I didn't know Gilbert-Rolfe was your teacher. He now teaches at the Art Center in Pasadena CA. I've been a fan of his writing since I heard him reading his paper "Seriousness and Difficulty in Criticism" at an Art Papers conference, around the time of the Mapplethorpe/NEA flap. He got hissed by someone in the audience for this statement:

I have suggested that resistance to difficulty in the work of art comes in three varieties: the innocent; the pious [i.e., the left]; the embittered [the right]. The point I should like to make is that while the innocent deserve our help, the left and the right deserve one another. There is, from the point of view of anyone actually interested in seriousness and difficulty, no significant difference between Andres Serrano and Jesse Helms. Indeed they need one another.

HIISSSSSSS....

Here's another passage (worth quoting at length) from his essay Art Writing and Art School:

Contemporary art journals mirror the general culture inasmuch as they do not regard art as mysterious and alien, but as transparent and exhausted, and they converge with it in their desire to see and enjoy the subordination of the art object to that which it is said to have once been indifferent. In confirmation of this belief, most of the contemporary art that gets exhibited and written about is suspicious of art as such and is grounded in a counter-esthetic of, usually, one of two sorts -- Pop or Conceptualist.

These are Duchampian arguments, and as I've said elsewhere, Duchampianism provided the `80s art world with a version of postmodernism that galleries can sell. The art world wanted postmodernism in the sense that it was sick of modernism, but it couldn't afford to want what postmodernism implies, which would be something like the end of an art history describable in Hegelian terms. Duchampianism preserves modernism by demystifying it, thus prolonging it through critique. Such demystification always presents itself as metacritical, which is its commercial strength and the basis of its appeal to art historians.

Moreover, the art of the `80s raised no questions about Duchamp's definition of art's problematic while attaching it wholesale to the aspirations of the Frankfurt Institute. The crucial text was Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, which permitted the art of the `80s to make the ready-made into a lens through which to look at the question of high and low culture and to maintain that question in a persistent condition of artificial resuscitation. The art magazines conspire in that artificiality and derive sustenance from it. Thus has the ready-made been assimilated to what might be described as a social realism of the symbolic, the constant theme of which is that art is dead but its ghost is a populist and very productive.

Following Calinescu, I'd agree that once one has Warhol one doesn't need Duchamp. Following that, I'd suggest that Baudrillard is right and that where Warhol "made nullity and insignificance into an event where it was transformed into a fatal strategy of the image," his successors "have nullity only as a commercial strategy, to which they give the form of publicity, the sentimental form of merchandise, as Baudelaire said" ("Le complot de l'art," Liberation, 20 Mai 1996).

The social realism of the symbolic proceeds from the notion that art is dead but has an afterlife as its own critique, which takes the form of a redemptive engagement with the everyday. The latter proceeding from the assumption that there's nothing wrong with the everyday but art is beyond redemption. Therefore, one does not find in contemporary art magazines any arguments about the success or failure of works or larger projects. Appearance in print renders success presumptive. What is discussed instead is what the work is about in the old-fashioned sense of its subject matter, the importance of which is already presumed for the same reason.

It's in this sense that I'd summarize the recent history of art magazines as a passage from art to everything else. In the `60s there was a lot of formalism in the art magazines. Artforum's square format said a lot about its founders' interests. This, by the way, raises a question which can't be pursued here, which is that the exfoliation of art journals comes after the heroic era of Greenberg and Rosenberg and so forth--there was no Greenberg magazine, but there was a question about the extent to which Artforum should be a Greenberger magazine. In respect to which there was plenty of hostility to formalism, however conceived, already present in the Artforum of the `60s, all of which had to do with the need for a ritual victory over the absent but thus more present Greenberg rather than with anything that was going on in a work of art.

In the `70s this kind of resistance to what we'd now call "theory" won its victory in a convergence of populism with the marketplace that would set the tone for the rest of the century. "Theory" was by and large banished from the art magazines and obliged to find refuge elsewhere, including in October, which was invented for that purpose. The art magazines would henceforth retain "theory" for guest appearances only. Persons reputed to be important theorists would sometimes be asked to write something, not too long, about a specific cultural event or phenomenon like Disneyland or Documenta or somebody's retrospective.

Otherwise by the end of the `70s populism had become both the norm and normative. The stage was set, just as Carter set the stage for Reagan, for the `80s and `90s, where art itself would be regarded as both passé and too elitist for comment in art magazines, its memory and its critique instead serving as a base from which to address cultural production in general, and indeed as kinds of simulated cultural production themselves.

Here it should be said that once again Artforum set the tone and the pace. ARTnews, once the journal in which Barnett Newman and Panofsky traded letters about whether Newman should have written "sublimus" instead of "sublimis," has long since settled into being the CNN of contemporary art. Like CNN, it tells you only about money and power and simultaneously that they are the only things worth telling you about. Arts somehow failed to survive, I think because Paul Shanley and Barry Schwabsky liked art too much.

Every magazine that's emerged in the last 20 years has defined itself in relation to Artforum, which in turn apparently sought to resemble other magazines, like Rolling Stone and Interview, which cast a wide net in terms of topics covered while maintaining an unambiguous ideological position, known as an editorial policy. Like them, it usually has something on identity, film, style and politics. It locates these discourses in an art context by publishing them, and the process is reversible, art thereby being relocated within these discourses.

Right on. And he's able to say these things without sounding cynical or bitter. Just dry (very dry) analysis.
Not to pile on Jerry Saltz (OK, let's pile on), but here's his Marden review from the Voice. To be fair, you can only expect so much from these short pieces in general interest magazines, but Saltz tells you even less than Schjeldahl about the "success or failure" of the art. This kind of writing is industry boosterism, like book jacket blurbs and the quotes on movie ads (does it matter if the quoted "critic" exists or not?). At best, they descend from criticism to connoisseurship, which always serves the capital of collectors and dealers, rather than any dialogue about art as such.

