Some Ways of Writing about Art is really a kind of speculative fiction—The World Accord- ing to Rosalind Krauss, or Dave Hickey’s Fantastic Planet, or The in the Twenty-First Century Moons of Lynne Tillman. Flora and fauna, weights and measures—not to mention who lives there and what they enjoy—vary wildly from one Jarrett Earnest writer’s body of work to the next. Contrasting Krauss’s with Hickey’s writing on Ed Ruscha—an artist they both admire—is like slipping between alternate universes. That both of their very different arguments are anchored in the artwork, materially and historically, illustrates the inherent multiplicity of form, the ability to generate manifold meanings that makes something “art” in the first place. These disparate takes coexist in a multiverse we call art criticism. Every value judgment and The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it. That is not the least distinction in “quality”—the usual expectations of criticism—mani- of the tasks in store for the critical spirit. fests a particular worldview, formed by highly contingent emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic predispositions, making it all the more sur- —Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891) prising how little attention is paid to understanding critics’ perspec- tives. I always want to know, Who is this person and what do they want from art? Which is another way of asking, What do they want from life? This collection aims to show that these thirty critics, theorists, historians, and thinkers are each unique in their approach and under- lying motivations, while all engaging in essentially the same activity— finding words for visual art. It’s worth pointing out that this unifying gesture will horrify many of them. (Participants in a 2001 October roundtable on criticism that included Hal Foster and Rosalind Krauss made a special point of beating the “belletristic” criticism of Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl like a piñata, declaring it devoid of “critical rigor.” And that’s but one of many antagonisms.) Frank O’Hara’s line, supposedly quoting Franz Kline, that “to be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in” sums up my approach to the history and the future of criticism. I aim to move away from tedious cries of “crisis” and tiresome brawls over “good” or “bad” to instead understand what is striking about any given critic’s work—the nuances of how they approach writing and the way these styles and tactics become meaningful across a body of work and, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of this collection, over the course of a life.

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The cultural context for every polemic or appreciation is always in the understanding of “discourse” itself. motion, shifting kaleidoscopically through time. Objects don’t change, Similarly, in Challenging Art, Amy Newman conducted individual but social and historical forces do, continually. Art and criticism are interviews with the original participants of , including Philip both highly relational, and one ambition of this book is to sketch how Leider, John Coplans, Rosalind Krauss, Michael Fried, Barbara Rose, each critic sees the particular formations of their work. My hope is that Max Kozloff, Annette Michelson, Sidney Tillim, Robert Pincus-Witten, putting these often contradictory perspectives together will let them and Peter Plagens. She then chopped the transcripts up, shaping inflect each other, creating a holographic sense of a past that shapes each flamboyant proclamation into a perfectly faceted jewel within the our present and future discussions. Thus my deliberately anachronistic larger setting of the book. Her own voice is removed, but you sense her use of the word “means” in the book’s title, What it Means to Write presence and intelligence in the structure and montage, like that of a About Art—meaning itself is the slippery byproduct of human intention filmmaker. The resulting polyphony conveys thehuman, all too human and attention. dynamics that drive culture and constitute intellectual history. Two books have been vital to shaping the one you’re now holding: Linda Montano’s Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (2000) and Amy Newman’s Challenging Art: Artforum 1962–1974 (2000). * * * Montano is herself an artist, and Performance Artists Talking was a decade-long “talking performance.” She interviewed a hundred artists After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009, I moved about how “Sex,” “Food,” “Money/Fame,” and “Ritual/Death” related to , intent on having an adventure and figuring out how to their work. What struck me most was her willingness to push the to write in the process. As an artist myself, I felt I knew how to talk conversation into uncomfortable places. For instance, the book opens about art and that doing interviews would be a kind of back door into confrontationally with Vito Acconci. Montano begins, “I would like to becoming a writer. Through my late teacher, the poet and critic Bill ask you about sex because your work reflects that theme, even though Berkson (who is also interviewed