“I don’t do that myself, so it’s presumably not the only thing she’s interested in. But it’s what is at the center of the magazine. Rene Ricard and Edit deAk really keep track of the art world. They really know what’s going on. There are other people who keep obsessive track of that world, but only within the framework of that tiny world itself, and they’re very boring. Rene Ricard and Edit deAk, in their strange ways, are connected to many other worlds as well—a bewildering variety of them, especially in Ricard’s case—and that’s where their criticality comes in: from being outside. Ricard lives in a very strange world, with all kinds of very strange people. He is an ex-Warhol person, and his world is one I don’t know very much about. He seems to have a strong art-historical background. And also—it’s all very eccentric—he is involved with the side of the art world that has to do with collecting. All his personalities are available at once, so you get this strange refraction. What holds it all together, it seems, is the sort of ecstatic, fanlike involvement he has with one thing or another from moment to moment, so that his obsessions kind of recapitulate the whole art world. He’s impossible, he’s hopeless. He is someone who is always connected to someone else. There used to be Warhol; now there’s Ingrid.”
“He’s supposed to be an important figure in the art world,” I say. “But I find his significance elusive.”
“Yes, very. Because you can’t ever find the center of a Rene Ricard article. I’m not sure I know what he’s talking about a lot of the time. He’s this kind of gestural presence—the spirit of the new painting. And it’s not just a question of someone coming along and saying that the new painting is great, because others have done that, and they don’t occupy Ricard’s position. These gestures he makes in the vicinity of the new painting seem to reflect something about it, seem to illuminate it in some way. He’s a kind of messenger figure: he’s bringing us news about the new painting, assuring us of its significance, or at least making a very strong claim for it. I think he’s important, because if there hadn’t been this irrational love that he, and maybe deAk, expressed for the new painting—and by ‘irrational’ I mean a love based not on argument and sober judgment, but just on this really flamboyant embrace—then people’s suspicions that the new painting is empty and calculating and manipulative might be stronger. I am almost swayed by Rene Ricard. I don’t know him, and I don’t pay all that much attention to him. But I do pause at the spectacle of his mad love for this new painting. I don’t quite see it—I mean, I think that in many ways Schnabel’s painting is banal and predictable—but the presence of Rene Ricard calls my judgment into question in some way.
“The other thing I think is important about Ricard is that he represents a kind of sordidness that it’s important for the art world to believe it is still capable of. The art world is supposed to be alienated, to be on the periphery—and it’s not. In fact, it’s very much integrated into the mainstream of culture. It’s not that most people like art; rather, it’s that the art world has found a secure place in ordinary life—which goes against all the avant-garde’s claims to being adventurous and in opposition. At a time when artists bring in architects to design their lofts, a flaky character like Ricard is very important. He makes it more believable that art is odd and weird and challenging.”
Thomas Lawson is another of Sischy’s more dependable and quiet writers—personally quiet, that is. His writing is tough, sharp, hard-hitting, very cold-eyed. In the November 1984 issue of Artforum, Lawson published a short article ironically entitled “Hilton Kramer: An Appreciation,” which had nothing good to say about Kramer. In one of its milder passages, Lawson wrote: “Kramer and the Times were a formidable combination. There, on a regular basis, he could press the authority of his opinions on those who were unable or unwilling to think for themselves; there his forceful mediocrity found its most congenial home.” Earlier, in a piece published in the October 1981 issue of Artforum entitled “Last Exit: Painting,” Lawson had not scrupled to attack a fellow contributor to Artforum:
Rene Ricard, writing in these pages on Julian Schnabel, has offered petulant self-advertisement in the name of a reactionary expressionism, an endless celebration of the author’s importance as a champion of the debasement of art to kitsch, fearful that anything more demanding might be no fun. The writing was mostly frivolous, but noisy, and must be considered a serious apologia for a certain anti-intellectual elite.
