Forty-One False Starts (36 page)

“Anyway, I started writing reviews for
Art in America
because I was so irritated with the situation. And soon I got a little name for myself as someone who could write quite acerbically about older art, who would throw a negative light on what was being shown, and who was something of a participant-champion of the new art. But then I had a falling-out with
Art in America
, though not to the point of exchanging words. David Salle and Cindy Sherman had shows that I desperately wanted to write about but wasn't allowed to, and I began to feel used, I began to feel like a hired gun. I'm really quite good at cutting away the pretensions that accrue around a body of work, and I had done this to some established artists, which was obviously what they liked at
Art in America
. But it wasn't exactly what I wanted to base a career on. My whole intention had been to be more constructive, and suddenly, with these two shows I wanted to do, I found myself being denied the opportunity. There had been a misperception at
Art in America
of my relations with Sherman and Salle—with whom I was neither friendly nor unfriendly. I do have sympathy for their work—I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm an advocate of partisan criticism. Most art writing is from an insider point of view; there is very little that has an Olympian distance. I remember once reading something about Harold Schonberg, the music critic of the
Times
—about a deadly, life-denying thing he did. He forbade himself any personal contact with musicians, on the ground that it might influence his judgment. He wouldn't even let his wife, who was a musician, have anything to do with them. Apart from the horror of that on the human level, I think it's just crazy. You learn so much by knowing what in fact musicians and artists are actually thinking about and talking about, instead of pretending to drop in from the sky.”

Of his work with Sischy, Lawson says, “She's almost chameleon-like. When I talk to her, we appear to be in complete agreement. But then an issue of
Artforum
comes out and—” Lawson gestures his feeling of betrayal. He goes on to describe a strange evening he once spent at the old
Artforum
office, on Mulberry Street (it recently moved to Bleecker Street), working with Sischy late into the night on an article about to go to press, and being acutely conscious of the presence of Rene Ricard in another room. Sischy was like a doctor going back and forth between patients in cubicles. “She would spend half an hour with me, and be extremely helpful and sympathetic, and then she'd get up and say, ‘I have to go and see how Rene is doing,' and presumably she'd be equally helpful and sympathetic to him,” Lawson says. “There was no communication between Rene and me. We can barely talk to each other anyway, we're so opposed in our opinions and our lifestyles. But Ingrid could move back and forth between us all night with ease. The Feast of San Gennaro was going on that night, and all that fairground noise outside—the firecrackers and the hawkers and the vendors—only accentuated the feeling of unreality which that night with Rene had for me.”

For the past seven years Lawson has been publishing a small art magazine of his own, called
Real Life
, with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts, which reflects, in its unpretentious format and its radical critical content, the no-frills avant-gardism of its editor. The following excerpt from an interview by Rex Reason with Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher, the directors of the Nature Morte Gallery, in the East Village, gives some sense of
Real Life
's tone:

RR : You guys are so modern. What do you look for in an object? What qualities?

AB: Right now we like either black, white, or gray, or generic color.

PN: We're pretty anti-color.

RR : By generic you mean red as “red” rather than modulations of it?

AB: Yeah.

PN: So many people bring us slides that are just like Salle, Basquiat, or Roberto Juarez. These poor kids are out there going to the galleries and they say, “This is what I have to do to have a show.” So they run home and paint them. We don't want that—we want stuff we've never seen in a gallery before.

RR : And what do you think is the best art? What influenced the shaping of your taste?

AB: Right now, we like pretty classic late modern stuff: Pop Art, Paolozzi, Indiana for logos, Duchamp, Manzoni, Beuys, Klein. Scarpitta's a favorite of mine.

PN: We think Op Art is highly underrated. Bridget Riley. That's corporate psychedelia, the orgasm of modernism.

AB: We started the gallery because we really just wanted to get our voices in.

PN: And chose the name “Nature Morte” for its Fifties-jazz, pseudo-continental appeal. Ersatz European. Franco-American Chef Boy-ar-dee.

AB: We wanted to be the Leper Gallery.

PN: But then I thought of the Wallet Gallery.

