Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

“Did you read the exchange of letters that Rubin and Varnedoe had with McEvilley?”

  “Yes. And I must say I found it very unpleasant, because you couldn’t tell which side was the more horrible. On the one hand, you had Rubin and Varnedoe sounding like complete assholes and, on the other, you had McEvilley doing his hideousness. I have never been able to finish a piece by McEvilley. He seems to be another Donald Kuspit. He’s a slightly better writer than Donald Kuspit. But his lessons on Plato and things like that—they drive me crazy. I think, God! And I just can’t stand it.”

  John Coplans’s loft, on Cedar Street, has the look of a place inhabited by a man who no longer lives with a woman. There are ill-defined living and work areas (after being fired from Artforum, Coplans became a photographer, and the loft serves as his studio and darkroom as well as his living quarters), punctuated by untidy mounds of things on which a gray-striped cat perches proprietorially. The furniture is spare and of simple modern character. Coplans is a man of sixty-six, with curly gray hair and with black eyebrows that give his eyes a kind of glaring gaze. He speaks with a British accent in a vigorous, incisive, almost military way. (I later learn that he was in fact a British Army officer.) At the same time, there is something ingratiating and self-depreciating in his manner. Coplans leads me to a table strewn with papers and books, brings a bottle of seltzer water and two glasses, and talks about the early history of Artforum, in California.

  The magazine, he says, was founded in San Francisco in 1962 by John Irwin, a salesman for a printing company who had formed the desire to start an art magazine—“a sweet, naive guy, in his early thirties, who had very little idea of what he was doing.” Coplans had recently come to San Francisco—he had gone to art school in London after leaving the army and was now a painter and occasional art teacher—and he was with the magazine from the start, serving as an adviser to the wide-eyed Irwin and writing reviews and articles. But Irwin’s most important recruit was a brilliantly intelligent young man named Philip Leider, a law-school dropout who had briefly been the director of a San Francisco gallery that showed Coplans’s paintings and was now employed as a social worker in the San Francisco welfare department. Within a few months of his joining the magazine, Leider was asked by Irwin to become the magazine’s managing editor (and its only paid staff member), and then its editor—a position he held for the next seven years. But even as early as 1964 the magazine was failing financially. It was rescued the next year by the publishing magnate Gardner Cowles and his stepson, Charles Cowles, who had just left Stanford and was looking for something to do. Charles Cowles became publisher. (Irwin, when last heard from by Coplans, was running a dry-cleaning business in Cleveland.) “Gardner Cowles provided the magazine with an annual subsidy and Charlie with a job and a position in the world,” Coplans says. “But Phil Leider couldn’t stand Charlie, who was concerned with social position and with the prestige of being publisher, and was indifferent to the everyday minutiae of publishing. Phil was the kind of intense human being who could sit for five years in this tiny office next door to Charlie Cowles and never say a word to him. Phil came out of a quite poor, nonintellectual Jewish immigrant family—Jewish immigrant in the most traditional sense: high morality and very involved with Jewishness itself. He got through college by writing papers for other people, at five or ten dollars apiece. He got a master’s degree in English and then served in the army, where he worked as a typist—he was one of the fastest typists the army had. Later, he went to law school, but he sheered off from that. Phil was always wary, alert, and skeptical. He had no personal ambition; he was not a careerist in the American sense. He wanted nothing to do with power or money. He lived with his wife and children in the simplest way. Furniture was just plain, straightforward furniture, like mine—whatever could be bought cheap, like office furniture. He loathed and hated decoration, social ambition, careerism, making money. He dressed simply but neatly, in a black suit. The whole orientation of his life was his family. I’ve rarely come across a man so involved with his wife—they used to read together every night—and with his children. His only aberration was that every year he and his wife would drive down to Las Vegas, and he would take maybe a hundred dollars and gamble as long as the money lasted. Then he would come home; he had purged himself of frivolity for the year. He was an enormously articulate man, and he couldn’t stand inarticulateness in others. He was offended by it, by the dumbness of artists. His best friends eventually were the artist Frank Stella and the art historian Michael Fried, two of the most articulate men in the American art world. I took to the guy tremendously; I really liked him, and he saw in me someone deeply strange and felt that there could be some dialogue between us. I have to say that he didn’t trust me, really, because as time went on he thought—and he may have been right—that I was too interested in power. He saw in me some aspect of worldly ambition that he backed away from.