Lawson is a calm, fresh-faced, somewhat burly thirty-five-year-old Scotsman with a very level gaze, who came to New York in 1975 to pursue a career as an artist. During a conversation with him, I ask how he got into art criticism, and he replies, “Desperation. When I first arrived here, there was apparently no space for younger artists. There was a real doctrinaire thing going on. Every gallery was selling and every magazine was covering something called postminimalism. Postminimalism was very systematic and black and low performance, which was fine, but it was the only game in town. I began to meet other younger artists who had also just arrived and were also dissatisfied; the connective tissue between us was an interest in mass media. We felt that TV and the movies and advertising presented a problem and a challenge to visual artists that these postminimalists were avoiding. What we did, first of all, was to perversely deny ourselves originality of any kind—and this denial runs the gamut of all young artists working today. Even artists who are not directly involved in appropriating mass-media imagery—Julian Schnabel, for instance—refuse to accept the idea that you have to invent. There is something melancholy about our work. If pop art represented a kind of optimistic acceptance of mass culture, ours is a kind of melancholic acceptance. We never had coherence as a movement. For some reason, this generation has a particularly high incidence of extreme individualism and of paranoia about one’s peers. So there has never been much of a group. This all took place after ‘the death of painting.’ We had all been schooled in the idea that painting was finished, and the second perverse thing we did was to decide to paint. Since there’s a deadness to mass-media imagery, there was a fittingness to our decision to work in a medium that we didn’t have all that much conviction about. But, interestingly, once you start working in it you become more and more convinced by it. All these years later, painting actually seems interesting in itself, rather than a mere perverse challenge.
“Anyway, I started writing reviews for Art in America because I was so irritated with the situation. And soon I got a little name for myself as someone who could write quite acerbically about older art, who would throw a negative light on what was being shown, and who was something of a participant-champion of the new art. But then I had a falling-out with Art in America, though not to the point of exchanging words. David Salle and Cindy Sherman had shows that I desperately wanted to write about but wasn’t allowed to, and I began to feel used, I began to feel like a hired gun. I’m really quite good at cutting away the pretensions that accrue around a body of work, and I had done this to some established artists, which was obviously what they liked at Art in America. But it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to base a career on. My whole intention had been to be more constructive, and suddenly, with these two shows I wanted to do, I found myself being denied the opportunity. There had been a misperception at Art in America of my relations with Sherman and Salle—with whom I was neither friendly nor unfriendly. I do have sympathy for their work—I don’t see anything wrong with that. I’m an advocate of partisan criticism. Most art writing is from an insider point of view; there is very little that has an Olympian distance. I remember once reading something about Harold Schonberg, the music critic of the Times—about a deadly, life-denying thing he did. He forbade himself any personal contact with musicians, on the ground that it might influence his judgment. He wouldn’t even let his wife, who was a musician, have anything to do with them. Apart from the horror of that on the human level, I think it’s just crazy. You learn so much by knowing what in fact musicians and artists are actually thinking about and talking about, instead of pr
etending to drop in from the sky.”
Of his work with Sischy, Lawson says, “She’s almost chameleon-like. When I talk to her, we appear to be in complete agreement. But then an issue of Artforum comes out and—” Lawson gestures his feeling of betrayal. He goes on to describe a strange evening he once spent at the old Artforum office, on Mulberry Street (it recently moved to Bleecker Street), working with Sischy late into the night on an article about to go to press, and being acutely conscious of the presence of Rene Ricard in another room. Sischy was like a doctor going back and forth between patients in cubicles. “She would spend half an hour with me, and be extremely helpful and sympathetic, and then she’d get up and say, ‘I have to go and see how Rene is doing,’ and presumably she’d be equally helpful and sympathetic to him,” Lawson says. “There was no communication between Rene and me. We can barely talk to each other anyway, we’re so opposed in our opinions and our lifestyles. But Ingrid could move back and forth between us all night with ease. The Feast of San Gennaro was going on that night, and all that fairground noise outside—the firecrackers and the hawkers and the vendors—only accentuated the feeling of unreality which that night with Rene had for me.”