After her three nights of ministering to Ricard at his place on Twelfth Street, Sischy begins a similar series of vigils with Thomas McEvilley at his place, on Clinton Street near Houston. I attend one of these sessions, which begins in the late afternoon and goes on until two or three in the morning. (I do not last the course.) McEvilley is a thin, bearded man, harried-looking but cheerful, who wears old corduroys during the day and in the evening often appears in a dashing white suit that he bought in a secondhand-clothing store. As I look around his place, I am struck by its peculiar combination of poverty and electronics, which speaks of our coming predicament with a kind of satiric authority. The apartment is a former ground-floor shop, and McEvilley has painted over the show window jutting out into the street, both for privacy and in order to have more wall space for books: the tiny room is entirely lined with books in cheap commercial cases. It has a lairlike aspect. There is an orange shag rug on the floor, and the furniture is four chairs of the sort you see thrown out on the street. But on a huge desk near the ex-window is a word processor; classical music is playing from an advanced stereo system; and there is an electric coffeemaker on a rickety side table, in which McEvilley's girlfriend, Maura Sheehan, prepared an odd herbal drink before leaving for her studio—an identical space across the hall—where she is painting classical Greek-vase motifs on cracked automobile windshields.

McEvilley, as he once told me, sort of drifted into art criticism. He is a classicist by training (he has a Ph.D. in Greek and Latin) and some years ago shifted from the Classics Department of the University of St. Thomas to the Art and Art History Department of Rice University, in Houston, to which he actually commutes from New York during part of the school year. Before his critique of the primitivism show, he had done pieces on the conceptual artists Yves Klein, Marina Abramović and Ulay, and James Lee Byars, as well as an article called “Art in the Dark,” about extreme types of performance artists, among them people who subject themselves to very unpleasant ordeals, such as spending five days and nights in a two-by-three-foot locker without food, or sitting on a shelf in a gallery for twenty-two days. McEvilley said that he had dabbled in the genre himself, “but strictly as ordeal, not in an art context.” He told me that he had spent a year sleeping only four hours a night—a notion he had got from Buddhist monks—and that he had also experimented with fasting, vegetarianism, and meditation. However, one day he had caught himself feeling superior to other people because of these activities and had decided to curb them.

McEvilley began writing for Sischy's
Artforum
in 1981. “In the seventies, I couldn't stand the magazine,” McEvilley said. “It was promoting minimal art in overwhelming doses, and it had forced reductionist art modes on everybody with its aggressive ideological stance. Its power was undeniable—everyone knew the term
Artforum
Mafia, and used it.” (A disaffected member of the Family—Max Kozloff, the critic and editor, now turned photographer—once spoke to me in a similar vein about the old
Artforum
. “The magazine was looked upon with a kind of delirious bitterness,” he said. “It solaced the readership to know that there were people of such self-confidence and commitment at the helm, rendering such zippy and righteous judgments right and left. But if you were an artist they were not interested in—and they were interested in a very few artists, about whom they wrote repeatedly—then you found this a repellent phenomenon. You were put off by this
camarilla
of king-makers and bully boys—or, as the case may be, bully women—who wrote in a hermetic language that they were partially inventing and who took themselves with ultra-seriousness. They used to say that
Artforum
was like Listerine: it tasted terrible, but it was good for you.”)

McEvilley went on to speak of Sischy's ideological suppleness. “She's very sensitive to the Frankfurt school's perspective on the social function of art, and she wants to maintain that perspective in the magazine. But she has gone far beyond what I see as the naive hostility of the old regime to the art market—a hostility that I myself used to share, I should add. I came to the magazine with a poet's or a scholar's or a philosopher's antagonism to the market process. But Ingrid has pointed out to me very intelligently that in the past fifteen years, as the major New York museums have withdrawn from what is happening in art, serious dealers have become terribly important. They are the people who nurture contemporary art and bring it to us.”

Now I sit in a corner of McEvilley's living room diligently jotting down snatches of the inscrutable dialogue going on between him and Sischy at the desk, punctuated by long silences while McEvilley works at the word processor.

“Is the idea that selfsameness is the only reality? I don't think so.”

“Can I get rid of it?”

“Let's see. Later it becomes clear that . . . Okay, let's take the sentence out.”

“Okay.”

“ ‘Preemptively.' What do you mean, ‘preemptively'?”

McEvilley goes to the word processor and unknots a sentence. Sischy looks it over. “It now reads as if Beuys is mad because Duchamp got there first.”

