol, probably a horse trader.
The studio is bright, noisy from the traffic on Canal Street, and bare. Several large canvases are propped against a wall, their faces inward. (A year later, at a large SoHo gallery, I see them unveiled: brilliantly sharp-sighted pastiches of old, modernist, and last week’s postmodernist paintings, with an occasional Stalin or Hitler thrown in as a kind of signature.) Komar and Melamid lead Sischy and me to a group of wooden chairs near the Canal Street window and bring a bottle of seltzer water and white plastic cups, and a basket of red apples that immediately evoke Mother Russia. After a minimal amount of desultory small talk, the two men abruptly plunge into a philosophical argument about the nature of time. Do we live in a space between past and future or are we perpetually in the past? Melamid argues that the present exists. No, Komar says, the present does not exist; there is only the past and the future. They argue back and forth, speaking very rapidly in accented English, and gesticulating vehemently. Then, like a pair of house cats aimlessly walking away from a fight, they simply stop arguing. Melamid shrugs and says, “We always argue like this.” Komar smiles benignly. He speaks worse English than Melamid, who often corrects his pronunciation in a brotherly way.
Melamid tells us of the great discovery that he and Komar made in Russia before emigrating here, in 1978. While other Russian artists publicly did Socialist Realism and secretly worked in advanced modernist styles, he says, “it dawned on us that Socialist Realism could itself be a vehicle for avant-garde art.” Komar tells of an American friend in Russia who brought them a can of Campbell’s soup as a work of Conceptual art. “One day, there was nothing in the studio for a snack, so we ate the soup,” he says. “It was not a bad snack.” “It was bad,” Melamid says. “It was not bad,” Komar says. They start another animated debate, one that soon gets into art theory, the condition of art today, the situation of art in New York. As this argument, too, begins to peter out, Melamid sighs and says, “We sit here, and we talk, and I think, ‘Where is life in all this? Life! Life!’ We go at things obliquely, to the side,” making a gesture of ineffectuality with his hand, “instead of straight, like this,” pounding his fist into his palm. He continues, emotionally, “Last year, I woke up in a hotel room in Amsterdam. There was a woman in my bed. I looked in the mirror and saw that my eyebrows were gray. I saw that I was forty.”
“You got that from Chekhov, you faker,” I say to myself. I am no longer charmed by this pair. I find their performance tiresome, calculated. I look over at Sischy, who is enjoying herself, who thinks they are “great,” and I ponder anew the question of authenticity that has been reverberating through the art world of the eighties. The feeling of mistrust that Komar and Melamid now arouse in me is the feeling that has been repeatedly expressed, within and without the art world, about the work of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and the other new stars who have emerged into prominence during the past five years. In a long poem, published in The New York Review of Books in March, 1984, that was modelled on Pope’s “Dunciad” and entitled “The Sohoiad: or, The Masque of Art, A Satire in Heroic Couplets Drawn from Life,” Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time, brought this feeling to a brilliant, splenetic apogee. Lashing out at artists, dealers, critics, curators, and collectors alike, he offered a vision of the contemporary art world as a Bosch-like inferno of greed, fraud, hype, and vacuity. After dispatching “Julian Snorkel,” “Jean-Michel Basketcase,” “David Silly,” and “Keith Boring,” among others (and treating Snorkel—“Poor SoHo’s cynosure, the dealer’s dream, Much wind, slight talent, and vast self-esteem”—with special savagery), Hughes went on to mordantly inquire:
When I showed the poem to Sischy, she was not amused. “Forgive my lack of a sense of humor,” she said, “but what I see in that poem is just another reinforcement of stereotypes about the art world. It’s like a Tom Stoppard play, where you have an entire Broadway audience snickering about things they haven’t understood. It makes outsiders feel clever about things they know nothing about. The New York Review is a magazine I really respect—I respect its editors and I respect its audience—but this poem reflects the gap that exists between the serious literary audience and the serious art audience. Hughes’ overwhelming message is that all of today’s art is worthless, that the whole art world is a bunch of frauds and grotesques. I would agree with him that about half of what is being produced today is worthless, but I get worried when everything and everyone are lumped together and jeered at. That’s too easy.”