For the past seven years Lawson has been publishing a small art magazine of his own, called Real Life, with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, which reflects, in its unpretentious format and its radical critical content, the no-frills avant-gardism of its editor. The following excerpt from an interview by Rex Reason with Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, the directors of the Nature Morte Gallery, in the East Village, gives some sense of Real Life’s tone:
RR : You guys are so modern. What do you look for in an object? What qualities?
AB: Right now we like either black, white, or gray, or generic color.
PN: We’re pretty anti-color.
RR : By generic you mean red as “red” rather than modulations of it?
AB: Yeah.
PN: So many people bring us slides that are just like Salle, Basquiat, or Roberto Juarez. These poor kids are out there going to the galleries and they say, “This is what I have to do to have a show.” So they run home and paint them. We don’t want that—we want stuff we’ve never seen in a gallery before.
RR : And what do you think is the best art? What influenced the shaping of your taste?
AB: Right now, we like pretty classic late modern stuff: Pop Art, Paolozzi, Indiana for logos, Duchamp, Manzoni, Beuys, Klein. Scarpitta’s a favorite of mine.
PN: We think Op Art is highly underrated. Bridget Riley. That’s corporate psychedelia, the orgasm of modernism.
AB: We started the gallery because we really just wanted to get our voices in.
PN: And chose the name “Nature Morte” for its Fifties-jazz, pseudo-continental appeal. Ersatz European. Franco-American Chef Boy-ar-dee.
AB: We wanted to be the Leper Gallery.
PN: But then I thought of the Wallet Gallery.
After her three nights of ministering to Ricard at his place on Twelfth Street, Sischy begins a similar series of vigils with Thomas McEvilley at his place, on Clinton Street near Houston. I attend one of these sessions, which begins in the late afternoon and goes on until two or three in the morning. (I do not last the course.) McEvilley is a thin, bearded man, harried-looking but cheerful, who wears old corduroys during the day and in the evening often appears in a dashing white suit that he bought in a secondhand-clothing store. As I look around his place, I am struck by its peculiar combination of poverty and electronics, which speaks of our coming predicament with a kind of satiric authority. The apartment is a former ground-floor shop, and McEvilley has painted over the show window jutting out into the street, both for privacy and in order to have more wall space for books: the tiny room is entirely lined with books in cheap commercial cases. It has a lairlike aspect. There is an orange shag rug on the floor, and the furniture is four chairs of the sort you see thrown out on the street. But on a huge desk near the ex-window is a word processor; classical music is playing from an advanced stereo system; and there is an electric coffeemaker on a rickety side table, in which McEvilley’s girlfriend, Maura Sheehan, prepared an odd herbal drink before leaving for her studio—an identical space across the hall—where she is painting classical Greek-vase motifs on cracked automobile windshields.
McEvilley, as he once told me, sort of drifted into art criticism. He is a classicist by training (he has a Ph.D. in Greek and Latin) and some years ago shifted from the Classics Department of the University of St. Thomas to the Art and Art History Department of Rice University, in Houston, to which he actually commutes from New York during part of the school year. Before his critique of the primitivism show, he had done pieces on the conceptual artists Yves Klein, Marina Abramović and Ulay, and James Lee Byars, as well as an article called “Art in the Dark,” about extreme types of performance artists, among them people who subject themselves to very unpleasant ordeals, such as spending five days and nights in a two-by-three-foot locker without food, or sitting on a shelf in a gallery for twenty-two days. McEvilley said that he had dabbled in the genre himself, “but strictly as ordeal, not in an art context.” He told me that he had spent a year sleeping only four hours a night—a notion he had got from Buddhist monks—and that he had also experimented with fasting, vegetarianism, and meditation. However, one day he had caught himself feeling superior to other people because of these activities and had decided to curb them.
