Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  “After 1967, when Philip Leider moved the magazine to New York, there was a lot of hanging out together. You had a sense of not being isolated. You were talking to other people. It might be only five people, but you were talking to somebody, and you knew who you were talking to. I would write an article knowing that what I was basically doing was having a fight with Michael. We were a group of people who had had the same kind of education addressing the same topics from different points of view. The magazine had coherence, which the culture had at that point, too. There was then such a thing as a core curriculum, there was such a thing as a liberal arts, humanistic education, there was such a thing as a thorough art history education. These things don’t exist anymore. The people involved in the art world don’t have them. The new Artforum is a media magazine; it’s totally media oriented. There’s no real criticism in it, or almost none. McEvilley writes criticism, and John Yau writes criticism, but I haven’t found anything else that I would call criticism in the new Artforum. It’s some kind of writing—some strange kind of writing—but it’s not criticism. It’s Rene Ricard doing whatever it is that Rene Ricard does. I mean, it’s something weird, and a lot of the people can’t write. They have no background; they don’t know what they’re talking about, if they’re talking about anything.

  “We were literary people—academic literary people. We didn’t watch television. If we were interested in cinema—which Annette and I were—it was on the level of avant-garde film, not Hollywood. And we didn’t like junk. There wasn’t this horrible leveling, where everything is as important as everything else. There was a sense of the hierarchy of values. We felt that we had to make a distinction between Mickey Mouse and Henry James. There’s a generation now that feels you don’t have to make that distinction. Mickey Mouse, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Talking Heads, Mozart, Amadeus—it’s all going on at the same time, and it all kind of means the same thing. For that, you have Andy Warhol to thank. I also think Susan Sontag was very influential in giving permission to so-called educated people to watch trash. Her article ‘Against Interpretation’ said that this idea of highbrow and lowbrow didn’t matter any longer—you could just love everything that was going on, you could be positive and optimistic and just love it all.

  “I used to be able to earn a living as an art critic. I got paid a lot of money by Art in America because there was a differential, you see: if you were a very popular writer or were considered a very good writer, you got paid more money. Then, all of a sudden, the great era of democracy came to Art in America, and they started paying everybody the same. So I said, ‘Forget it—I have too much experience, and I’m not going to write for the same amount of money you pay my students.’ I don’t believe in democracy in art. I think that when elitism got a bad name in this country, it was the beginning of the end for American culture. The only interest The New Criterion has is its pretension of being an elitist magazine. Unfortunately, it’s not. What it is is just a strange kind of dinosaur. It has such a clear party line that it’s just not an interesting magazine. In fact, it’s extremely boring. But its goal—the reconstruction of what was once a consensus of educated people—is correct.”

  The party at Marian Goodman’s apartment where I first talked to Robert Pincus-Witten began with a certain—as Pincus-Witten would say—déconfiture. Almost everyone there had heard about, if not actually seen, a confrontation that had taken place between two of the party guests an hour before, at the Anselm Kiefer opening. The opening had been an enormous one, with hundreds of viewers on hand drinking bad champagne, and the confrontation had taken place in an alcove off the main, museum-size room, so that not too many people actually witnessed it. Those who did—I among them—were stunned by what had suddenly erupted in their midst. At one moment, Richard Serra and Ingrid Sischy were having a normal conversation; at the next, Serra, his face contorted with fury, was jabbing a finger at Sischy’s face and abusing her with a stream of invective. “I think he would have hit me if I’d been a man,” Sischy said later. “I was very glad I wasn’t.” Sischy—a short, very young-looking person with cropped dark wavy hair, a round, clear olive-skinned face, and large glasses, who was wearing tapered stretch pants and a tailored shirt—stood facing Serra, occasionally putting in a quiet word and showing no emotion beyond a reddening of her face. Like the other bystanders, I stood transfixed, catching some of the words but not able to understand what Serra’s tirade was about or what had so enraged him. This was the first time I had seen Richard Serra, and he didn’t fit the image I had formed. From his massive, thrusting sculpture, his difficult, theory-laden writing, his reputation as a major artist, and the name Serra itself, I had imagined a large, dark, saturnine man—a sort of intellectual-conquistador type, emanating an air of vast, heroic indifference. The actual Serra looked like someone from a small American rural community: a short man with a craggy, surly face, receding gray hair, and pale eyes rimmed by light eyelashes. He was wearing a long black shirt over black trousers and under a black leather jacket—an artist’s costume—but his aura was of rough small-town America rather than of bohemia. I have seen men like him standing beside pickup trucks in wintry landscapes, locked in slow, obdurate, implacable argument; I have heard that voice, that aggrieved intonation of flat unyieldingness and threat, that conviction of being right, and that suspicion of being put upon; I know that closed yet oddly sly expression. Sischy stood her ground, letting Serra’s abuse rain down on her without flinching, and finally he stalked off and she unclenched her fingers. I shared a taxi with her to the Goodman party, and I at last learned what she had said to trigger the explosion. It had had to do with the Tilted Arc controversy, which was then at its most intense.

