Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1972. . - book review

AMY NEWMAN

Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1972 New York: Soho Press, 2000. 559 pp.; 17 b/w ills. $42.00

In 1975, Hilton Kramer wrote in the New York Times that, for significant sections within the art world, "Artforum has functioned for some years as a kind of Bible." Amy Newman's riveting oral history of Artforum in the decade preceding Kramer's comment can be described without sacrilege or flippancy as the Talmud to go with that bible. Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 is an invaluable addition to the literature of recent art history. Like the Talmud, it weaves around the original texts new layers of meaning through a disconcerting hut richly rewarding synthesis of legend and lore, philosophical speculation, social analysis, anecdote, telling contradiction, and dialectic. In common with the rabbis, the interviewees in this exhaustively researched collection take the reader in conflicting directions, toward clarification and mythopoela, exposing misunderstandings and tapping hitherto under appreciated social and personal complexities. Another perhaps not coincidental commonality Challenging Art shares with t he Talmud is that a majority of the passionately committed and fiercely argumentative players in it are Jews.

While the style and presentation of Challenging Art ought to prove appealing to audiences concerned with American intellectual history or the paradoxes of writing about any period of art, the accessibility of this book and the pleasure it provides in no way undermine its scholarly value. Newman has, on the surface, absented the author's voice from her account (save for concise introductory texts to each time period), but the rigor and probity of both the questioning that produced these rare and original interviews and the ingenuity with which the responses are restructured into (literally) an argument should not be downplayed. It is ironic that a work concerned with theory and criticism should actually rely on the kind of meticulous and empirical research--in this instance, actually getting the key players to talk--that used to be the bread and butter of the discipline of art history. A further irony is that counter to a trend bolstered in the world of art criticism by Artforum itself, this is an instance of commentary that is more accessible than its primary text. Many of the very authors who made Artforum notoriously impenetrable are to be heard in the interviews collected here reminiscing candidly and straightforwardly about the background and causes of their own opacity.

Challenging Art charts the history of the magazine from its foundation in San Francisco in 1962, under the stewardship of Philip Leider, to the dramatic exit in 1974 of its second editor, John Coplans, who had succeeded Leider just a few years earlier. The cutoff date also represents, in Newman's estimation, the end of Artforum's glory days. The journal enjoys renewed vitality in its current incarnation, to be sure, but it never regained the intellectual hegemony it achieved in the 1960s (thankfully, pluralists would argue). The mantle of high theory seemed to pass to October, which was founded by dissident sometime-contributing editors of Artforum Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson.

One reason no journal today could match Artforum in the 1960s in wielding muscle within the art scene--making stars, bolstering prices, sustaining institutionalized careers, undoing cultural edifices, determining the discourse for makers and viewers alike-is the shrinking position of criticism per se within the cultural field. Several voices in Challenging Art recognize this fact. A telling event in the changing fortunes of the journal and its writers was the provocative ad placed in the November 1974 issue by artist Lynda Benglis. It featured a photograph, one of a triptych, in which she appears naked (but for sunglasses) and wielding a large dildo. Beglis had originally hoped the photo would accompany an article about her by Robert Pincus-Witten. The publication of the ad led to an indiguant letter of complaint from several contributing editors, a rare instance of unity among a board then on the brink of civil war. (The signatories were Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Erauss, Joseph Masheck, and Michelson.) "That ad was tantamount to saying that we were all hookers together," complains Krauss (p.415), while to Michelson it showed how "the magazine itself is the brothel within which things are for sale" (p. 417). Benglis's photograph can be read in various ways, appealing to the libertarian feminist (it met with the approval of Lucy Lippard, and Robert Rosenblum describes it as "a timely, marvelous explosion that shattered this ivory tower," p. 414) as surely as it repelled the more puritanically minded. Aside from any political dimension, it was, in part, an inside, art-world statement. Benglis knowingly echoed a similarly playful act of self-promotion, Robert Morris's advertisement of a show in which he depicted himself greased up and wearing a Teutonic military helmet (this photograph, just to complicate the tale, was taken by Erauss, who lived with Morris). The key issue, however, is that an artist realized that more could be achieved in the reproduction of an image over which she had complete control, withou t text, than through the medium of highbrow criticism, in which the choice of image was out of her hands.

