From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual

From Head to Hand

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FROM HEAD TO HAND Art and the Manual

David Levi Strauss

2010

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by David Levi Strauss Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Strauss, David Levi. From head to hand : art and the manual / David Levi Strauss. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-539122-0 1. Art—Psychology. 2. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) 3. Mind and body. I. Title. N71.S879 2010 700.1—dc22 2009023760

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Robert Duncan and Leon Golub, for their disparate guidance

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Contents

Preface, ix I From Head to Hand and Back Again: Some Lines for Martin Puryear, 1 Sculpture and Sanctuary: Ursula von Rydingsvard, 9 Laborare Est Orare, 19 Reanimating Matter: Raoul Hague and Robert Frank, 23 II Beuys in Ireland, 33 Between Two Worlds: The Haida Project, 39 The Memory of the Fingers, 55 Reverie and Luck, Incarnate, 61 III In Praise of Darkness, 67 Why Move On from Illuminations That Haven’t Yet Been Understood? 71

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Her Plumbing and Her Bridges, in Sweet Assemblage, 77 Signal to Noise, 87 IV The Fighting Is a Dance, Too: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, 97 Fallen Figures and Heads, 105 Remembering Golub, 115 Spero’s Heart, 119 V Hosephat and the Wooden Shoes: Robert Duncan and Délire, 123 Radial Asymmetries: On Guy Davenport, 135 The Bias of the World: Curating after Szeemann and Hopps, 149 Father and Daughter: Flesh, 161 It Has to Be Danced to Be Known: On Leo Steinberg, 167 Acknowledgments, 185 Notes, 189 Index, 203

Preface

Both of my grandfathers worked with their hands. One was a carpenter and the other was a blacksmith. I grew up in the latter’s shop, entranced by the forge. His son, my father, went to work early, supporting his family at age 12 by tending threshing machines during the wheat harvest, and later running his own gas station and repair shop on Old Highway 40 in Chapman, Kansas. We lived across the tracks from the station. I always worked with my hands, and when I began to write, that seemed like handwork to me, as well. And I always thought of artists and writers as workers, at base, ultimately involved in the transformation of matter by hand. In an increasingly mediated world, one of the most radical things artists can do is to use their hands, especially in the transformation of matter in its most telluric forms: earth, stone, wood, pigments, and oil. This book traces a persistent concern of my work in criticism over the past 20 years: the passage from idea to object in the plastic arts. This passage can take a lifetime or happen instantaneously in the works of painters and sculptors. It is reciprocal, since once made by hand, the work is recovered by the eye, for the mind. As Leo Steinberg taught us, “the eye is a part of the mind.” How does something that begins as an idea or image in the mind become material?

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How is the work of the hand influenced by the movements of the mind and vice versa? Thoreau said that we reason from our hands to our heads. Heidegger said: “All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.” A number of themes recur throughout this book: the relation between the sacred and the mundane; considerations of labor in the process of creation; dance and other “somatic dialogues”; various transformations of trees; and the distinction between tradition and convention and how things get passed down from one generation to another. In the end, and much to my surprise, this ended up being a book about ancestors, mine and ours. It is dedicated to two of my most important guides, the poet Robert Duncan and the painter Leon Golub, and it ends with tributes to two writers I revere, John Berger and Leo Steinberg. But I have learned a great deal from all the artists and writers invoked in these pages, and I am grateful to each of them for their gifts.

I

Two views of Vessel (1997) by Martin Puryear, photographed by Mimmo Capone; courtesy of the artist

From Head to Hand and Back Again SOME LINES FOR MARTIN PURYEAR

What is necessary is containment, that that which has been found out by work may, by work, be passed on (without due loss of force) for use USE —Charles Olson, “The Praises” (1950)

For some time, Martin Puryear kept a red-tailed hawk in large mews he’d built next to his own house. He was training the hawk to hunt; or rather, he and the hawk were training each other. The first time I went to see the bird, I found it perched motionless on a long wooden pole that ran across the back of its enclosure. Standing before the mews, I received the full force of the hawk’s gaze. It was piercing and fierce, and caused me to take a step back. But what was ultimately more affecting and memorable was the quality of the hawk’s attention. I don’t remember ever being looked at like that before. I could feel it changing me into something else. When viewers and critics dwell excessively on the craft in Puryear’s sculptures, they are responding to the extraordinary quality of attention that is brought to bear in these works. Concentrating on their craft alone is a way of avoiding or delaying the repercussive force of this attention, and the changes it might require of us. In an age of mass-produced mass culture (produced not by but for the masses), making things by hand has unavoidable political and social

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ramifications. It puts human beings in a direct, rather than hidden, relation to labor, and it is this hidden relation that makes our alienation from work and its use possible. Interrupting this hidden relation renders the human confrontation with matter palpable. But the overweening emphasis on the fine facture of Puryear’s works occludes more than it reveals. These sculptures look the way they do because they need to in order to mean what they do. The labor that is compressed into them allows them to work over time, and the time it takes to make them is the time taken to mean it. That they so often employ specialized tradesmen’s skills in their making allows them to work at the edges of utility—vessels that might be dwellings in the shapes of bodies—and in that fertile seam between representation and abstraction. Thoreau said that we reason from our hands to our heads. We know and understand things as we apprehend them through the labor and pleasure of our hands, so we tend to proceed from the perceptual to the conceptual and back again. When one side of the relation is overemphasized, an imbalance occurs. The craft of Puryear’s sculptures gives them a presence and a concentrated intensity that can be daunting. It can also blind one to their transformational suppleness, and to the subtle, often precarious inquiries they engage and enact. One of the most persistent of these inquiries has involved questions of identity and difference. How is one thing the same as or different from another? In the painted bentwood wall pieces of 1981– 82, this inquiry sometimes takes a comic turn, as in Big and Little Same (1981), where two elliptical “heads”—nearly identical except in size—meet and seem to contemplate one another across a divide that turns out to be the distance between their respective ends of the same circle. In Dream of Pairing (1981), the differently colored but similarly shaped ends bend back toward the circle’s center, lifting their heads to face one another in deadpan wonder. And in the later Endgame (1985), the two ends—one closed and red, one open and blue/yellow—seem frozen in Beckett-like apprehension of union. In Puryear’s highly refined form-language, singular masses often grow appendages, either short stubborn ones or long filiform shoots or necks that are cast out and come to a head down the line. They bend and stretch and reach out in desire. In Desire (1981), a great

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wheel turns on an axle/tether that keeps it attached to, but at an enforced distance away from, its object. The object of desire is fixed and unchanging, while the desiring subject revolves restlessly, endlessly, hoping against hope. Some Tales (1975–77) is an elegant wall display of six attenuated linear forms (five spliced, spoke-shaved saplings and a saw-tooth board)—a typology of extensions whose differences tell tales. A “tale” used to be a tally or reckoning, later an account of what happened, a telling relation. I think of these pieces as “feelers,” tools for measuring and probing binary relations. They offer varied accounts of how two ends (or heads) can be in relation to one another: side by side (when a single sapling is bent double), advancing and receding while remaining equidistant (across the board), shape-shifting to assert difference or to attempt union (in the curved and bent pieces), side by side in parallel (in the saplings whose round heads meet in the end), and pointed in opposite directions at either end of a continuum (in the rod sharpened at both ends). Puryear’s questioning of the constraints of identity reached a new level of articulation in Self (1978). This dark monument rises up out of the floor to the height of a man, leaving its larger portion submerged. It hunches forward into a prominent cranial cap and a sheer face. Its surface is opaque and reflective, and the outer shell is molded around a concealed interior. This is the self as construction, as something made. Self also marked a breakthrough in Puryear’s form-language. By adapting the techniques of timber framing and boat building, Puryear was able to move from rectilinear and angular forms into more organic ones that were constructed rather than stacked or carved. This signaled a change in the metaphorical possibilities of the works as well, as their interiors became activated in containment. A Selflike surface was stripped back to reveal the warp and woof in Bower (1980), and Cask Cascade and Old Mole (both 1985) reenact this stripping away to reveal the underlying structure. The singular egoistic Self eventually morphed into the collective one of manifest destiny in Empire’s Lurch (1987), a similarly flat-bottomed dark mass, now extending a portentous appendage like a club. For Beckwourth (1980) is a related meditation on identity, this one more celebratory. It is dedicated to the African-American mountain

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man Jim Beckwourth, whose incredible tales of life on the American frontier were recorded in an as-told-to book published in 1856, The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians. The son of a black slave woman and a white man, Beckwourth started out as a blacksmith’s apprentice after gaining his freedom, but soon struck out on his own, eventually becoming a respected scout and explorer, and crossing cultural boundaries to become chief of the Crow Nation. He married into and was adopted by the Crow people of the Absaroka Range in Montana and Wyoming, the finest horsemen in the West, also skilled in leatherwork and embroidery, and was selected as first counselor by the dying chief. Beckwourth’s Indian son Black Panther eventually succeeded him. Puryear’s attraction to Beckwourth is telling. To Puryear, Beckwourth exemplifies the cultural nomad and shape-shifter, overcoming racial stereotypes and other strictures imposed on one’s identity from without. Beckwourth’s chosen world was the uncharted American wilderness, where he survived through his wits, will, and abilities. Like another of Puryear’s exemplars, the North Pole explorer Matthew Henson, Beckwourth was a black man who beat the odds stacked against him. But, also like those of Henson, Beckwourth’s contributions have been largely overlooked or diminished in official histories. The exploits of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Tom Fitzpatrick entered the history books, as well as popular mythology, while Beckwourth’s were subjected to a different kind of scrutiny. The influential American historian Francis Parkman called Beckwourth “a mongrel of French, American, and negro blood” and “a noted old liar.” For Beckwourth is an act of recovery and a paean to the autochthonic spirit. A bullet-shaped mound of cracked earth is held in by slabs of rough-hewn pitch pine and oak. The earthen head seems to be rising up from below, thrusting its way through intractable obstacles with a blunt and emphatic insistence. Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth (1978) is a seven-line elegy in passages of twisted rawhide. The colors of the tufted hair—black, white, and red—correspond to the three worlds Beckwourth traversed and weaved together in his cross-cultural travels. This work carries the typological articulation of Some Tales even closer to

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language. It echoes the prescriptural form of the quipu, the knotted strands used by the Incas to keep accounts and tell tales. In The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art (1996), César Paternosto recounts that in both the Andes and in China, records made with knotted and colored cords preceded writing, and he calls the quipu “a harmonically organized system of visual, or visual-tactile, signs that operate as an efficient substitute for writing.”1 Quipu is a Quechua word (the language of the Incas, now spoken by over five million people in South America), and the Chilean poet and sculptor Cecilia Vicuña notes that some believe the word “Quechua” itself derives from q’eswa: a rope made of twisted reeds. In Some Lines, Puryear’s lifelong syncretic negotiation between the pre- or protoliterate materiality of the traditional world and the hyperliterate immateriality of the post-traditional one (with its attendant crisis of identity) is brought into visual-tactile articulation. What is writing but some marks arranged into lines, which we variously decode according to the conventions of legibility? What is the real relation between these marks made by hand and the images and concepts the head ascribes to them? Can the world of things ever be read without the interference of language? Puryear’s sculptures are metaphorical structures that continually resist reduction to fixed identities or single meanings. They operate instead at the interstices of various lines of meaning and identification—at those places where a form could be a basket or a mountain, an internal organ or a dwelling, a figure or a vessel. And they inhabit and grasp this liminal zone, this place of transformation, with extraordinary tenacity. Rather than frustrating metaphorical associations, the effect of this is to separate the single strands of association and leave them suspended in the mind, where one can appreciate their linkages, and also see through or between them. These works activate a proliferation of narratives, metaphors, symbols, and allusions. They are cross-cultural, polysemous, and nomadic, working their way from hand to head and back again. How can he make these blood-points into panels, into sides for a king’s, for his own for a wagon, for a sleigh, for the beak of, the running sides of

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a vessel fit for moving? —Charles Olson, “In Cold Hell, in Thicket” (1951)2 Approaching the large freestanding sculpture called Vessel, we might at first think of a bottle, lying half-buried on its side, its unstoppered neck sticking out at an angle. The sculpture’s openwork nautical construction brings to mind another kind of vessel or craft—a boat keeled up and over. The rush of referents brings with it a ship in a bottle, or a message in a bottle, washed up on shore. We imagine that the bottle has been lying here for some time, since a considerable quantity of soil has collected inside it. Looking more closely at the soil, we see a burial mound or grave, then a face or mask. As soon as the face appears, the bottle we saw in beginning turns into a head, face down in the dirt (then reversed, introverted), with the longitudinal lines of the ship’s hull connecting a cruciform cranial cap at one end with the perfect geometry of a concentrically ringed neck at the other. Seeing this large head parked so, we might recall Shelley’s Ozymandias, whose “half sunk, shattered visage” symbolized the transitoriness of temporal power. But Vessel is no “colossal wreck, boundless and bare.” It’s a freshly built hull that seems to be growing something inside it. If this is the wreckage of the imperious self, it is also the beginning of something else, grounded yet mobile: a rooted vessel for a different kind of voyage. We might now see it as an alembic or crucible within which the “subtle work” of alchemical transformation begins (“Separate the Earth from the Fire, the subtle from the gross, cautiously, and with great ingenuity”). The face in the dirt is an image of great humility, and we are reminded that “humus,” “humility,” and “human” all grow from the same root. As so often happens in Puryear’s work, this open structure decisively defines space, but remains permeable and open to interpretation. Far from a Romantic ruin, this head is clearly new. The effect of time on the body is to move it away from symmetry, and this one is still true and unmarked, inexperienced. So it must be a young head, perhaps the head of a child. Puryear once mentioned that, at the time these head forms began to appear in his work, he had been

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Vessel (1997–2002) by Martin Puryear, courtesy of McKee Gallery, New York

fascinated by the shape of his then infant daughter Sascha’s head, marveling especially at the perfect contour in the back. That gently swelling, expansive form has appeared often in Puryear’s works, perhaps most strikingly in the monumental Bearing Witness (1994– 98), installed at the Federal Triangle in Washington, D.C., where that proud head rises on a long neck and shows a sheer face to the monuments of temporal power that spread out before it. The minimalist sculpture that preceded and informs Puryear’s work (Puryear has called it “the last coherent dogma we had, now atomized”) avoided interior space, both sculpturally and as a symbol. Puryear has worked to activate this interior—putting it where it’s least expected, disguising and veiling it, furnishing it with objects, filling it with meaning. In Vessel, the skeletal structure for the first time defines an interior that is literally grounded, taken down to ground. In previous freestanding pieces, a contained mass often cast out a linear “feeler” or member in order to change. In Vessel, the change is occurring within the form itself. This interior space, site of sanctuary and germination, has now become a place of incipient identity, where identity is taken in hand.

For Paul (1990–92) by Ursula von Rydingsvard, photographed by Jerry L. Thompson; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

Sculpture and Sanctuary URSULA VON RYDINGSVARD

One of my oldest memories involves neither images nor words, but rather a certain sensation arising from a sculptural instant. I remember the feeling of running my fingers over the ends of a bundle or stack of wooden sticks. The feeling is very strong and very old, certainly prelinguistic, and extremely intimate and charged. I remember the delicious claustrophobic sweetness of compaction, enclosure, and repetition, and the sense of being cornered or hemmed in by something, like a confessional, a coffin, or a womb. “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture” at Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley was the first full-scale museum exhibition of this important American sculptor’s work.1 Fourteen wood sculptures (two from 1978 and 1979, the rest from 1986–92) filled the Art Center’s interior galleries, while four new site-specific pieces occupied the green hilltop grounds just outside the museum building. In managing to effectively survey at least a part of Rydingsvard’s abundant oeuvre in a limited indoor space and also break new ground and open up new possibilities for outdoor work, the Storm King show reflected some of the most persistent lines of inquiry in Rydingsvard’s work: the reciprocal tension between past and future, interior and exterior, intimacy and monumentality, sanctuary and history.

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Since 1975 Rydingsvard has worked most often with milled fourby-four-inch cedar beams, laminated and carved into abstract human-scale sculptures of great emotional weight and resonance. Limiting her material means in this way allowed Rydingsvard to concentrate a tremendous energy into her forms, and to produce a remarkably coherent body of work over two decades. The restraints are also consistent with the ethical base of Rydingsvard’s work, a peasant ethic of economy and resourcefulness born out of her earliest memories growing up in forced-labor and refugee camps in Germany at the end of World War II. Rydingsvard’s Ukrainian-born woodcutter/peasant father and Polish mother were driven out of Poland into Germany in 1938 and spent the next 12 years moving from one labor camp to another. Ursula, the fifth of seven children, was born in 1942 near Deensen, Germany. Life in the camps was austere and frugal, but not torturous. The family and the Catholic Church provided sanctuary from the barbarism of history. The isolation of the camps caused each detail of daily life—the grey timbers of the barracks-like dwellings, the look and feel of household utensils and simple furniture, the rustic interiors of the buildings used for worship—to become highlighted in a child’s memory. This contained but nomadic existence came to an end in 1950 when the family emigrated to the United States, but the images and textures of that period remained vivid in memory, eventually to be transformed into a durable and flexible sculptural vocabulary. The Storm King exhibition contained a number of works especially marked by this history. Zakopane (1987) is a wall-size piece that weds figuration with abstraction and manages to be both menacing and reverential. It takes its name from a town in the Carpathian Mountains of southern Poland (the word in Polish means something like “to be buried under snow”) and may recall a row of bowed, kneeling, kerchiefed worshipers backed by the grey weathered walls of a barracks sanctuary, except that the canopy of bowed heads looks more like defiant fists, and the whitened knees of the supplicants metamorphose into heads of reptilian burrowers.

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As the vernacular architecture of the camps is charged in Rydingsvard’s theater of memory, so are common household implements and utensils, and the line between these objects and liturgical devices disappears. Paul’s Shovel (1987) is clearly a shovel laced with frost, but it is also a religious icon as potent as a crucifix, and Mother’s Bonnet (1990) is swelled by devotion (and fear?) into the spiky headgear of a demigoddess. The five stretchers (cradles?) of Urszulka (1986) are transformed into ritual objects marked by a sort of scarred script written in pain. Even the near-Oldenburgian knives in a rack in Dreadful Sorry (1987–88) cast shadows of sacrifice and cloistered piety. This is not to say that Rydingsvard’s work deals in symbols, but that her way of working appreciates these connections among objects and their effects. Joseph Beuys used to say that he did not work with symbols, but with materials. Rydingsvard’s relation to the symbolic is effected by her relation to nature. She has often spoken in interviews of her abhorrence of competing with or imitating nature. She eschews mimesis in favor of reciprocity, aiming to get the objects she makes “to echo things that nature might say but doesn’t.”2 Her organicism is always a mediated organicism, arising from the religious imagination as defined by W. S. Piero: “The religious imagination is a respondent, form-making act of consciousness, back toward and into that which it believes has shaped it—the force of otherness. It replies to the givenness of existence by reshaping the forms of nature into the forms of work.”3 In going “back toward and into that which . . . has shaped” her, Rydingsvard releases the correspondences among and within objects of memory, their symbolic and combinatory properties. Humble household utensils and tools are both materialized and consecrated. This wedding of the sacred and mundane found precedent and inspiration when Rydingsvard traveled to Italy in 1979 and 1980 to study Giotto’s paintings in Assisi, Florence, and Padua. In addition to his incorporation of familiar Italian landscapes into depictions of biblical scenes, Giotto’s break with the abstraction of Byzantine art, his firm drawing of contours, and the sculptural compactness,

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economy, and integrity of his forms made a lasting impression on Rydingsvard’s work as a sculptor. Though completed just before her Giotto pilgrimage, For Weston (1978; the earliest piece in the Storm King show) already evokes the gentle modeling of Giotto’s Tuscan hills. This group of seven rounded conical forms begins to project a sort of emotional landscape that was then projected into an actual landscape, site-specifically, in Song of a Saint (St. Eulalia) (1979, at Artpark in Lewiston, New York), Koszarawa (1979, at Wave Hill in the Bronx), and St. Martin’s Dream (1980, in “Art on the Beach,” at Battery Park City Landfill). In Song of a Saint (St. Eulalia), a field of 180 18-foot-high cedar posts sprouting carved growths or appendages spread out over the slope of a hill like pale cacti. The carving of the appendages was less rounded, sharper, and more faceted than previous carving, since these appendages on one level signified the mutilated body or body parts of St. Eulalia hanging on trees, as lamented in Federico García Lorca’s “Martirio de Santa Olalla” (The Martyrdom of Saint Eulalia): “Here lies the undulating snow. / Eulalia hangs from the tree.”4 The violence of the act is transformed in Rydingsvard’s threnody into constitutive detail. In that same year, Song of a Saint (1979), a small rectangular field of sharpened upright cedar stakes hemmed in by 12 uncarved stakes, succinctly stated another theme central to Rydingsvard’s work—the ecstasy and horror of confinement—that would also find expression in large outdoor works such as Tunnels on the Levee (1983), and later be incorporated differently into the facture of Rydingsvard’s work following the breakthrough of Untitled (Seven Mountains) (1986–88). The formal breakthrough in Seven Mountains was the assertion of the grid. Eva Hesse was perhaps the first post-minimalist sculptor to break the geometric-versus-organic-form dualism, but the dilemma is perennial. By accepting the grid formed by her four-by-fours and allowing it to come forward, Rydingsvard was freed to work against this underlying mathematical regularity in any way her hands led her, working always into the compelling tension between stasis and change.

