Calvin Tomkins
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THE SCENE: REPORTS ON POST-MODERN ART ALSO BY CALVIN TOM KINS Intermission (Novel) The Bride and the Bachelors The Lewis and Clark Trail The World of Marcel Duchamp Eric Hoffer: An American Odyssey Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum Living Well Is the Best Revenge WITH JUDY TOMKINS The Other Hampton CALVIN TOMKINS REPORTS ON THE VIKING PRESS NEW YORK POST-MODERN ART Copyright ©1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976 by Calvin Tomkins All rights reserved First published in 1976 by The Viking Press 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022 Published simultaneously in Canada by The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Tomkins, Calvin, 1925 The scene: reports on post-modern art. Includes index. CONTENTS: Moving with the flow.—Raggedy Andy.—The skin of the stone.—EAT.—Maybe a quantum leap.—All pockets open. [etc.] 1. Arts, American. 2. Arts, Modern-20th century— United States. 3. Avant-garde (Aesthetics) I. Title. Nx504.T64 700'.973 76-1863 ISBN 0-670-62035-1 Printed in U.S.A. All of these essays except "Raggedy Andy" originally appeared in The New Yorker. a man collided with the moon and the painters found other vocations: they painted faces no longer, but scars, intimations, signs ... -PABLO NERUDA, Amores ; \4( I i \ C f 11/\ lia,}_i 4:17.;! i ...s............,...........11.410•45611.9‘,...................-°.4. PREFACE An art critic once scolded me for writing uncritically about contem- porary artists. His tone was clearly territorial: If you can't bring some intellectual heavy artillery to bear on these imbeciles, he seemed to imply, then stay off the range. Being a reporter and not a critic, however, I tend to feel that what artists say or think—and certainly what they do—is a good deal more interesting than what contem- porary art critics write about them. Not much critical artillery is deployed, at any rate, in the following reports, all but one of which appeared originally in The New Yorker between 1970 and 1976. They are presented here more or less chrono- logically, except for the profile of Henry Geldzahler, written in 1972, which I have put first, because it covers in a general way the larger "scene" that formed the background for the period under review—the 1960s and early 1970s. Taken as a group, the pieces seem to have relatively little to do with painting and sculpture in any familiar sense. Painting and sculpture did not vanish from the scene during this period, of course; at the moment, in fact, the new photorealist painting is the hot ticket in a number of SoHo galleries, in more than a few museums here and abroad, and in the collections of the German buyers who currently dominate the American art market. But a lot of energy has been going, nevertheless, into activities of another order. One current preoccupation is with theater. "Where do we go from here? Towards theater," John Cage wrote in 1957. Cage was referring to experimental music and musicians, but his forecast could have applied equally well to most of the artists discussed here—artists who have chosen to work with time as well as with space by making films and videotapes, or by involving themselves in dance and performance pieces of various kinds. Robert Wilson, a painter who found that he could realize the images in his head more fully on a stage than on canvas, has pushed the concept of an artist's theater further than any- one else. His work perhaps foreshadows a revival of the periodic urge toward the Gesamtkunstwerk, the marriage of all the arts in a grand X PREFACE spectacle of sound and color and image and gesture, an ultimate mix- ing of media. Some other recent trends have proved abortive, at least temporari- ly. The art-and-technology movement that generated such a lot of steam only a few years back has clanked to a dismal near-halt; the earth artists are hard put these days to find benefactors willing to fi- nance their grandiose excavations. This could change. At the present writing, Christo is struggling to get clearance for his proposed eigh- teen-foot-high, twenty-four-mile-long Running Fence in northern Cal- ifornia. Television, in the hands of Nam June Paik and other genial madmen, may yet become a technology hospitable to art. Meanwhile, a great many artists engage in a great many entirely different activi- ties that are unrecorded here, some of which may turn out to have been well worth watching. For several years there has been no dominant movement or style in contemporary art. Heavy-artillery (or large-bore) critics see a decline in the quality and seriousness of recent American art, a lowering of standards and a surrender