When Sischy first took up her duties at Artforum, a few days before Christmas, 1979, the next issue of the magazine was due at the printer’s in two weeks. (She had been unable to start any sooner because of two exhibitions she was committed to do for the Modern.) “Everyone was about to go off for the Christmas holidays and probably were not very thrilled at the sight of me,” Sischy recalls. “I think people were shocked at the thought of working for a young woman they had never heard of, as against an established academic man. After they were gone, I sat there looking at this pile of articles that were ready to go into the issue, and I just couldn’t do it. I thought to myself, If this thing isn’t going to suck you up, if it’s not going to kill you, the only way you can do it—even though it will irritate everyone because you go so slowly—is to take one step at a time and do only what you know and feel secure about. The minute you do something that isn’t yourself, the minute you publish something you can’t stand, the minute you answer somebody faster than you want to, it’s all over. I’m positive it is. So I looked at those manuscripts, and I said to Amy and Tony, ‘I don’t think I can publish these things.’ I said, ‘If I’m coming in here, and I’m this new person, I’ve got to say right away who I am and do what I have to do, even if it’s going to be crazy or stupid or two months late.’ And Amy, quite rightly, said, ‘Look, it can’t be two months late. Because that’s a part of what they’ll know about you—that you’re someone who can’t get the magazine out. It’s got to be on time.’ So I said, ‘Okay. That makes sense.’ We went to Amy’s house for lunch and talked about what to do. The only things I knew were artists’ books and projects and photographs. I didn’t know how to deal with eighty manuscripts by art historians, but I did know contemporary art, and I knew artists. So I said, ‘Why don’t we make a whole issue of new art? And let’s not get famous artists, who will do a little doodle—let’s get people who have a real commitment to the printed page.’ So we made lists. It was pointed out to me that we had to have a finished pile of material in two weeks. I also knew it had to be pretty good. I didn’t think it had to be great. I mean, I would already have been happy if I could have figured out how to get the typesetter on the phone. I didn’t even know what a typesetter was. The only thing I had was this ability to relate to people. So I called people up and told them what I wanted them to do, and they said, ‘Great! When do you want it?’—thinking I would say in a month—and I said, ‘In a week.’ And something must have happened in these phone conversations because every one of them came through.”
When the issue—the issue of February 1980—arrived on the newsstands, it caused a great stir. It was utterly unlike any previous issue of Artforum. The contributors included the photographer William Wegman, the English conceptual artists Gilbert and George, the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, the editors of the radical-feminist magazine Heresies, and the editors of the art journal Just Another Asshole, and the whole thing had an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised yet oddly poised air.
Sischy had happened to take over the editorship of Artforum at exactly the start of the new decade, and the appearance of an untried, unbookish, unknown, very young woman at the helm of a magazine whose three previous editors had been older men of parts, and whose atmosphere, even in its recent, least successful manifestation, was that of a powerful and exclusive men’s club (notwithstanding its women contributors, who possibly even contributed to that atmosphere), was a kind of portent of the astonishing developments in art that the eighties were to witness. In the abrupt transformation of Artforum’s format from a predictable high-art austerity to an unpredictable sort of underground press grunginess/flashiness may be read the changes that were to transform the quiet and stable New York art world of the seventies—with its minimalist and postminimalist stars surrounded by familiar constellations of conceptual, performance, video, and film artists—into today’s unsettling, incoherent postmodern art universe. One has to remind oneself, of course, that every present is disorderly, that art history is an artifact of time, and that certain temperaments tolerate chaos better than others. Barbara Rose, for example, found the present as threatening twenty years ago as she finds it today; the following passage, from a piece by Rose entitled “How to Murder an Avant Garde,” was published in Artforum in November 1965:
Today, there is no “scene.” Although the slick magazines have invented a fictional scene for public consumption, the experimental artist is more alone than he has been since the thirties. There are many disturbing signs: among art students, one perceives a “make-it” mentality conditioned by mass press descriptions of artistic high-life . . . There are other bad omens. As the pace becomes more frantic and distinctions are blurred, values are equally obscured . . . Pseudo-art writing in mass magazines confuses issues, imputes artists’ motives while supposedly honoring them . . . Having lost their common purpose on being accepted into the Establishment, and now rapidly losing their center as galleries and museums and exhibitions proliferate, is it any wonder that avant-garde artists are experiencing a crisis of identity?