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In the “wall” pieces such as Lace Mountains (1989) and Undo (1992), the violence of change (like that which could uproot a poor family, send them wandering from one labor camp to another, and then break them apart on the shores of a “new world”) is enacted and transformed by Rydingsvard’s incessant lacerations, a form of markmaking that defines a constantly changing surface. The constant is the grid, the cuts are change. The gestural impact of this markmaking is never obscured by surface treatment. This was the overall method of three of the four outdoor sculptures installed at Storm King. Five Cones (1990–92) is a variation on a well-developed theme. Five inverted cones, perched precariously on their vertices, grow together and shift their stances, achieving a hardwon solidity and stability. A view from above (the second-floor gallery at Storm King) revealed the hollowed communal sanctuary the separate cones concealed. They stood like scarred sentries, defending their form. Directly related to the more separated Three Bowls (1989) and the flipped wide-based cones of Untitled (Seven Mountains) (1986–88), Five Cones also related to the wall pieces, in which forms grow out of and away from the wall in undulating waves, as in Lace Mountains (1989). Beginning with her first large-scale outdoor sculpture, Song of a Saint (St. Eulalia) in 1979 at Artpark, Rydingsvard has exhibited an uncommon willingness and ability to respond generously to a given landscape, without sacrificing autonomy or intensity. This approach is much riskier than oblivious assertion. Land Rollers (1992), especially constructed for the Storm King hilltop grounds, attempted to tie the trees and ground together kinetically. Viewed from the museum building, the row of 14-foot-long carved rollers lined up perfectly with a maple-tree-lined road at the bottom of the hill. Perched on their ramp-like base, the rollers were all potential. A more successful work in this mode is Iggy’s Pride (1990–91), at Oliver Ranch in Northern California. This piece is so integrated with the Sonoma Valley landscape that it appears more as an extension than an intervention. Nine craggy carved fingers grow out of the

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Ene, Due, Rabe (1990–92) by Ursula von Rydingsvard, photographed by Jerry L. Thompson; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

hillside as if in benediction of the valley below. Dedicated to Rydingsvard’s father, Ignacy Karoliszyn, the piece embodies and enacts the “packed pride” and “containment of emotions” that Rydingsvard has admired in Giotto’s forms.5 The two remaining outdoor sculptures installed at Storm King, Ene, Due, Rabe and For Paul, broke new ground in Rydingsvard’s work, and achieved a monumentality out of all proportion to their physical size. The largest single sculpture Rydingsvard had ever made, Ene, Due, Rabe (1990) (the Polish title refers to the first words of a children’s rhyme) was actually produced in San Francisco, during Rydingsvard’s six-week residency at Capp Street Project in the winter of 1990. To complete the massive project in the allotted time, Rydingsvard employed six full-time assistants and 150 part-time volunteers, who worked around the clock in eight-hour shifts, grinding, cutting, gluing, rubbing, and brushing graphite into the wood. The piece

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was built from the ground up, with Rydingsvard marking each of thousands of individual cuts and fitting the pieces together to form an 18-by-45-foot honeycomb of 98 body-size cavities in an irregular 7-by-14 grid. The many observers of this process marveled at the duration and intensity of the work required, and especially at Rydingsvard’s endurance. But Rydingsvard herself has a peasant’s attitude toward labor: labor is simply what one does, what it takes. Although Rydingsvard is clearly influenced by process art, in her work the process is always directed toward visual and sculptural needs. Rydingsvard is equally pragmatic about her tools and materials. She uses grinders, circular saws, and hammers forcefully, but has no fetishistic attachment to them. “I am not involved,” she says, “in getting the best of tools and tending to them with loving care. I think this is true for a lot of women especially. I get whatever I need to get done what I need to do—what the image needs, what the idea needs.”6 Wood, also, is strictly a means to an end. Milled cedar wood has certain properties—the right solidity and “give,” clean cut lines, lack of grain—that serve the sculptor’s purposes. But she has no sentimental attraction to wood and has always said she would switch to another material in a minute if she found something more useful or fitting. This she shares with Louise Bourgeois, who told Donald Kuspit, “You do not make sculpture because you like wood. That is absurd. You make sculpture because the wood allows you to express something that another material does not allow you to.”7 Ene, Due, Rabe marked a passage in Rydingsvard’s work toward the monumental. While previous large-scale works were sequential and extensive, Ene, Due, Rabe drew the sequential into one unified, monumental form. The separate tublike receptacles placed in a grid in a forest clearing in the untitled work of 1988–89 for Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis were integrated in Ene, Due, Rabe into a mass of “welded, organic vessels [moving] in an anchored yet charged way as giant pores might.”8 Whether one views Ene, Due, Rabe as funerary sculpture (a sepulchral bed or perhaps the raft carrying the mutilated body of Osiris

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to its sepulcher at Abydos) or as a matrix of birthing chambers, the endless hollows beg for bodies. In this way the piece reifies the double sense of monument as both memory and warning, recollection and prophesy. Clearly the breakthrough piece of the Storm King show, For Paul (1991–92) had an overwhelming presence. It seemed to rise up out of the ground like some lost Eolithic monolith, or like a conglomerate butte formed by eons of subterranean pressure. Taking over two and a half years to complete, it became known to the workers in Rydingsvard’s studio as “The Fortress,” and its articulated walls do resemble those of a castle keep in more ways than one. At Storm King, swallows nested in the south face of the structure, and its walls concealed an equally intricate interior sanctuary that could not be seen from the ground. Its exterior is forbidding but not menacing, since its strength is protective of the hidden sanctuary. The dismembered body, the absent father, the displaced childhood, the lost origins—all must be brought into being sculpturally. For Paul is a monument to the strength of sanctuary. In the chapter “The 1980s and Beyond” in her encyclopedic survey American Women Sculptors, Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein placed Ursula von Rydingsvard in a special section (also including Mia Westerbund Roosen and Ida Kohlmeyer), describing their work as “an odd new kind of eccentric abstraction, somewhere between animal, vegetable, mineral and geometric form.”9 The term “eccentric abstraction” recalls the influential show of that name organized by Lucy Lippard at Fischbach Gallery in 1966, including the work of Eva Hesse, Alice Adams, and Louise Bourgeois, among others. Lippard almost immediately regretted her title, as women sculptors have so often been deemed “eccentric” to mark their distance from the canonical (male) center from which they are excluded. The term would be more accurate if male sculptors of comparable originality were referred to as “concentric.” In explaining her appropriation of the term “eccentric,” Lippard later wrote that she was trying “to indicate that there were emotive or ‘eccentric’ or erotic alternatives to a solemn and deadset Minimalism which still retained the clarity

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of that notion,”10 and that these works built on a post-minimalist sensibility possessing “an aspect of visceral identification that is hard to escape.”11 In the sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard, this inescapable visceral identification acquires a new spiritual urgency.

Maglownica (1995) by Ursula von Rydingsvard, photographed by Ben Barnhart; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York

Laborare Est Orare

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s sculptures have often engaged and activated the relation between a tool or implement—something used to make something else—and the thing made. She’s found the clarity of this relation most present in the most primitive examples of it, where one rude object impacts another to make an impression. Working into the physical reality of that prime encounter, she uncovers a certain incommensurability of cause and effect: there is always something left over when the work is done, a remainder that may in fact be the beginning of the aesthetic. I’ve often heard this sculptor speak of the honesty of a given material: the way a certain kind of wood or type of viscera holds up under pressure and over time; the way it takes a cut or weeps when it dries, but especially the way it bears and shows its transformation through labor. She constantly tests the integrity of her materials as she pushes them beyond their defining limits. She is alert to the indwelling potency of organic materials, but insists that they be transformed through work. She understands the cult of relics (being an irrepressible collector of old, odd remnants), but recognizes these things as raw material to be worked, rather than merely contemplated. In its Greek beginnings, the tool or implement was the organon, “that with which one works.” From there we get to bodily organs as

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instruments of sense or faculty, and the organic as the entire category of organized bodies (plant and animal), but always in the sense of them acting as an instrument of nature or art, to a certain end. All this from the root of work. Her incorporation of actual organs—the stomachs of ruminants—as sculptural material happened in the late 1990s. When I visited her studio in 1999, Rydingsvard showed me the cow stomachs stored in her refrigerator, packed in salt and shrunken into velvety white wads. As she held the tripe under a faucet, massaging it and filling out its form with water, she described the “exotic landscape” of almost unbearable beauty she had found inside the carcass of a freshly killed cow, “like what one might find under the sea.” Rydingsvard isolates particular sculptural effects—the way the skin of organs draws tight over striae, or the laminate, sexual (adhering) embrace of a malleable substance after being compressed between two more rigid surfaces—in order to open up the sensuous rapport of a made object to its utility: a waffle iron impresses a grid pattern on cooking batter; a farmer’s plough cuts furrows in the ground; wet laundry is rubbed over the ribs of a washboard; animal hides are stretched on racks to dry. All of these acts have effects based on the zero point requirements of necessity and candor. The present work can be seen in the context of a number of other sculptures Rydingsvard made after returning from her first trip to Poland in 1985. Though she was raised in a Polish Catholic home, it was never in Poland, but always on the tortured edges of it, always in exile, where memory was both sweet and painful, love was bound up with loss, and labor was always mixed with violence. In these works, especially Ignatz Comes Home (1986), Zakopane (1987), Dreadful Sorry (1987-88), Oj Dana Oj Dana (1989), and Dla Gienka (1991–93), individual repeated members or columns (sometimes alluding to household implements) are distressed, stained, leaded down, even whitewashed. In the latter two works, Rydingsvard’s signature cuts into milled cedar beams line up into series of striations. But the most direct precedent or seed for this work is Maglownica (1995), in which a 12-foot-high flat paddle formed of four laminated four-by-four milled cedar beams is sheathed in stitched cow intestines. The edges of the cedar paddle are cut into spines or ribs so that

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the membranous covering is stretched taut as if over bones. The piece was inspired by the rasp-surfaced paddles traditionally used by Polish farm women to soften linen sheets after laundering. As Rydingsvard recalled to Martin Friedman, “the linens were so harsh, it was often difficult to sleep on them, for fear of bloodying yourself.”1 Maglownica is a work of tremendous compression, of contained violence and pent-up energy. The critic Michael Brenson has observed that it “suggests the attentiveness of a solitary child observing a world to which he or she does not belong, or perhaps the last moments of a man in front of a firing squad. But this object maintains its ability to react. In fact, like most of Rydingsvard’s creations, it seems ultimately unconquerable.”2 This resonates with what Rydingsvard said when Dore Ashton asked the artist what her earliest artistic experience had been: “I remember something about unbleached, coarse linen. It would almost take its own form. I remember its being on me, almost like a nightgown—something about light on my body. Maybe I was three or four . . . outdoors, on the steps.”3 This is the image I can’t get out of my head, looking at this piece. A row of little girls, standing up straight in their coarse linen wraps before the world, unconquerable. These sculptures have always seemed to me to arise from a kind of diastrophism, twisting and turning in different directions around a solid core. Whether these repeated inset columns of viscera over cut boards makes one think of snow fallen on furrowed fields or dressings on wounds, they definitely form an embodied passage from one state or condition to another. I see it as a passage leading from the memory of innocence to experience, where the unjust torments of matter and memory are transformed through inspired labor, and where, in the final judgment, laborare est orare, labor is prayer.

Raoul Hague and Robert Frank at the Woodstock house, 1988 photo by Brian Graham; courtesy Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York and the Raoul Hague Foundation

Reanimating Matter RAOUL HAGUE AND ROBERT FRANK

Raoul Hague was born Haig Heukelekian in Constantinople in 1905 and died in Woodstock in 1993, and within that 88-year span he mastered what Constantin Brancusi called “the art of reanimating matter” (direct carving). Hague came to direct carving in his twenties, working with William Zorach at the Art Students League in New York. One day the sculptor John Flannagan (who hewed Woodstock’s Maverick Horse, symbol of the Maverick artists’ colony, out of an 18-foot-high standing chestnut stump at about this time) took Hague to a stone yard in Brooklyn and taught him to pick out the best stone for carving. Hague lugged a choice block of limestone back to his third-floor walk-up studio and whaled away at it all night with a hammer and chisel, while Flannagan watched, drank, and read the paper. In the morning, Flannagan said, “Well, that’s it. That’s your life. You are a sculptor.” And Hague was, for the next 68 years. In the City, Hague carved stone in the summer (producing stone sculptures for the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration from 1935 to 1939) and wood in the winter, but when he moved up to Hervey White’s domain on Maverick Road in Woodstock for good in 1943, he found it difficult to get good stone (the local bluestone, he said, was “impossible to work”), so he began to

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work with wood all year round. Large tree trunks were plentiful in Ulster County, but one had to know how to get them. Hague’s friend the painter Holly Hughes tells of driving Hague all over the county scouting for old trees of sufficient girth and compelling character that were dead or dying or otherwise slated for felling. Hague remembered the locations of choice trunks by assigning them placename titles: Shandaken, Peekamoose, Onandaga, Otsego Falls, Meads Mountain Meadows, Wallkill Walnut. Once secured, these massive trunks (often weighing 600 pounds or more) were hauled back to the little brick and log house on Maverick Road and hoisted through a large door into Hague’s 10-by-15foot studio. In order to clear the doorway, the selected trunks had to be less than 42 inches in diameter, and not more than 6 feet 4 inches in height after trimming. Hague cut away the largest pieces first with chainsaws, then used chisels and finer tools for the close work, sometimes taking six months or more to free the forms he saw within. The work was both physically and aesthetically demanding. Hague faced each raw chunk of wood anew, remaking himself each time in the unpredictable reciprocity of direct carving. The beginning of a piece, he said, was “very cruel.” Each trunk presented different problems and required a different approach. One had to listen closely (with the eyes) to know what was required. Trying to force anything was disastrous. “I consider the wood has got half of the relationship with me,” Hague said. “I cannot dominate the material. It is a very close association.”1 Hague chose wood as his sole material, of course, for reasons other than its ready availability. As Ionel Jianou wrote in describing the relative values of Brancusi’s materials: “Marble lends itself to the contemplation of the origins of life, while wood lends itself more easily to the tumultuous expression of life’s contradictions.”2 Wood is resistant yet malleable, obdurate yet yielding, consistent yet variable. Its contradictions are resonant and generative in relation to human will. In Hague’s early years, the transformations of the trunks were more forceful, and the results often more

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figurative. Toward the end, the relation changed, so that more of the tree showed through. In his last years (he worked right up to the end), he listened more and asserted less. He became less concerned with finish, letting the tool marks show along with the irregularities of the wood. The forms became less labored, more spontaneous and raw. Reviewing Hague’s show at Lennon, Weinberg Gallery in December 1988 (when Hague was 83) for the New York Times, Michael Brenson wrote: “What is so striking about these works is the sense that he does not so much carve as listen. When he gets it right, the sculptures seem to have revealed themselves and shown him what they wanted to be. . . . When a piece of wood does finally speak, it seems to reveal itself all at once, in a hurry. The result is sculpture that is patient and impulsive at the same time.”3 Another of the active contradictions that is repeatedly and sumptuously explored in Hague’s work is that of masculine and feminine, what James Joyce called “the He and the She of it.” In the shifting grain and textures of the wood, in the dichotomous branching and successive forking of the trunks, Hague found fertile ground for his explorations. The forms are set in erotic tension and release, and this movement drives the most abstract later works as much as it does the earlier torsos. One experiences these works with one’s whole body, or not at all. The chestnut torso from 1946, shown on the following page for the first time in nearly 40 years, is a work of exquisite torsion and balance. When Hague carved this piece, he had just given up carving in stone, and was beginning to find all the tension and potential he needed in wood. He liked carving chestnut, but couldn’t get it in large enough pieces, so most of his carving from this point on is in walnut. But in this torso, you can see the dawning of a new engagement with his material. The strong circular grain radiates out from a linked solar plexus and mons veneris, and Hague responds by twisting the entire sculpture the other way, around the vertical axis— legs crossing demurely below as the upper torso lifts and torques the other way. In these turnings, the torso comes alive.

Chestnut Torso (1946), photographer unknown; courtesy of Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, New York and the Raoul Hague Foundation

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Jill Weinberg Adams has pointed out that this sculpture from 1946 may be the first instance of Hague engaging directly with the whole form of a tree trunk: its shape, grain, texture, scale, and movement. The balance achieved in this sculpture, between the assertions of the material and the will of the artist, showed Hague a way forward. When Hague’s work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, Leo Steinberg wrote that Hague’s sculptures were “more concretely physical, far less involved with ideal essences than Brancusi’s. . . . They are stilled and collected and content in their own mass, without attempting to suggest the dynamics of growth, or potentials of space penetration.”4 Even though most of Hague’s sculptures are roughly the same size, some of them do fool the eye, suggesting a monumentality far greater than their actual dimensions—from the centrifugal spread of Peekamoose, to the forceful truncations of Onandaga, to the gravitational compaction and concentrated mass of Wallkill Walnut. Steinberg recognized that Hague’s early works did not attempt to imitate “the superficial look of antique art, but the great surge and sinuous torsion of a stub of body.”5 Though Hague eventually moved away from the more explicit torsos, his sculptures remained thoroughly embodied. What we have in the end are no longer trees, but discrete somatic dialogues of an extraordinary kind. In his own physique, Hague appeared to be all trunk and no limbs. The Woodstock historian Alf Evers once said of his friend, “There is nobody less likely to dance than Raoul, but apparently he did.” In fact, he did it in earnest, professionally, right before turning to sculpture. Soon after the 17-year-old Armenian refugee began his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, a pretty Italian girl named Maria coaxed him into joining her on the vaudeville stage. She even convinced him to change his name to Raoul, so they could be billed as “Raoul & Maria, the Tango Sensation.” Publicity photos from the time picture a young man with matinee idol good looks, wearing a Spanish hat set at a rakish angle. Though it might seem a long way from this “tango sensation” to the sculptor on Maverick

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Road, the fact is that Hague never stopped dancing; he just transformed the dance into direct carving. His sculptures materialize the movement of the body in space, over time. Two bodies—man and tree—work on one another. Their interaction might be violent at one moment, and tender in the next. From the outside, it might look more like a fight than a dance. But for Hague, it was a way of life, and he was thoroughly absorbed in this dance for over 50 years. Raoul Hague and Robert Frank were friends. You can see how much they enjoyed each others’ company by looking at their faces in the photographs of them together taken by a third friend, the photographer Brian Graham. Hague and Frank had much in common. Both were expatriates and bohemians, and both were fiercely independent of the institutional New York art world and similarly allergic to its cant and puffery. It’s why Hague moved up to the cabin on Maverick Road to work, and why Frank escapes to Mabou. But there is another reason, a better one, to look at the works of these two artists together. Frank’s photographs of Hague’s sculptures have the effect of reanimating them, putting them back in motion to correspond to the way we see the sculptures. Many people over the years have remarked on the extreme difficulty of photographing Hague’s sculptures, because they exist so insistently in three dimensions. Hague carved these sculptures in the round, turning them constantly as he worked, and to see them one must move around and keep moving. Each movement of the viewer yields a new view of the work, and the effect is cumulative. Frank’s photographs work so well because they accept this limitation, and revel in the fragmentary and contingent nature of the representation. As always in Frank’s work, images are combined to add up to something much more than can occur with a single image. This is particularly appropriate in relation to Hague, who spent his entire life as a sculptor trying to make whole forms from fragments, and building a body of work that is greater than any single piece.