- alex 5-30-2002 6:35 pm [add a comment]

Schjeldahl's piece was vaguely offensive in its know-nothingism. Nothing new in the rhetoric of abstraction since the '70s? Beginning with NeoGeo in the '80s, there has been a rather strong movement to redefine abstraction in terms other than the old formal vs emotional dichotomy. I can name dozens of artists thinking about ways to address content--political, semiotic, pop-cultural--without resorting to an easy narrative strategy. Some of these people are among the top sellers in the market. As for Saltz, he's stuck between a scholar's rock and a hard place. For the past several years he's been pushing "girls taking pictures of girls" as the new avant garde (see Gilbert-Rolfe on art-magazine-inspired "populism") and giving lectures actively condemning abstraction. (At NYU a few years ago, he showed slides of current abstraction to students and said "If you're thinking of doing something like this, here's my phone number: call me, day or night, and I'll try to talk you out of it.") Yet he is respectful of the established order, and probably actually likes Marden's work. Result: a fence-straddling essay.
- tom moody 5-30-2002 9:00 pm [add a comment]

Well, each generation tends to see its coming of age moment as the last great event before everything went downhill. Sounds like both critics think that Marden was the guy who synthesized the "formal vs emotional dichotomy" thereby rescuing painting from mere objecthood. To them, he's post-Minimalist. What really has been done since, in terms of rhetorical (i.e. formal) advances in abstract painting? NeoGeo would seem to be the case in point, and Peter Halley the point man. He used the means of Minimalist painting to different ends, (arguably he made caricatures of 60s style paintings,) but I don't see where he made any formal breakthroughs, except that you had to read his texts to really make the paintings work (something Smithson had done for sculpture 15 years before). Sure, there are good abstract painters around, but most seem less ambitious as artists than Halley, even if more sincere as painters. For that matter, there are good landscape and figure painters, too. If any painters are making news, it's on the narrative level, not the rhetorical. Certainly nobody uses the term "advanced painting" anymore, the way Gilbert-Rolfe could when writing for Art Forum 30 years ago. He thinks Mary Boochever is a "very important" artist; what say you? And how about yourself? You use dated tropes: the modularity of Minimalism, the exploded cubist fracture of Pollock, but rendered in a different medium. How do you see yourself in relation to the tradition of abstract painting?
- alex 5-31-2002 1:39 am [add a comment]

I don't agree that you had to read Halley's writing to understand his paintings. The writing helped to clarify the most straightforward interpretations: that the design of the paintings referred to architecture and graphic notation (ie flow charts); that the facture was pumped up ("hyperrealized," in Halleyspeak) compared to '60s painting (50 coats of paint where three would suffice, sharper edges, more optical vibration), and that there was an element of existential bathos in the form of the Roll-a-Tex granules added to the paint, which anyone (not just Halley) could relate to motel ceilings. Whether these are advances is surely a moot question, since after the excesses of Modernism we no longer look so hard for progress in art, but they are definitely differences, which Schjeldahl should be worldly enough to acknowledge. The injection of the social and the demotic into abstract painting inspired dozens of other good artists, many of whom emerged in the '90s. The exhibition Steve Di Benedetto and I were in, "post-hypnotic," collected a number of these practitioners (Jim Isermann, David Clarkson, Michelle Grabner, Sarah Morris, Tad Griffin) and I would also include Jeff Elrod, James Hyde, Carl Fudge, Pamela Fraser, Ruth Root, Monica Pierce, Nina Bovasso (the latter four rejecting heroic scale and themes in favor of the intimate and quirky). "post-hypnotic" traveled to about ten venues but as close as it got to New York was Boston, and as yet no local critic (that I'm aware of) has connected most of these artists.

As for me, I consider my work very much in this vein of coded abstract art, believing that the viewer can crack the code without the aid of a specific French theory. Where I part company with the rest is (a) I also do portraits and stupid cartoons, and (b) I'm not really committed to painting as a vehicle. Right now I'm more interested in mixing the old tropes with new ones engendered by recent art-making technology. (And unlike some "computer artists," I'm off the hook for pretensions to progress because the programs I use are dated, or strictly for amateurs.) Thanks for asking.
- tom moody 5-31-2002 10:11 pm [add a comment]

No offense to the fine artists mentioned, but the title "Post-Hypnotic" might suggest that they operate under the influence of a commanding style, which might also explain why I saw Kris wearing an "I Love Minimalism" shirt (large block letters, of course) given her by the aforementioned Ruth Root.
(OK, OK, one should be careful about reading too much into those clever exhibition titles. The first NY show I was in, currated by Steve Parrino, at International With Monument (a Tatlin reference, for cryin' out loud), was titled "Semi(op)tics". My mother, smarter than the average art world bear, didn't stop with the semiotics pun, but saw the word "semitics" isolated. "But you're not all Jewish" she observed…)

- alex 6-03-2002 9:54 pm [add a comment]

Your mother made a good point. "Semioptics" would have avoided the triple reading. Regarding "post-hypnotic," here's the first para of my catalog essay:

As a title for a show of latter-day optical art, "post-hypnotic" hits the bullseye on several counts, Obviously it's a sly double-entendre, referencing the subliminal messages long suspected to lurk within psychedelic-type art, while at the same time mocking the art world's mania for art historical labels. The pun, in turn, puts ironic quotation marks around the exhibit, allowing the artists to participate in a "movement" and at the same time distance themselves from those much-maligned (oversimplified, hegemonic, market-driven) groupings.