There were other instances where writers were confronted with the marginal significance of their efforts. While Michelson was attending a downtown roundtable with young collectors and artists, it became painfully clear to her that a new generation of Artforum readers looked only at the short reviews, ads, and reproductions, leaving the hefty footnoted essays at the front of the magazine to the academic readers to whom they were increasingly addressed. This was a change from the way things had been a few years earlier. The most extraordinary aspect of the triumph of Artforum in the 1960s is that a group of young writers genuinely seemed to exercise an authority to match that of dealers, collectors, museum directors, and artists themselves.

Such a phenomenon could only occur with a confluence of impersonal forces and strong personalities. What comes across strongly about the 1960s in this book is the fusion of idealism, intellectualization, and newfound professionalism. As it happens, the helmsmen, Leider and Coplans, did not have art historical backgrounds or, in Coplans's case, even academic credentials. In the latter's picturesque description, they "two fingered [their] way through to some kind of critical view" (p. 93), in contrast to the typical East Coast contributor. Michael Fried, Barbara Rose, Kozloff, Krauss, Pincus-Witten, Rosenblum, and others all took up criticism of contemporary art after completing graduate studies in the history of art. Many of the younger artists who, in turn, attracted their attention were similarly intellectually equipped, in marked contrast to the ruggedly antiacademic stance of earlier generations of American bohemian painters and sculptors, whom Pincus-Witten dismissively characterized as the "duh" generati on (p. 204). Fried and Frank Stella were classmates at Princeton; Rose had met Donald Judd in a seminar at Columbia. In Pincus-Witten's words, "'art' had gone to college" (p. 204).

Common ground between theorist and maker is a crucial aspect of art writing in the 1960s as, of course, it would transpire to be for art making, particularly with the advent of Conceptual art. The Artforum generation influenced, and was in turn influenced by, a newly empowered breed of highly articulate and intellectually resolute artists. But it also spawned future generations of scholars and academic theorists completely remote in their thinking and activities from any kind of living art production. (Fried and Krauss would largely withdraw from active engagement with contemporary art to become scholars predominantly of past periods.) The heyday of Artforum thus represents a unique moment of transition as high criticism made its way from bohemia to the academy. As Brian O'Doherty (aka painter and fiction writer Patrick Ireland) deftly phrases it, these academically trained critics "still had one foot in the loft" (p. 466).

These writers were reacting in a similar way to the same cultural forces that exercised the minds of the artists they wrote about. The cool, cerebral, diffident art of the 1960s and the hard, clinical, scientific language developed to describe it constituted an inevitable backlash against the existentialist, mythopoeic, romantic, heroic New York School painters and their poet-critic champions. The latter group was exemplified by Harold Rosenberg, a regular whipping horse in Challenging Art with no one in Newman's cast to defend him. But Rosenberg was astute to the situation in which he and the art and criticism of his time found themselves. He saw in the career of Stella and his rise to stardom the personification of new and suspect values affronting what he cared for in art and writing. Stella was patronized by a newly ascendant art establishment in a fashion that appalled Rosenberg. In 1959, when still a student of twenty-four, he was given a room to himself in the seminal exhibition Sixteen Americans that was held at the Museum of Modern Art. A decade later, he was the subject of a retrospective there. To that museum's chief curator, William Rubin (a disciple of Rosenberg's archrival, Clement Greenberg), Stella's achievement had in no small measure to do with his debunking of the "romanticism" and "rhetorical posture" of Abstract Expressionism while representing possibilities for the renewal of abstract art. To the anarchistic and romantic Rosenberg, this career trajectory-"To go directly from the university finearts classroom to the museum is the common ambition of art students today"-- exactly mirrored the spiritual decline of institutionalized culture: "Stella belongs to a period in which the problems of painting keep painting alive and make decorations into art. One step further and the paintings can be abandoned for the sake of the problems. Stella is a forerunner of conceptual art." (1)