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In 1978, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander realized that they had both been photographing Hague’s sculptures for some time, and wanted to do something as a gesture of admiration for the sculptor and his work. The result was a limited edition portfolio produced by the Eakins Press in New York, titled The Sculptures of Raoul Hague: Photographs by Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander. Each photographer made six sets of prints that were combined into six albums. This was the most limited edition the Eakins Press ever produced, and none of the copies were offered for sale. Photography has always had a complex relationship with sculpture. Its static, two-dimensional rendering paradoxically heightens and clarifies sculpture’s occupation of three-dimensional space. In memorializing single temporal views, photographs call attention to the kinetic push of sculpture. A viewer cannot look at photographs while he or she is moving, and can only look at sculptures by moving, so the distance between the two media never collapses entirely. The gap between image and object remains unbridgeable, and a certain charge accrues from bringing them into close proximity. In his six images of Wallkill Walnut, 1964, Frank circles the sculpture as it sits on a rough stand in Hague’s studio, watching the way sunlight plays over it, picking out its planes and modulating its textures. The sculpture has just been completed, and Frank is not displaying it, but regarding it, with pleasure and curiosity. We imagine Hague standing off to the side, looking at Frank looking at the sculpture. For an abstract artist, Hague had an overwhelming appetite for realistic images. He produced no drawings, but collected thousands of photographic images from books, magazines, and newspapers, and collaged them onto the walls of his studio and house: Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, Assyrian reliefs and Arabic calligraphy, Muybridge’s camels, Christo’s umbrellas, a group of mannequin heads wearing bridal veils, and lots and lots of dancers. In 1971, Leo Steinberg said of Hague, “I continue to feel that this fine sculptor has been unjustifiably ignored,” and in 1998, Donald Kuspit,

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writing in Artforum, called Hague “a major figure accorded only minor recognition.”6 You will hear it said of Hague that he turned his back on the New York art world when he moved up to Woodstock in 1943 (as some also say of his friend and next-door neighbor Philip Guston, who did the same thing 24 years later), and there is some truth in that. But what he also did was put himself in a position to devote himself wholly to the practice of his art, without the (to him) intolerable distractions of showing and promoting his work. When he did finally have his first one-man show at Egan Gallery in 1962, the then 57-year-old Hague said he was so distracted that he “couldn’t work for a week after seeing it.” In a prescient piece published in ARTnews in 1955, Thomas B. Hess wrote: “Perhaps we are entering a period of underground art, and men like Raoul Hague . . . will fill catacombs near their studios with works which will be the marvels of the future.”7 And that’s more or less what’s happened, with Hague’s sculptures preserved in storage sheds near his studio. Hague cared little for the trappings of success in his lifetime, but he well knew the value of his work, so he took care to preserve it. Now others have taken care, and we are the beneficiaries. One of the signal pleasures of spending time with Hague’s work is the way it causes us to slow down and look. It took time to make these sculptures and it takes time to see them. A glance will yield very little. The act of reanimating matter does not happen quickly and its results take time to contemplate. If this kind of time is no longer available to us, then Hague’s sculptures will eventually become ciphers, and we will have lost something critical to our survival. Hague used to say that Arshile Gorky had teased him in the 1940s about being “behind the times,” but Hague thought then that his sculptures might come through in the end, like the tortoise passing the hare. And well they might, if anyone is still around to see the finish.

II

Standing stone surrounded by seven oak saplings (top) and 7,000 one-year-old oak seedlings (bottom) in the walled garden at Uisneach, in Ireland, photographed by David Levi Strauss in 2000

Beuys in Ireland

I believe that planting these oaks is necessary not only in biospheric terms . . . but in that it will raise ecological consciousness—raise it increasingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting. —Joseph Beuys, on 7,000 Oaks (1982) I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time. The oak is especially so because it is a slowly growing tree with a kind of really solid heartwood. It has always been a form of sculpture, a symbol for this planet ever since the Druids, who are called after the oak. Druid means oak. They used their oaks to define their holy places. I can see such a use for the future. . . . The tree planting enterprise provides a very simple but radical possibility for this when we start with the seven thousand oaks. —Joseph Beuys, in conversation with Richard Demarco (1982)

Planting trees does provide a very simple but radical possibility. In fact, it may be the quintessential radical act. And planting 7,000 native Irish oaks on the Hill of Uisneach in the ancient Celtic center of Ireland is certainly an act of regeneration, to recover what has been lost. These 7,000 all spring from one mother—the 700-year-old Charleville Oak near Tullamore—and their seed will in time spread from the center of Ireland to the four quarters.

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The inspiration for this planting came from Joseph Beuys’s 7,000 Oaks project in Kassel, Germany, and in fact this Irish planting must be seen as a continuation of that initial effort. Beuys planted the first oak tree in Kassel in March 1982, before the opening of Documenta VII. His son Wenzel planted the 7,000th tree at the opening of Documenta VIII there in 1987, a year and a half after his father’s death. Beuys always thought of the Kassel project as the beginning of something, not the end. 7,000 Oaks was Beuys’s largest and most successful piece of “Social Sculpture,” conceived as a process to activate society by means of human creative will. Beuys had engaged in more conventional political activism for years. In December 1971, the Environmental Protection Workshop of the Organization for Direct Democracy (later integrated into the Free International University) organized an action in the Grafenberg Forest near Düsseldorf. It was a G.A.Z., or Gruene Aktion Zukunft (Green Action for the Future). Their cry was “Overcome the dictatorship of the political parties. Save the forest!” Beuys was one of the founding members of the Green Party in 1979, and he acted as an anarchist goad to the Greens until his death in 1986. “The Greens have a hard time,” he said, “seeing that ecological politics calls for a concept of creativity and culture that truly embraces human beings and makes them aware of how the whole can be conceived. . . . It is not just a question of conserving nature, but creating nature; the idea of human beings as creators. . . .”1 The first Beuys pronouncement I ever heard, in 1974, was this: “They say that human beings are not by nature suited to revolution. Well then, we must change human nature.”2 Beuys viewed art as the understanding of the labor in the process of creation, and thought of this creative labor as an essential part of human life—for all people, not just artists. He believed that if this labor could be better understood and applied socially, it could transform the world. Beuys’s theory of Social Sculpture arose from his recognition that the core of sculpture is the transformation of matter or substance. If we include in our definition

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of matter “the actual substance of thought or expression,” then the transformation of matter can also include thought, speech, and society. Beuys insisted that Social Sculpture also be “a sculptural form which could comprehend both physical and spiritual material.”3 In 7,000 Oaks this form simply comprised a planted tree with an accompanying marker stone. In Kassel, the stones were basalt columns rising about four feet out of the ground. (Beuys got the idea of using basalt from his visit to the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim in Northern Ireland, where tens of thousands of 55-million-year-old hexagonal basalt columns line the ocean shore.) At first, the basalt columns would dwarf the young oak seedlings. Over time, the oaks would achieve parity with the stones, and eventually surpass them. For Beuys, this illustrated one of his main sculptural principles—the passage from cold, crystalline form to warm, organic form—that was enacted over and over again in his work. The principle is an alchemical (or spagyrical) one, arising from the relation between plant and crystal: “The will within a seed determines the outer form of the plant; a crystal possesses an intellect that creates its ordered geometric shapes. Man too must will form and order and with eye and hand try to recreate those two truths in his work.”4 Beuys had always been especially attracted to Ireland, which he called “The Brain of Europe.” In the fall of 1974, his Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland was exhibited in the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin and then at the Arts Council Gallery in Belfast. Beuys traveled around Ireland with the show, also lecturing in Derry, Coleraine, Cork, and Limerick, and visiting the stones at New Grange, where he discovered more symbols of the sculptural principle of cold, crystalline form transformed into warm, organic form. Also while in Ireland, Beuys and Caroline Tisdall tried to launch the Free International University (an “autonomous research institute,” based on Beuys’s expanded concept of art) in either Dublin or Belfast, and it almost happened.

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On the Celtic new year, Samhain (November 1), in 2000, a gathering of perhaps 70 people climbed the Hill of Uisneach under a clear blue autumn sky. We paused at the Fire-Eye stone for some words from a local historian, then climbed to the summit and descended to Ail na Mireann, the Stone of Divisions, for a round dance, songs, and libations. Late in the afternoon, we came down from the hill and crossed the road to a spacious walled garden, where the glancing sun picked out the yellow and green leaves of 7,000 Quercus robur one-year-old seedlings, arrayed in rows. To celebrate, we ritually planted 70 oak seedlings in a heart shape, with seven larger transplants circling a single basalt column. Three copper rods had been laid into the stone—a particularly Beuysian touch, since Beuys often used copper as a high-speed continuous conductor in his objects and actions. The heart shape reminded me of Beuys’s “Spade with Two Handles,” with its heart-shaped blade and two handles projecting out of it like arteries—signifying people working together in the spirit of cooperation and humor. After poems and statements were read, we joined hands around the 70 oaks, and then repaired to the farmer’s house for coffee, cake, and conversation. It was a glorious day. It’s such a simple act, planting a tree. But it gives one immediate purchase on the human condition: powerful agency, limited longevity. If all goes well, these 7,000 trees will survive ten generations of their human agents. But for that to happen, someone will have to care for them a little. If there is to be a future, these are its acts. There seemed to be a sort of chain reaction in all this creation, but Elzéard Bouffier didn’t trouble about that: he just went stubbornly on with his task, simple and natural as ever. But going back down through the village I saw there was water flowing in streams that had been dry as long as anyone could

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remember. As chain reactions go, this was the most remarkable one I’d ever seen. The last time those brooks had flowed was in very ancient times. —Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees (1953)5

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Jim Hart photographed by Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (top), and Reg Davidson and Florence Davidson photographed by Jacqueline Gijssen (bottom), during the Haida Project in 1990

Between Two Worlds THE HAIDA PROJECT

“There is in New York a magic place where all the dreams of childhood hold a rendezvous,” wrote Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1943, describing the Pacific Northwest Coast exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History. “Where century-old tree trunks sing or speak, where indefinable objects lie in wait for the visitor with an anxious stare. . . .”1 As this uncharacteristically rapturous passage from the doyen of anthropology indicates, his attraction to these indefinable objects went beyond purely professional interest. In fact, the native cultures of the Pacific Northwest have always had a special aesthetic appeal for European social scientists, from Franz Boas to Marcel Mauss to Lévi-Strauss and beyond. The collecting of Northwest Coast artifacts by Europeans goes back to at least 1787, when Captain George Dixon took from the Queen Charlotte Islands a bowl carved in the shape of a human figure lying on its stomach in supplication, with its back hollowed out (now in the British Museum), and in the period from 1875 to 1906 systematic museum collecting by institutions such as the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum, and Berlin’s Museum für Völkerkunde resulted in the wholesale expropriation of cultural artifacts from the region. By 1906, it was said that New York City housed more Pacific Northwest Coast material than remained in British Columbia.

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Recent critics, both Native and non-Native, have decried these material collections, as well as much of the collection of ethnographic information by anthropologists and others, as out-andout cultural theft. While this characterization is true as far as it goes, it conceals more than it reveals about the experiential reality of Native/non-Native relations. As Marjorie M. Halpin, longtime curator of ethnology at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, wrote, “To view the extraction of either goods or data from traditional peoples as an appropriation, rather than a transaction, is to miss the moral ambiguity of crosscultural work.”2 The principal moral justification for artifact collecting and theft in the nineteenth century was that these artifacts would be lost if they weren’t collected; that they had to be preserved at all costs because they might be the last expressions to come from these traditional, “disappearing” cultures. Although this “salvage paradigm” has been effectively criticized and discredited under the larger critique of ethnographic and anthropological methods and texts mounted in recent years, this judgment is complicated by the fact that, in the case of at least one effected culture, the salvage paradigm seems to have actually worked. Artifacts, stories, ceremonies, and even the language of the Haida people of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the coast of British Columbia, were salvaged by anthropologists in the nineteenth century and then recovered by the Haida themselves on the way to a twentieth-century cultural renaissance. Lévi-Strauss described the original Haida art as being “on a par with that of Greece or Egypt.” Once the world’s most densely populated society of hunter-gatherers, the Haida were nearly wiped out by contact with Europeans. It is said that a visitor from San Francisco landed in Fort Victoria in 1862 carrying smallpox, and within two years a third of the Haida were wiped out. The Haida population, probably once numbering in the tens of thousands, dwindled from 8,000 in 1835 to 588 in 1915. What smallpox and other diseases did to the population, missionary zealotry did to Haida culture. The magnificent totem poles of Masset, Skidegate, and other island villages were deemed idolatrous and were cut down. An entire generation of Haida children were sent away to missionary schools where they

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were corporally punished and shamed for speaking their native language. In 1884, the Canadian authorities passed legislation prohibiting the potlatch, without which all aspects of traditional Haida culture were weakened. Cultural practices of all kinds were forced underground and knowledge of the meaning of the arts was nearly lost. The once powerful and fiercely independent Haida were spoken of as a defeated people. In the 1950s, artist Bill Reid began to recover parts of the Haida artistic legacy, and to make objects using the intricate visual language of traditional Haida art. To do this, he had to rely mostly on ethnographic records and artifacts held in various public and private collections. Over the next 20 years, Reid transformed himself into a metalworker and carver of extraordinary achievement, one of Canada’s most important sculptors. It was his exquisite craftsmanship as well as his tireless promotion of the Haida Renaissance that drew attention to great Haida carvers of the past such as Charles Edenshaw (1839–1924) and helped spawn a new generation of Haida artists. Bill Reid did not single-handedly recover Haida art, as some have claimed, but he was largely responsible for making it visible to a larger public. As Lévi-Strauss put it in 1974, “Hereafter, thanks to Bill Reid, the art of the Indians of the Pacific Coast enters into the world scene: into a dialogue with the whole of mankind.”3 Reid himself embodies the contradictions and ambiguities of practicing traditional art in a post-traditional society, and has always been outspoken about his “impure” status. While he is the most well-known of contemporary Haida artists, he has referred to himself as “a product of urban North American culture” and “just a middle-class WASP Canadian.” Though his mother was Haida (from Skidegate Mission), his father was Scottish-German American, and according to the old Canadian (patrilineal) law under the Indian Act, this made him legally non-Haida until recently (the Haida are matrilineal). Like many others of her generation, Reid’s mother was made ashamed of her heritage and did everything she could to conceal it from her children. Bill Reid had to find out about his roots on his own, getting to know his Haida grandfather, silversmith Charles Gladstone, in his early twenties. To recover the ancient forms of the Haida visual language, Reid studied Northwest Coast objects in

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museum collections and ethnographies written by early anthropologists, and so is circumspect about casting European/Native exchange as absolutely and forever one-sided: Some day soon I hope the native people of the Northwest Coast and members of the strange tribe who inhabit the groves of Academe will overcome the last of the mistrust and suspicion which have always lurked, sometimes hidden, sometimes overt, in their long relationship, and realize how truly symbiotic it has been. Of course, the academics have always been totally dependent on the raw stuff of native culture to feed their word machines, but only recently have some of the native people begun to realize, as the older generations pass from the scene taking their verbal recollections irrevocably with them, how dependent they have become on the words and pictures of the academic community for knowledge of their histories and almost forgotten cultural achievements.4 While European anthropological interest in Northwest Coast art has always run high, it was not, for various reasons, among the “primitive” arts that had such a great influence on the artistic revolutions of the early twentieth century in western Europe, chronicled in the controversial Museum of Modern Art exhibition of 1984, “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” The transformation from ethnography to art did not begin to occur to Northwest Coast objects until 1939, when a selection of them were exhibited in the “Pacific Cultures” part of the Department of Fine Arts section of the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco. This was the first time Northwest Coast pieces were presented to the American public as works of art. Fifty years later, another project was initiated in San Francisco, this time to bring the contemporary art of the Haida to the attention of a wider public. The Haida Project, organized and sponsored by three leading contemporary arts organizations—Capp Street Project, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Society for Arts Publications of the Americas—was a cross-cultural exchange intended “to explore . . . the relationship between the way something is made and its significance in Western and non-Western cultures,” and “to

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promote discussion about the role of art in society, the consequences of cultural assimilation, cultural imperialism, the survival of cultural memory and the parallel concerns of Native and non-Native artists regarding the function of community in an ever more complex society.”5 Two young Haida carvers from the village of Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands, Reg Davidson and Jim Hart, were commissioned to carve a full-size seagoing canoe and a 35-foot totem pole, respectively, out of two huge red cedar logs hauled down from the north woods. In the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, in an old U.S. army warehouse at East Fort Baker, Davidson and Hart and their assistants worked for three months in the fall of 1990 to complete the project. On December 15, 1990, Rock Pole was raised at Fort Baker, and Yaalth Tluu (Raven Canoe) was launched on San Francisco Bay in public ceremonies that combined traditional Haida rituals with Marin/San Francisco raucousness and awe. The carving shed where Hart and Davidson worked was open to the public throughout most of their residency, and the response was tremendous. The scale (10- and 18-ton logs from 500-year-old cedar trees being carved into a 28-foot, 750-pound sea canoe and a 35-foot, 3-ton totem pole) and intrinsic interest of the project attracted more than 10,000 spectators, volunteers, and participants, and generated extensive media coverage. Davidson and Hart are cousins, both members of a prestigious Haida family. Their great-great-grandfather was Charles Edenshaw, the first “professional” carver of the modern renaissance of Haida art, and their grandmother is Florence Davidson, a highly respected Haida elder (and subject of a popular oral history by Margaret B. Blackman).6 Reg Davidson began carving in 1972, and is now an internationally acclaimed artist working in cedar and alder sculpture, masks, serigraphs, and gold and silver jewelry. Reg’s older brother is Robert Davidson, the most well known and respected Haida artist after Bill Reid. As Robert apprenticed himself to Bill Reid in his formative years, Reg apprenticed himself to Robert during the carving of the Charles Edenshaw memorial housefront and other houseposts in 1977 and 1978. Apprenticeship has always been the principal method of transferring knowledge and craft in

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cultural work among the Haida, and has become, if anything, even more important in recent years. Jim Hart was born in Masset in 1952 and began carving non-Haida sculptures in mahogany while still in high school. He also apprenticed himself to Robert Davidson in 1978, and in 1980 he assisted Bill Reid in the completion of the large yellow cedar sculpture The Raven and the First Man, now at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Both Reg and Jim have been included in numerous exhibitions and have completed commissions internationally. Reg has danced in Kobe and paddled a Haida canoe up the Seine in Paris. One of Jim’s poles graces the grounds of Sofiro, the king’s old summer castle in Helsingborg, Sweden. As originally intended by the organizers, the Haida Project became a focus for a series of discussions about cultural difference arising from certain basic questions: How do distinctions between “art” and “craft” effect cultural work? How do the motivations, techniques, and economies of traditional art differ from those of modernist art? How does innovation function in traditional art? How do tradition and lineage function in modernist art? Is there something that could be called a “Native aesthetic”? Because the actual carving was done in public, these discussions surrounded and infused the making of the work. The carvers understood from the beginning that this public contact and discussion was an integral part of the project, and they were extremely generous and patient with questioners. Davidson and Hart were certainly not innocents when they arrived in San Francisco, but neither were they altogether prepared for the level of cultural difference they encountered there. In the course of the Haida Project, the carvers were treated as representatives not only of all Haidas, but sometimes of all Indians. Davidson commented later that many of the visitors had a “Hollywood Indian” notion of what Native people were like, and were confused or irritated when the carvers did not conform to this stereotype. He and Hart were actually chastised by some observers for using “inauthentic” methods and tools (the best German chainsaws and Japanese woodworking tools), even for their dress (usually T-shirts and jeans). As Reg commented later, “Sometimes it’s a lot of work being an Indian.”