  “I am a self-educated man. I was raised in South and East Africa, in a Russian-Jewish family, and I left school when I was sixteen. I joined the British air force and then the British Army, for a total of eight years of military service. I didn’t go to college, but I wanted to learn everything. I was curious. I became an art historian. I taught art history at the University of California at Irvine. I became a curator at the Pasadena art museum, a writer, an editor. When I was editor of Artforum, I had half a dozen editors on my board. They were always quarreling with each other. They all hated each other. They were strong people, all academically very well trained, all extremely knowledgeable, the most experienced writers and critics in America, who had all gone through the various evolutions of art since the fifties. And now here’s this young lady Ingrid Sischy, who goes in at about twenty-five and has been learning everything on the job and trying to find out what to do. She has no background in American art—this moment in art is all she can deal with—and she doesn’t have the range of people I had. She’s got a little board. She’s got Germano Celant, who’s a European, hardly ever here; and this Frenchman whom I simply don’t know; and Edit deAk, a young woman like herself; and Thomas McEvilley, who is first-rate, absolutely first-rate; and a books editor who is a lightweight.”

  As Coplans talks, my eye is drawn to a large black-and-white photograph on the opposite wall of a male torso and genitals. It is part of a series of photographs that Coplans has taken of his own naked body, which are soon to be shown at the Pace/MacGill Gallery here and have already been exhibited in Paris. Coplans gets up and shows me other pictures in the series: brutally searching examinations of an aging, sedentary, hirsute body, which refer both to ancient sculpture and to twentieth-century art and photography and have an appearance of monumentality and solemnity that almost obscures their underlying, disturbing exhibitionism. I am therefore not surprised by Coplans’s subsequent unrepentant recollections of the Lynda Benglis incident:

  “The ad was in response to Robert Morris’s photograph of himself as a macho German, wearing a steel helmet and iron chains over bare muscles, which he used as a poster for a show of his work at Castelli/Sonnabend. This was her message to him. She wanted it to run in Artforum, and I said to her, ‘Look, the editorial content of the magazine can’t be interfered with in any way. We don’t allow any artist to have a role in what is published. I’m sorry, but you just can’t have this in the magazine.’ So she said, ‘Well, can I do an ad?,’ and I said, ‘There is a publisher, and you’ll have to ask him. I don’t interfere with him, and he doesn’t interfere with me. Go to Charlie Cowles and ask him.’ Then Charlie came to me and said, ‘What do I do?’ I said, ‘Charlie, make a decision. I will not be put in the position where you don’t make a decision. You have to face the art world and the artists. I’m not saying anything. Make a decision.’ After about three days of heavy sweating, Cowles came to me and said, ‘I can’t not publish it. They would hate me.’ I said, ‘That’s right, Charlie.’ So he said, ‘All right, we’ll run it.’ I made up the magazine and sent it down to the printer, and the printer refus
ed to print the ad. So Charlie said to me, ‘It’s solved. I’m off the hook.’ And I said, ‘No, Charlie, you’re not off the hook. Those printers have no right to refuse to print, and our lawyer will tell them so. They can’t select what’s going to appear in the magazine.’ So I went down to the printer, and the head of the printing firm was a former brigadier general in the U.S. Army, and I’m a former army officer, too, and I said, ‘Come on, General, you know you can’t do this.’ He was a nice guy, actually. I said, ‘We have a contract with you. Don’t let’s have to go to law.’ So the general said, ‘All right.’ I went back to Charlie, and I said, ‘Charlie, it’s going to be printed. I insisted that it had to be printed as a matter of principle.’ Now, I was obviously interested in seeing that ad get published. My position was that every woman had the right to make her individual choice as to how she faced her womanhood. This was an artist, and she had made this choice, and I was determined to protect her choice. Annette Michelson and Ros and Max thought it was obscene, that it was too sexually explicit. They were wholly opposed to me. Whether I was right or wrong I don’t know.”

