Sischy and Sandback arrive with a vague, unrepentant story about a distrait taxi driver. Sandback is 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 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:
When I wrote about Julian Schnabel’s last show at the Mary Boone Gallery for Art in America, I became so embroiled in a distasteful episode with the gallery concerning my request for an exclusive on the picture I wanted to use as an illustration that I vowed never to cover any painter represented by that gallery. I ignored Stephen Mueller’s last show there and I really wanted to write about it. Now Julian has ascended to Leo Castelli—though he’s splitting the bill with Boone—and I can leave personal feelings out of the picture, where they belong. Anyway, my responsibility is not to the painter, the dealer, or myself; it is to the pictures.
Nor was this the only treachery perpetrated by a dealer. I wanted to know how much a drawing Brice Marden had given me was worth. That very day, the person I’d asked (not at his current gallery) told Brice’s best friend that I was selling his drawing. Next time I saw Brice the first thing he said was, “I hear you’re selling my drawing!” As a point of fact I’d never part with it. I just wanted to know how much it was worth. For someone of my generation the possession of a Marden drawing is a big thing. I call it my de Kooning, and I have a de Kooning.
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 crewneck 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 discotheque, 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, and Ricard eats it hungrily. He tells, as if for the first time, the story he told in “Not About Julian Schnabel” concernin
g 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 write-up,” 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
I’ve advised people to get haircuts that made them
Look a mess, and poked fun behind their backs.
I’ve convinced writers to destroy their best work.
I’ve thrown people out of their own apartments
I’ve sublet, and never paid the rent.
I’ve conned young girls into giving me heirlooms to pawn.
I tease people who stutter. I like to talk dirty in front
Of old women.
I’ve talked nouveau-riches people into letting me throw
A party and then invited derelicts into their home,
Leaving it in shambles.
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 more than 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 that 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?”
“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.
Forty-One False Starts Page 27
