Forty-One False Starts

by Janet Malcolm

  Whereas the esthetics of [formalist modernism] had been seen as higher criteria by which other styles were to be judged, now, in quite respectable quarters, they began to appear as just another style. For a while, like Pre-Raphaelitism or the Ashcan School, they had served certain needs and exercised hegemony; those needs passing, their hegemony was passing also. But the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is predominantly based on the idea that formalist Modernism will never pass, will never lose its self-validating power. Not a relative, conditioned thing, subject to transient causes and effects, it is to be above the web of natural and cultural change; this is its supposed essence. After several years of sustained attack, such a credo needs a defender and a new defense. How brilliant to attempt to revalidate classical Modernist esthetics by stepping outside their usual realm of discourse and bringing to bear upon them a vast, foreign sector of the world. By demonstrating that the “innocent” creativity of primitives naturally expresses a Modernist esthetic feeling, one may seem to have demonstrated once again that Modernism itself is both innocent and universal.

  Rubin, he went on to say, made “highly inappropriate claims about the intentions of tribal cultures without letting them have their say, except through the mute presence of their unexplained religious objects, which are misleadingly presented as art objects.” And he continued:

  In their native contexts these objects were invested with feelings of awe and dread, not of esthetic ennoblement. They were seen usually in motion, at night, in closed dark spaces, by flickering torchlight. Their viewers were under the influence of ritual, communal identification feelings, and often alcohol or drugs; above all, they were activated by the presence within or among the objects themselves of the shaman, acting out the usually terrifying power represented by the mask or icon. What was at stake for the viewer was not esthetic appreciation but loss of self in identification with and support of the shamanic performance. The Modernist works in the show serve completely different functions, and were made to be perceived from a completely different stance. If you or I were a native tribal artisan or spectator walking through the halls of MoMA, we would see an entirely different show from the one we see as 20th-century New Yorkers. We would see primarily not form but content, and not art but religion or magic.

  The gauntlet flung down by McEvilley was picked up by Rubin in a long reply that Artforum published in its issue of February 1985, together with a shorter reply from Varnedoe. Rubin started out by complimenting McEvilley for being “fair-minded” and for maintaining “a high level of discourse” but quickly went on to say that “notwithstanding his evidently good intentions, his review is interwoven with sufficient misconceptions, internal inconsistencies, and simple errors of fact that—given its seriousness—it should not go unchallenged.” The chief factual error of which Rubin accused McEvilley—an accusation that developed into one of the most excruciatingly particularized squabbles about a matter of doubtful significance ever published—concerned the number of objects in a pair of vitrines at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris. McEvilley, to illustrate his dismissal of the idea of the primitivism show as “not new or startling in the least,” cited (among other examples) an exhibition of “about one hundred tribal objects” from the Musée de l’Homme which the Centre Pompidou had placed in meaningful proximity to its modern art collection shortly after it opened, in 1977, and left up for about five years. Rubin challenged the figure one hundred. He said that “a rapid check reveals that . . . the two vitrines at the Centre Pompidou together never contained more than twenty or so objects.” I will spare the readers of this essay what the readers of Artforum had to endure in order to finally learn that neither contestant’s figure was strictly accurate: in one of the sixteen footnotes that Rubin appended to his second reply, he confessed that according to a list he had just received from the Musée de l’Homme, there had been as many as fifty-two objects in the vitrines. As one of the readers who did not fall by the wayside in the battle of the vitrines, I can report that, despite my boredom with the particulars of the debate, I was kept going by the passionate intensity with which it was conducted. Clearly, each man had more at stake than being right or wrong about a number. The number had become a kind of objective correlative for the anxiety each man felt about his position. Rubin frankly told me later, “McEvilley was at great pains to show that the exhibition was old hat, and since I had spent five years and a pile of money on it, I took it ill. Some of our trustees are readers of Artforum. I didn’t want them to think that I had gone to all this trouble and expense just to do a rerun of something that had already been done.” McEvilley, for his part, felt that his position as challenger of the Establishment was threatened by the insinuation that he couldn’t get his facts straight, and he displayed a kind of young man’s anger over being corrected by an elder. (Actually, McEvilley isn’t so young—he is forty-seven, to Rubin’s fifty-nine—but in the psychodrama of his encounter with Rubin he fell easily into the role of the impetuous young Jack the Giant Killer, just as Rubin, by position and temperament, was a natural for the role of the giant.)