Sischy’s fascination with what’s difficult sometimes leads her into incoherence and opacity, as in a recent special issue of Artforum called “the light issue.” It was conceived (according to an editorial by Sischy and Edit deAk) as a response to “the failure of the recent spate of big international shows to intelligently meet the development of contemporary art, and . . . their tendency instead to carelessly throw all ‘the names’ together in an expensive but cheap hanging spectacle of so-called international pluralism.” The alternative it offered its readers was a survey of international art (the issue had no articles and was made up entirely of reproductions of paintings and photographs, some of them created specially for the issue), based on the common denominator of light. The issue left its readers utterly mystified. Since light, perforce, is the common denominator of all visual art, something other than the mere statement of this truism must have been intended—something less obvious and more particular to contemporary art—but to this day no one knows what it was. The light issue included, among other works, photographs by Joel Meyerowitz of moonlit water, ink-and-watercolor drawings by Agnes Martin of horizontal bands and lines; a Neo-Expressionist painting by Enzo Cucchi of a piano playing itself on a vast white plain; a cryptic five-panel figurative work by Komar and Melamid; a fold-out four-page spread by Francesco Clemente showing a pair of monstrous creatures emitting a sort of white gas from their posteriors; a photograph by Weegee of lightning in Manhattan; photographs of a set from Paul Schrader’s film “Mishima;” a photograph of a starving African child vomiting. These were followed by a page of “shadow captions,” whose explanatory texts only deepened the enigma of what all these works were doing together and what they were saying about light. The caption for Clemente’s contribution, for example, read:
The light issue has become a famous, interesting failure of Sischy’s—people in the art community talk about it indulgently, as if speaking of the endearing foibles of a beloved, brilliant child. Sischy herself has no regrets about it, and of all the issues she has produced it may be the one that most tellingly elucidates the character of her editorship. Its mysterious amorphousness is akin to her own boundless and restless energy. She is the Ariel of the art world, darting hither and yon, seeming to alight everywhere at once, causing peculiar things to happen, seeing connections that others cannot see, and working as if under orders from some Prospero of postmodernism, for whose Gesamtkunstpatchwork of end-of-the-century consciousness she is diligently gathering material from every corner of the globe as well as from every cranny of the East Village. Sischy not only travels to the big international art expositions, such as the Venice Biennale and the Kassel Documenta, but will impulsively get on a plane to check out a show in London or Paris that she thinks the magazine might want to review. She will spend a week in Spain or Italy recruiting reviewers and writers; she will fly out of town to give a talk at a museum or a university; she will journey to Japan on an exploratory mission for some possible future inscrutable special issue. While in New York, she tries to see as many as possible of the fifty or sixty gallery and museum shows that open every month, to attend as many openings and after-opening parties as possible, and to pay as many studio visits as she can.
During this ceaseless activity, Sischy remains unhurried, relaxed, and strangely detached. “In a world where all kinds of people—from editors to curators to collectors to dealers—want control, where control is of the essence, she doesn’t seem to want it,” the critic Donald Kuspit observes to me over a drink at a bar near Gramercy Park. Kuspit is a fifty-one-year-old professor of art history at Stony Brook who has been writing art criticism of a dense prolixity for Art in America, Arts, and Art Criticism, as well as for Artforum, for the past dozen years. He goes on, “She’s not looking to be the Archimedes of the art world, with a lever that can move it. I think one of the things she realizes is that that whole way of thinking is obsolete. She’s smart. There’s a kind of canniness to her, what Hegel calls ‘the cunning of reason’ —insofar as there is reason in the art world. Frankly, I think the art world would be a terrible place without her. It would be a macabre place. Even as it is, it’s a dreadful place. The megalomania that is rampant among artists is unbelievable, and so is the self-importance. Bankers must be the same, but the cry for attention from artists—the ruthlessness of their sense of what is due them—is extraordinary. When I first moved to art criticism, which was a natural extension of my work with Adorno in critical philosophy, I had a great need to concretize the importance of art. Now I go through bouts of wondering whether art isn’t just a matter of fashion and glamour. The artists are getting younger by the minute, and, increasingly, anything with a little flip to it gets visibility. It used to be that when art was made, people would be unsure of its value until—slowly, through all kinds of critical discourse and debate—the art would acquire cultural significance. And only then would people arrive with money and say, ‘I want that.’ Now—and I think this started with Pop Art—there’s money waiting like a big blotter to blot up art, so that the slightest bit of inkiness is sponged up. That’s a very hard thing to keep a distance from. Ingrid walks around it. She doesn’t let her magazine serve as a little subservient blotter for whatever powers there may be. She is fearless. Nobody owns her, yet she doesn’t give offense because of that. I’m not saying that the editors of the other art magazines are owned, but somehow this free-spiritedness seems a more vivid part of Ingrid —almost as if she doesn’t want to be owned even by herself.”