  In 1979 Richard Serra received a $175,000 commission from the federal program called Art in Architecture—whereby one-half of one percent of the cost of a new building goes for public art—to create a sculpture for the circular plaza in front of the glossy and ugly forty-one-story Jacob K. Javits Federal Building, on Foley Square, and in 1981 he fulfilled the commission by sinking a seventy-three-ton curved steel wall, twelve feet high and a hundred and twenty feet long, into the paving of the plaza, positioning it so that it seemed to be arrogantly turning its back on the bland fountain that had previously been the plaza’s focal point and in every other way declaring its contempt for the characterless place it had been chosen to embellish. Tilted Arc, as Serra called his work, brutally dominated the plaza and confirmed the worst suspicions of the building’s federal employees as to the unlovable nuttiness of modern artists. The wall blocked the view of the street and bisected the plaza like a kind of Berlin Wall, and as time went on and its surface acquired a patina of rust, graffiti, and—if one witness at a public hearing held in March of 1985 was to be believed—pee, it looked less and less like a work of art to the federal workers and more and more like a forgotten piece of industrial debris that someone would eventually come and cart away. The hearing was called by William Diamond, the regional administrator of the General Services Administration, which is the Washington agency that runs Art in Architecture; it was a somewhat belated response to a petition submitted three years earlier by thirteen hundred federal workers in and around the Javits building, asking for the removal of the Serra piece. It has been said, and it has not been denied, that the hearing was a kind of Stalin trial—that a decision to recommend removal of the sculpture had already been made by Diamond and his four-man panel—and indeed, after three days of testimony such a recommendation was handed down, even though the testimony had been predominantly pro-sculpture. It has also been observed that the art world, which appeared to be solidly behind Serra at the hearing, was in fact in a state of anxious division over the paradox-fraught controversy. For this was no simple case of a philistine public’s hostility to an artwork it didn’t understand. The public’s objection was only secondarily aesthetic. The primary objection was to the way the sculpture had moved in on the plaza and turned it from a place of benign, ordinary workaday
recreation into a kind of dire sculpture garden of the Age of Orwell. “The placement of the sculpture will change the space of the plaza,” Serra had told an interviewer in 1980. “After the piece is created, the space will be understood primarily as a function of the sculpture.” The disconcerting thought that the public might, after all, prefer eating lunch and hanging out to interacting with a piece of minimalist sculpture evidently never crossed his mind. What troubled many people in the art world—people who ordinarily would have sprung to the defense of avant-garde art against philistine attack—was the touching reasonableness of the federal employees’ wish to have their plaza restored to them. Although a few people at the hearing made the obligatory hysterical references to Nazi book burning, most of the pro-Serra speakers were quiet and thoughtful, well aware of the pitfalls and traps that lurk in the vicinity of any position that puts the claims of avant-garde art ahead of those of a clerk or a secretary who wants to hold a health fair outside the building where he or she works.

