Forty-One False Starts (34 page)

Rubin replies yes to both questions. “The people at
Artforum
were at great pains to be fair, though I think they were reluctant when we said we wanted to write a second letter,” he says. “Ingrid would have liked to say no, but we made certain points about misstatements, and then she realized that the matter couldn't just be left there. I feel very secure in thinking that students and other people reading this exchange ten years from now are going to come down on our side. If I didn't feel that way, I would have to accept criticism that would put five years of work into question. Not that there aren't things in my exhibition which I wouldn't have done differently. Sure there are. And not that I'm saying that all the criticisms of the exhibition were wrong. I think there was good criticism even in McEvilley's article. But McEvilley wanted a different exhibition altogether. Someone in the department here said to me, ‘McEvilley would have liked to be invited to do the exhibition.' That's the sort of thing you run into in this work. Since we invited people from all over to participate in the exhibition, to write articles for the catalog, McEvilley may have felt that the museum overlooked him. There may have been personal offense taken. Frankly, Kirk and I found McEvilley's replies to the letters much worse than his original article. We deeply felt the absence of
politesse
in the thing about the bears.”

A few days after this meeting, to my surprise, Rubin telephones me and says he would like to speak to me again. Evidently under some compulsion to do everything twice, he says that he has had some further thoughts over the weekend about the McEvilley exchange and wishes to share them with me. When I arrive in his office, he hands me a three-by-five file card on which the following list has been typed:

Bears

Shoddy arguers

Poverty of intellect

19th-century

minds

Childish tactics

Arrogance

Cheapest . . .

tactics

Rubin has spent the weekend reviewing his exchanges with McEvilley and evidently no longer feels satisfied with himself. He tells me he feels that McEvilley has bested him through “rhetorical devices,” examples of which he has typed out on the card. “McEvilley went down claiming that he never did or said a single thing that was wrong,” Rubin says. “At least I admitted that I was wrong about the number of objects in the vitrines, though I don't think I was as wrong as McEvilley believes. The point is, these rhetorical devices that he has obviously studied somewhere are for winning arguments, not for getting to the truth. I never studied rhetoric, so I'm disadvantaged to that extent. It may be that McEvilley is emotionally so offended by the very conception of the show that he can't see straight. And I think it kind of shocked him, and hurt him, that he was being questioned at all. The tone of his reaction seems to me to contain not a little anger at being called on to defend himself. His interest only in winning an argument is how I explain his unwillingness to see if there is a common ground. I'm only human. If someone uses invective on me, and slithery techniques to prove he's always right, I'm going to come straight back—I'm not going to try and find common ground either. But I think there
is
common ground. I don't think McEvilley really believes half these extreme things he says.”

Like a teacher handing out reading material to a class, Rubin hands me a pack of xeroxes he has made of McEvilley's article, of his letters and Varnedoe's, of McEvilley's replies to them, of various other reviews of the primitivism show, and of an exchange in
Artforum
in 1967 between him and Harold Rosenberg over a piece Rubin wrote on Jackson Pollock, which McEvilley cited in his second reply. Referring to a set of xeroxes of his own, which I notice are extensively underlined, Rubin proceeds, like one of Borges's obsessed men, to go over the entire exchange, point by point. He continues this rite of self-justification for the next two hours, touching yet again on the dread vitrines, and also on the other exhibition that McEvilley cited—that of the Menil Collection in the Grand Palais in 1984. “McEvilley dismisses our show as old hat because it was done before, in the Menil show,” he tells me. “Then I write in to say that in the Menil show there were only two juxtaposed examples of primitive art and modern art, and that all the rest of the tribal art was shown separately, in its own area. And how does McEvilley respond to this? He responds by
blinding the reader,
in effect: ‘The fact that Rubin can neither growl away nor live with is that the tribal objects were not shown
entirely
in their own separate area,' he writes. By the time you get to this, your head is dizzy. You would have to be much more clearheaded than anyone is likely to be at this point to see that what he's saying is just ridiculous. It's so tricky and slimy.”

The telephone rings, and the secretary announces Rubin's next appointment. Rubin looks at his watch and says to me, “I'll just race through this.” Then, in a moment of apparent uncertainty, he lets the pack of xeroxes fall from his hand. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and seems to be hovering on the edge of seeing the absurdity and futility of the proceedings. Then he puts his glasses back on and resolutely picks up the xeroxes.

One afternoon in April 1985, I deliberately arrive late at the Upper West Side apartment of the artist Lucas Samaras, where I am meeting Sischy and Amy Baker Sandback, the president of
Artforum
. I want to make sure that I am not the first to arrive: I have never met Samaras, but his mysterious, aggressive work—menacing black boxes lined with pins, strange objects made of bright-colored yarns, fantastic pieces of painted furniture, photographs of his own leering face and contorted naked body—though it has a sort of creepy fascination, has made me instinctively feel that this is not a man I want to be alone with. I am late, but the others are even later, and I am met at the door by a tall, thin, dour man in his forties with a graying beard, who ushers me into the apartment with a resigned air and motions for me to sit on a sofa whose cushion is a tangle of colored yarns encased in a plastic cover. The place is like an enchanter's workshop, filled with rolls of sparkling metallic fabrics, collections of broken wineglasses, jars of rhinestones, long sticks to which plastic brides and grooms are affixed, sinister clay figures, a wall of necklaces, a weirdly shaped handmade table and chairs, all bearing the Samaras signature. But the place is also like one of those shabby, harshly orderly apartments inhabited by old women from Balkan countries; it lacks only the embroidered cloths and the religious kitsch to complete its authoritative dissociation from middle-class taste and fashion. When Samaras tells me that he is from Macedonia—he came here as a boy of eleven—I think, Of course, where else? He stares at me expressionlessly but not unkindly, and we fall into talk. I almost immediately realize that the dire persona that emerges from his work and the actual person who is Lucas Samaras bear the sort of relationship to each other that a lion bears to a house cat. Where the work glints with menace, irony, and disdain, the man is merely acerbic, willful, and a little needling. He says of Sischy that she is unique among editors he has known. “All the others are interested in power—they play power games. If they are women, they use their femininity to gain power. Ingrid is not interested in power.”

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.