to the gossipy tastes of a sensation-hungry, pseudo avant-garde audience. The situation is nevertheless a good deal freer than it was in the mid-1960s; when Pop or Minimal or Color-Field Painting took up most of the aesthetic oxygen, and it is also more difficult for artists; the young artist today has to make all the decisions for himself. Curiously, one no longer hears so much about the "crisis" of contemporary art—a critical cliché of the 1960s. Artists continue to work, and even to sell. A few dealers flourish, as always. Preoccupations change, but the scene remains lively. Another persistent tendency in recent art has been for artists to try to make the viewer an active participant in their work. Through his own involvement, it is hoped, the viewer completes the process that the artist has set in motion (thereby circumventing the critic, whose anguish increases). The following reports are offered very much in this spirit. Ten years from now we may all be artists, and, as Warhol has said, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. C .T. CONTENTS PREFACE ix MOVING WITH THE FLOW 1 RAGGEDY ANDY 35 THE SKIN OF THE STONE 55 EAT 85 MAYBE A QUANTUM LEAP 129 ALL POCKETS OPEN 161 VIDEO VISIONARY 195 TIME TO THINK 227 INDEX 265 ILLUSTRATIONS "Henrys opening," October 18, 1969 5 Henry at eight 8 With Christopher Scott; painting by David Hockney 20 Geldzahler ponders a wall; light sculpture by Dan Flavin 32 Two of Andys shoe drawings 38 From Andys cat book, c. 1954 42 Andy Warhol: the Factory, 49 The Factory at 4:00 p.m.—and after midnight 50-51 Tatyana Aguschewitsch with her parents 63 Wedding portrait with Maurice, 1931 66 The studio at ULAE 71 Tatyana with Jim Dine 72 Jasper Johns, Tatyana, and Bill Goldston 75 Lunch at ULAE, August 1975 81 Fujiko Nakaya, David Tudor, and Robert Breer 100 Billy Kluwer and Forrest Myers 101 The Pavilion: testing the fog system 113 Inside the mirror dome 118-119 Michael Heizer surveys his Double Negative 137 Walter De Maria in the Mojave Desert 141 Robert Smithson and Spiral Jetty; Spiral Jetty from the air 145 Christos Valley Curtain: Rifle, Colorado 159 From Diaries, Notes, and Sketches—Central Park 162 Homecoming, 1971, Jonas and Adolfas with their mother 165 The marquee of the Charles Theatre 176 Jonas with Andy Warhol 184 P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka at the Anthology Cinema 189 Jonas Mekas 192 Nam June Paik and his father; Paik and spiritual father, John Cage 203 xiv ILLUSTRATIONS Charlotte Moormans arrest, February 1967 214 Doctored TV: from Paiks "Electronic Opera No. 1" 217 Moorman and TV cello, and with TV bra 223 Nam June Paik 224 Robert Wilson 230 The Cave Scene from The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud 243 The murder scene from Deafman Glance 244 The forest, Deafman Glance 248-249 The Ostrich Ballet from The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin 261 THE SCENE: REPORTS ON POST-MODERN ART MOVING WITH THE FLOW It is not without irony that the Metropolitan Museum of Art chose to inaugurate its second century with the largest exhibition of modern American painting and sculpture ever assembled. For nearly a hundred years, the museum had never quite known what to do about the work of American artists living or recently dead. It did not even have a Department of Contemporary Arts until 1967, and then the total exhibition space allotted to it was one gallery; moreover, a good many established artists, critics, and dealers looked with grave mis- trust upon Henry Geldzahler, the fledgling department's ebullient young curator, and it was clear from the outset that any major exhi- bition put on by Geldzahler was bound to become embroiled in con- troversy. While the uproar over Geldzahler's "New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970" exceeded all expectations, it did at least serve to dramatize the Metropolitan's long-delayed plunge into the maelstrom of modern art. It was an enormous show: 408 works of art by 43 artists, filling 35 galleries on the second floor—an exhibition space nearly twice as large as that of the entire Whitney Museum. Geldzahler, who said af- terward that he had got just about everything he wanted from lenders in this country and abroad, actually performed a considerable feat of organization and installation under great pressure. His show had originally been scheduled to open a year later; the opening date was moved up to October 1969, when it became evident that the pre- Columbian exhibition called "Before Cortes," with which the Metro- politan had intended to open its year-long centennial celebrations, was running into delays. The selections were Geldzahler's alone—no consultants or committees were involved.