  The coeditors of October and a younger colleague, Douglas Crimp, were among the most delicate treaders in the pro-Serra party. Annette Michelson pointed out Serra’s working-class origin and read a statement from him saying, in part, “As a kid, I worked in steel mills . . . and my work could have something to do on the personal level with the fact that my father was a factory worker all his life.” (From Michelson’s testimony, one would not have suspected that Serra also went to college at the University of California, to graduate school at Yale, and then to Italy on a Fulbright.) She went on to say that Serra was concerned that working people “be confronted with an art which . . . does not necessarily confirm their beliefs or impose second-class or third-rate qualities on them” and that “the working man and the office worker be presented with that same kind of challenge that the middle-class and upper-class art patrons have found so interesting.”

  Rosalind Krauss, accordingly, paid all the spectators present the compliment of speaking to them almost as she might have spoken to a seminar of her students at the graduate school. In her elegant lecture on, as the transcript has it, “minibalist” sculpture (the phonetic spellings that leap off the pages of the transcript—“Grancoozi,” “Saint Gordons,” “DeSuveral,” “DeEppilo,” “Model-well,” “Manwhole”—testify to the gap that exists between the ordinary literate American and the tiny group of people who are the advanced art public), Krauss told the group:

  The kind of vector that Tilted Arc explores is that of vision. More specifically: what it means for vision to be invested with a purpose, so that if we look out into space, it is not just a vacant stare that we cast in front of us but an act of looking that expects to find an object, a direction, a goal. This is purposiveness of vision, or, to use another term, vision’s intentionality. For the spectator of Tilted Arc, this sculpture is constantly mapping a kind of projectile of the gaze that starts at one end of Federal Plaza and, like the embodiment of the concept of visual perspective, maps the path across the plaza that the spectator will take. In this sweep, which is simultaneously visual and corporeal, Tilted Arc describes the body’s relation to forward motion—to the fact that if we move ahead it is because our eyes have already reached out in order to connect us with the place to which we intend to go.

  Evidently, not everyone was up to the stern challenge of Krauss’s discourse; after she had spoken, Diamond had to admonish the audience, “Please, no negative comments.”

  As for Douglas Crimp, who lives a few blocks from the Federal Building, he said that although he considered Tilted Arc the “most interesting and beautiful public sculpture in my neighborhood,” he had to acknowledge that “my experience evidently differs from that of many people who live and work in the area of Tilted Arc.” However, he went on, “I believe that this hearing is a calculated manipulation of the public . . . What makes me feel manipulated is that I am forced to argue for art as against some other social function. I am asked to line up on the side of sculpture against, say, those who are on the side of concerts or maybe picnic tables.”

  What Sischy had said to Serra at the Kiefer opening—which took place a few weeks after the hearing—was that she was not lined up on his side in the Tilted Arc controversy. He had begun talking to her about the case, comfortably assuming that she was one of his supporters, and she had felt constrained to disabuse him. “I felt I couldn’t just stand there and say, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s terrible,’ ” she told me. “It would have been a kind of betrayal of my job to get drawn into a conversation where it was assumed that I was one of a gang of outraged people. I knew that if I didn’t say anything and then commissioned an article on the thing, I would feel like a hypocrite. As an editor, I felt that it was necessary to claim not neutrality—there is no neutrality—but that this was still an open book. So I said, ‘The whole thing is very complicated.’ And there was like a minute of surprise on Richard’s part—which there shouldn’t have been—and then he flooded out with all this stuff. Calling me a capitalist, saying that I sucked up to advertisers, telling me that I was a fascist, because ‘you believe in petition signing.’ I guess he thought I was a fascist because I found significance in the fact that thirteen hundred people had signed the petition. He said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to have your work on trial’—as if those of us who are trying to do something or make something weren’t on trial all the time. He said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be betrayed by your country. It was my government, and I believed in it. I believed in art and government. Don’t you understand that I’ve been betrayed?’ But how can he or I or any of us be so angry about a betrayal over an object? The betrayal wasn’t Vietnam. How could we dare to be so naive and personal?

  “Everything in my head and body says that we can’t go around undoing works of art because people have signed petitions. But what do you do when people really don’t want something? There’s more than one liberty involved here. And I think that if we ever get to the point of believing that avant-garde art is so sacrosanct that we can’t undo a decision, then it’s all over. The worst thing we could do is to feel that our decisions are so sacred, and our committees of experts are so sacred, and avant-garde art is so sacred that the very notion that something should be debated causes us to invoke all those horrifying, atrocious episodes in history.”