The telephone rings. McEvilley picks it up and hands it to Sischy. It is Ricard. Sischy speaks to him in a motherly way. She explains, as if speaking to a child, that she is busy at the moment. “Rene, you
knew
I was going to be working with Tom.” She listens to him talk at length, occasionally interjecting a “Great!” or a “Beautiful!” As soon as she can, she ends the conversation and returns to the manuscript.

“Is Rene okay?” McEvilley asks.

“Yes.”

“I thought he looked a little freaked the other day.”

“Maybe he didn't have enough sleep,” Sischy says, with the dryness that I have come to recognize as her characteristic response to an invitation to be indiscreet.

A few days later I run into Ricard himself at the recently opened Palladium discotheque. The place is the creation of the former owners of Studio 54, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, who, after finishing jail sentences for tax evasion, hired the eminent advanced Japanese architect Arata Isozaki to turn the old Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street, into a state-of-the-art discotheque, and the result is now being hailed as an improbable triumph of architecture, art, and chic by the city's architecture critics, art critics, and arbiters of chic. The young artists who have done paintings on the walls and ceilings of the Palladium's various rooms and corridors—Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat—are receiving renewed, wondering notice as nouveau riche media stars from a press apparently still haunted by the idea of a revolutionary, marginal avant-garde; and the Palladium itself is being viewed as a kind of metaphor for the current state of art—the implosion of high and low culture into ever more grungily demotic and sleekly marketable forms. On this night, the Palladium has been turned over to a party for Keith Haring, and it is filled with beautifully and/or weirdly dressed people from the art world and its periphery. I come upon Ricard in a room that is apart from the discotheque proper, called the Mike Todd Room, which has a large bar, small marble-topped tables, and wire-back chairs, and is where the celebrities of the art world like to congregate. Ricard, resplendent in a white sharkskin suit, is sitting at one of the tables in a state of high, almost incandescent excitement. As I glimpse him, I recall a passage, in a recent
Art in America
article on Watteau by the art historian Linda Nochlin, about the painting of the clown Gilles in the Louvre:

You can see
Gilles
as a small, vague, white glow shining in the distance. As you draw nearer, the glow assumes a shape, a significance, and, finally, a vast authority. Grand in scale, looming in its frontal pose, half-sacred in its silky whiteness, it becomes the famous
Gilles
, Christ-like in his innocent exposure to the gibes of the crowd, the very prototype of the tragic clown, the clown with the broken heart, avatar of Pierrot Lunaire,
He Who Gets Slapped
, and Prince Myshkin—that whole galaxy of more or less holy fools whose existence has marked the art, literature, and film of the modern period.

Ricard beckons me to sit with him, gives orders for drinks to a passing waiter, and points out celebrities as they go by. “Isn't she
pretty
,” he says of Marisol. Of another well-known artist he says, “He's a closet queen,” adding, “
I'm
no closet queen.” The poet Allen Ginsberg pauses at the table to chat with Ricard, and after he leaves, Ricard grumbles about what he took to be a piece of prospective
schnorring
on Ginsberg's part when he looked longingly at our drinks. Several times, I get up to leave, and each time Ricard clamps a hand on my arm. “So, what I was about to say,” he begins, and I am obliged to stay. I ask him whether he has been writing poetry, and he replies, “The manuscript of my new poems is in Julian Schnabel's safe. If you want to read them, go to Julian's house, get the manuscript, strap it to your person, and have it xeroxed.” As Ricard speaks, he keeps scanning the crowd for people he knows. I counterpropose that Ricard himself go to Schnabel's house and get the poems out of the safe. “Or are you too busy?” “I have too much to do, and I have nothing to do,” he replies. I laugh and once again get up to leave, and once again I am prevented from doing so by Ricard's desperate clutch. I don't know why he wants me to stay—and I don't know why I do stay. I only know that I am drawn to this Factory-made Myshkin; he is an oddly familiar, possibly anachronistic figure. In his “Not About Julian Schnabel,” Ricard wrote about a kind of line that “just gets tuckered out after a while,” adding, “The beautiful charcoal smudges and style we can follow from Matisse through de Kooning to Rivers, Serra, and, in its ultimate decadence, to Susan Rothenberg are perfect illustrations.” He went on, “Judy Rifka told me that when she was in art school all her teachers drew that way. That was the way you were taught, and no matter how lousy the drawing was, it always looked pretty good, like ‘art.' ” The conventional bohemianism that Ricard embodies may be going the way of the art line he so tellingly describes.