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Some of the visitors treated them like ciphers of authenticity, onto which these visitors could project whatever images of “purity” or “wholeness” they desired. Unlike the missionaries who converted their ancestors to Christianity, the Haida do not proselytize. Their spiritual and cultural beliefs are their own and are not intended for export. So both Reg and Jim were taken aback when eager Californians sought their guidance in these matters. At one point Jim ruefully commented that he might “set up in the back room and give shamanism lessons. I could make a few extra bucks.” In fact, the relation between spiritual/cultural and material exchange in Haida culture is very different than it is in Euro-Californian culture. In traditional Haida society, the exchange of goods is not a mechanical but a moral transaction. One gains social standing not just by accumulating wealth, but by giving it away, in the contractual, economic, spiritual ceremonies known as potlatch (a Chinook word originally meaning “to nourish” or “to consume”), which continue to this day. In his seminal work of 1925 The Gift, Marcel Mauss surveyed the forms and functions of exchange among certain traditional societies, including the Haida, and concluded that the principal of reciprocity distinguished them from modern European economic systems. This principle of reciprocity in all things is reflected in the root, traditio, of “tradition”: a giving up and giving over, in relation. Mauss wrote that the Haida have “in fact sacralized, in the manner of Antiquity, the notions of property and wealth.”7 The exchange of property and wealth is highly regulated in traditional Haida society, and even slight departures from the rules are viewed with disdain. Reg Davidson told me that after the ceremonies in San Francisco, a number of people who had not been present at the “doing” asked to receive as souvenirs the small gifts that had been distributed. “That would not have been right,” he said. “Those gifts are intended as payment to the people for witnessing the blessing of the pole and canoe.” In Haida society, every task performed is reciprocated. Although there was some worry on the part of the Euro-American participants in the Haida Project that the payment of commissions to the carvers might disturb the “purity” of their acts, Davidson and Hart had no such compunctions. To them, there could be no pollution,

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because there existed no purity. Haida carvers have always been paid for their work, and the payment is as much a part of the act as anything else. In the same way, concerns over whether to call Haida carving “art” or “craft” held little importance for Davidson and Hart. Europeans generally base this distinction on utility: if something has a practical use, it is craft, not art. The Haida pointed out that this valuation seems to be based on an extremely limited definition of utility. Reg Davidson had this to say about the distinction between an artist and a craftsman: “If an artist makes a mistake no one will ever know because he has the knowledge to work the problem out. A craftsman is a technician, copying someone else’s plans. When he’s copying something and he makes a mistake, he can’t correct it, because he doesn’t know how the whole works.” This distinction can be carried over to another, between “conventional” and “traditional,” two words that are often used interchangeably, but are in fact contradictory. Conventional art does nothing but repeat conventions, whether old or recent. Traditional art, on the other hand, is involved in the transformation of substance within a context, the “carrying over” of substance from the past to the future. There can be no real change without tradition. Not all Haida art is traditional. There is a good deal of it that merely repeats accepted conventions. Over the course of the Haida Project, prior assumptions about the relation of “tribal” or “Native” art and practice to the art practiced by Europeans gradually gave way to more telling distinctions between traditional art and modernism. The critic Donald Kuspit defined modernism as “that point of view which sees art as the mastery of purity” and which involves “not so much a loss of tradition as a willing suspension of tradition.”8 He then quotes Jung saying in Modern Man in Search of a Soul that man “is completely modern only when he has come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and acknowledging that he stands before a void out of which all things may grow.”

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In the traditional Haida context, the “mastery of purity” is virtually meaningless, and the individualistic social alienation of modernism is a kind of idiocy. An “idiot” (literally, an isolated individual) in Haida terms is one who does not know where he or she comes from. Modernism displaced or “suspended” tradition in order to pursue the “mastery of purity” on an individual level. Traditional practice like that of the Haida pursues not purity, but balance. And if the modernist stands “before a void out of which all things may grow,” the traditional artist stands, always, between two worlds. ON THE WAY TO HAIDA GWAII The deepest instinct of Haida culture is that there must always be two sides, and that they must come together in marriage: that they must touch: that the boundary between them must be crossed repeatedly—and that the boundary nevertheless is absolute and must remain. —Robert Bringhurst, The Black Canoe (1992) 9 Crossing Hecate Strait by air from mainland British Columbia to the Queen Charlotte Islands, one realizes very quickly why the ancient Haida had such a reputation as rugged seafarers. Contemporary Haida call these islands Haida Gwaii, or Xhaaidlagha Gwaayaa, “The Islands at the Boundary of the World.” The waters of the strait are black and gray, with even darker forms shouldering up out of the deep. Their fierceness and unpredictability are legendary, and palpable. So I was relieved when the small Time-Air plane touched down at Sandspit airport. I immediately rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle and drove north on Yellowhead Highway, the only main road on the islands, linking Sandspit, Skidegate, and Queen Charlotte City in the south with Masset and Haida in the north. After smallpox decimated the population of the many old villages, the surviving Haida split up, settling in either Skidegate or Masset. Though there has always

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been some rivalry between the two towns, current relations are mostly friendly. When I arrived in Masset and called Reg Davidson, he invited me to accompany him to a “doing” the next day: a mortuary potlatch in Skidegate, put on by Chief Skidegate himself to honor the first anniversary of the death of his two young sons. The mortuary ceremonies began at the Skidegate cemetery, with an elaborate tombstone-washing ritual performed by the boys’ aunts. After that, a mortuary pole was raised between the two headstones, under the direction of the young hereditary chief who had carved the pole. The grave procedures were carried out by members of the Raven moiety, who would be paid for their services by the Eagle moiety. All Haida are either Raven or Eagle. As Robert Bringhurst has written, “Gods, humans, mountains and everything living, which is everything there is, are all necessarily divided in Haida cosmology into two halves, Eagle and Raven, precisely so they can come together again.”10 Then it was time to attend the mortuary potlatch, one of the largest in recent memory, with 500 people invited. As we entered the large hall we were greeted by little girls in white dresses who handed us a memorial card for the two boys who had died. The card carried two verses, both anonymous: “They are not lost to you, / they are now one with Haida Gwaii. . . .” We sat down at one of the 24 long tables covered with apples and oranges, and pies and sweets of all descriptions. Plastic bags were handed out to everyone, to take home whatever one didn’t eat there. One long table running the entire length of the hall groaned under pans piled high with crab legs, smoked salmon, black cod, herring roe on kelp, potato pancakes, various breads, potato salads, and much else. The ceremonies opened with an invocation and a welcome, and then the speeches began. Over the course of the evening, from 6 p.m. to midnight, 25 or 30 speakers rose to eulogize the dead, to praise Chief Skidegate and the other hereditary chiefs seated at the head table, and to sound off on political matters, cultural matters, and whatever else they wanted or needed to air publicly. Most of the speeches were decorous expressions of sorrow and thanks for the opportunity to speak. The most often repeated phrase used by

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speakers was “It is appropriate that . . .” or “What is appropriate to say at this time is . . .” When everyone had been given an opportunity to speak, the gift giving began. People from the chief ’s family carried goods to the middle of the hall and then roamed among the tables distributing them: blankets, appliances, canned fruits and smoked fish, decorated cups and dishes, towels. . . . All were given more than they could carry. The Rainbow Creek Dancers (formed in 1980 by Robert and Reg Davidson, and consisting today of Robert, Reg, Robert’s adopted brother Joe David and his brother from the west coast of Vancouver Island, and Guujaaw) danced and sang a number of Haida songs. Robert Davidson presided over an end-of-mourning ritual consisting of three parts: the first brought the spirits of the dead in, the second was a time for weeping, and the third was the time to let go of the dead. Two masked dancers representing the dead sons danced slowly around the room, looking out into the audience, calling forth memories of the deceased. Even for an stranger who did not know the deceased, this evocation was difficult to watch. Toward the end of the proceedings Joe David gave a moving speech in which he said that his father told him to “pay attention when the people gather for weddings, feasts, and deaths, because if we do not pay attention, we will end up like other peoples of the New World—people without names, without songs, without family ties, even without spirit, it seems.” THESE TREES ARE NOT DEAD The visual language that Haida artists have inherited from their ancestors is an extremely durable and flexible one. When asked about the designs on Yaalth Tluu, Reg Davidson replied: Because this was the first canoe I’d made, I first wanted to paint an Eagle design on it, because that is my crest. But a month after we started carving in San Francisco, my father was diagnosed with cancer and they gave him weeks to live, so I decided to dedicate the canoe to him and to choose his crest. Projecting out from the prow of the canoe is a carved Raven, and a Raven is also painted underneath on the bow, but the

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wing of the Raven there is also a Killer Whale, with big teeth. On the stern is a Shark and the pectoral fin of the Shark is also a Raven’s head. Coming out of the Shark’s mouth is its tongue, which also becomes the Dogfish’s tail, which is also the wing of the Raven. I chose these designs because they are my Dad’s crests and the canoe is dedicated to him.11 As Reg Davidson’s description of his design for Yaalth Tluu shows, the intricate visual language of the Haida is a language for representing transformation. The complex arrangement of ovoids and U-shaped designs in Haida compositions is an abstract approach to figuration, where shapes metamorphose into creatures that in turn become other creatures. The formlines are boundaries, to be crossed and recrossed. The underlying “subject” of all Haida art is the great chain of being, the cyclical transformation of life forms. This is certainly true of totem poles, in which forms often seem to grow up and out of other forms below them on the pole. Jim Hart’s Rock Pole is a story pole, with the mythological sea creature Wasgo on the bottom, Raven (Stealing the Moon) in the center, and Eagle on the top. “If I was doing this at home, I would incorporate family crests and other things,” said Jim Hart, describing the planning for Rock Pole, but for here I decided a story pole was the way to go. So I was running through stories, and a lot of forms ran through my mind, but nothing I could stick with because I needed to see the log first. I needed to see what I was dealing with, because that determines a lot. As soon as I knew the dimensions, I worked on the log one day to figure out how I could get the most out of it. I was working through the images in my mind and all of a sudden I thought, “Okay, I want to do a Wasgo” (Wasgo is the Sea Wolf, a mythical being that is part wolf and part whale). Then the Raven appeared, then the Eagle. You can actually tie them all into the Wasgo story. The Eagle is my clan crest. The Eagle on the top is also an homage to the American eagle, since it was done here. Then I put the moon in there (with abalone shell) with the Raven, so it refers to Raven Stealing the Moon, which is a good story.12

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Rock Pole (1990) by Jim Hart, installed at the Discovery Museum, Sausalito; photographed by Liza Malm in 1990

Neither Yaalth Tluu nor Rock Pole was finished, in the carvers’ minds, until they were ceremoniously named by 97-year-old Haida matriarch “Naanii” Florence Davidson, who traveled to San Francisco from Masset for the ceremony. (Reg once said, “Not until my grandmother smiles do I know that I have done well.”) The naming of a canoe, pole, or Haida house is as important as the naming of a person, and must be done with the appropriate ceremony. A person can be given several different names over the course of his or her life. The name then belongs to that person, and they have the right to use it and, sometimes, to hand it down when they die. The same is true of songs and dances. Both Reg and Jim believe that the objects they make are not made real, not born, until they are involved in the proper ceremonies. “If you look at an old mask in a museum,” Reg told me, “it’s dead. Put it on and start dancing it and it comes alive.” This is one of the things that sets the younger Haida artists, from Robert Davidson forward, apart from the first generation of Haida renaissance carvers, who

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generally did not couple their carving expertise with knowledge of songs and dances. “You can’t separate ‘art’ and ‘culture’ and ‘spirituality,’” Reg explained. “You can’t put dance and songs and ceremonies and carving in different categories, because they’re all interconnected.” This attitude also informs the Haida’s sense of “authenticity.” “If I do a mask and sell it,” Reg explains, “but I could still borrow it back and use it in a ceremony because that’s what it was made for, then that’s authentic. But if someone did a mask and sold it and then tried to use it for a ceremony and it didn’t work, it’s not authentic. Because then it’s just a wall hanging, not a mask. A mask works.” The interconnectedness of cultural categories requires that contemporary Haida artists play an active role in the public life of their people. For Robert and Reg Davidson and for Jim Hart, the isolated and alienated modern artist is no model. Their willingness to act socially also makes them more willing to engage in the kind of cross-cultural exchange that occurred during the Haida Project. “As long as you go into cultural exchange with an open mind and a positive approach, it will work,” Reg said. “We’re all so stubborn. We have tunnel-vision—our way is the only way. But if we go into this kind of exchange with an open mind and are willing to learn, anything can happen. We’re all striving for the same things, really.” The overwhelming public response to the Haida Project indicates a great longing for this kind of cultural exchange. With all of its frustrations and difficulties, the Haida Project was one model for cultural exchange between Native and non-Native people in the spirit of the Quincentenary. There is a great deal of confusion in our time about the formation of community and identity, and about the role of tradition in art and culture. As we move into the 500th year of European occupation of the Americas, it is becoming increasingly clear that we Europeans are going to have to learn first things last. One of the only ways to learn these first things is by listening to traditional peoples, who have lived on this continent for over 10,000 years. As Reg Davidson’s brother Glen Rabena, who assisted Reg in the carving of Yaalth Tluu from a 500-year-old tree, said at the conclusion of the project: “Tradition is not dead. It’s like a tree putting

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out new leaves and roots all the time. These trees are not dead. They have just been changed. They are alive and well.” Just as the totem pole and canoe have traditionally operated between worlds, linking earth and sky, land and sea, natural and supernatural realms, the Haida Project brought the world that Davidson and Hart occupy in Haida Gwaii into relation with the largely non-Native world of the San Francisco Bay Area art world. For many involved, the experience prompted a reassessment of their own systems of property, alienation, and exchange, and pointed to the increasing relevance of traditional practice in a supposedly posttraditional society.

cloud-net (2000) by Cecilia Vicuña, photographed by Kim Thompson; courtesy of the artist

The Memory of the Fingers

I had known and admired the protean poetry of Cecilia Vicuña for some time by 1999, but I knew less about her work as a sculptor, and didn’t fully realize how thoroughly entwined the two arts were for her. So I was intrigued when she invited me to join her as she installed her cloud-net—a huge open net formed from lengths of unspun white fleece—at Art in General in Lower Manhattan in the spring of 1999. Afterward, we recorded this conversation about “becoming precarious.” David Levi Strauss: When we were talking in the gallery as you were installing cloud-net, you began to tell me about the origin of spinning. You said that long, long ago someone, probably a woman, found a clump of wool that a llama or a vicuña or an alpaca had left when it rubbed up against a shrub or a rock. This first person pulled the wool off and twisted it between her thumb and forefinger, and that original action was the beginning of making the world up. Cecilia Vicuña: Yes. As I see it, it must have happened on all continents where there are wooly animals. Of course, the first weaving must have been the crisscrossing of grass and twigs, for building a nest or a shelter to give birth, or twisting vines to make rope. But to get from that early imitative gesture to spinning wool required a

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powerful leap of imagination—noticing, perhaps, that any piece of wool, either caught by the wind or by an object in passing, tends to immediately form a spiral. When a person rubs these two fingers together, whatever is between the fingers spins, either to the right or to the left. Everything around us has this spinning energy in it, which probably originates in that first spiraling energy coming out of the Big Bang, spinning things out from a center. Strauss: Tell me about the origin of this cloud-net. Vicuña: It was in April of last year. I had been asked to think of a piece that could be recreated many times and still be the same piece. I was sitting at my table and suddenly I saw the image of a cloudbasket. A little while later I happened upon a page of Savitri, a long visionary poem by Sri Aurobindo, and there I read the line: “Delight shall sleep in the cloud-net of her hair.” And I thought, my god, that’s the cloud-basket I saw! Strauss: Did you decide right away to use that image? Vicuña: Yes. The image already contained the material, the shape, and the form of the piece. I had been working with this unspun fleece for a long time already, over ten years. I think I first noticed this material in the area around Lake Titicaca, between Peru and Bolivia, where people still use it as an offering, because unspun wool is thought to contain the primal force. Then I began to discover other symbolic associations, with the clouds of cosmic gas, and with semen and sea foam, which are also seen as clouds. Strauss: When I first saw it, I immediately thought of it as a matrix: mater, matrix, materia—the womb of matter. It’s a very direct image, and it operates both as an image and as material. The material in this form is substantial in the way it takes up and defines the space, but it’s also almost not there, because the material is so light and cloudlike. Afterward, I wanted to find out where “cloud” came from, where the English word came from. And I found that it actually came out of a “clod,” a clump of earth. How it got from the earth to the sky I’m not at all sure, but it’s always had this sense of adhesiveness, of forming something into a compact mass.

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Vicuña: Around the time I was working on the cloud-net, I watched this magnificent PBS film, Raging Earth, devoted to the power of clouds. There you could see how clouds charged with positive and negative energy created the lightning and the storms that ignited life on earth. I immediately thought of Illapa, the oldest Andean deity, the creator of the world whose name means “thunder & lightning.” (In the Odyssey, Zeus is the “cloud-gatherer” too.) Now, because of the destruction of the forest, storms are gathering such violent energy that you get events like Hurricane Mitch in Central America, where thousands of people die. To weave clouds at a moment like this is an attempt to change the pattern of destruction, as if this impossible gesture (you cannot “weave” with unspun wool—it falls apart as you touch it) had the power to effect the climate and move people to thought. Strauss: Today, when people hear the name cloud-net, they think of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Vicuña: That’s why I began the poem of cloud-net with the line “hanging by a thread, the web says . . . ,” to play again with the forgotten association between the World Wide Web and the web of life. For someone like me, “www” is “weaving, weaving, weaving.” Other fragments of the poem continue to play with certain capitalist ideas such as “net worth,” proposing a new form of reading it, as the worth of the net itself. And since cloud-net began as an image, that became an action, a performance, a video, and a poem that is performed and continues to be transformed until it becomes a book and a website, it will also end up speaking from the web and in the net. Strauss: When people talk about the Information Age, I always think that what we’re really in is the Age of Forgetting. More information (not to speak of knowledge) is being lost now than at any time in history. Every time we switch to a new storage medium, that medium is less stable than the previous one, which is made obsolete so that we can now no longer read or access the information it contains. And this destabilization is accelerating at an astounding rate. Soon it will all disappear—all will be forgotten. It’s like your “Quipu que no recuerda nada” (Quipu that remembers nothing).

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Vicuña: Exactly. It’s a great irony. The Incas had a myth about this. They believed that writing created forgetfulness, but textile— weaving knots—created memory. Strauss: “Digital” no longer has anything to do with our fingers; it means saying yes or no very rapidly. I think this has accelerated the drift toward either/or kinds of thinking that were first set in place by the technology of writing. Do you have that sense that textile, in its tactility, is more memorious than the word? Vicuña: I don’t know because, you see, I am a mixed person, a person of two cultures. So I don’t trust either, that is the reality. I use everything because I want to ask them all to remember. I write, I sing, I weave at the same time, because I’m at the moment of emergency, at the moment of danger, when you actually feel that all of this could go away. Life itself could go away. The web can disappear. So I work on that edge. Strauss: Whenever I see and read and think about your work, I am thrown back into the web of words, because I share your addiction to etymology, to the roots and histories of words. One word that came up this time was “heirloom,” a valued possession passed down through succeeding generations. The “heir” was originally an orphan, and “loom” was a tool. So an heirloom involves the passing on of a tool to an orphan. Vicuña: How beautiful. Yes. Strauss: Is there is some purpose to this, some reason why we are so rapidly forgetting so much? Vicuña: How else could we be destroying the planet itself ? How else could we live here and do that if not by forgetting that we are living here? We are all becoming precarious. Strauss: There is a line in your poem about “weaving clouds against death.” I take this as weaving clouds against the death of the planet, but also I wonder if it isn’t weaving against our individual deaths. Cloud-net seems to me to be the opposite of a monument. There are a lot of monuments being made today, objects to commemorate what

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is being lost. But this is not exactly that. It is more votive, or more like Penelope, weaving and unweaving in order to stave off catastrophe. Vicuña: Yes, you can say it is an attempt to speak back to the elements, to that instant of all potential, all creation, when we could take a new evolutionary leap, although I prefer to say a leap of imagination, equivalent to that first moment when a hand noticed that fleece could be spun into yarn. For me, this work is a proposal to listen to certain images. The ancient inhabitants of the Amazon spoke of the mist of the mountains and the mist of the forests. They said that when the mist is gone, we will all be gone. When you disregard the poetry of these ancient cultures, you disregard their lives. We think of trying to preserve them as if this is an act of charity. But if we valued poetic utterance we would recognize the power of their warning. It’s a warning that they created thousands of years ago for themselves, because they also lived and worked in this place. They said pay attention to the relation. They said the way we move in the mist affects the mist. Weaving against death is a way of remembering, of relating to the Earth and each other in a different way. Strauss: I’ve often said that I can always tell the work of a traditional artist (as opposed to a conventional one) by the way their work speaks to the dead as well as to the living. Not all artists speak to the dead; many would never dream of it. But you are one of those who does. Vicuña: I have a very particular relationship with the dead. I have always been aware of the fact that, to use an African expression, “you are always becoming an ancestor.” The idea that you will soon become dead and the fact that you are speaking to your own death has always been part of the ethical teaching in traditional cultures. In the future we will be past. I am also speaking to the dead by remembering. When you touch this particular material, this unspun wool, it transmits knowledge to the fingers. When we were first speaking of this original gesture, spinning wool between the thumb and forefinger, I was thinking of it not as an intellectual memory, but a sensorial memory. My fingers discovered it. It’s in the memory of the fingers.