  In his reply to Rubin and Varnedoe, McEvilley adopted a provocatively folksy tone. “I’m the one who barked these grouchy bears out of the woods, so I guess I have to listen to their howling and gnashing of teeth,” he wrote. “In a sense, it’s a chance in a lifetime. We rarely see these bears out in the open—especially the big one.” McEvilley quickly dispatched the little bear, as he maddeningly called Varnedoe:

  The whole-cloth 19th-centuryism of Varnedoe’s thought is revealed in a display of comedic ignorance. He quotes me as using the term “intentionalities” and notes parenthetically that this is “a word [McEvilley] favors as a substitute for the simpler ‘intentions.’ ” He evidently doesn’t recognize that “intentionality” is a technical term in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and in the whole phenomenological movement.

  Rubin, in his second letter, saw an opportunity to avenge Varnedoe’s honor, and he gleefully pounced on it:

  I can only envy McEvilley’s authority in art history, anthropology, linguistics, phenomenology, and literary theory, and sympathize with his need to mock the comedic ignorance of those less accomplished than he. Alas, as but a poor art historian, I can only hope that after a professional lifetime in this field I know something about it, at least . . . McEvilley asks us to consider that “the charioteer of Delphi, ca. 470 B.C., for example, was seen totally [sic] differently in classical Greece from the way we see him now. He was not alone in that noble, self-sufficient serenity of transcendental, angelic whiteness that we see.” Perhaps I should take it less amiss to find my own ideas being transformed beyond recognition by McEvilley when I discover that he can also somehow transform this familiar monument of introductory art history from a bronze into a marble.

  I am afraid that almost all of McEvilley’s art-historical assertions come from the same quarry as the marble charioteer.

  But Rubin’s triumph was short-lived. McEvilley retorted:

  Hibernation can be a productive method—one can go into solitude and come back with understanding—or it can cloud the mind with dreams of scrambled facts, of fabricated evidence and marble charioteers. “The charioteer of Delphi,” I wrote, “ca. 470 B.C., for example, was seen totally differently in classical Greece from the way we now see him. He was not alone in that noble, self-sufficient serenity of transcendental, angelic whiteness that we see.” The word “marble” is Rubin’s, not mine, and comes up in his claim that I misreported the classical bronze as a marble work—after which he exercises his wit against me by referring to “the marble charioteer.” Rubin never deals with the question of why I brought the charioteer up in the first place. My point was about the manipulation of the object through its context; we now see the work alone on a pedestal in a white room in the Delphi archaeological museum, in the typical kind of installation with which we relate to works from other cultures or times by isolating them so that they are available to receive our projections. The c
harioteer is decontextualized in this artificial white atmosphere and made meaningless in terms of his native context, function, and intention. I drew the analogy in my initial article as a criticism of the installation of the primitive works at MoMA, where, similarly, fragments of complex pieces were isolated in such a way as to render them meaningless in their own terms, as if indeed they had no terms of their own. Rubin chose to ignore this issue, as well as others that related to the example of the charioteer, and instead to argue a point of physical detail that would not have affected the argument in any way even if he had gotten it right.

  If Rubin did himself no good by engaging in these scholastic skirmishes, his greatest disservice to himself was his writing to Artforum at all, thus giving McEvilley a second, and then a third, chance to score off the primitivism show. McEvilley’s original critique was probably not as airtight as it might have been if he had had more than four days in which to write it. Now Rubin had afforded him more time, and perhaps even more motivation, to shine. Taking his argument against a universal aesthetic to another level, McEvilley listed three periods in the history of the West’s relationship to tribal art. In the first period, primitive objects were “denied the status of art, as if it was an honor that they did not deserve.” In the second, primitive objects were thought “formally and intellectually ‘good enough’ to be called art.” And in the third, which is the present period, “one may begin to look at the tribal objects from the point of view of their own culture and to realize that, whatever they are, they fall in between the categories on our grid.” McEvilley chastised Rubin for being stuck in the second period: He accused him of presenting “a value system that had been firmly in place for sixty years as if it were a terrific new discovery,” and of treating the primitive objects in the show “as if they had nothing to do with any living societies except ours, as if they were pretty objects and no more, there for us to do with as we like.” In his first letter, Rubin complained that McEvilley had missed the point of the show, which was to study tribal works from the point of view of the pioneer modernists. “Of course the tribal objects in our show are decontextualized,” Rubin snapped, adding, “In fact, they are more than that; they are recontextualized, within the framework of Western art and culture. And that is what our particular story is all about. McEvilley simply refuses to accept the fact that our story is not about ‘the Other,’ but about ourselves.” But McEvilley stubbornly insisted that “to really be about us, the show would have to be about the evolution in our relationship to the Other.” He wrote:

  We no longer live in a separate world. Our tribal view of art history as primarily or exclusively European or Eurocentric will become increasingly harmful as it cuts us off from the emerging Third World and isolates us from the global culture which already is in its early stages. We must have values that can include the rest of the world when the moment comes—and the moment is upon us. Civilization transcends geography, and if history holds one person in this global village, it holds another. In fact, if one of us is privileged over the other in art-historical terms it is the so-called primitive object-makers, through whose legacy we got our last big ride outside our own point of view, and called it Modern art.

  A few months after the publication of the final round of the McEvilley-Rubin exchange, I pay a call on Rubin at his office in the Museum of Modern Art. In his embodiment of all the clichés about men in positions of power, Rubin is an almost allegorical figure. To make an appointment with him requires prolonged conversation with a secretary (“Mr. Rubin has asked me to get as much information about his calls as possible so that he may judge the urgency of returning them”), and to enter his office is to immediately experience a feeling of diminishment, in the same strange way that entering a Gothic cathedral gives one a feeling of exaltation. Rubin is extremely well dressed and well groomed, with a dark, assertive, attractive face; he sits behind an enormous, immaculate desk in a large white room that commands a spectacular view of the museum’s sculpture garden and a panorama of New York buildings, and is fitted out with spare, expensive modern furniture, abstract paintings, and an African sculpture. In spite of the dossier of information I have left with the secretary, he does not know who I am and why I have come. Once my identity and purpose have been reestablished, I ask him the two questions I have come to ask: Was he satisfied with the treatment he received from Artforum, and was he satisfied with his performance in his two letters to the editor?

  Rubin replies yes to both questions. “The people at Artforum were at great pains to be fair, though I think they were reluctant when we said we wanted to write a second letter,” he says. “Ingrid would have liked to say no, but we made certain points about misstatements, and then she realized that the matter couldn’t just be left there. I feel very secure in thinking that students and other people reading this exchange ten years from now are going to come down on our side. If I didn’t feel that way, I would have to accept criticism that would put five years of work into question. Not that there aren’t things in my exhibition which I wouldn’t have done differently. Sure there are. And not that I’m saying that all the criticisms of the exhibition were wrong. I think there was good criticism even in McEvilley’s article. But McEvilley wanted a different exhibition altogether. Someone in the department here said to me, ‘McEvilley would have liked to be invited to do the exhibition.’ That’s the sort of thing you run into in this work. Since we invited people from all over to participate in the exhibition, to write articles for the catalog, McEvilley may have felt that the museum overlooked him. There may have been personal offense taken. Frankly, Kirk and I found McEvilley’s replies to the letters much worse than his original article. We deeply felt the absence of politesse in the thing about the bears.”

  A few days after this meeting, to my surprise, Rubin telephones me and says he would like to speak to me again. Evidently under some compulsion to do everything twice, he says that he has had some further thoughts over the weekend about the McEvilley exchange and wishes to share them with me. When I arrive in his office, he hands me a three-by-five file card on which the following list has been typed:

  Bears

  Shoddy arguers

  Poverty of intellect

  19th-century

  minds

  Childish tactics

  Arrogance

  Cheapest . . .

