Forty-One False Starts (30 page)

Robert Pincus-Witten is a short, fresh-faced man with a sleek, well-tended look about him who seems younger than his fifty-odd years and who speaks with the accent of that nonexistent aristocratic European country from which so many bookish New York boys have emigrated. Pincus-Witten is a professor of art history at Queens College and teaches at the City University Graduate School. He was one of Coplans's gang of contributing editors, and for the last ten years he has been writing a column for
Arts
in the form of a journal. I first talked to him at a gathering of artists, collectors, curators, art-magazine editors, and critics at Marian Goodman's apartment after an opening of Anselm Kiefer's work at the Goodman Gallery, and I retain an image of him slightly bent over the buffet table as he helped himself, with a serious, responsible, almost sacerdotal air, to delicious, expensive food. Later, we talk further over lunch at a Japanese restaurant near the graduate school. He speaks of Rosalind Krauss, who is a fellow member of the graduate faculty, with grumpy familiarity: “Ros is a full professor, and she tends to pout in order to get her own way. She receives extraordinary academic consideration. She teaches only two courses a semester, instead of the three that the rest of us teach. She's a very attractive person, and many of the seemingly better students—I don't know if they actually are better—are drawn to her glamour. What happens is that she tends to be condescending, though not cruel, to students she doesn't think are intellectually desirable, so those students, as it were, become the students who come to one. They are not intellectually undesirable, but they walk around with this feeling of rejection and intellectual disparagement. Rosalind tends to attract a certain kind of stylishly intellectual student. Some of them are not particularly well prepared. I myself am more interested in general cultural knowledge than in the interpretative skills of the new dispensation, under which the truth of Derrida, the truth of de Saussure—what have you—are replacing the truth of Greenberg. The kids who can do this deconstruction talk are doing the eighties' equivalent of the fifties' Greenbergian formalist talk. It disturbs me. When I examine them, they have very little general knowledge. They have methodology, but they don't know the monuments. I happen to be interested in monuments. When one supports a certain radical position, one should know the conservative position that one is rejecting. What troubles me is the unexamined adoption of a radical stance. These kids still believe in a class struggle without realizing that they have made an a priori judgment that capitalism and its fruits are evil. I'm not happy with that, so I'm considered an archconservative. And it shocks me, because these are such privileged kids.”

I ask Pincus-Witten if he feels a kinship with the New Right.

He replies, “No, I feel a kinship with something much older: the aristocracy of the intellect, the aristocracy of sensibility. The others, they're just Rotarians. They're bowling teams, whether they're bowling teams of the right or the left. I know that I must always remain an outsider. I feel a fundamental alienation that is not materialistic or class oriented, and that's why I don't join anybody. Ingrid Sischy is another person who doesn't belong to any team or party, and that's why there is a thread of identification between her and me. Ingrid is very anarchic, and that's why she is resented by some sectors of the art community. Her reluctance to adopt a party line is viewed as a
retardataire
form of bourgeois privilege and opens her to a dated form of criticism that seems to come from fifty years ago. The fact that she can be interested in any style that might be regarded as involved with commodification—or what her critics imagine to be commodification—identifies her in their minds as an enemy of the class struggle. I find it quite astonishing that people who embrace such textbook theories still have no trouble being owners of co-ops or putting copyright marks at the bottom of their writings. They're stuck in a paradoxical situation that renders their absolutism ludicrous. Ingrid is odd. She can get curious idées fixes. She is very interested in popular culture. I remember one conversation I had with her and some fairly glamorous people when she was telling us about the tragedy of an extremely popular pop singer—the one who wears a glove. His tragedy was the built-in supersedence of his prestige by another extremely popular pop singer, named Prince. And it was simply impossible for me to think of that as even remotely entering the sphere of tragedy. She was reading tragedy in connection with some issues in popular culture, and I was reading it in terms of, you know, hubris, nemesis, the idle cruelty of the gods. What was nice about the conversation was that on some level Ingrid was closer to what the conversation was really about than I was with my high-flown stuff. When I first met Ingrid, I was struck by how young she was and how she wasn't conventionally pretty—she didn't look like Gloria Steinem. I've known Ingrid for six years now, and I've never seen her behave badly or coldly or curtly. I've never seen her even be short. I've never seen her behave in an ugly way—ever.”