Noli Me Tangere (2008) by Ron Gorchov, photographed by Tom Powel; courtesy of Nicholas Robinson Gallery

Reverie and Luck, Incarnate

The Day and the Body, two great powers. —Paul Valéry I don’t know what to do. I have two thoughts. —Sappho

Ron Gorchov’s paintings are among the most fully and graciously embodied being made today. They engage our whole bodies from our first encounter with them and sustain this engagement over time. You have to move to see them, and when you move, they come alive. With one’s whole body involved, the mind is also free to move, and does. Each painting, like each human body, is unique, yet repeats the same basic elements: two eyes, two ears, two legs, and two arms, mounted on a head and torso. Like bodies, the paintings are threedimensional and irregularly symmetrical, with skins stretched over skeletons. The break or curve of the surface recalls that of a face or back, between shoulder blades. Like us, they have weight and gravity, but can also be affable and friendly. Like us, they are made things—creatures—and so have a poetics. The attention paid to their structures and how the mixed pigments and medium with which they’re made is applied is considerable, but their force ultimately derives from what is not there. Invested with bodily nature and form, they are also emblematic, even totemic. This dual nature allows them to display qualities that are both iconic and ephemeral, telluric and sublime.

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Usually, two organic shapes are drawn suspended or carved out of color against a liquid ground. One can see these two shapes as positive, like seeds, or negative, defining the space between a figure’s arms and torso. Sometimes rectangular shapes appear as posts and lintels or dolmens (in Cantina, Cul de Sac, and Calumet City). The regular white slabs that appear in a field the color of dried blood in Chateau d’If were inspired by bricks that St. Clair Cemin brought back from China a few years ago. “If you have posts holding up a lintel, those columns can become human forms, like caryatids,” Gorchov told me. “I wanted to see if I could make a character out of a rectangle.” An enormous pile of paint-spattered shoes rises in the middle of Gorchov’s studio. He changes his shoes every hour when he is painting. “Putting on a different pair of shoes is like changing your ground,” he says. Standing before a painting in progress, he says, “To me, paint looks pretty good if you don’t pay too much attention to putting it on. It might take me a long time to get there, to figure out what needs to happen in a painting, but, if possible, I like to do the final coat all at once. Italian fresco painters had a term, giornata, for how much paint one can apply in a day. With me, it’s how much I can put on in a minute.” In the gallery, looking at his painting Anaktoria, which is a kind of homage to lovesickness, Gorchov says that in Sappho’s fragments, one has the impression that “she just put it down. It’s that direct. I’d like to paint that way. I’d like to just put it down.” When asked about the drip line along the bottoms of his paintings, he said, “Paint drips. It’s one of the things paint does. I want other painters to be able to see what I did to make the painting. Nothing hidden.” And it’s true, on one level, everything is visible in Gorchov’s canvases: the staples fastening the linen to the frames, the backs of the shaped frames themselves, the palimpsests of drawn and redrawn shapes. But when the shapes and colors, and we, begin to move, a new music begins. With drips, washes, and tension-breaking, the conversation between liquidity and quiddity, or luck and mastery, comes into play. “The music of painting comes from manipulating space,” he says, “and from letting the colors sing.”

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Each painting evokes a mood (“I never want to have more than one mood in a painting”), often arising from a childhood or adolescent memory of a particular place (like Calumet City, where Gorchov grew up, or Chase Street Lounge, a jazz joint in Chicago) or story (like Chateau d’If, the island prison from The Count of Monte Cristo, or Rasulka, a mermaid who’s also able to become a sea nymph, or Marsyas, who was flayed alive for losing a musical contest with Apollo). The source must have enough emotional charge to jump-start the process and move it all forward, but once it enters into the form language of the painting, that takes over. Where do the colors come from? “Through drawing, I imagine color—something that you push into or carve. With abstraction, you can often influence color a lot as you push into it.” In the large painting Mistral, an off-white half-angular shape argues with a smaller, rounder, earth and ground jasper one, as an acid green liquid storm comes down around them. The torso formed in the space between the two forms is torqued and agitated, inspired by a performance of Medea. Gorchov said, “I wanted heavy weather here, a violent storm, but I had no idea the paint would break so much. Tension-breaking is an electrostatic phenomenon, like lightning. It’s also what happens when the vehicle evaporates, as in death.” And looking at the incandescent small painting Noli Me Tangere, Gorchov mused, “Jesus’ raising of Lazarus from the dead was the dark foreshadowing of the Resurrection. Even Jesus could go too far. ‘Don’t touch me?’ Why not? Because the skin is between coming and going. And because the mystery of Incarnation must be honored.”

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III

It Is So Dark It Is Transparent (1998) by Raquel Rabinovich; courtesy of the artist

In Praise of Darkness

In the early 1960s a young artist returned to her native Argentina, after spending six years in Europe, studying at the Sorbonne and exhibiting her paintings in Edinburgh, London, Copenhagen, and Paris. Back in Buenos Aires she learned that Jorge Luis Borges had been appointed director of the National Library of the Argentine Republic (after the fall of Perón), and she determined to go and meet him. Always receptive to the company of young women (and perhaps recalling his own similar homecoming long ago), Borges greeted her enthusiastically, and they became friends. Every week she met him at the library and together they crossed the street to the Plaza Lavalle, where they would sit on a bench and talk. He told her stories, and she described the new paintings she was making. One day as they were on their way back to the library, the young artist announced that her paintings were going to be shown at the Galería Rioboo, and she invited Borges to come and see them. He immediately said no, he could not come and see her paintings. “But why not?” she asked, a bit hurt. And Borges replied, “Because I am blind.” Until that moment, she hadn’t known. The series of paintings Raquel Rabinovich showed in 1963 at the Galería Rioboo was titled “La Obscuridad liene su Luz” (The dark is light enough), and it marked a turning point in her work, from the

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colorful, lyrical abstraction of her European years to a more pareddown, contemplative practice. In 1996, 35 years after that initial turning, Rabinovich made a series of drawings that engage and enact the dark as an imminence rather than as an absence, in a way that Borges, who titled a book of his poems In Praise of Darkness, would surely have appreciated. The habits of mind that so influence the way we see are lodged in our language, and the language we use to speak of darkness and light is phototropically prejudiced. Good things happen in the light of day; bad things in the dark. Light indicates clarity and cheerfulness, while the dark brings obscurity and gloom. “I am the Light of the World” and the other is the Prince of Darkness. In art, light and dark are names we give to the parts of a relation, and it is the relation that matters. When one begins to make dark marks upon a light ground, there arises at least the possibility of making this relation active and visible. In drawing, dark is not the absence of light, but something built up over time—the result of a process. One begins with the void of the white paper, and works back toward the dark through form. Every mark, like every other act, obscures, first. But if one persists, these obscuring marks may eventually, paradoxically, come to reveal things. We proceed this way, in a kind of hopeful nigrescence. Rabinovich’s method is humble—one stroke next to another, in pastel, charcoal, and manganese powder on paper—but her aspiration is great: to enact and make visible the secret process of becoming, which always begins in the dark. With inspired patience (alchemists say that patience is the ladder, and humility the key to their garden), she continuously works the ground. These drawings are abstract in the original sense of drawing away, from the visible to the invisible. How does she know when to stop? “I know that a painting is finished,” she has said, “when the ground becomes groundless and the surface dissolves into that groundlessness.”1 A primary relational source is the work of Jasper Johns, whose “characteristic dense veil of graded gray strokes” that Leo Steinberg noted early on has here become more fluid and transparent.2 And I suspect that Rabinovich has used stenciled words for the same reason Johns has: letters and words made in this way appear to be found

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rather than made. The stencils make the words into things that can become parts of a painting or drawing, and the danger of literalness is cooled. Text appears often in Rabinovich’s work, but there is never very much of it. Another line of affinity runs back to some of Brice Marden’s early drawings, in their fine tolerances of tone, in the quality of their layering and enfolding of gestural strokes, and in their visual urgency and emergency. There is a quality of restraint in these works by Rabinovich that draws the eye into a dialogue between acuity and blindness, between grasping and letting go. They require a certain kind of attention, and it takes time to discover how to look at them. But after one’s eyes become adapted to the dark, one can begin to see into the drawings, and the eyes feel lightened as the layers begin to separate and open out. In the relations between the various hues of gray one can glimpse the colors they are shadows of: nigrosin blue, shade green, even dusky yellow, but never red. (Borges has pointed out that it is wrong to think that the blind see only blackness. In fact, he says, black is one of the colors they cannot see. Red is the other.) As the marks lose their discretion, our sense of spatial location is loosened. “Everything near becomes distant,” and things begin to move, with the free-form line drawing acting as counterpoint, and the stenciled words rising up out of the ground into legibility. The texts embedded in these drawings seem to me to refer to the alchemical nigredo, or tenebrositas, that “darkness darker than darkness” wherein putrefaction occurs and opposites are dissolved. It is the darkness that necessarily precedes awakening. As the Rosarium philosophorum says, “When you see your matter going black, rejoice: for that is the beginning of the work.” Drawing away from the allconsuming pandaemonium of colorful images that surrounds us outside, these densely layered works draw us into the dark, where we might begin again, to see.

Not Duchamp (Large Fountain, 1917) (1991–99) by Mike Bidlo; courtesy of the artist

Why Move On from Illuminations That Haven’t Yet Been Understood?

The writer Carlo McCormick did an important interview with Mike Bidlo in 1985, in which these two active participants in the East Village art scene of the early 1980s discussed the successes and failures of Bidlo’s performances and installations during this time. Near the end of the interview, Bidlo is talking about the “public entertainment” aspect of his Yves Klein piece (Not Yves Klein Anthropometries, performed at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1986), and McCormick says, “Something like this quote of yours on the wall: ‘When I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya were great painters; I am only a public entertainer who had understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere.’” We imagine a long pause, and then Bidlo replies, “Well, to tell you the truth, Picasso said it—not me!”1 The question of plagiarism or forgery (and thus of originality and authenticity) is never far from any discussion of value in art, and the recent substitution of the term “appropriation” for the older terms has done little to clarify the basic issues. As Rosalind Krauss so

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deftly demonstrated in her book The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, artists have always made copies. Every good artist appropriates ideas, images, and techniques from the past, and great artists do it with abandon. But this fact has been obscured by the modern rhetoric of originality. As Krauss says, “The discourse of originality . . . represses and discredits the complementary discourse of the copy. Both the avant-garde and modernism depend on this repression.”2 Copying is the one area of art in which the intent of the artist actually matters. If an “American Friend” copies a painting by Picasso with the intent to sell it as a Picasso, that is forgery. But if one copies Guernica and shows it at Larry Gagosian’s gallery, or copies Demoiselles d’Avignon and a number of other Picasso paintings of women and shows them all together at Leo Castelli’s gallery, and then Gagosian and Castelli sell the paintings not as original works by the Spanish painter but under the name of their “forger,” Mike Bidlo, that is something else entirely.3 In this case, the intent is not to deceive but to enlighten. So, what are we looking at when we look at a Mike Bidlo copy of a painting by Picasso, or Matisse, or Cézanne, Léger, De Chirico, Kandinsky, Man Ray, Morandi, Pollock, De Kooning, Yves Klein, Franz Kline, Lichtenstein, or Warhol? A study? A facsimile? A later performance of an original score? A kind of impersonation or visual ventriloquism? An homage? A pastiche? An enchantment? We might notice that Bidlo’s copy of a Franz Kline painting has a very different relation to its original than does a copy of a Lichtenstein painting, or one by Yves Klein. We might try to determine whether Bidlo’s Not De Chirico is closer in its effect to early or late De Chirico. We’ll recognize that the distance between Bidlo’s recreations and the originals is drastically reduced when both are seen, as they most often are, in reproduction, in books. And we can’t help but track the copyist’s relative affinity with each artist he engages: his preference for Picasso over Matisse, Pollock over Kline, Lichtenstein over Warhol. It might also occur to us as we look at these works that we usually judge quality in art by measuring difference and with these works we do it by measuring likeness and that this is a significant turn.

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Looking back over many years of Bidlo’s investigations in this area, the obsessive intensity of his quest begins to emerge, with a kind of innocent adherence that seems wholly incongruous with the public life of the works. Only someone who considers art to be the most important thing in the world would spend so much time debunking its myths and testing its limits. Tradition must go to extraordinary lengths to operate today, to carry it across. “Appropriation” gets people excited because it is a crime against property; it threatens our sense of propriety. Out of imposture, Bidlo has forged a distinctive practice. “Ultimately,” he’s said, “my goal is to confront and challenge the viewer to accept these works as mine.”4 They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself. —Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975)5 From 1996 to 1998, Bidlo made some 3,000 drawings of Duchamp’s readymade urinal. These are no more “copies” of Duchamp’s Fountain than are Ellsworth Kelly’s drawings of plants and flowers “copies” of their subjects. Each one of “The Fountain Drawings” is unique, and the range of articulation across them is astonishing, from a well-rendered pencil sketch to an abstract smear on a page from a phonebook, from schematic drawings to cartoons, from ink blots to fine lines to gouache. There are Rorschachs, Buddhas, animations, organic abstractions, rustic caves, and refined lingam/yonis. One of my favorites imposes a thickly painted outline of the urinal onto a page from an art history text discussing the symbolism of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. One is reminded that after Alfred Stieglitz photographed Fountain at “291” in April 1917, Carl Van Vechten wrote to Gertrude Stein in Paris telling her that Stieglitz’s photographs of the urinal “make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha.”6 “The Fountain Drawings” have been a veritable fountain of youth for Bidlo, a principal source and point of origin for a new beginning. It’s as if Bidlo’s originality had been voluntarily held in balance with the copy for all these years, and was now exploding out of him like a, well, like a fountain.

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“The Fountain Drawings,” East Village cellar studio view (1997) by Mike Bidlo; courtesy of the artist

Before beginning the drawings of the “Fountain” series, Bidlo spent five years fashioning careful replicas of Fountain (in ceramics), of the Bottle Rack in meticulous detail, and of glass ampules containing not Paris air but Bidlo’s breath (a sort of miniature monument to inspiration. Duchamp: “I am a respirateur—a breather. I enjoy that tremendously”).7 In the fall of 1996, Bidlo also mounted an homage installation of relics—the Bicycle Wheel, Fountain, the Bottle Rack, as well as copies of Nude Descending a Staircase and T um’—in his little storefront in the East Village. He christened it “Saint Duchamp,” intending the French pun on “sans Duchamp.” There are many who think we have moved (or are moving) out of the age of art into a new age of the image. If this is true, Bidlo’s investigations may be especially appropriate to our present condition. He returns to making handmade images of a readymade symbol (Duchamp said he resorted to the readymade “to cut my hands off ”) in order to show that originality can be as rampant and seemingly endless as the copy. We recall here also Duchamp’s invention of the “infra-mince” (infra-thin) to measure the subtlest differences

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between supposedly identical things (like twins, or clones). Duchamp was investigating this at about the same time that Walter Benjamin was writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” If only the two could have gotten together in 1936 and compared notes! Bidlo himself has said that, in “The Fountain Drawings,” he brings “a symbolist aspect to the piece” that Duchamp didn’t wish to pursue. “Maybe he saw them [the symbolic references] but was too much of a rationalist to see any merit in pursuing this kind of symbolism . . . like he thought it was outside of his formalist concerns. Or maybe he wanted the viewer to discover it for himself, like a hidden message.”8 Bidlo’s attraction to Duchamp makes perfect sense, of course, for it was Duchamp who pushed the investigation of the reciprocity between reproducibility and originality to a new level. Judged as an influence on later art and discourse, Duchamp’s work can only be seen as wildly successful. But as an attempt to change the way art operates in the world, it was a failure, as all art historically is, for that change must be made anew by each generation. In a short entry on Mike Bidlo for Artforum’s “Best of 1998” issue, Wayne Koestenbaum called “The Fountain Drawings” “the diary of a perverse quest,” and asked the substantive question “Why move on from illuminations that haven’t yet been understood?”9 This is as concise and elegant a statement of the rationale for Bidlo’s way of working as we are ever likely to find. The truth is that Bidlo is engaged in an inquiry that will never end. “Copying is the instinctive means of learning,” he has said. “For me at least, recreating a work in any form becomes revelatory.”10 And one good revelation deserves another, and another, and another, and . . .

The Yearling (1992) by Donald Lipski; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York City

Her Plumbing and Her Bridges, in Sweet Assemblage

The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges. —The Blind Man (1917) Why not look at the constellations of things that surround us every day? That is the combinatory art. Nothing should be left out. Everything has to undergo the test of how it can live in this relatedness. —Frederick Sommer, The Constellations That Surround Us (1992) Art supposes that beauty is not an exception—is not in despite of—but is the basis for an order. —John Berger, “The White Bird” (1985)

From the viewpoint of art for art’s sake, aesthetic decisions are continually being contaminated by the things of this world. In Donald Lipski’s art, this process is not merely tolerated, but celebrated. In fact, this contamination—resulting from the contact and mixture of disparate substances and materials—defines the method and has come to be the principal subject of Lipski’s art. Lipski’s medium—the medium of things in the world (in this context called “found objects,” translated from the French objet trouvé) and their formal arrangement in relation to one another (called “assemblage”)1—was born in 1913, when Marcel Duchamp, for his own amusement, mounted a spinning bicycle wheel on a wooden

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stool.2 Though later called a readymade, this object is different from the Bottle Rack (1914) and the snow shovel (In advance of a broken arm, 1915), in that something was physically done to transform it, and to combine two different things (aside from the selection and the addition of language). Why not sneeze Rrose Sélavy? (1921) was also essentially an assemblage, called by Duchamp an “assisted readymade.” Duchamp chose objects for his readymades that he hoped would have no visual appeal and thus would elicit “no aesthetic emotion.” While Duchamp’s readymades were made in response to the question “Can one make works which are not works of ‘art’?” Lipski’s pieces, whether they succeed or not, are always “art” works. The distinction is made with great clarity and elegance in Lipski’s Artwork (1993), which consists of a Duchampian bottle rack meticulously sheathed and stitched in leather and hung on the wall so that it projects out into the room like a playfully erect handiwork. Of his 1914 bottle rack, Duchamp said, “It can no longer be a matter of plastic Beauty. The idea of contemplation disappears completely. Simply note that it was a bottle-rack which changed its destination.”3 In Lipski’s version, the bottle-rack is given new directions, only reaching its destination through physical manipulation and the motor of plastic Beauty. But the contemplation of such beauty in Lipski’s artworks is never pure or undisturbed, because the objects he employs in these works are never entirely stripped of prior reference. However transformed, they carry their histories into the work with them. Along with the considerable visual appeal of Untitled (1994) comes a complex of mental, physical, and emotional associations arising from the admixture of thousands of razor blades to a Medivac stretcher. That combination of menace and rescue works on the skin of the viewer as well as on the eyes. As Duchamp noted in his Green Box: “Razor blades which / cut well and / razor blades which no / longer cut / The first have / ‘cuttage’ in reserve.”4 Perhaps the closest Lipski comes to the “assisted readymade” is a work like Salt Box (Psychiatrist’s Couch) (1993), which effects the transformation of a child-sized psychiatrist’s couch into a salt box with relatively little manipulation. The white of the rock salt contrasts pleasingly with the black upholstery, and the polished silver ring

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Artwork (1993) by Donald Lipski; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York City

appears to settle in on its own to complete the appliance. But what sort of appliance is it—one to cleanse the tortured psyche, or pour salt in the wounds? The more one tries to separate the “matter of plastic Beauty” from these other (associative) matters, the less accurate to one’s actual experience of Lipski’s works it becomes. Looking at Untitled 89–20 (1989), one might notice the tactile, seeming softness of the gray material against the six harder, more regular and resistant tines, at about the same time that one recognizes a fan wrapped with steel wool. And the aesthetic integrity of the work has something to do with the way the purely sensual apprehension of it combines with the sense of those potentially spinning blades wrapped and stilled— suspended there for our delectation. In one of his treatises on aesthetics and the combinatory arts, Frederick Sommer calls aesthetics “the non-judgmental assessment of structure,”5 and one of the enduring pleasures of Lipski’s art is the way the stubborn insistence of identity in materials gives way to