  tactics

  Rubin has spent the weekend reviewing his exchanges with McEvilley and evidently no longer feels satisfied with himself. He tells me he feels that McEvilley has bested him through “rhetorical devices,” examples of which he has typed out on the card. “McEvilley went down claiming that he never did or said a single thing that was wrong,” Rubin says. “At least I admitted that I was wrong about the number of objects in the vitrines, though I don’t think I was as wrong as McEvilley believes. The point is, these rhetorical devices that he has obviously studied somewhere are for winning arguments, not for getting to the truth. I never studied rhetoric, so I’m disadvantaged to that extent. It may be that McEvilley is emotionally so offended by the very conception of the show that he can’t see straight. And I think it kind of shocked him, and hurt him, that he was being questioned at all. The tone of his reaction seems to me to contain not a little anger at being called on to defend himself. His interest only in winning an argument is how I explain his unwillingness to see if there is a common ground. I’m only human. If someone uses invective on me, and slithery techniques to prove he’s always right, I’m going to come straight back—I’m not going to try and find common ground either. But I think there is common ground. I don’t think McEvilley really believes half these extreme things he says.”

  Like a teacher handing out reading material to a class, Rubin hands me a pack of xeroxes he has made of McEvilley’s article, of his letters and Varnedoe’s, of McEvilley’s replies to them, of various other reviews of the primitivism show, and of an exchange in Artforum in 1967 between him and Harold Rosenberg over a piece Rubin wrote on Jackson
Pollock, which McEvilley cited in his second reply. Referring to a set of xeroxes of his own, which I notice are extensively underlined, Rubin proceeds, like one of Borges’s obsessed men, to go over the entire exchange, point by point. He continues this rite of self-justification for the next two hours, touching yet again on the dread vitrines, and also on the other exhibition that McEvilley cited—that of the Menil Collection in the Grand Palais in 1984. “McEvilley dismisses our show as old hat because it was done before, in the Menil show,” he tells me. “Then I write in to say that in the Menil show there were only two juxtaposed examples of primitive art and modern art, and that all the rest of the tribal art was shown separately, in its own area. And how does McEvilley respond to this? He responds by blinding the reader, in effect: ‘The fact that Rubin can neither growl away nor live with is that the tribal objects were not shown entirely in their own separate area,’ he writes. By the time you get to this, your head is dizzy. You would have to be much more clearheaded than anyone is likely to be at this point to see that what he’s saying is just ridiculous. It’s so tricky and slimy.”

  The telephone rings, and the secretary announces Rubin’s next appointment. Rubin looks at his watch and says to me, “I’ll just race through this.” Then, in a moment of apparent uncertainty, he lets the pack of xeroxes fall from his hand. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and seems to be hovering on the edge of seeing the absurdity and futility of the proceedings. Then he puts his glasses back on and resolutely picks up the xeroxes.

  One afternoon in April 1985, I deliberately arrive late at the Upper West Side apartment of the artist Lucas Samaras, where I am meeting Sischy and Amy Baker Sandback, the president of Artforum. I want to make sure that I am not the first to arrive: I have never met Samaras, but his mysterious, aggressive work—menacing black boxes lined with pins, strange objects made of bright-colored yarns, fantastic pieces of painted furniture, photographs of his own leering face and contorted naked body—though it has a sort of creepy fascination, has made me instinctively feel that this is not a man I want to be alone with. I am late, but the others are even later, and I am met at the door by a tall, thin, dour man in his forties with a graying beard, who ushers me into the apartment with a resigned air and motions for me to sit on a sofa whose cushion is a tangle of colored yarns encased in a plastic cover. The place is like an enchanter’s workshop, filled with rolls of sparkling metallic fabrics, collections of broken wineglasses, jars of rhinestones, long sticks to which plastic brides and grooms are affixed, sinister clay figures, a wall of necklaces, a weirdly shaped handmade table and chairs, all bearing the Samaras signature. But the place is also like one of those shabby, harshly orderly apartments inhabited by old women from Balkan countries; it lacks only the embroidered cloths and the religious kitsch to complete its authoritative dissociation from middle-class taste and fashion. When Samaras tells me that he is from Macedonia—he came here as a boy of eleven—I think, Of course, where else? He stares at me expressionlessly but not unkindly, and we fall into talk. I almost immediately realize that the dire persona that emerges from his work and the actual person who is Lucas Samaras bear the sort of relationship to each other that a lion bears to a house cat. Where the work glints with menace, irony, and disdain, the man is merely acerbic, willful, and a little needling. He says of Sischy that she is unique among editors he has known. “All the others are interested in power—they play power games. If they are women, they use their femininity to gain power. Ingrid is not interested in power.”