  Robert Pincus-Witten is a short, fresh-faced man with a sleek, well-tended look about him who seems younger than his fifty-odd years and who speaks with the accent of that nonexistent aristocratic European country from which so many bookish New York boys have emigrated. Pincus-Witten is a professor of art history at Queens College and teaches at the City University Graduate School. He was one of Coplans’s gang of contributing editors, and for the last ten years he has been writing a column for Arts in the form of a journal. I first talked to him at a gathering of artists, collectors, curators, art-magazine editors, and critics at Marian Goodman’s apartment after an opening of Anselm Kiefer’s work at the Goodman Gallery, and I retain an image of him slightly bent over the buffet table as he helped himself, with a serious, responsible, almost sacerdotal air, to delicious, expensive food. Later, we talk further over lunch at a Japanese restaurant near the graduate school. He speaks of Rosalind Krauss, who is a fellow member of the graduate faculty, with grumpy familiarity: “Ros is a full professor, and she tends to pout in order to get her own way. She receives extraordinary academic consideration. She teaches only two courses a semester, instead of the three that the rest of us teach. She’s a very attractive person, and many of the seemingly better students—I don’t know if they actually are better—are drawn to her glamour. What happens is that she tends to be condescending, though not cruel, to students she doesn’t think are intellectually desirable, so those students, as it were, become the students who come to one. They are not intellectually undesirable, but they walk around with this feeling of rejection and intellectual disparagement. Rosalind tends to attract a certain kind of stylishly intellectual student. Some of them are not particularly well prepared. I myself am more interested in general cultural knowledge than in the interpretative skills of the new dispensation, under which the truth of Derrida, the truth of de Saussure—what have you—are replacing the truth of Greenberg. The kids who can do this deconstruction talk are doing the eighties’ equivalent of the fifties’ Greenbergian formalist talk. It disturbs me. When I examine them, they have very little general knowledge. They have methodology, but they don’t know the monuments. I happen to be interested in monuments. When one supports a certain radical position, one should know the conservative position that one is rejecting. What troubles me is the unexamined adoption of a radical stance. These kids still believe in a class struggle without realizing that they have made an a priori judgment that capitalism and its fruits are evil. I’m not happy with that, so I’m considered an archconservative. And it shocks me, because these are such privileged kids.”

  I ask Pincus-Witten if he feels a kinship with the New Right.

  He replies, “No, I feel a kinship with something much older: the aristocracy of the intellect, the aristocracy of sensibility. The others, they’re just Rotarians. They’re bowling teams, whether they’re bowling teams of the right or the left. I know that I must always remain an outsider. I feel a fundamental alienation that is not materialistic or class oriented, and that’s why I don’t join anybody. Ingrid Sischy is another person who doesn’t belong to any team or party, and that’s why there is a thread of identification between her and me. Ingrid is very anarchic, and that’s why she is resented by some sectors of the art community. Her reluctance to adopt a party line is viewed as a retardataire form of bourgeois privilege and opens her to a dated form of criticism that seems to come from fifty years ago. The fact that she can be interested in any style that might be regarded as involved with commodification—or what her critics imagine to be commodification—identifies her in their minds as an enemy of the class struggle. I find it quite astonishing that people who embrace such textbook theories still have no trouble being owners of co-ops or putting copyright marks at the bottom of their writings. They’re stuck in a paradoxical situation that renders their absolutism ludicrous. Ingrid is odd. She can get curious idées fixes. She is very interested in popular culture. I remember one conversation I had with her and some fairly glamorous people when she was telling us about the tragedy of an extremely popular pop singer—the one who wears a glove. His tragedy was the built-in supersedence of his prestige by another extremely popular pop singer, named Prince. And it was simply impossible for me to think of that as even remotely entering the sphere of tragedy. She was reading tragedy in connection with some issues in popular culture, and I was reading it in terms of, you know, hubris, nemesis, the idle cruelty of the gods. What was nice about the conversation was that on some level Ingrid was closer to what the conversation was really about than I was with my high-flown stuff. When I first met Ingrid, I was struck by how young she was and how she wasn’t conventionally pretty—she didn’t look like Gloria Steinem. I’ve known Ingrid for six years now, and I’ve never seen her behave badly or coldly or curtly. I’ve never seen her even be short. I’ve never seen her behave in an ugly way—ever.”

