Forty-One False Starts (35 page)

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” concerning 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.

“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.