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relational urge. In Untitled 90–40 (1990), a copious mass of azure blue shoelaces gives up its former binding utility to form an object of stunning beauty and presence—a swelling blue heart, in fullness, with erotic cleavage and lots of strings attached. Lipski’s attention to color has been little remarked upon, but it is remarkable. The greens of the rubber bands in Untitled 91–17 (1991), of the plants in Water Lilies 58 (1990), and of the broken glass in Free Reef (1987) are precisely calibrated in each case to work in saturated accumulation, to enhance the effect of cohesion. In the anagrammatically titled Free Reef (an homage to Carl Andre), the way the color comes out of the ends of the broken glass shards adds to the aquatic effect. Rather than the result of forced couplings, these pieces are participations of a sort, more like recognitions. And when they work, the combinations seem, if not inevitable, at least meet and right, as if these things were meant for each other, and as if each miscellaneous thing was a part of some grand design. They are apprehensions of the adhesiveness of things, of the desire of things to cohere. The smile that often comes when one first sees a Lipski piece is partly due to that recognition, but is also an automatic response to that pleasurable twist in the mind as one tries to make rational sense of the combination and fails. It’s the failure that makes us smile. Lipski’s wall pieces are collections of sketches, the seeds from which all the other work has grown. Gathering Dust—300 miniature sculptures arranged in a grid—was first exhibited at Artists Space in New York in 1977, and then three months later at the Museum of Modern Art. Each tiny piece is a preliminary study, an impromptu test of a sculptural idea. Again, color is a prime element, in the individual pieces and in the arrangement of the whole. Lipski’s art is particularly well suited to contemporary postindustrial society, a society of plethoric overproduction, wealth, and waste. But his art is not plethoric. It is, rather, remarkably light on its feet, transforming glut into spare elegance. The work clearly responds more to minimalism than to pop, but with a twist. In his conclusion to a 1990 essay on Lipski’s work, David Rubin wrote: “Although minimalism was born of a disdain for metaphor and materials with associative value, Lipski has brought new life to its

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most cherished principles. In subjectifying minimalism, altering it as he does objects, Lipski has effectively transformed it from an art of the few into an art for the many. In applying minimalist aesthetics to familiar objects that tend to elicit a wide range of personal experiences, Lipski is essentially a benevolent populist.”6 Although the constituent objects are not chosen for their metaphoric content, this content, when it exists, is also transformed. The candle pieces trade on the symbolic—votive and ceremonial—associations of candles in various ways. In Untitled C-40 (1991), the two ends of a large dark elbow pipe are stuffed with white tapers, pointed down. This draping action shows up often in Lipski’s work— in several of the Poxabogue Pond and Water Lilies glass pipe works, in the new “Would Work” piece, Dialog (1999), and in one of the miniatures in the wall work Tobaccolage (1993), where a smaller elbow pipe is stuffed with cigarettes. When the tapers of Untitled C-40 are lit, they burn up rather than down, and the flames and smoke leave the traces of their struggle against gravity on both candles and candleholder. The pure white of the tapers is smeared and sullied with soot. The poet and critic Marjorie Welish has noted the “sense of the anarchic, or, alternatively, of play tinged with violence” in this piece.7 In Untitled C-19 (1991), one half of a sousaphone case is packed with hundreds of unlit candles. Their potential conflagration is held in suspension, turning the oversize instrument case into a kind of well-tempered instrument of portable mourning. One of the operative tensions in Lipski’s art has been the conflicted relation between symbol and object. In 1990, at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, Lipski produced a series of works using the American flag as a sculptural material, prompted in part by congressional attempts to make flag desecration a crime (this was the year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a Texas flag desecration law unconstitutional). Lipski’s title for the series was “Who’s Afraid of Red, White & Blue?”8 It didn’t take long for his question to be answered; a confused but purposeful patriot vandal (flagellant?) responded to what he perceived as Lipski’s desecration of the Stars and Stripes by slashing one of Lipski’s large flag balls to pieces. The logic of such an act is difficult to parse, but it must have gone something like this: “You desecrate my symbol by transforming it into

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art, so I will desecrate your art, in the process desecrating my own symbol doubly.” Or perhaps the patriot vandal was implicitly acknowledging Lipski’s transformative powers. Since Lipski had effectively transformed the symbol of the flag into art, that art could now be attacked directly, without harming the symbol. Speaking of an earlier piece that presaged the “Who’s Afraid” work—Half Conceals, Half Discloses (1988), a 20-foot-long flag that Lipski had perforated in a regular pattern with burn holes and titled with a phrase from “The Star-Spangled Banner”—Lipski said: “People ask: Is this desecration? I say no, its decoration.”9 The very idea that using the material flag to make art might be seen as unpatriotic struck Lipski as an essentially un-American idea. It is also a decidedly un-Lipskian one. From the flag balls to the flag chair to the wonderfully, symmetrically insistent flag book, these are clearly celebrations—graceful, seemly adornments—not desecrations. In this, as always, Lipski goes forward with a kind of willed innocence that is invigorating. In place of studied distance and obfuscation, Lipski says, in effect, “What you see is what you get. If you don’t get it, you’re not looking, and if you get something else, that’s your responsibility. My responsibility is to make it beautiful.” In several highly public artworks, Lipski has found some surprising ways to fulfill that responsibility socially. The Yearling (1992) is composed of a toy horse standing on the seat of a child’s nursery chair. What makes it work is that the horse is the size of a real pinto pony, and the bright red child’s chair is over 20 feet high. Till the end of May 1998, this steel and fiberglass sculpture stood at the southeast entrance to Central Park, and was one of the most successful and affecting pieces of public sculpture I’ve ever seen in New York. Whenever I caught a glimpse of it, passing on foot or from the window of a cab or bus, it made me smile. Towering over the people scurrying around on the sidewalk below, gently mocking General Sherman on his horse across the way in Grand Army Plaza, it was a benign yet powerful image. Not everyone shared this view. The piece was originally made for a school in Washington Heights, but the school’s principal objected to it. He apparently took it as some kind of personal insult. And perhaps it is an insult, to adult propriety, pedantry, and

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Sirshasana (1999) by Donald Lipski; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York City. Collection of Grand Central Market, New York and MTA Arts for Transit

small-mindedness. Like all of Lipski’s works, it will not reduce to a single, literal meaning, but it appeared to many of us as a monument to the child’s imagination, to its willful resilience and fortitude. One person who surely will understand it this way is Donald Lipski’s son, born the year of its making.10 The public artwork Lipski completed in 1998 for Grand Central Terminal in New York marks another departure. Titled Sirshasana, it consists of a huge artificial olive tree, suspended upside down from the ceiling. The tree’s roots are covered in gold leaf, and 5,000 Austrian lead crystals hang from its branches. The tree itself was fashioned by “the world’s foremost artificial tree builder,” the fortuitously named Jonquil Le Master, and the pendant crystals were supplied by Swarovski of Austria. Placed just inside the 43rd Street entrance to the newly opened Grand Central Market, the piece rapidly became the talk of midtown. Because it so completely fills the domed ceiling area above the entrance, its visual reception comes in stages. At first, people may

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just see a fulsome chandelier, with thousands of crystals sparkling in the lights. Then they might see further into it, to the tree trunk and spreading branches, and eventually, the gilded roots secreted high up in the dome. Even though Le Master’s craft achieves a flawless verisimilitude, most viewers will not recognize it at first as an olive tree. And even if they do, what are they to make of the replacement of the tree’s oily fruit with lead crystals, or the gilding of the upended roots? In this most recent public work, Lipski has moved from exploring the sculptural properties of a symbol (as in the flag works, especially Wave) to exploring the symbolic properties of a sculpture. The Cauldron, which he installed at the Parrish Art Museum in 1996—consisting, in part, of two large charred trees extending horizontally end to end and sharing a common root ball—certainly presages this one, but Sirshasana is much more symbolically loaded. The title refers to a yogic posture or asana that involves standing on one’s head. The inverted tree, with its roots in heaven and its branches reaching down to the earth—as a sort of bridge linking heaven and earth—is a primary image in both Indian and Judaic mystical traditions. It is described in detail in the earliest Indian scriptures, the Vedas and Upanishads (c. 900–500 b.c.). “The name given to the Indian asvattha, the tree of life,” writes Hans Peter Duer, “is sometimes quoted as urdhvamulam, ‘with roots toward the top,’ or, as we read in the Chandogya Upanishad, as nyagrodha, ‘growing downward.’”11 And in kabbalistic texts, it appears as the Sephirotic Tree. The thirteenth-century Zohar says: “The Tree of Life extends from above downwards, and is the sun which illuminates us all.”12 In his book The Tree of Life, Roger Cook juxtaposes a picture of a Buddha Tree temple decoration from China with a photograph of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. “Questioning the meaning of the visual image,” writes Cook, “the twentieth-century artist Marcel Duchamp removed this apparently meaningless Parisian bottle-rack from its utilitarian context and exhibited it as a ‘work of art.’ In doing so, he drew attention to its dignity and power as a symbol. Placed next to this Buddhist Celestial Tree, its latent symbolism is further brought out.”13 Whether or not one buys Cook’s projection, one has to admit that the purity of Duchamp’s gesture is in

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increasing danger of being contaminated the longer it exists in the world of things. Meanwhile, Lipski’s contamination is growing to include ever more substance as he further explores the relation of symbol to object. At a time when the separation between contemporary art and its public seems to be widening daily, Lipski is finding new ways to make a public art that is neither condescending nor pandering, neither didactic nor empty. Two women are standing before one of the full-to-bursting glass cases of food near the entrance to the new Grand Central Market, expressing their approval of the display. A security guard approaches, lifts one finger like a sage, and says, “If you want to see something really beautiful, look up.”

Colony (1983) by Terry Winters; courtesy of the artist

Signal to Noise

That’s the tension, that’s where the traction is. Between image and organizing principle. —Terry Winters, interview by Nancy Princenthal (2009) Ontologically, traditional images are abstractions of the first order insofar as they abstract from the concrete world while technical images are abstractions of the third order: they abstract from texts which abstract from traditional images which themselves abstract from the concrete world. . . . Ontologically, traditional images signify phenomena whereas technical images signify concepts. —Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2000) Painting is where this new visual consciousness rose, and I think probably every evolution of it will occur in painting first. And I’ll tell you why: people can only deal with so much. —Stan Brakhage, in conversation with Philip Taaffe (1997)

We have recently entered a new period of political and economic instability on a global scale. The collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1989 and 1990 left world capital without a viable counter or antagonist, and aggressive neoliberal policies rapidly globalized markets. As soon as the world economy became truly integrated and globalized, it became possible for it to truly fail, globally, and it

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did. Many now believe this world financial and economic crisis will soon be exacerbated by environmental catastrophe. In the wake of these growing crises, the fundamentals of scientific inquiry also seem to have been shaken. According to some analysts, physics, the science of matter and energy, has been overwhelmed over the last three decades by a vast number of “string theories,” which cannot be proven or disproven by experiment, and have thus become a matter of faith.1 Physics has become more and more disconnected from the physical world, which itself appears to be disappearing. Scientists now say that 97 percent of all the stuff in the universe is invisible and almost completely unknown to us, consisting of dark matter and dark energy. It seems that Heraclitus was making an understatement when he said that nature loves to hide, and what William James called the “unseen order” has become rather terrifyingly reified. Faced with this simultaneously disappearing and threatening environment, what’s a painter to do? If you’re Terry Winters, you go back to basic methods—“my approach is very basic; it’s like drawing or writing”2—and basic principles—“Through manual labor the haptic imagination is activated—revealing graphic expressions of vitalized geometries”3—and you take strength from what is possible: Abstraction is a category of work and thought that is easily accessible to everybody now. Everybody understands abstract painting. Now that twentieth-century painting is finally over, everybody gets it. . . . I think it’s run a certain course and become part of the lexicon of what it means to be contemporary. I’m interested in how that language can be extended, and distended or torqued to address something beyond the rhetoric. To make something new, to project it into a new place.4 Refusing to remain within the inherited modernist rhetoric of abstract painting, Winters wants painting to contribute to the next iteration of that new visual consciousness. And it may be that painting is singularly well positioned to do just that. There is nothing nostalgic about making something with one’s hands—at least, not yet. Even though what it means to be human is changing, our primary experience of the world continues to be aesthetic; that is, it comes to

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us through the exercise of our five senses. What Winters calls “the manual imagination” will remain predominant as long as we have bodies. But in terms of images, certainly, things have shifted significantly toward the acheiropoetic (not made by hand). What Vilém Flusser called “technical images” (comprising all photographic-based images and their digital extensions) have quantitatively overwhelmed our visual environment. Ten million images are uploaded to MySpace every day. One might argue that all images are technically “technical” (derived from technique) and that paintings and drawings are in some sense more technical than photographs or digital images, since the word derives from the Greek tekhne¯, referring to art or skill. But Flusser defines the technical image as “a technological or mechanical image created by apparatus,” and apparatus as “an overarching term for a non-human agency, e.g. the camera, the computer, and the ‘apparatus’ of the State or of the market.”5 So we can distinguish between manual and machinic images, and one of the distinguishing characteristics is the intention and the level of automaticity. In the Iliad, Homer used the Greek term automatos to describe the movements of the gates of Olympus and the goldenwheeled tripods of Hephaistos, which produce results otherwise accomplished by hand.6 Over the last 150 years, projections have been that these automatic devices would someday free human beings entirely from the drudgery of physical labor, leaving us more time to expand our minds and perfect society. Many of our beliefs were transferred from the gods to technology, and theological questions have been largely displaced by what Heidegger called “The Question Concerning Technology.”7 As Avital Ronell put it, “The death of God has left us with a lot of appliances.” We believe in technology, and we believe in technical images, and these beliefs leave us vulnerable to manipulation through apparatuses. In Flusser’s phenomenological reading of technical images, he identifies the principal feature of apparatuses: Apparatuses were invented in order to function automatically, in other words, independently of future human involvement. This is the intention with which they were created: that the

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human being would be ruled out. And this intention has been successful without a doubt. . . . Apparatuses now function as an end in themselves, “automatically” as it were, with the single aim of maintaining and improving themselves. This rigid, unintentional, functional automaticity is what needs to be made the object of criticism.8 For Flusser, the stakes in this critical initiative are very high indeed, for it must “reveal the fact that there is no place for human freedom within the area of automated, programmed and programming apparatuses, in order finally to show a way in which it is nevertheless possible to open up a space for freedom.”9 He finds hope, ultimately, in the efforts of “all those who are attempting to create a space for human intention in a world dominated by apparatuses,” and who “reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in face of the chance necessity of death.”10 NAKED EYE Terry Winters has drawn on all kinds of technical images over the years as source material for his paintings, drawings, and prints: anatomical images, natural history images, microscopic and telescopic images, images made with mathematical formulae or algorithms, and information systems and computer graphics. But Winters’s transformations of technical images respond to the current and rapidly changing dynamics of the visual field. He is one of the artists who made it possible for painting to renew itself as a primary means of exploration and extension of the visual field into the twenty-first century. And he did this not by ceding territory and ambition to technical images, but by growing the proprioceptive possibilities of painting and drawing as necessary knowledge. This is what sets him apart. There is nothing automatic in Winters’s pictures. Each mark is intentional, moving from head to hand and back again, in constant feedback. From Flusser’s vantage point, Winters is infiltrating the apparatus, permeating its interstices, and refiguring the visual field. (Flusser points out that the word apparatus is derived from the Latin

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verb meaning “to prepare.” The apparatus is always prepared, whereas the painter is never prepared.) In the output of an apparatus, there is no feedback, so the result is automatic and ultimately autocratic. Feedback makes a different kind of progress possible, because it introduces new energy into the system. “Ontologically,” Flusser wrote, “traditional images signify phenomena whereas technical images signify concepts.”11 Phenomena are remarkable appearances, whereas concepts are things conceived. The chain of mediation is longer with technical images. In drawing and painting, there is less interference between the maker and the thing itself—a pencil (Sanford/Design Ebony/Jet Black/Extra Smooth) or a brush or foam pad loaded with oil paint—so it is by definition more immediate. But there is something in technical images that Terry Winters wants. Standing over a table full of drawings (Animal Associations, 2008) in his Tribeca studio, he told me, “I want to make drawings that are as clear and evident as a photograph; to make an image of something you can’t photograph as believable as a technical image.” When the endlessly reproducible photographic image lost its aura of uniqueness, it gained another: the aura of believability. As Flusser (and many others) have pointed out, this believability is based on a series of misunderstandings about the nature and operation of technical images, but that doesn’t lessen the effect. The most persistent misunderstanding about photographs is that they have a direct relation to the real, that they are one-to-one transcriptions of reality, and the analogous misapprehension of paintings is that they are purely fictional and have no direct relation to the real. Terry Winters’s desire for believability indicates, I think, a wish to make a certain direct connection with the contemporary viewer. In 2001, I spoke with Leon Golub about the relation between painting and photography, and he told me that he was “trying to make some connection to what is going on in the world. To make some sort of contact. And I use the instruments that our modern world offers, these extraordinary instruments of photography and film and computers.”12 Golub and Winters are very different kinds of painters, but they were and are both painters, through and through, and they

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both were and are committed to present and future relevance. Toward the end of our conversation, Golub voiced his belief that painting would only become more relevant in the future: Painting has the capacity to send out signals, and you may be attuned to that signal at that particular moment. . . . [Painting] may become even more critical due to the very transience of virtually everything else. You know? As everything goes speeding by and we’re running for our lives, so to speak, painting may have staying power, for those who are susceptible to it!13 SIGNAL TO NOISE As our day-to-day communications environment grows ever more crowded and complex, the signal-to-noise ratio plummets. The signal, the sign for giving notice, is increasingly overwhelmed by the din, the nausea, of noise, and sifting for signal consumes more and more of our time. The signal-to-noise ratio first arose as a measurement in electrical engineering and quickly migrated to other fields, especially neuroscience. In this ratio, signal refers to meaningful or desired information and noise to background interference. In digital image processing, the Rose Criterion (named after physicist Albert Rose, whose work in converting optical images to electrical signals led to the development of the modern television tube) states that a signal-to-noise ratio of at least 5 is required to be able to distinguish image features at 100 percent certainty. The term signal-to-noise was eventually picked up by hackers and quickly gained widespread use online, to refer to the ratio of useful information to fake or irrelevant data. SIGNAL AND IMAGE The image is a fossil of its evolution and hovers in the time and space of its creation. —Klaus Kertess, “Drawing Desires,” in Terry Winters (1992)14

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In Terry Winters’s work over the last decade, certain things are constant—the work in series, the central importance of drawing, the close attention to materials—but the relation between the image and the organizing principle has always been in flux. This, as he has said, is the engine, where the tension and the traction are. His prodigious drawing is constantly discovering and transforming new images, and the paintings put forms and images into play in a seemingly inexhaustible array of energetic transfers. The seeds of the spherical and molecular forms in the paintings from Winters’s show “Knotted Graphs” at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York in December 2008, can be found in paintings from 1983 and 1984 like Colony (1983), Morula I and II (1983), and Double Gravity (1984). Today, these forms remind us of stem cells at the stage of explosive embryonic growth, when all is possible. A great deal of our future on this planet appears to depend on events occurring at the microscopic level, on particles too small to see with the naked eye, moving through charged grounds. We cannot see our future, but we must imagine it. When does something become an image? Is it when enough of it is recognized, as one of those “things the mind already knows” that Jasper Johns pointed to? Surely an image can be something previously unknown and unseen, but there must be enough in it to signal a recognition, to prepare a place for it. The image is not the organizing principle. It is an appearance. Paying attention to appearances is, or can be, at variance with the desire to organize them. The tension, and traction, is in this movement from image to organizing principle. Ten years ago, the philosopher John Rajchman responded to the problem of the flat-bed picture plane first raised by Leo Steinberg in 1968. Steinberg, Rajchman writes, found in Robert Rauschenberg’s works a situation wherein “the picture plane abandons its appeal to upright posture and frontal vision as in the classical window on the world. Opaque, tiltable, mixing disparate elements, no longer governed by figure-ground or near-far relations of projection or Gestalt psychology, it acquires a new function: it becomes an operational device, an abstract machine. . . .”15 Rajchman then proposed that Terry Winters’s paintings of the time, especially the “Graphic Primitives” works, were moving into a place where the “window