here), I met Phong Bui, publisher of you indicated that you didn’t want to be identified that way. Can we the monthly arts newspaper The Rail, which features four talk about it just the same?” Acconci pushes back, the way anyone or five long interviews in every issue. As I read through its eclectic might. They continue talking, largely about how language constructs assortment of “artists’ artists,” I began to see it as an alternative oral and constricts both art and identity, using their exchange in real time history of the last few decades of art in New York. (In 2017, I was lucky as a case study. Montano sticks with him, step for step, until eventually enough to coedit sixty of these into the volume Tell Me Something Acconci is comfortable enough to loop back: “Now that we’ve gotten Good: Artist Interviews from The Brooklyn Rail, also published by David an atmosphere of talking, we can go back to that first question. As a Zwirner Books.) The Rail gave me a free hand to interview whomever child, sex had the same kind of mystification that religion had . . . ” I wanted and to experiment with different forms—including an often In contrast to the generic questions I knew from journalistic inter- incomprehensible “epistolary glossary” with Richard Tuttle that views, Montano showed me what it would be like to highlight tussling spread over three issues and a prolonged analysis of Nina Simone’s intersubjectivity. Foregrounding the interviewer, who brings his or her devastating performance of “Feelings” (1976) in a discussion of own weird desires, curiosities, and eccentricities into the exchange, Giovanni Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece (1505) with Lisa Yuskavage. could illuminate an artist’s work in more complex ways, expanding In the Rail I published idiosyncratic conversations with artists including

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Nayland Blake, Christo, Robert Gober, Barbara Hammer, Roni Horn, together as a book (about half being published previously, often in Lorraine O’Grady, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Luc Tuymans, Dana altered form, with the rest appearing here for the first time). Taken Schutz, Jack Whitten, and Martha Wilson, among many others. This together, they argue for approaching and evaluating criticism as itself openness helped me find my own voice in ways that would have been essentially creative—that writing criticism is a craft that contributes impossible at a mainstream magazine. That voice, in turn, helped clarify palpably to our shared world. In each conversation, the goal is to my larger project as a writer in the art world. provide enough space to experience that complexity, showing that When preparing to conduct an interview, I gather everything critics have more in common with artists themselves than with the that’s been written on or by the subject—all the reviews, interviews, reactionary hacks of popular imagination. This vital dialogue between catalogues, and books—and read them sequentially, in chronological artists and critics is a major way art stays relevant and connected to order. Through this process, you see that the language around some- its culture. one’s work gets set very quickly and continues to be recycled for In the most foundational sense, this book insists that art criticism decades. Reading the complete body of critical writing on a specific isn’t any one thing, even while presenting all the critics foremost as artist is like tracing the rings of a tree—a cross section of growth in time. writers. Throughout the process of writing, every critic develops their You begin to sense the underlying shape of their thought, and how the own idiosyncratic framework for understanding what a work of art is, artist is in a dynamic exchange with their critics, attempting to steer how they relate to an artist and an audience, and what their specific conversations in certain directions in response to what is being written. goals are. They create their own, often unstated rules. Roberta Smith, I also focus on the art itself, attending as closely as possible to how it for example, sees herself on the readers’ side and doesn’t write about looks and the way it was made. Often, I’m trying to identify the things an artists she’s friends with. Lucy Lippard, on the other hand, considers artist strategically avoids speaking about, which their work nonetheless herself an artists’ advocate, and the people she champions are often suggests. Artists are always trying to understand new aspects of what enmeshed in her personal life. Neither of these positions is right or they’ve done—being paradoxically and essentially both inside and wrong, better or worse; each represents a negotiation between individ- outside of it—and these conversations become forms of collaboration, ual talent and cultural necessity. As Michele Wallace puts it in her ways of inventing new language that fits their work more precisely. interview, talking about Lippard as her role model: “The only person Over a few years of interviewing artists every month, a couple of who wanted Lucy Lippard to be ‘Lucy Lippard’ was Lucy Lippard”— writers slipped into the