The cover of Sischy’s first issue was a reproduction of the cover of the first issue of an avant-garde magazine of the forties called VVV, which styled itself a magazine of “poetry, plastic arts, anthropology, sociology, psychology” and numbered André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, William Carlos Williams, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Harold Rosenberg, Arthur Cravan, and Lionel Abel among its contributors. The VVV cover, by Max Ernst, was an Ernstian design of mysterious figures and diagrams from some abstruse, invented science, which surrounded the three V’s in black, on a green background. Sischy had borrowed the original cover from David Hare, VVV’s former editor. Someone who had not come from John Szarkowski’s photography department might not have been as over-joyed as Sischy was by the cigarette burn and the spills that stained it, but she correctly gauged the surreal beauty that these ghostly traces of a past life would assume when photographed, and also the sense of quotation marks that they would help impart to the notion of a cover about a cover. There was in addition a special personal fittingness to the unretouched, worn, dog-eared appearance of Sischy’s first cover. Among the people in positions of power in the cultural institutions of this city—book publishers, magazine editors, newspaper executives, museum directors and curators, theater producers—there has developed a style of dealing with staff that is noted for its informality, directness, simplicity, ordinariness. The pompous, self-important boss who puts a glacial distance between himself and his underlings, the petty tyrant who surrounds himself with cowed secretaries is so rarely seen today that he is almost an endearing anachronism (in the upper-middle-class establishment of which we speak, that is). In this context, Sischy’s way of running her magazine as “a kind of kibbutz” (in the words of the critic Donald Kuspit) is not all that remarkable. If there are some things Sischy does that editors of other magazines don’t do—such as running out of the office several times a day to the luncheonette across the street to get coffee and pastry for the staff—her relations with her employees are, in general, only slightly more egalitarian than the norm.
Where Sischy is outré is in her obsessive, almost fetishistic concern with questions of ethics. She sees moral dilemmas everywhere—and, of course, there are moral dilemmas everywhere, only most of us prefer not to see them as such and simply accept the little evasions, equivocations, and compromises that soften the fabric of social life, that grease the machinery of living and working, that make reality less of a constant struggle with ourselves and with others. Sischy, however, rejoices in the struggle; she is like someone walking through a minefield who has taken a course in mine detection. She positively enjoys staring into the abyss and drawing back just in time. Once, at Printed Matter, she received a telephone call from a museum curator who wanted to buy a copy of The Xerox Book, a collection of work by seven conceptual artists, published in 1968, that had been very successful and had become something of a collec
tor’s item. “Our last copy had just been ordered by somebody,” Sischy told me. “So I said to the curator, ‘Sorry, it’s gone.’ And the curator said, ‘Ingrid, we’ll give you a lot of money for a copy.’ We were really in deep financial trouble then, and the museum was talking, I think, a minimum of a thousand dollars. But I thought, How dare they? And I told them I had just sold it for twenty-five dollars, first come, first served, and hung up.”
In the presence of such shining rectitude, one cannot—worm that one is—but feel a little resentful. One can even, if one pursues this cynical train of thought far enough, summon up a bit of sympathy for Richard Serra. Who does she think she is? Why does she always have to behave better than everyone else? There are times when the heroines of Henry James’s novels provoke just such coarse thoughts—moments when the thread of sympathetic attention snaps and we fretfully wonder why these girls have always to be so ridiculously fine. But if Sischy’s moral imagination is of a feverishness to invoke the spirits of Fleda Vetch and Milly Theale, her atmosphere is very different from that surrounding those tense, exquisite intelligences. She has an incongruous, almost Mediterranean easiness and dailiness. The momentary irritation one feels with her when one believes she is riding her ethical hobbyhorse too hard (I remember once standing with her outside an Italian airport sulkily watching everyone else get a taxi while we, at her insistence, honorably waited our turn behind a pair of utterly baffled Japanese) is swept away by the disarming agreeableness of her company. Her capacity for enjoyment is movingly large. She is a kind of reverse Jewish princess: she goes through life gratefully accepting the pleasures and amenities that come her way, and if they are not the particular pleasures and amenities she ordered—well, so much the better. Her relationship to the world of consumer objects is almost bizarrely attenuated. (If a person could be likened to a work of de-commodified art, Sischy would be that person.) She has no credit cards, no charge accounts, no savings account (until last year, she had no checking account), no car, no driver’s license; she doesn’t even have a handbag, and stuffs her money and the tiny scraps of paper that serve her as an address book into a bulging wallet, which she awkwardly carries in her hand, like a kid on the way to a show. She uses no makeup and wears the plainest of clothes: the knit pants and shirt are her uniform. She has no possessions to speak of—she has never bought a painting, a sculpture, a photograph, a decorative object, or a piece of furniture or jewelry. All her belongings (mostly books and papers) fit into a trunk that she brought to the house of the woman she lives with when she moved in four years ago, and that she has yet to unpack.
The not yet unpacked trunk is a fitting metaphor for Sischy. As a child, she was twice uprooted—first from South Africa at the age of nine, and then from Scotland at the age of fifteen. She was born in 1952 in Johannesburg, the youngest of three children (she has two brothers, one a doctor and the other a lawyer) of a Jewish professional family. Her father, Benjamin Sischy, is a physician, and her mother, Claire Sischy, is a retired speech therapist. The family emigrated to Edinburgh in 1961, after the Sharpeville massacre, and again in 1967, to Rochester, New York, where Dr. Sischy took a position in oncological research at Highland Hospital. In Edinburgh, Ingrid went to a famous private school for girls, George Watson’s Ladies’ College; in Rochester, she went to public high school; and in 1973 she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. In all three places she became a leader very quickly and easily. “My ability to adjust got to be a family joke: we’d move to a new country, and within six months—at most, a year—I ’d be president of the class, and eventually president of the school,” she told me almost ruefully.