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through which one sees, or the frame within which one locates” was being eclipsed by “the table of information in which things slide back and forth, images arising from other images rather than from external things.”16 It now appears that this field of visual information that Steinberg saw behind Rauschenberg’s paintings was the first effluvium of Flusser’s apparatus, and it is this effluvium of images and information (defined by their excess) that Terry Winters now draws on, and subjects to the painting process, turning this table of information (concepts about concepts) back into a window on phenomena, through which archaic images move. One of the things that initially attracted me to Vilém Flusser’s phenomenological analysis of technical images was his use of the word “magic” to describe the effects of images—“action at a distance.” This space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context. Such a world is structurally different from that of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example: In the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical.17 It is in this magical world that Winters’s paintings primarily function. Flusser defined an image as “a significant surface on which the elements of the image act in a magic fashion towards one another.”18 Terry Winters said, “I see the painting process as a combination of the technical and the magical—invisible forces are generated by the images, and they’re moving.”19

IV

Top: Gesture III (1964–65) by Leon Golub, photographed by David Reynolds; art © Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery Bottom: I Am on My Way Running (detail, 1979) by Nancy Spero; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York City

The Fighting Is a Dance, Too LEON GOLUB AND NANCY SPERO

For many of us, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero have long been exemplars of artistic and political courage and commitment—resistance fighters who persevered and triumphed. That two such radical artists managed to survive, and even thrive, is remarkable. That they did so in the intimate collaboration of 50 years of marriage (and the raising of three sons) is even more surprising. And that this collaboration was maintained not by gingerly avoiding conflict, but by encouraging the most generative disagreements and drawing energy from the resultant volatility, is a real mystery—to them, it seems, as well as to us. The deepest part of this mystery is the relation between these two fiercely independent artists’ works. How did their life together affect their work? The question is more valid and insistent in regard to Golub and Spero than it might be for some other artist couples, since theirs has always been a thoroughly implicated art. One of the things they agreed upon early was that art cannot and should not be strictly separated from the rest of life. Their staunchly antiformalist (feminist and figurative) stance set them outside the artistic mainstream from the beginning. Golub and Spero’s first joint exhibition occurred in 1958 at Indiana University, where Golub was teaching. But when the gallery

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announcement appeared, it irritatingly read “Leon Golub and Nancy Spero (Mrs. Leon Golub).” After that, they didn’t show together for almost 30 years. In the 1990s it became possible to do so, and the relation between their works was directly addressed in the context of extensive collaborative retrospective exhibitions, including the large retrospective at the American Center in Paris, the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T., and the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1994–95, and the 1996 exhibition in Japan, where they were awarded the third Hiroshima Art Prize. These shows revealed that the relation between the two bodies of work is much richer and more complex than was previously assumed. At first approach, the works of Golub and Spero look so different that it is difficult to perceive likeness. Golub was always a manly painter (in the way Cézanne was a manly painter), but he was also a brutalist, attacking his canvases with rubbing alcohol and a meat cleaver! His most subtle effects were achieved through muscular overextension and outsized gestures, and his subject matter included the look and feel of male power as exercised in the world. In his attempt to show the real face of power, Golub produced portraits of political leaders from 1976 to 1979, and then spent years portraying those the poet Charles Olson called “Finks of the Bosses,” the men used to carry out the policies of people in power, in the parallel but unseen world they inhabit. Repelled by the extravagant claims being made for big male abstract expressionist painting, Spero turned her back on that medium in 1964, and took up the devalued and “feminized” medium of collage, hand printing, and marks on paper. If the art world wanted to marginalize her, she’d sparrow-blast them, with paper dolls that spit curses back in their faces! She introduced all kinds of “impurities” into the pictorial, including text—first ventriloquizing the brilliant screams of Artaud, then the language men have used to demean women, then women’s rituals and songs—in passionate illuminations of cruelty and endurance, apotropaic talismans of words and images to interrupt the language of power and turn it back on itself. Although some stylistic rhymes can be found in their separate works, the real similarities are to be found not in style but in character.

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Both artists have engendered an art of contingency rather than certainty. Rejecting dominant claims for the perfectibility of art, they have both insisted on an art that is engaged with the world, that meets the world head on, without apology or special pleading, and without resort to the pieties of art for art’s sake. (As Spero succinctly put it in 1994: “The more acceptable work remains within a discourse circumscribed by the idea of art itself.”)1 Both practiced an agonistic, public art—somatic and political. Both were inveterate image scavengers, descending into the Dark to bring them back. Both looked back to find ways to move forward, mining the history of art for new sources of energy. Both focused on gendered bodies in motion, in transformation and passage. And both pursued the representation of power in a way that opened a space for resistance, a fissure of possibility in the public imaginary. Golub’s large drawings in sanguine conté on vellum and black conté on paper are all studies for the “Gigantomachy” paintings of 1965–67. The sanguine drawings were made in Paris in 1962–64, where Golub and Spero had been living since 1959, and the black drawings were made just after they moved to New York in 1964. Up until about 1960–61, Golub’s figures had been more or less fixed, presented in mostly frontal poses. After that, he wanted them to move, to put his men into action. The drawing Gigantomachy V is a head in profile, but it is the head of a man of action—a fighter, with a broken nose smashed against his cheek, a gaping toothless mouth, and a tuft of hair sticking straight out behind as a result of the forward thrust of the head, moving wound-first into the future. Gigantomachy IX is a fallen figure, rather awkward, with legs too long, and one severed arm stuck upright like a column on a base of broken fingers. Golub’s chief inspiration for these figures was the high-relief frieze on the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon (now in Berlin). Completed in the second half of the second century b.c., it depicts the war between the Olympian gods and goddesses and the giants. Golub was attracted not to the classical per se, but to the classical in ruins. In the Pergamon frieze as it has survived, both gods and monsters are damaged and dismembered, eroded and fragmented.

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Nyx, the personification of Night, attacks a giant who has vanished, leaving only his legs behind. Zeus is headless, the giant Porphyrion has lost his face and hands, and Herakles has a badly broken nose. To the influence of these late-phase Hellenistic figures, Golub added contemporary photographs of athletes in motion from wrestling and soccer magazines. The figure in Gesture III, in black conté, could be a modern running back in full stride, with all his weight forward on a massive left leg and his right leg foreshortened and bent behind. His face is that of the broken-nosed fighter, but, as Golub pointed out to me in his studio, it could also be that of Marlon Brando. Writing about the “Gigantomachies” in 1967, Golub called them “a kind of barbaric realism,” and said they “document the frenzy of today and so view American power, violence, mass death, and destruction.”2 The “Gigantomachy” paintings are the furthest extension of Golub’s existential kinetics. They are a visceral realization of the development of consciousness. With them, his earlier monsters—the “burnt,” “damaged,” “fallen,” and “thwarted” men—came up into relentless fate, and into conflict with one another. From here, they would soon come into history, with the corrosive clarity of the Napalm and Vietnam paintings. But in these drawings we first see them stirring from their ancient monumentality—still anonymous and chthonic, but beginning to move toward modern differentiation. What if, when we spoke, our words came out in big block letters and were suspended there, so that we had to live with them? Nancy Spero’s illuminations have always resonated with poets. I first saw her work in reproductions in Clayton Eshleman’s seminal literary journals Caterpillar and Sulfur. Spero’s engagement with the materiality of language and the symbolism of images offered the hope of a new language, one perhaps less hampered by ideology. The panel Licit Exp is from a series with that title made in 1974. The title is derived from the “Explicit Explanation” that concludes each chapter of an eighth-century Spanish monk’s commentaries on the Book of the Apocalypse, illuminated by Ende and Emeterius in 975 a.d., and seen by Spero in a facsimile at the Metropolitan Museum of Art library. The Beatus Apocalypse of Gerona depicts the wars of

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angels and demons, and makes explicit the horrifying fate of nonbelievers. Licit Exp is cut from the center of “Explicit Explanations.” It can also be read as an inversion of “explicit” (so, implicit) or a contraction of “licit (permitted) expression.” The full phrase, “Explicit Explanation,” was printed on the first panel of Spero’s explicitly feminist work, the epic agonal “Torture of Women” series in 1976. In 1974, Spero made many of these small panels with stamped phrases—“smoke lick, knife cut, body count, acid rain, fascist pig, torture in Vietnam, Made in USA, normal love, shoot out, life force depletions”—and drawn or printed figures, experimenting with different combinations of word and image. A number of these panels were inserted into The Hours of the Night, 1974, a processional piece consisting of 11 vertical columns or banners, each made from four sheets of drawing paper glued end to end. Each column had “the hours of the night” printed vertically on the left side, “the first hour,” “the second hour,” and so on horizontally on successive panels, and collaged inserts placed irregularly on the columns. The title The Hours of the Night refers to the Egyptian sun-god Ra’s passage through the Underworld each night in order to be able to rise again in the morning. To get through the 12 hours of night, Ra had to know the right words to say at each hour to placate the beings that guarded it. Spero repeated the 11-panel format of The Hours of the Night a decade later, in Sky Goddess/Egyptian Acrobat, 1987–88. When Spero exhibited in the Cairo Biennale in 1998, an Egyptian artist and critic named Nazli Madkour wrote a fascinating essay registering her discomfort with the magical properties of Spero’s works—the way she sends curses and casts spells with certain pieces, and “invokes the powers of goddesses and spirits and imparts talismans for joy and happiness” in others. Madkour goes into some detail about Spero’s use of “all the stratagems of magic arts in order to make destiny more vulnerable,” including: The extensive use of repetition of specific forms and figures . . . The amputation and distortion of figures and written words and texts . . . Isolating parts of the body to invoke and magnify the particular powers

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of a specific organ. The recurrent use of the opisthotonos posture (arched figures), which is an archaic hysteric acrobatic trance due to a shock . . . Constantly varying and shifting the position of the same figure so that it avoids being pinned down and controlled by the gaze. and The sadomasochistic reenacting of the Passion . . . Madkour concludes that Spero’s art is “a ‘disturbatory’ art of resistance, and despite its aggressive sparks, it aims at rebuking aggression rather than committing it. It is feminist for resorting to the sacred and the occult for assistance. It is feminist for its compassion and social responsibility, and it is feminist in the way it deals with personal suffering, which reaches sublimation—beyond chauvinist narcissism—in a communion with collective human suffering.”3 The Hours of the Night, which comes just after the rage of the Codex Artaud in Spero’s oeuvre, is a work of poetic ritual. It is also a magical device to make things happen, to get through the terrors of the Night (and of War), and keep coming back. It is a talisman for survival. Speaking of the Codex Artaud in a conversation with Katy Kline and Helaine Posner in 1994, Spero said “Perhaps I was mocking the giants that had been pouring forth in Leon’s Gigantomachies, and was reacting to the pompous world of postwar American painting, with its huge spaces and gesturings.” And later in the conversation, Golub replied, “I recognize in Nancy’s work a subtle, complex and powerful subversion of much of what I’m about. She really can interrupt or counter these posturings. But even when she interrupts them, they are still there, because the world is still out there.”4 I Am on My Way Running, a horizontal scroll with painting and typewriter collage from 1979, is an initiation work. The drawn and printed figure of a woman running, with her arms extended like wings, is accompanied by lines from a young girl’s puberty ceremony used by the Papago people: I am on my way running I am on my way running Looking towards me is the edge of the world

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I am trying to reach it The edge of the world does not look far away To that I am on my way running The small panel carrying an invocation of the goddess Artemis from the same year, For Artemis Who Heals Woman’s Pain, is a related piece, since Artemis presided over women’s transitions, especially that of puberty—the passage from virgin (parthenos) to fully acculturated woman (gyne). One possible etymology for the name “Artemis” is “she who cuts up,” making her an especially appropriate deity for a collagist. In recent works, Spero’s running or dancing figures have leaped off the surface of the paper into architectural space, tattooed on walls or windows—out of time and into space. Over the years, Golub and Spero made a way to live and work together (sharing a studio from 1977 on), in an intricate dance of implicate subjectivities, zigzagging into the future. Finally, the most astonishing thing about the Golub/Spero collaboration is that their works seem more relevant now than ever, in the way they both speak directly to our distraction culture and the virtual hustle—she with her new massive cinematic subway mosaic and he with his new kind of distract expressionist paintings, incorporating graffiti-like fragments as “pseudometaphysics” and garbled transmissions. I doubt if it ever happened quite this way, but I imagine them working in the studio, back to back—she working on one wall and he on the other—and at the end of the day, they turn around.

Gigantomachy V (1962-63) by Leon Golub, photographed by David Reynolds; art © Leon Golub/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; courtesy of Ronald Feldman Gallery

Fallen Figures and Heads

OLDER MEN STANDING I, II MEN—STANDING I, II, III FAT MEN FIGURES—DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE GESTURES I, II, III, IV GESTURES—MEN IN SUITS SEATED MEN I, II, III KNEELING/BENDING OVER I, II SEATED WOMEN I, II CHILDREN WOMEN I, II, III, IV, V OLDER WOMEN ANATOMY, MAPPELTHORPE ANATOMY I, II DETAILS—ANATOMY SKELETONS SKULLS ARMOR HERALDIC & MYTHIC SPACE/COLOR I, II, III JAMES NACHTWEY

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DISTORTED PERSPECTIVE I, II DISTORTED PERSPECTIVES—HEADS—HANDS EXTREME EXAMPLES, ETC. I, II ALPHABETS FLAGS YOGA HORSES EAGLES BULLS SNAKES FEET EYES/MOUTH EARS MEN LEFT HAND RIGHT HAND BOTH HANDS WOMEN LEFT HAND RIGHT HAND BOTH HANDS NAPALM EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS WOMEN I, II EXAGGERATED EXPRESSIONS MEN I, II MERCS I, II, III, IV SPORTS I, II, III PRISONERS & HEADS PRISONERS I, II, III PRISONER, FALLEN FIGURES, DRAGGED RIOTS I, II, III, IV, V FALLEN FIGURES & HEADS FALLEN FIGURE I, II MISC: CHAIRS, WOOD, FIRE, ETC. UNIFORM DETAILS, GESTURES POLICE ACTION MISC I, II, III LE MONDE À L’ENVERS

FALLEN FIGURES AND HEADS

EROTIC HORSING AROUND BACK VIEWS GUNS, ETC. DRESSING TANKS-PLANES AUTOS/TRUCKS WHITE WOMEN—HEADS FRONTAL LEFT PROFILE RIGHT PROFILE LOOKING DOWN LOOKING UP OVER THE SHOULDER CRYING OR PAIN OLDER WOMEN BLACK WOMEN—HEADS FRONTAL OVER THE SHOULDER LOOKING DOWN LOOKING UP LEFT PROFILE RIGHT PROFILE CRYING OR PAIN OLDER BLACK WOMEN—HEADS FRONTAL RIGHT PROFILE LEFT PROFILE OVER THE SHOULDER LOOKING DOWN LOOKING UP WHITE MEN—HEADS FRONTAL I, II, III, IV OVER THE SHOULDER LOOKING DOWN LOOKING UP RIGHT PROFILE I, II

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LEFT PROFILE I, II CRYING OR PAIN OLDER WHITE MEN—HEADS FRONTAL OVER THE SHOULDER LEFT PROFILE RIGHT PROFILE LOOKING UP LOOKING DOWN CRYING OR PAIN BLACK MEN—HEADS FRONTAL OVER THE SHOULDER RIGHT PROFILE LEFT PROFILE LOOKING UP LOOKING DOWN CRYING OR PAIN OLDER BLACK MEN—HEADS FRONTAL OVER THE SHOULDER LOOKING UP LOOKING DOWN LEFT PROFILE RIGHT PROFILE WOMEN DRINKING & SMOKING DRINKING CIGARETTES BLACK MEN I, II OLDER BLACK MEN OLDER BLACK WOMEN BLACK WOMEN MALE FIGURES HERALDIC & MYTHIC & ANAMORPHOSES LIONS/EAGLES PRISON

FALLEN FIGURES AND HEADS

TITLES, SLOGANS—I, II POLITICAL FIGURES CURRENT I, II, III, IV FUTURE PROJECTS I, II, III SPHINX/LIONS LIONS/EAGLES LIONS I, II DOGS, CURRENT DOGS SPECIAL I, II, III, IV FRONTAL LEFT PROFILE RIGHT PROFILE DOGS—BOOK PROJECT COSMOGONIES I, II DRAWINGS, GRAFFITI, I, II GRAFFITI/SLOGANS I, II DRAWINGS, GRAFFITI DRAWINGS I, II ITALIAN GRAFFITI IMAGES I, II, III, IV, V TATTOOS MALE—HEADS FEMALE—HEADS HEADS POLITICAL PORTRAITS/SPECIAL THRENODY/GESTURES ACTIVE FIGURES GYMNAST, GREEK ATHLETES GREEK—SPORTS—WAR ALPHABETS AMERICAN EL SALVADOR COMPUTER IMAGES USED/UNUSED CURRENT, I, II MALE FIGURES CLASSICAL

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The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than a list, instrument of wondrous hypotyposis. —Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (1983) People are divided over them. Either one makes lists or one doesn’t, and the ones who do are changed by them. They start making lists as an aid to memory and to bring a sense of order into their lives. But in time, the lists work so well that their makers drift into amnesia and chaos. They develop unhealthy attachments to their lists, as their work is increasingly cut out for them. Finally, they are left helpless and listless. This progression is presaged in the etymology of lists, where the boundaries between list and lust, or list and listen, are quite porous. The currently prevalent sense of list as “catalogue” has a Teutonic origin, including the German leiste, “a border or edging,” which was eventually transferred to a “strip” of paper or parchment containing a “list” of names or numbers arranged in order for some specific purpose. But the parallel sense of list meaning “to choose, desire, or have pleasure in” is never far away, and this one includes lust, from the Anglo-Saxon lystan, “to desire.” The desire or inclination of a ship to lean one way or the other makes it list, and a person is described as listless when he or she exhibits a lack of inclination, leading to an overly upstanding stasis. Eco’s wondrous instrument points to the work of lists as sketches, outlines, or patterns, and the Greek hupotuposis derives from tipos, “an impression, form, or type.” When lists become compendious, they list toward the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis, “by which a matter [is] vividly sketched in words” (according to Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon). Sextus Empiricus titled his summary of the doctrine of skepticism The Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes. Writers are especially susceptible to a kind of list-lust that borders on womb-envy, since lists were there at the misty beginnings of literacy, in those lists of sacks of grain and heads of cattle inscribed on clay tablets at Uruk, in what is now Iraq. In lists, writers intimate origins. They hear the Homeric catalogues, the biblical genealogies, Whitman’s Leaves, and Ginsberg’s Howl. The list is the linguistic

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reflection of the unstructured world; it’s what’s left when structure is pulled out. Paradoxically, the list may also be the ultimate structure. When everything is compressed to its least complicated form and relation, it’s all a list. Life consists, finally, of one damned thing after another. When I first spoke with Leon Golub about his use of photographic images as source material for his paintings, he told me that he had “huge files of images and image-fragments. I virtually sense myself as made up of photos and imagistic fragments jittering in my head and onto the canvas.” So when he sent me the list of headings in his image files, I took them as a kind of self-portrait, and immediately began making poems out of them, for Leon. Actually, the first one, written from only the first page of the list, was a double portrait of Leon and Nancy Spero: Extreme Examples (for Leon & Nancy) I saw the anatomy of current older men, standing with armored skulls, ears, eyes/mouth, and feet like alphabets. And seated women, bending over eagles, bulls, and snakes in distorted perspective— current, too, heraldic and mythic as flags. Then I remembered a poem I’d written long ago in Venice, an agnostic hymn to modernism called “Peg’s House,” formed from titles of works in the Peggy Guggenheim collection, which began “Blu su blu in her bedroom, / to see how the modern has aged.” Since this rhymes pretty well with Leon’s various wry proclamations about modernism in his works and writings (including the succinct “Modernism Is Kaput”), I was encouraged to draw more poems from Leon’s lists:

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Extreme Examples, Etc. The Dogs’ current book project, “Le Monde à L’Envers,” entails their distorted perspectives on tattoos, black men crying, women drinking and smoking, Italian graffiti, and James Nachtwey. Fat men in armor, looking up and looking down, sport the exaggerated expressions of prisoners or fallen figures; while white women, horsing around with lions and eagles, create flags and yoga. But eventually, all these active figures, with their sometimes erotic (over the shoulder) back views, become mere skeletons with uniform skulls due to the actions of political figures with titles and slogans, using images and napalm. So, a new form of imagism—list imagism, or, as Leon might have it, “jittery ima-jism”—was born. Leon’s lists of image files refer to real filing cabinets containing actual, rather than virtual, folders and documents, so the items on this roll name images one can hold in the hand. This physical referent, along with the abrupt juxtapositions of the headings, increases what Derrida called “archival violence” (laying down the law and giving the order), and gives this list the edgy aggressiveness of Leon’s paintings (recalling the old sense of list as “a place of combat or contest”). And the pared-down, fragmentary quality of the list— highly compressed language with large gaps between fragments— is also much like Leon’s last paintings, done in what he had called his “Late Style,” after Adorno, who wrote that late works