Barbara Rose's loft, on Sullivan Street, with its mirror-filled walls, soft-gray carpeting, curved black sofa, mirror-topped coffee table, abstract and Oriental art, and fur-covered bed, looks more like a Park Avenue co-op than like a downtown living space, and Barbara Rose herself—a thin, pretty, somewhat jumpy woman of around fifty, with apricot-colored hair and wearing a loose, stylish light-blue wool dress and high heels—has a decided uptown aspect. When I arrive, she is talking on the telephone, and throughout my visit the telephone (which she sets to have answered by machine) rings frequently, with a discreet, rasping electronic sound. Barbara Rose's speech puts me in mind of simultaneous translation: she speaks very rapidly and a bit remotely, as if dealing with someone else's text. Since leaving
Artforum
, she has taught art history at several universities, has been a museum curator, and has written art criticism for
Partisan Review
,
Art in America
, and
Vogue
. “The art world today is not a serious world,” she says. “Art today is an aspect of decor, of entertainment. It's like gourmet food. In the sixties, I would invite people over—I was married to Frank Stella then—and there would be raging fights. Of course, people like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt were alive then. They were major intellectuals. There's nobody like them today. There are a few artists who are intellectuals, but most artists have become professionals. They're like cloak-and-suiters—they make this product, it's the thing they do. It's not about the agony and the ecstasy, or whatever, anymore; it's middle-class, it's bourgeois. There used to be a sharp demarcation between the bourgeois world and the art world. The bourgeois world was Other, its values were Other. You didn't have anything to do with these people; you didn't see them socially, you certainly didn't have dinner with them. But now that's all artists want to do—be invited to fancy restaurants and discotheques. And there are all those people from the suburbs. How do they get a foothold in Manhattan? They get involved with art. They're out there in New Jersey and Long Island collecting Major Works. And all those ladies running around with—you know—the briefcases and the slides. The people who are talking about art today are the people who twenty years ago were talking about—What were those people talking about twenty years ago? They were talking about big cars. I find the art world today very much like suburbia, and I'm not interested in the values of suburbia or its lifestyle or its aspirations. I left suburbia many years ago, and I don't want to go back.

“At
Artforum
in the sixties and seventies, we were talking to each other and we were talking to a group of artists who could understand us—Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, the remaining abstract expressionists. They were people of high intellectual caliber—I mean major intellectuals, not dodos. We had all been formed by the same educational process. We were all trained art historians, and we all had a background in philosophy and aesthetics. We knew what we were talking about. Annette and Max and I had been pupils of Meyer Schapiro at Columbia, and Michael Fried and Rosalind had been at Harvard. Frank and Michael, who were undergraduates at Princeton together, went to hear Clement Greenberg lecture, and they were converted immediately to the Greenberg doctrine because it offered a coherent way of looking at art. Nothing else did. Harold Rosenberg wrote, but nobody serious took him seriously—it was sociology; it wasn't art criticism. It had nothing to do with aesthetics, it had no background in art history, it was off the top of the head. It was fine for a general audience, but for people who had been trained in aesthetics and art history it seemed very hollow, and it had nothing whatever to do with actually looking at art. Whereas Greenberg looked at art. Now, he was a strict formalist, but he really shone in comparison with Harold, particularly at that time. We were all very impressed by Wittgenstein and by Anglo-American philosophy and by linguistic analysis and the verification principle—by that school of philosophy, which fitted perfectly with Greenberg's way of thinking—and Harold just simply didn't seem to have any philosophical underpinning to his thinking.

“After 1967, when Philip Leider moved the magazine to New York, there was a lot of hanging out together. You had a sense of not being isolated. You were talking to other people. It might be only five people, but you were talking to somebody, and you knew who you were talking to. I would write an article knowing that what I was basically doing was having a fight with Michael. We were a group of people who had had the same kind of education addressing the same topics from different points of view. The magazine had coherence, which the culture had at that point, too. There was then such a thing as a core curriculum, there was such a thing as a liberal arts, humanistic education, there was such a thing as a thorough art history education. These things don't exist anymore. The people involved in the art world don't have them. The new
Artforum
is a media magazine; it's totally media oriented. There's no real criticism in it, or almost none. McEvilley writes criticism, and John Yau writes criticism, but I haven't found anything else that I would call criticism in the new
Artforum
. It's some kind of writing—some strange kind of writing—but it's not criticism. It's Rene Ricard doing whatever it is that Rene Ricard does. I mean, it's something weird, and a lot of the people can't write. They have no background; they don't know what they're talking about, if they're talking about anything.

