I've been moving through Amy Newman's oral history Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. I was given a copy shortly after it came out and enjoyed flipping through it for old gossip and amusing bitchiness, which Phil Leider, among others, supplies in spades (on Max Kozloff: "He might as well have been born blind...Read his first stuff on Robert Morris; he's just blind. And blind in a sort of horribly pompous way, as well."), but this is the first time I’ve read the book from front to back. Unsurprisingly, the picture that emerges often reveals personalities more than art theory, with the familiar narrative of 1960’s art and criticism shown through memories of individual attractions, tensions and dramatic breaks. Newman does effectively undercut some of the more self-serving statements in her endnotes, where she often cites letters and other documentary evidence to show how the speaker has selectively remembered the past. While it may not dig as deep into the substance of the art criticism of the time as one might wish, the book provides a useful account of the origins of the magazine and its operation, as well as how the times felt to some of the leading players.
Tyler Green (scroll down) has expressed wonderment at why Artforum continues to favor a kind of tired academic discourse in its articles. Nothing against academic discourse, mind you; I can enjoy that quite a bit. But when one flips open a copy of the magazine and can page through counting up the references to “Art and Objecthood” reliably even today, well, that seems like a rut. The effect is like reading the dutiful literature review section of a dissertation, where mastery of the field is demonstrated at tedious length. That’s essentially what is happening, and one can’t entirely blame those taught to value such writing for producing it. One remembers, reading Newman’s volume, the academic roots of the Artforum style – not just Greenbergian, but linked through Sydney Freedberg back to the foundations of art historical formalism in Wölfflin. Even many of the younger critics from outside the Harvard gang associated with the early days of the magazine had academic backgrounds as graduate students of Meyer Schapiro or others. The institutional significance of the magazine, in a sense, arose not so much out of any of these specific approaches as it did in creating a sort of career path and market for academic art criticism. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I’ll leave aside for now.
In light of an earlier post, though, I’ll conclude with this anecdote from Phil Leider quoted in the book:
When we went to Los Angeles Ed Ruscha took over. And he followed this [design] format also. And I learned a lot from him, too. He’s very gifted in this area – a very good designer. He didn’t think much of the magazine, by the way, the content. He thought that we were basically biased against West Coast artists, that we never gave them the kind of splash that we gave New York artists. He once said to me very readily, "“Look, Phil. I know what you think of me. You think I’m a tenth-rate Pop artist.” And I remember just looking up, we were both at the light table, and I just looked up at him and our eyes met, and he knew and I knew. I couldn’t say anything.
Ouch. Well, Ruscha has survived...
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