McEvilley began writing for Sischy’s Artforum in 1981. “In the seventies, I couldn’t stand the magazine,” McEvilley said. “It was promoting minimal art in overwhelming doses, and it had forced reductionist art modes on everybody with its aggressive ideological stance. Its power was undeniable—everyone knew the term Artforum Mafia, and used it.” (A disaffected member of the Family—Max Kozloff, the critic and editor, now turned photographer—once spoke to me in a similar vein about the old Artforum. “The magazine was looked upon with a kind of delirious bitterness,” he said. “It solaced the readership to know that there were people of such self-confidence and commitment at the helm, rendering such zippy and righteous judgments right and left. But if you were an artist they were not interested in—and they were interested in a very few artists, about whom they wrote repeatedly—then you found this a repellent phenomenon. You were put off by this camarilla of king-makers and bully boys—or, as the case may be, bully women—who wrote in a hermetic language that they were partially inventing and who took themselves with ultra-seriousness. They used to say that Artforum was like Listerine: it tasted terrible, but it was good for you.”)
McEvilley went on to speak of Sischy’s ideological suppleness. “She’s very sensitive to the Frankfurt school’s perspective on the social function of art, and she wants to maintain that perspective in the magazine. But she has gone far beyond what I see as the naive hostility of the old regime to the art market—a hostility that I myself used to share, I should add. I came to the magazine with a poet’s or a scholar’s or a philosopher’s antagonism to the market process. But Ingrid has pointed out to me very intelligently that in the past fifteen years, as the major New York museums have withdrawn from what is happening in art, serious dealers have become terribly important. They are the people who nurture contemporary art and bring it to us.”
Now I sit in a corner of McEvilley’s living room diligently jotting down snatches of the inscrutable dialogue going on between him and Sischy at the desk, punctuated by long silences while McEvilley works at the word processor.
“Is the idea that selfsameness is the only reality? I don’t think so.”
“Can I get rid of it?”
“Let’s see. Later it becomes clear that . . . Okay, let’s take the sentence out.”
“Okay.”
“ ‘Preemptively.’ What do you mean, ‘preemptively’?”
McEvilley goes to the word processor and unknots a sentence. Sischy looks it over. “It now reads as if Beuy
s is mad because Duchamp got there first.”
The telephone rings. McEvilley picks it up and hands it to Sischy. It is Ricard. Sischy speaks to him in a motherly way. She explains, as if speaking to a child, that she is busy at the moment. “Rene, you knew I was going to be working with Tom.” She listens to him talk at length, occasionally interjecting a “Great!” or a “Beautiful!” As soon as she can, she ends the conversation and returns to the manuscript.
“Is Rene okay?” McEvilley asks.
“Yes.”
“I thought he looked a little freaked the other day.”
“Maybe he didn’t have enough sleep,” Sischy says, with the dryness that I have come to recognize as her characteristic response to an invitation to be indiscreet.
A few days later I run into Ricard himself at the recently opened Palladium discotheque. The place is the creation of the former owners of Studio 54, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who, after finishing jail sentences for tax evasion, hired the eminent advanced Japanese architect Arata Isozaki to turn the old Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street, into a state-of-the-art discotheque, and the result is now being hailed as an improbable triumph of architecture, art, and chic by the city’s architecture critics, art critics, and arbiters of chic. The young artists who have done paintings on the walls and ceilings of the Palladium’s various rooms and corridors—Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—are receiving renewed, wondering notice as nouveau riche media stars from a press apparently still haunted by the idea of a revolutionary, marginal avant-garde; and the Palladium itself is being viewed as a kind of metaphor for the current state of art—the implosion of high and low culture into ever more grungily demotic and sleekly marketable forms. On this night, the Palladium has been turned over to a party for Keith Haring, and it is filled with beautifully and/or weirdly dressed people from the art world and its periphery. I come upon Ricard in a room that is apart from the discotheque proper, called the Mike Todd Room, which has a large bar, small marble-topped tables, and wire-back chairs, and is where the celebrities of the art world like to congregate. Ricard, resplendent in a white sharkskin suit, is sitting at one of the tables in a state of high, almost incandescent excitement. As I glimpse him, I recall a passage, in a recent Art in America article on Watteau by the art historian Linda Nochlin, about the painting of the clown Gilles in the Louvre:
Forty-One False Starts Page 28