  I asked Sischy how she felt during Serra’s attack.

  “I felt okay,” she said. “Before he attacked me, I felt nervous and anxious—when he thought I was part of his gang, on the side of those who were saying that this was like a book burning. I felt like a hypocrite then. But once I’d told him where I stood, I felt okay. I felt as though I’d had a job to do and I’d done it. But he wasn’t able to listen to me. It just never occurred to him that I might have something to say. He was abusive in the most extraordinary way.”

  “It was as if he were yelling not at you, but at some fantasy figure,” I said. “Who do you think you represented to him?”

  “It wasn’t me, in the sense that you mean, but in another sense it was me. You have to remember that I haven’t been overly obedient to the tyranny of this particular avant-garde. I think I’ve been a great disappointment to people like Richard. I’ve turned down articles on works like Richard’s. This avant-garde was the power structure that ruled the art world and was never questioned—an authoritative, massive power structure. Its rule was that painting was dead—it was just decadent picture making, the regressive act—and all one could do was produce heroic works of abstraction, accompanied by a great deal of terminology. There wasn’t room for anything else. My interest in painting—particularly in European painting—as opposed to heroic structures, was offensive to them. When I ran articles on Kiefer and Clemente and Schnabel in Artforum, I’m told, artists like Richard felt that I’d done something devastating. There wasn’t much bridge building going on between the avant-garde and the world outside, and I think my bridge building drove—and drives—people like Richard Serra mad.”

  Ingrid Sischy became
editor of Artforum at the age of twenty-seven. She was offered the job by Anthony Korner, a forty-year-old English former banker, and Amy Baker Sandback, a thirty-eight-year-old art historian and art-book publisher. They had jointly bought the magazine from Charles Cowles in 1979 and had decided to replace the editor they had inherited, Joseph Masheck, who had succeeded Coplans. Masheck, an art historian, was probably the most scholarly and the least impossible of Coplans’s gang of warring contributing editors, and under his editorship the magazine entered a period of calm enervation and dry academicism. With the troublemakers gone (Krauss, Michelson, Rose, Pincus-Witten, Alloway, and Kozloff had all left), Artforum seemed somehow to have lost its reason for being; it was as if all the air had slowly leaked out of it. At the time that Korner and Sandback were acquiring it, Sischy was finishing a fifteen-month curatorial internship under John Szarkowski in the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art. Before that, she had worked as the director of an organization called Printed Matter, which had been formed by a group of artists, critics, and publishers—among them Sol LeWitt, Pat Steir, Lucy Lippard, and, fatefully, Amy Baker Sandback—to publish and distribute what they called “artists’ books,” as distinguished from art books. Artists’ books were a pleasing expression of the decommodification ideology: where art books are about art, artists’ books are themselves art of a sort—art that is mindful of its social responsibility, art that refuses to be a precious commodity, art that is cheap, multiple, and without aura. “They had a great idea, but they didn’t know how to do it, and they all had other jobs,” Sischy has said of the board members of Printed Matter. Sischy didn’t know how to do it, either—she had had no experience running a business—but she made it her job to turn Printed Matter into a proper, self-sustaining small business, which it has remained to this day. I once watched Sischy chop tomatoes. She took a small paring knife and, in the most inefficient manner imaginable, with agonizing slowness, proceeded to fill a bowl, tiny piece by tiny piece, with chopped tomatoes. Obviously, no one had ever taught her the technique of chopping vegetables, but this had in no way deterred her from doing it in whatever way she could or prevented her from arriving at her goal. She is less afraid than anyone I have ever met of expending energy unnecessarily. While at Printed Matter, in order to convince the Internal Revenue Service of the legitimacy of the organization’s claim to be nonprofit, she dragged twenty cartons of records down to the IRS office. (They were records of pitifully small transactions: in Sischy’s day, the average sale at Printed Matter was five dollars; today, it is ten dollars.) At Artforum, she will think nothing of spending a whole night in the office working with a writer whose piece is going to press the next day, ministering to him like a kind of night nurse.