The rivalry of Rosenberg and Greenberg was the stuff of legend in the milieu of bohemian New York in the 1940s and 1950s. In personal terms, "the battle of the 'bergs'" dated back to the 1930s, when the two men had been friends. Greenberg's championing of Jackson Pollock was pitted against Rosenberg's of Willem de Kooning to produce an opposition within Abstract Expressionism reminiscent of the Ingres-Delacroix rivalry of the preceding century. In suprapersonal terms, therefore, it is not whimsical to interpret the conflict between these two critics and what they represent as a reincarnation of "that old chestnut" (a phrase of Herbert Read's, a friend of Rosenberg's, a bete noire of Greenberg's, and a theorist much given to the lure of oppositions), the classic-romantic dichotomy. Greenberg's most formative intellectual influence, after all, was Irving Babbitt, whose New Laocoon spawned Greenberg's own "Toward a Newer Laocoon" (1940), a classic, in more senses than one, restatement of the argument for medium specificity. Rubin, in a sense, press-gangs Stella into an old battle.

On the face of it, the Artforum generation would seem to be squarely on the classic side of the opposition. Many voices in Newman's book rise against Art News, the house journal of the New York School during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, which continued to dominate the scene, intellectually, until the end of the 1950s. Edited by Rosenberg's friend Thomas Hess, Art News preferred poets to art historians, patronizing, for instance, during the period of Challenging Art, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler and starting Carter Ratcliff, Bill Berkson, David Shapiro, and Peter Schjeldahl on their art writing careers. "It was actually useful to have that to react against," Fried recalls in his first quoted appearance in Challenging Art. There was "a violent distaste for that kind of bullshit and a craving for something real" (p. 41). That "something real"--demystified empirical, disciplined, unpoetic, unfanciful, formal criticism--presented itself in the writings of Greenberg. Until the publication of Art and Culture in 1961, Greenberg's criticism was confined to back issues of such journals as Partisan Review, the Nation, Commentary, and Arts; he had given up regular reviewing at this stage. Fried, Leider, and others made their way to his writings, notwithstanding their elusiveness. The republication of thirty-nine of these essays and reviews was of seminal influence to the emerging consciousness of a new generation of critics. "Everybody smart and educated turned into a Greenberg groupie," as Rose puts it (p. 165).

Art News was self-consciously Baudelairean in its sense of the role of the poet in the formation of taste; intellectually, meanwhile, Rosenberg, author of The Anxious Object (1964) and coiner of the term "Action Painting," was looking to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in Paris in the development of his own aesthetic position. In opposition to this Francophilia, Greenberg was insisting on the transfer of the baton of modernism from France to America. In this context, the antagonism toward France in particular and an indifference toward Europe in general among the Artforum crowd is striking. Their aesthetic isolationism contrasts with the pervasive idealism and intellectual curiosity of the 1960s. "We were totally against the French style of poetic art criticism," says Coplans. "We wanted hard, factual description of the material as it was presented and an assessment as to what it stood for" (p. 130). Leider is even more forthright on this issue: "The only sense we had of Europe was that it was a nightmare a nd nothing French was good. There is a definition of bad art--that it 'tastes French'" (p. 131).

The Greenbergian generation had no oedipal ax to grind with "Uncle" Rosenberg. The critical pater familias, however, was the focus of a deep-seated and unremitting obsession. Of course, Greenberg was not a static eminence during this period. As it gained in institutional and commercial hegemony, his position became increasingly entrenched. He started the decade, therefore, as an offbeat exemplar to an ascendant group of young writers; by the end, he was viewed as a bete noire precisely as some of those writers were confronting pressures on their earlier idealism from the political and social turmoil of the times and from the internal aesthetic crises of art and criticism.