  Barbara Rose’s loft, on Sullivan Street, with its mirror-filled walls, soft-gray carpeting, curved black sofa, mirror-topped coffee table, abstract and Oriental art, and fur-covered bed, looks more like a Park Avenue co-op than like a downtown living space, and Barbara Rose herself—a thin, pretty, somewhat jumpy woman of around fifty, with apricot-colored hair and wearing a loose, stylish light-blue wool dress and high heels—has a decided uptown aspect. When I arrive, she is talking on the telephone, and throughout my visit the telephone (which she sets to have answered by machine) rings frequently, with a discreet, rasping electronic sound. Barbara Rose’s speech puts me in mind of simultaneous translation: she speaks very rapidly and a bit remotely, as if dealing with someone else’s text. Since leaving Artforum, she has taught art history at several universities, has been a museum curator, and has written art criticism for Partisan Review, Art in America, and Vogue. “The art world today is not a serious world,” she says. “Art today is an aspect of decor, of entertainment. It’s like gourmet food. In the sixties, I would invite people over—I was married to Frank Stella then—and there would be raging fights. Of course, people like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt were alive then. They were major intellectuals. There’s nobody like them today. There are a few artists who are intellectuals, but most artists have become professionals. They’re like cloak-and-suiters—they make this product, it’s the thing they do. It’s not about the agony and the ecstasy, or whatever, anymore; it’s middle-class, it’s bourgeois. There used to be a sharp demarcation between the bourgeois world and the art world. The bourgeois world was Other, its values were Other. You didn’t have anything to do with these people; you didn’t see them socially, you certainly didn’t have dinner with them. But now that’s all artists want to do—be invited to fancy restaurants and discotheques. And there are all those people from the suburbs. How do they get a foothold in Manhattan? They get involved with art. They’re out there in New Jersey and Long Island collecting Major Works. And all those ladies running around wit
h—you know—the briefcases and the slides. The people who are talking about art today are the people who twenty years ago were talking about—What were those people talking about twenty years ago? They were talking about big cars. I find the art world today very much like suburbia, and I’m not interested in the values of suburbia or its lifestyle or its aspirations. I left suburbia many years ago, and I don’t want to go back.

  “At Artforum in the sixties and seventies, we were talking to each other and we were talking to a group of artists who could understand us—Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, the remaining abstract expressionists. They were people of high intellectual caliber—I mean major intellectuals, not dodos. We had all been formed by the same educational process. We were all trained art historians, and we all had a background in philosophy and aesthetics. We knew what we were talking about. Annette and Max and I had been pupils of Meyer Schapiro at Columbia, and Michael Fried and Rosalind had been at Harvard. Frank and Michael, who were undergraduates at Princeton together, went to hear Clement Greenberg lecture, and they were converted immediately to the Greenberg doctrine because it offered a coherent way of looking at art. Nothing else did. Harold Rosenberg wrote, but nobody serious took him seriously—it was sociology; it wasn’t art criticism. It had nothing to do with aesthetics, it had no background in art history, it was off the top of the head. It was fine for a general audience, but for people who had been trained in aesthetics and art history it seemed very hollow, and it had nothing whatever to do with actually looking at art. Whereas Greenberg looked at art. Now, he was a strict formalist, but he really shone in comparison with Harold, particularly at that time. We were all very impressed by Wittgenstein and by Anglo-American philosophy and by linguistic analysis and the verification principle—by that school of philosophy, which fitted perfectly with Greenberg’s way of thinking—and Harold just simply didn’t seem to have any philosophical underpinning to his thinking.