Sischy speaks of her parents with affection and approval bordering on reverence, and she once told me how, as a child of such a socially conscious family, she was able to reconcile herself to the apparently socially useless work that she does now. “For my parents, art was something that you did after the day’s work,” she said. “I grew up with the assumption that I would go into a profession like theirs—one that did some social good every day. When I took this job, I realized that the only way for me to do it was as if I were going to medical school. I worked sixteen hours a day, the way I saw my father work, and the way I saw my brother work when he was a resident, and I still work that way. I’m still serving my residency.” She went on, “I used to have the fantasy that I would do this work for a few years and then one day I’d stop and dedicate the rest of my life to South Africa. But more and more I have come to understand that to edit an art magazine today is to participate in all of today’s social, economic, and political discourses. Nowhere was this clearer to me than in the primitivism show.”
Thomas McEvilley’s attack, in the November 1984 issue of Artforum, on the Museum of Modern Art’s major exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern made an extraordinary impression on the art world. There was something about the piece that was instantly recognized as more deeply threatening to the status quo than it is usual for a critique of a museum show to be—and not least aware of the threat was William Rubin, the director of the show, and also the director of the museum’s Department of Painting and Sculpture. The article had a sort of dangerous luster, and this quality was also present in the two replies that McEvilley, a classicist turned art historian and critic, wrote to the letters that Rubin felt impelled to address to the editor of Artforum. (Kirk Varnedoe, codirector of the exhibition, joined the fray for the first round of correspondence and prudently dropped out for the second.) McEvilley’s article was like the knocking on the door dreaded by Ibsen’s master builder—the sound of the younger generation coming to crush the older one—and drew its power as much from the urgency of its Oedipal subtext as from the cogency of its manifest argument. Other reviews just as critical and as well argued as McEvilley’s—Arthur Danto’s devastating one in The Nation, for example—didn’t get under Rubin’s skin as McEvilley’s did. (With one exception: an earlier piece, by Michael Peppiatt, published in Connaissance des Arts, caused Rubin to threaten to sue the magazine—it remained calm—when it refused to publish his long riposte, which was accompanied by fourteen color illustrations.) What also may have contributed—indeed, must have contributed—to the specially charged atmosphere of the McEvilley article was the intense pressure under which it was produced. It was written, revised, and prepared for publication in just eleven days. Sischy told me how this had come about. She and McEvilley had gone to the opening of the primitivism show together, with the understanding that he would write about it if he felt moved to do so after seeing it. “As I walked through the show, I had a really creepy feeling that here, yet again, was a case of two objects looking the same but not meaning the same,” Sischy told me. “As I went along, I began to feel that yet again the Other was being used to service us. Yet again. Practically a thesis had been written on the label below a Brancusi work, but it was enough to say of the primitive sculpture beside it, ‘From North Africa.’ All the research had gone into the Brancusi, while the other thing was being used once again simply for affirmation of our values. A supposed honor was being bestowed on primitive work—the honor of saying, ‘Hey! It’s as good as art! We’ll even call it art.’ But now we know that a different set of questions needs to be asked about how we assimilate another culture. Tom had the same feelings—maybe even stronger. So we went to the Plaza and had about five drinks, and after the drinks Tom said, ‘Look, can we get the review into the next issue?’ and I said, ‘Tom, the issue is all designed. It’s going to the printer in four days.’ And he said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ and I said, ‘It would be incredible to come out with the piece while the show is still so new. Let me think about it.’ And I had another drink and said, ‘I’ve thought about it.’ I went to the office the next day and asked Amy and Tony whether it would be possible to open up the magazine and add an article a week late, which is an insane thing to do. But Tony and Amy agreed that in this case it would be a great thing to do. So Tom wrote the
piece in four days, and then we sat in my office for seven days and seven nights working on it.”
The article, entitled “Doctor Lawyer Indian Chief: ‘ “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984,” not only bore down heavily on the ethnocentricity of which Sischy (among others) was so painfully conscious (“This exhibition shows Western egotism still as unbridled as in the centuries of colonialism and souvenirism”) but denied that it was any longer interesting to see modernist paintings and sculptures juxtaposed with tribal objects to which they bear formal resemblances. That sort of thing, McEvilley said, was all very well in 1938, when Robert Goldwater published his classic text Primitivism in Modern Painting, but today such a way of thinking is a pitiful anachronism. Writing of MoMA as “the temple of formalist Modernism,” McEvilley characterized the primitivism show as a sort of last-ditch stand by the museum against the incursions of advanced thought:
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