When Artforum was in California (it moved East in 1965), it had Kozloff as its New York editor. In contrast to most of his fellow contributing editors, Kozloff was under the sway of Rosenberg and had issued a sharp critique of Greenberg (it was run as a letter instead of an article) in the pages of Art International, a heavily Greenbergian publication. Later, when the magazine came under Coplans's brief and troubled stewardship, Kozloff would have a major influence in steering Artforum in a political direction, despite Coplans's low personal opinion of him, as would Alloway. It is interesting, however, that while Kozloff offered a distinctive voice in the magazine during the 1960s, as did the maverick advocate of realist painting Sidney Tillim, the journal was overwhelmingly perceived as inflexibly formalist. Leider, although influenced by Greenberg, with whom he was in regular contact, and almost embarrassingly in awe of his hero, Fried, was more pluralist than either of his highly dogmatic mentors. Leider's explanation as to why Fried cut such a dominant profile in the pages of Artforum is nearly sycophantic: "Every time Michael published anything it gave a tone to the whole issue. It was just his brilliance that made it seem like the magazine was his" (p. 246). On one occasion this was literally the case, as a whole issue was given over to the publication of Fried's dissertation on Manet. This was all the more remarkable because, once it established its identity, Artforum ran relatively few pieces on pre-20th-century subjects. To Kozloff, Fried's essay was "flag waving formalism through and through, despite its historical learning" (p. 285).

Irving Sandler tells Newman that "Clem's formalism is attractive to a younger generation because it seems systematic" (p. 167). Kozloff extends the argument (this sort of narrative turn, incidentally, exemplifies the flow and vitality of Newman's text, a superb marshaling of material) with the observation that "you had to twist Greenberg's notions to fit into what was happening, and I think a clutch of Artforum writers wanted to update and yet outflank him, so as to come in with judgments of their own, as attractively certain as his" (p. 168). For the neo-Greenbergians, the unwillingness of their mentor to acknowledge the new tendencies of the 1960s as a logical outcome of the directions he had so presciently championed was a source of both frustration and opportunity. They argue, contra Kozloff, that the twisting was done by Greenberg, not them, that Greenberg twisted out of certain realizations and acknowledgments. The neo-Greenbergians took up with renewed zeal the progressive element in modernism. By the 1960s Greenberg's penchant for progress can be said to have plateaued, his critical emphasis shifting to "quality." The younger critics wanted to see the determinist "choo choo train" (Krauss's phrase, p. 169) move forward a few stations.

Fried was the most faithful to Greenberg's aesthetics, while personalizing (and intensifying) the tone and theoretical depth of those aesthetics. He largely shared Greenberg's tastes in "post-painterly abstraction," devoting his seminal criticism of the 1960s to figures already promoted by the older critic, such as Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Anthony Caro. "His one act of rebellion," Rosenblum snipes (p. 197), was to insist on Stella. Everyone seems to agree that Greenberg's inability to accommodate Stella seems inconsistent with his own polemics. (Rose, who was married to Stella in the early 1960s, attributes it to her husband's independence of spirit and catholicity of taste.) To Leider, Rose, and Krauss, the other sometime-acolytes, Judd, Morris, and Carl Andre (and later, Robert Smithson and Richard Serra) seemed the most compelling artists of the day, to be prized for reinventing and extending the possibilities of abstract art. Leider now regrets that, while the Minimalists were represented as wri ters, the journal failed to afford them their first feature articles. He similarly regrets that Kozloff was assigned to cover the seminal exhibition 9 in a warehouse, curated in an ancillary space of the Leo Castelli Gallery by Morris, which introduced Serra, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, and others. Kozloff wrote "sheer drivel" for him, Leider feels, in contrast to the "incandescent" review by David Antin in Art News (p. 246). Since this period, theorists have worked hard to insist on a paradigm shift between the high modernism of Greenberg's chosen artists and the protoConceptual (implicitly postmodern) nature of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. Much of this argument revolves around key texts published in Artforum itself, several in the seminal June 1966 issue, American Sculpture, which included the now much anthologized essays "Art and Objecthood" by Fried, "Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site" by Smithson, and Sol LeWitt's "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art." But Challenging Art has the salutary effect o f recalling how competitive egos were concerned with essentially similar art.