“We were literary people—academic literary people. We didn't watch television. If we were interested in cinema—which Annette and I were—it was on the level of avant-garde film, not Hollywood. And we didn't like junk. There wasn't this horrible leveling, where everything is as important as everything else. There was a sense of the hierarchy of values. We felt that we had to make a distinction between Mickey Mouse and Henry James. There's a generation now that feels you don't have to make that distinction. Mickey Mouse, Henry James, Marcel Duchamp, Talking Heads, Mozart,
Amadeus
—it's all going on at the same time, and it all kind of means the same thing. For that, you have Andy Warhol to thank. I also think Susan Sontag was very influential in giving permission to so-called educated people to watch trash. Her article ‘Against Interpretation' said that this idea of highbrow and lowbrow didn't matter any longer—you could just love everything that was going on, you could be positive and optimistic and just love it all.

“I used to be able to earn a living as an art critic. I got paid a lot of money by
Art in America
because there was a differential, you see: if you were a very popular writer or were considered a very good writer, you got paid more money. Then, all of a sudden, the great era of democracy came to
Art in America
, and they started paying everybody the same. So I said, ‘Forget it—I have too much experience, and I'm not going to write for the same amount of money you pay my students.' I don't believe in democracy in art. I think that when elitism got a bad name in this country, it was the beginning of the end for American culture. The only interest
The New Criterion
has is its pretension of being an elitist magazine. Unfortunately, it's not. What it is is just a strange kind of dinosaur. It has such a clear party line that it's just not an interesting magazine. In fact, it's extremely boring. But its goal—the reconstruction of what was once a consensus of educated people—is correct.”

The party at Marian Goodman's apartment where I first talked to Robert Pincus-Witten began with a certain—as Pincus-Witten would say—
déconfiture.
Almost everyone there had heard about, if not actually seen, a confrontation that had taken place between two of the party guests an hour before, at the Anselm Kiefer opening. The opening had been an enormous one, with hundreds of viewers on hand drinking bad champagne, and the confrontation had taken place in an alcove off the main, museum-size room, so that not too many people actually witnessed it. Those who did—I among them—were stunned by what had suddenly erupted in their midst. At one moment, Richard Serra and Ingrid Sischy were having a normal conversation; at the next, Serra, his face contorted with fury, was jabbing a finger at Sischy's face and abusing her with a stream of invective. “I think he would have hit me if I'd been a man,” Sischy said later. “I was very glad I wasn't.” Sischy—a short, very young-looking person with cropped dark wavy hair, a round, clear olive-skinned face, and large glasses, who was wearing tapered stretch pants and a tailored shirt—stood facing Serra, occasionally putting in a quiet word and showing no emotion beyond a reddening of her face. Like the other bystanders, I stood transfixed, catching some of the words but not able to understand what Serra's tirade was about or what had so enraged him. This was the first time I had seen Richard Serra, and he didn't fit the image I had formed. From his massive, thrusting sculpture, his difficult, theory-laden writing, his reputation as a major artist, and the name Serra itself, I had imagined a large, dark, saturnine man—a sort of intellectual-conquistador type, emanating an air of vast, heroic indifference. The actual Serra looked like someone from a small American rural community: a short man with a craggy, surly face, receding gray hair, and pale eyes rimmed by light eyelashes. He was wearing a long black shirt over black trousers and under a black leather jacket—an artist's costume—but his aura was of rough small-town America rather than of bohemia. I have seen men like him standing beside pickup trucks in wintry landscapes, locked in slow, obdurate, implacable argument; I have heard that voice, that aggrieved intonation of flat unyieldingness and threat, that conviction of being right, and that suspicion of being put upon; I know that closed yet oddly sly expression. Sischy stood her ground, letting Serra's abuse rain down on her without flinching, and finally he stalked off and she unclenched her fingers. I shared a taxi with her to the Goodman party, and I at last learned what she had said to trigger the explosion. It had had to do with the
Tilted Arc
controversy, which was then at its most intense.