During the year that Sischy and I have been meeting for interviews, she has been unsparingly frank about herself. She has confessed to me her feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy, she has told me stories of rejection and mortification, she has consistently judged herself severely. At the same time, she has not been altogether uncritical of me. I have not lived up to her expectations as an interlocutor. She fears that I do not understand her. As I ponder this tension between us, a story that she told me early in our acquaintance comes back to me with special weight. It was an account of a small humiliation—one of those social slights that few of us have not in our time endured—that she had suffered the previous day at a public lunch honoring a sculptor from Texas who had done a work for the city. Sischy had sat down at a table next to a stranger, a sleek, youngish man who, as soon as they had exchanged names, turned away from her and began talking to the person on his other side. The guests at the lunch were from both the art world and the city government, and this man was a city politician. “He was clearly disappointed that someone who looked like me should have sat down next to him,” Sischy told me. “I could see him thinking, ‘What a waste of a lunch!’ I considered getting up and going to sit with some people I knew at another table, but then I thought, ‘No, I’ll stay here.’ A little later, a woman who had sat down on my other side asked me my name, and when I told her, she figured out who I was, and she was very interested. And then two people across from me figured me out, and they started talking to me. And eventually this guy, taking it all in, said, ‘I’m terribly sorry—I didn’t get your name.’ So I told him again, and the woman beside me told him what I did, and his whole manner changed. He suddenly became very interested. But he’d lost me by then.” Sischy told me this story with no special emphasis—she offered it as an example of the sexism that women still regularly encounter—but I obscurely felt it to have another dimension besides its overt one. Now, a year later, the latent meaning of the story becomes clear to me: it is a covert commentary on Sischy and me. I had formed the idea of writing about her after seeing Artforum change from a journal of lifeless opacity into a magazine of such wild and assertive contemporaneity that one could only imagine its editor to be some sort of strikingly modern type, some astonishing new female sensibility loosed in the world. And into my house had walked a pleasant, intelligent, unassuming, responsible, ethical young woman who had not a trace of the theatrical qualities I had confidently expected, and from whom, like the politician at the lunch, I had evidently turned away in disappointment.
In a charming and artful essay of 1908 entitled “A Piece of Chalk,” G. K. Chesterton writes about taking some brown paper and colored chalks to the Sussex downs on a fine summer day to do Chestertonian drawings of “devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colours on brown paper.” But as he begins drawing Chesterton realizes that he has left behind “a most exquisite and essential” chalk—his white chalk. He goes on:
Since Chesterton wrote these bubbly words, the world has seen two world wars and a holocaust, and God seems to have switched to gray as the color of virtue—or decency, as we are now content to call it. The heroes and heroines of our time are the quiet, serious, obsessively hardworking people whose cumbersome abstentions from wrongdoing and sober avoidances of personal display have a seemliness that is like the wearing of drab colors to a funeral. In “Why I Write,” George Orwell said, “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” One feels about Sischy that at another time she, too, might have been less grave, less morally weighted down, and more vivid. She told me that as a child she had been extremely naughty and wild. What remains of this naughtiness and wildness finds expression in the astonishing covers, the assertive graphics, and the provocative special issues of Artforum. Just as Sischy’s personal mutedness is the byproduct of an Orwellian sense of cultural crisis, so her vision of contemporary art is shaped first by societal concerns and only secondarily by aesthetic concerns. Her interest in the Neo-Expressionist painting that is coming out of Germany today, for example, is bound up less with the painting’s aesthetic claims than with its reflection of the anguished attempt of young German artists and intellectuals to come to terms with the Nazi past. Sischy once said to me, “My greatest love is Conceptual art. I may be even more interested in thinking than in art.” She added, “Rene and I used to have an argument. He’d say something like ‘Well, that work is really beautiful,’ and I’d say ‘So?’ and he’d say ‘Well, you hate art if you say “So?” about something being beautiful,’ and I’d say —and I’ve come to realize that it’s more complicated than this—‘Well, maybe I just hate art when the only thing going for it is that it’s beautiful.’ ” ♦
(This is the second part of a two-part article)
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