If commitment to reductive art and hairsplitting differentiation between one manifestation of it and another (Color Field painting, Minimal art) were two ways in which Artforum exuded purism, then another was its refusal to accommodate the dark sides of modernism: desire and irony, as manifest in Dada, Surrealism, and Pop. With few exceptions, Pop was marginalized, even though it was, arguably, the defining style of the period. And while the September 1966 issue--which Leider now claims to have hated--was devoted entirely to Surrealism, Pincus-Witten insists that the more typical anti-Surrealism of the younger writers be ascribed to their unswerving Greenbergianism. Krauss's violent reaction against Greenberg therefore represents an extreme antiformalism: "Now, clearly, the worm has turned. Ros is all Georges Bataille, and it's all this visceral, underbelly kind of side to Surrealism which she's largely valorized as the cynosure of graduate studies, displacing Breton" (p. 192). Viewed through the lens of Challenging Art, the focus of October magazine on Continental theory seems to represent a swing of the pendulum back in the romantic direction, however remote and displaced the sensibilities of the journal are from the poets of Art News and the existentialism of Harold Rosenberg.

Krauss's turn against formalism seems, from the evidence gathered by Newman, to have been in equal measure personal and ideological. There were many intense animosities among the Artforum writers, editors, and outside mentors. Greenberg falls out with Leider and Fried on the same day. Fried turns against Krauss, who had worshiped him, confiding in Leider that he wants to "eviscerate her in a footnote" (p. 223). Coplans disdains Kozloff, Alloway detests Michelson and Krauss, and so on. The turmoil of American society during the Vietnam War is reflected in the turbulent reversal in Artforum's politics. Leider and his star writers were apolitical in their art writing although increasingly engaged in their personal lives (Leider essentially walks away from the journal, exhausted and disillusioned). Coplans, although not systematically political, is a provocateur. He encourages Alloway in his deconstruction of the art world as a "system," publishes radical texts by Lippard, accepts increasingly shrill revisionist accounts of modernism by Kozioff, and runs the incendiary article "Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War" by Eva Cockroft (June 1974). A cocky reference to the Marlborough Gallery resembling a bank vault in Peter Plagens's "Peter and the Pressure Cooker" in the same issue results in a cancellation of a year's worth of advertising. Eventually, Castelli orchestrates the dismissal of Coplans, or so the dealer confides in Coplans aftenvard.

When Coplans dedicated to his predecessor the thiritieth issue of Artforum, which contained this kind of politicized and revisionist material, Leider wrote on a postcard: "Dedicating an issue like that to me is like dedicating the Aswan Dam to Golda Meir. There must be some mistake" (recounted by Mel Bochner, p. 347). There certainly was a radical shift in emphasis from one editor to the next. But what appears to have remained constant was a high level of writerly adrenalin. Rose recounts that Coplans was not an initiating editor; true to his nature as provocateur, he simply allowed writers he trusted to commit themselves to topics that mattered. This instilled a sense of urgency.

Many voices in Challenging Art talk of the religious tone of moral certainty that animated the magazine. Leider himself marvels at this quality in Fried. "Michael really felt that Western civilization was at stake" (p. 298). He came to share Fried's conviction that "if the culture was going to go sour, it was our fault" (p. 174). Such purism and moral fervor seem inimitable for art writing today. While few would wish to trade the pluralism of the current scene for the orthodoxies of the 1960s, the sense of young people engaged so energetically in a high critical endeavor that comes across almost novelistically in Challenging Art induces nostalgia for an idea.

Note

(1.) Harold Rosenberg, The De-definition of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 127.

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