mix, beginning with Dave Hickey, while we were the art world didn’t have a job description waiting for her to fill, so both residents at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, she invented one. The same is true of all of these writers, to varying Florida, in 2014. Aside from being really fun, that discussion directly degrees. Every critic is in some essential way self-made. addressed some of my actual questions about the mechanics of writing. There are a number of overlapping constellations scattered through- At the end of 2016, in dialogue with the Rail’s then managing editor out, of people knowingly and unknowingly in conversation with one Laila Pedro, I framed the idea of publishing a year of conversations another. Some are directly illustrated within the book—Eileen Myles with different writers on art inThe Brooklyn Rail, under the title on her early friendships with Chris Kraus and Peter Schjeldahl, or “Close Encounters.” Around the same time, through ongoing talks John Yau on his enduring closeness with the late John Ashbery. It’s about literature, criticism, poetry, and philosophy with Lucas Zwirner, touching to realize how much talking about ourselves is actually talking Lucas and I conceived of bringing these and additional interviews about others—for instance, Kellie Jones recalling bits of Robert Farris

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Thompson’s biography, or Fred Moten of Amiri Baraka’s, or Michael curated important exhibitions, I excluded “curators.” Despite the fact Fried of ’s, showing how other people’s stories become that many of my favorite critics are themselves artists, I chose to omit woven into the fabric of our own. Taken as a collection, these accounts such authors from this project, feeling that the impulses and pitfalls of emphasize that artists and critics are never performing monologues in an artist writing about their peers are necessarily different from those a vacuum, but always partaking in a multitiered discussion that at any of a critic. Even with these limitations in place, I could rattle off the given moment veers off beyond their control. names of thirty more critics I’m interested in and admire whom I wasn’t Across these thirty interviews, there are references to more than able to include for various reasons, time and space chief among them. three hundred artists, ranging from Édouard Manet to Kerry James But if there are hard feelings, give me a call—let’s talk about it. Marshall, Edgar Heap of Birds to Eva Hesse, Elizabeth Catlett to Caravaggio. They span the traditional art historical canon and the quirky personal influences that make up each critic’s specific universe. * * * Often there are overlapping encounters that reveal new aspects, as when Jerry Saltz and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve both talk about their Over a hundred years ago, in “The Critic as Artist” (1891), Oscar Wilde experience of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4 (1995) in the early argued for approaching criticism as an aesthetic attitude toward nineties, or when Darby English and Huey Copeland describe the being—“the influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own exis- impact of seeing Glenn Ligon’s work as college students. tence.” The essay is staged as a dialogue between two characters A similarly sprawling array of writers are mentioned in the conver- named Ernest and Gilbert. Near the end of their meandering night of sations, including poets, critics, novelists, essayists, and historians talk, Ernest asks: “You have explained to me that criticism is a creative from Richard Crashaw to Robert Creeley, Mohammed Mrabet to Toni art. What future has it?” To which Gilbert begins his reply, “It is to Morrison, James Baldwin to Roland Barthes. Because of the sheer criticism that the future belongs.” In that sense, I see this book as both range of these references, spanning several centuries and many sub- bouquet and gauntlet: a gesture of affection, given in thanks to those jects, there is no elegant way to provide adequate scholarly or con- who’ve spent their lives making and talking about art, and a challenge textual information for everything. Their proper names sparkle in every to future artists, writers, and thinkers to imagine new worlds— conversation, letting them catch you as they may. An index gathers keeping open channels for possible futures to flow through, for our these references at the end of the volume, opening new ways of moving conversations to continue. through it— tracking the multiple appearances of or Jeff Koons or Simone Weil, for instance. Additionally, an expanded “Further Reading” list is included, providing all relevant citations, as well as additional titles on the topic of art writing. Every book of interviews is in its way both partial and arbitrary, especially when seeking to expand rather than circumscribe a territory. I limited mine to US critics, with a heavy emphasis on New York City. There are “historians” here, but I focused on those who have also written substantially about the art of their own time. While several have

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