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by significant artists are “relegated to the outer reaches of art, in the vicinity of document.” The power of subjectivity in the late works of art is the irascible gesture with which it takes leave of the works themselves. It breaks their bonds, not in order to express itself, but in order, expressionless, to cast off the appearance of art. Of the works themselves it leaves only fragments behind, and communicates itself, like a cipher, only through the blank spaces from which it has disengaged itself.1

Portrait of Leon Golub (1989) by David Reynolds; courtesy of the estate of Leon Golub

Remembering Golub

Leon and I were set to record another of our conversations for publication on June 24, 2004, at his studio. The night before, he called to say that he was very sorry, but he didn’t think he was going to be able to make it to the recording session, because he was on his way into the emergency room at NYU Hospital. “Leon, what’s wrong?” I asked. “Everything,” he said. “Is there anything I can do for you?” “Yeah,” he said, “you can go find me another body.” It is a measure of my confidence in his strength of will that I thought then I would see him again, that he would rise and come back to work, and we’d continue our conversation. I thought this right up until August 8, when Leon’s son Stephen called to tell me his father had died in the night. I only got to know Leon late in his life, but when we were together, I often forgot that he was old, and in the best times, I think he forgot, too. He certainly wasn’t old in outlook. He was as curious as a kid, and had one of the most agile and inquisitive minds I’ve ever run across. He was well read, and was a great appreciator of writing. He knew what writing takes, having written well himself. Leon was one of the most intelligent artists I’ve known, and he knew that painting is primarily physical; that it comes from and speaks to the body, first. Sitting among his colossal heads from 1959–64 at

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his last show at Ron Feldman’s gallery in May, Golub said he could barely glimpse, then, the man who had the strength to paint those heads. I should have known then that he was dying. But it was hard to tell, because he was so damned cheerful. For a social pessimist who dealt head-on with what was wrong with the world, Leon was awfully optimistic. He appreciated the benefits of liberal democracy more than anyone I’ve ever known. He’d say, “You know, in many countries in the world today, you and I would have been thrown in prison or shot a long time ago. But here, we’re more or less left alone to keep working, even celebrated once in a while.” And though he was certainly not always pleased with the way his work was treated, he well recognized and reveled in the privilege to make it. “It’s something else, isn’t it?” he’d say. “We’re able to make art and write, and get by doing it—even more than get by, sometimes. What could be better than that?” By the time I got to know him personally, Golub had gained perspective on the vagaries of the art world, and he gave me wise counsel many times. When our bid for a joint exhibition of the works of Leon and Nancy for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale was summarily rejected, I was crushed, but Leon was philosophical about it. “You win some, and you lose some,” he said. “It was still worth a shot.” I don’t think Leon was afraid of dying, and he was too pragmatic to speculate too much on what happens after death (“looks to me like that’s the end, personally, you know? Kaput!”), but it definitely bothered him to think that he wouldn’t be around to see what was going to happen. He once told me he’d gladly sell his soul for the privilege of coming back every year or two to look in on the world— even the rather horrific world that is envisioned in his late paintings. The late work is fragmentary, explosive, and catastrophic. When I first saw the later paintings on the walls of his studio, I thought they looked like works made by a young artist, a man in his twenties. They’re smart-ass paintings, raw and free. They “jitter” (one of Leon’s favorite words) across the landscape, picking up bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam, as they go. “One has to keep moving,” Leon said in an interview I did with him in 2001. “Now I’ve shifted.

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I’m more sardonic and trying to slip around more. I’m trying! You know?”1 Golub turned physical awkwardness into a kind of grace. He was determined to make a connection, to be of his time, and to do that he had to reach back into the origins of painting, to the first marks and dabs and inscriptions, and forward to a world of cyborgs and roaming packs of dogs. Golub disdained mere facility. He continually put himself in the position, in painting, of not knowing. There is courage in that, but also a kind of faith in faithlessness. Donald Kuspit was right to call Golub an existential/activist painter.2 Golub’s work enacts a real challenge to painting itself. He threw down the gauntlet right at the beginning, and waged a furious, muscular struggle with it the rest of his life. His art is agnostic and agonistic. It exists in the heat of battle, where everything is at risk. This led, paradoxically, to constant renewal, so that Golub’s work was never done. And this is why, though he lived a long and productive life, to all of us who knew him, he died, goddamnit, too soon. When Giacometti died, John Berger wrote about how Giacometti’s work was utterly changed by his death. The reason Giacometti’s death seems to have changed his work so radically is that his work had so much to do with an awareness of death. It is as though his death confirms his work: as though one could now arrange his works in a line leading to his death, which would constitute far more than the interruption or termination of that line—which would, on the contrary, constitute the starting point for reading back along that line, for appreciating his life’s work.3 May it be so with Golub.

Cri du Coeur, detail (2005) by Nancy Spero, photographed by David Reynolds; courtesy of Galerie Lelong, New York City

Spero’s Heart

Nancy Spero’s Cri du Coeur is just that—a passionate cry against war, death, and destruction that is both political and personal, social and metaphysical. The work’s strength arises from an inspired restraint, limiting the aesthetic means—a group of figures transferred and repeated through a fury of color and tone on sheets of drawing paper joined end to end to make a continuous grounded frieze running around the base of an otherwise empty gallery—to extraordinary ends. The scale and compressed intensity of the baseline frieze activates the untouched white walls and ceiling of the gallery, which press down and ground our attention in the painting. It begins on the right, with a group of mourning women fully visible and intact, inscribed against a light background. The mourners’ feet are flat on the ground and their hands are in the air, waving like cilia seeking nourishment, beseeching, as their tears stream down, streaking the colors. This group of mourners—one thinks at first to count them, women and girls, but they proliferate into a mirrored multitude—is taken from the painted funeral scene in the rock-cut tomb of the vizier Ramos in the necropolis at Thebes, circa 1370 b.c., and has been in Spero’s repertoire of images for many years. The women are seen in profile, bare-breasted and sheathed in gray gowns, faces and extremely expressive hands raised in lamentation.

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There is a remarkable balance in the composition between movement and stasis, uncontrollable wailing and serene sorrow. This same group recurs rhythmically through the frieze, rising and falling as the environment they move through becomes more complex and dark, from passages of light yellow and pale blue to blood red and bilious green, punctuated by explosions in black and blue. These shifts in color and tone reflect the chronology of the Theban tombs, from pure colors washed onto light grounds in the earlier periods to more opaque tones in the later phases, but also the increasing violence of our own time. With no gisant before them, the mourners move ever forward, into the storm. We are well into the progress of their procession before we realize that we too are in a procession, walking slowly around the room in a counterclockwise direction, unwinding time. As in Spero’s mosaic for the Lincoln Center 66th Street subway station in Manhattan, Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers, the recurring figures are animated by our movement. As we walk, looking down, the sense of it washes over us—the relentless cycle of mourning, of women grieving for their dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, in Sri Lanka and New Orleans. It is the news cycle, the continuous stream of human catastrophes pictured in our newspapers and magazines and on our television and computer screens, people distraught amid the smoke and ash, the carnage and ruin, both natural and cultural. The scale of it dwarfs us. But there is a tremendous strength of resistance in these mourning women. In contrast to the single figures in Spero’s architectural installations of the past—the acrobats, dancers, and sky goddesses gliding and cavorting vertically, on walls and ceilings—these mourning women are resolutely grounded in their grief, within a frame, and moving in one direction (back to the beginning). At the end of the frieze, when the painting turns the corner and comes out of the gallery, and the figures are reduced to white phosphorescent traces against the darkness, we recognize that their gestures of grief are also, after all, gestures of praise, for the human heart, that prevails, against all loss. Now in memory, too, of Nancy Spero (1926–2009)

V

Members of the Homer Club (clockwise from center bottom: Robert Duncan, Jim Powell, Aaron Shurin, and David Levi Strauss), photographed by Susan Thackrey in 1984

Hosephat and the Wooden Shoes ROBERT DUNCAN AND DÉLIRE

I shall be drawn thru in music I shall be drawn thru in pain I shall be drawn thru in delirium. —Robert Duncan, “A Letter to Jack Johnson” (1942) The people about him said he had been for some time delirious; but when I saw him he had his understanding as well as ever I knew. —Jonathan Swift, “The Death of Partridge” (1706)

The Duncan books that are most present for me now are his last ones, the two volumes of Ground Work: Before the War (1984) and In the Dark (1987). I experienced these poems first in hearing Duncan read them, and for me it is only now that I can read them without hearing Duncan’s reading voice in my ear. Now they come to me straightaway, without pause or mediation. They are so much in the furrow that their music seems to me inevitable. The Ground Work poems are vatic, and their urgent truths and prophetic futures are becoming more and more insistent as time passes. But now I want to address that part of Duncan’s life and work that was “out of the furrow.” It goes under the name délire. It was there at the beginning and came around in force at the end of Duncan’s life.

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I have been guided in my inquiries into délire by the work of JeanJacques Lecercle, whose book Philosophy through the Looking Glass was published in 1985 (the same year as Duncan’s essay on Jabès, “The Delirium of Meaning”). Both Philosophy through the Looking Glass and Lecercle’s later book The Violence of Language are concerned with what Robin Blaser has called “the big gift, a Trojan Horse: the materiality of language.” Lecercle has been described as “a worldwide authority on Nonsense” (an enviable title). His books have the advantage over many others of this period in not reading as if they are translated from the French. Though drawing mainly from French theory, Lecercle himself writes in a remarkably lucid English prose. In Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Lecercle sets out to track the tradition of délire, or “reflexive delirium.” He writes: Délire as I shall now use the word is a form of discourse which questions our most common conceptions of language (whether expressed by linguists or by philosophers), where the old philosophical question of the emergence of sense out of nonsense receives a new formulation, where the material side of language, its origin in the human body and desire, are no longer eclipsed by its abstract aspect (as an instrument of communication or expression). Language, nonsense, desire: délire accounts for the relations between these three terms.1 Lecercle’s aim is to “provide a solution to what has emerged as our main problem, the problem of abstraction, that is of the relationship between sounds as materially produced by organs of the body, and sense as the immaterial entity transmitted in human communication.”2 More than anything else, délire means “abandoning control of and mastery over language. The logophilist no longer speaks through language, he is spoken by it. This is the core of the experience of language in délire: an experience of madness in language, of possession.” Lecercle describes this possession, in délire, as “the experience of the body within language, of the destruction and painful reconstruction of the speaking subject, not through the illusory mastery of language and consciousness, but through possession by language.”

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And he quotes Louis Wolfson’s Le Schizo et les Langues (1970) saying, “The psychotic’s cure does not consist in becoming conscious, but in living through words the story of love.”3 Here we can’t help but recognize Duncan, as in the opening lines of The Truth and Life of Myth: Wherever life is true to what mythologically we know life to be, it becomes full of awe, awe-full. All the events, things and beings, of our life move then with the intent of a story revealing itself. When a man’s life becomes totally so informed that every bird and leaf speaks to him and every happening has meaning, he is considered to be psychotic. The shaman and the inspired poet, who take the universe to be alive, are brothers germane of the mystic and the paranoiac. We at once seek a meaningful life and dread psychosis, “the principle of life.”4 In the four main parts of Philosophy through the Looking Glass, Lecercle traces the language of délire through literature, linguistics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The literature of délire is limited here to considerations of the works of Raymond Roussel, Jean Pierre Brisset, Antonin Artaud, and Louis Wolfson. In this, Lecercle remains with the texts that were assembled into a corpus of délire in the 1960s by a group of philosopher-critics including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Gilles Deleuze. But many of Lecercle’s characterizations of the language of délire can be applied outside of that context, certainly to Duncan. In writing about Roussel and Brisset, Lecercle says: Language in Roussel was a source of anxiety, a danger to the sanity of the writer: in Brisset, it is the only source of truth and the scribe must lose himself in it, let it regain its mastery, without which no remembrance of origins is possible. On the one hand a poet, for ever fighting for a mastery over language which constantly threatens to evade him: on the other hand a prophet, joyfully and gratefully possessed by language.”5 Duncan would of course never have divided things that way, or if he had, he might very well have reversed them.

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In his chapter on the linguistics of délire, Lecercle outlines the thesis of the centrality of language, mainly coming out of Lacan, but going back to Freud, and forward to Luce Irigaray and the linguist Judith Milner. The chapter on philosophy deals primarily with Deleuze, in Logique du Sens, where “proliferation is always a threat to order.” Lecercle writes, “If délire is concerned with the relationship between language and the human body, sense as Deleuze analyses it dwells on the frontier between them; indeed it is the frontier.”6 Lecercle’s chapter on the psychoanalysis of délire focuses on the famous case of Schreber, examining both Freud’s and Lacan’s readings of it. Lecercle closes this chapter with a contradiction: “délire as a form of speech has two fundamental roles—it testifies to a disruption of discourse, and it is an attempt at reconstruction.” His concluding chapter is titled “Beyond Délire.” It begins with George Herbert and lands squarely on Deleuze and Guattari: The first comment one can make about délire is that the truth about it cannot be grasped from the outside: it requires a degree of involvement and renunciation on the part of the philosopher. He must abandon his normal processes of thought, proceed by paradox (Deleuze and Guattari talk of the “bright black truth” of délire—Anti-Oedipus, p. 9), he must become delirious. Lecercle ends by saying that Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus “give the first positive account of délire as constitutive of language.”7 I’ve described elsewhere the delirious effects of Duncan’s speech on the students in the Poetics Program in San Francisco, how we experienced his lectures as a kind of delirium that we often needed to protect ourselves from in order not to become sick with it.8 (The root of the word délire is the verb meaning “to teach,” literally, “to lead someone on his way.”) And Duncan spoke and wrote often of himself as being possessed by language, a victim of his own logorrhea. Lecercle writes that “délire is first characterized by logorrhea,

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an unceasing flow of words, indicating that communication is no longer possible.”9 One of Duncan’s running jokes was that when he finally did become senile, how would anyone be able to tell? In the summer of 1986, after Duncan had been on dialysis for some time, he suddenly became delirious and was hospitalized. This is a notebook entry of mine from July 21, 1986: I’ve just come from a visit with Robert Duncan at Seton Medical Center in Daly City. Susan Thackrey was there when I arrived. Joanna McClure and Jess had just left. Robert was asleep, so Susan and I spoke in the hallway for awhile. We were told that Duncan had had a difficult night and needed to rest. After some time passed a nurse came and woke him to take his temperature and blood pressure. When he awoke he looked up at me and beckoned us in. Susan and I went in and sat down next to his bed and he began to speak. He said he’d been travelling in Russia, land of “stalwart young men on trains.” He picked up a cup from his table, examined it, and said “This is certainly an American cup.” When Susan picked up a cellophanewrapped package of candies on his bedside table and asked if they were his, he replied, “What would a jackass have on his table?” His room was situated next door to the nursing station, so their conversation could be heard through the door. Occasionally Duncan stopped and listened intently to the voices. Once after listening for awhile, he muttered “Hypocrites!” and turned back to us. The fifth issue of my literary journal ACTS had just appeared and when Susan held it up, Duncan said that Kenneth Rexroth was behind that magazine. When I asked at one point if he was going to eat his “orange-flavored dessert,” he thought I wanted it and said, “Well, I’ll have to revise my high opinion of your intelligence if you like that. I’ll have to revise it to something more agricultural.” Once Susan and I became accustomed to Duncan’s state, we talked and laughed as we always had, as if it all made sense. And it did, but certainly not in the way it had before. Duncan’s mannerisms, tone of voice, and gestures were unchanged, but

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what he said was transposed to another world. He called this world Russia, “behind the Curtain.” And he spoke of being there “before the War.” When Susan remarked that I looked very Russian, Duncan was pleased. When I took out my brown National notebook and laid it on my lap, he picked it up, looked it over carefully, and said, “I see you’ve brought your wooden shoes.” From this point on, he always referred to my notebook in this way: “Don’t forget to bring your wooden shoes tomorrow.” We laughed a lot. The asparagus on Duncan’s plate was cause for great hilarity, as was the frozen orange-flavored dessert. Sitting there with his hair twisted into a flame that stood straight up on top of his head, crossed eyes wild, Duncan looked quite mad. When he suddenly turned to me and asked, “Who is Hosephat?” Susan and I collapsed into uncontrollable laughter. After leaving Duncan at the hospital, I returned home and wrote for awhile. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. Finally, at 4 a.m., I fell asleep at my desk. At 6 a.m., I awoke to see my wife, Sterrett, over me, eyes wide. “Your father is dead,” she said. I took the phone and listened to my sister tell the story. They had been awake all night, giving my father liquid morphine. He was delirious with pain, and nothing would relieve it. He moaned in agony and couldn’t speak. Finally he stopped moaning. I got up and made arrangements to fly home to Kansas. My mind was cloudy from lack of sleep, so I laid down and slept from 11:30 to 1:30. Again Gret’s face was over me with the telephone. “It’s Jess. Duncan has refused dialysis. He says he wants to die.” Jess told me he’d been with Robert all morning in the hospital. When Dr. Conner came in to suggest that Robert have the hemodialysis that day instead of waiting until the next day, Robert said no, he would not have dialysis that day, or any other day. He would not have it at all. Jess and Susan tried to reason with him, to convince him that the doctors were trying to help him, but Duncan would have none of it. He said the doctors were “hypocrites,” and he was through with them. Later Susan, Duncan McNaughton, and Diane DiPrima spoke

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with Duncan and tried to reason with him. Susan tried several times to pin Robert down and make sure that he knew the consequences of his refusal of dialysis, that he would die without it. Duncan indicated that he knew this. Later, a hospital-appointed psychiatrist came to evaluate Duncan’s condition. Susan asked to speak with Duncan before the psychiatrist. She then spoke very directly to Duncan. She told him that if he wanted to retain any control over his situation, he must convince the psychiatrist that he was sane. If he did not do this, none of his friends could help him. He would be committed to the psychiatric ward where he would most likely be given dialysis and psychiatric medication against his will. Duncan replied that these matters, the things of this world, were no longer of any concern to him. He was in another world now. He was “in the Dark.” He couldn’t come back to act on this world. “I’m caught in the Mousetrap,” he said. He looked on what was to come as the Keatsian trials—part of the process, the vale of soul-making. He also spoke of wanting out, of not wanting to reincarnate. “I don’t want to come back on the Baby-Rama,” he said. Duncan’s delirium turned out to be iatrogenic. In the language of allopathy, it was a “side effect” of the dialysis, a chemical deficiency in the blood. Once the doctors figured that out, they righted the imbalance and the delirium immediately disappeared. Duncan lived for another two years and died on February 3, 1988, at the age of 69. I was fortunate to have gone into Duncan’s delirium with Susan Thackrey, a practicing psychotherapist as well as poet, student in the Poetics Program, and one of Duncan’s dearest friends. She led me into the delirium. I do remember being afraid at one point that we might not be able to come back out of the delirium, we were so much inside it. And Duncan was even then crossing back and forth from this world to the next, practicing for death. At the same time, Duncan’s delirium had many of the characteristics outlined by Lecercle. “Délire,” Lecercle writes, “is not merely an abnormal form of discourse: it is also a metalinguistic activity.”10

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Many of Duncan’s pronouncements in delirium were about the delirium and the language of délire. He may have been out of the furrow, but he was still very much in the field. His comment about having to revise his opinion of me to something more “agricultural” recalls the derivation of the word delirium, from the Latin meaning “out of the furrow,” as in ploughing the field, that ground work. In Logique du Sens, Deleuze remarks that “common sense is agricultural; it cannot be separated from the problem of enclosures. . . .”11 This comment about my intelligence being agricultural also referred to my original absorption into the Duncan/Jess household as their gardener. Duncan hired me to bring the garden back. It had been “let go.” And off the garden was the basement, where Duncan set me up with his mimeograph machine and enough paper to print the first issues of my literary journal ACTS. Some of the best discussions I had with Duncan during that time occurred while we were both down on our knees, sifting through the soil to rid it of the corms with which the incredibly rampant Oxalis plant had colonized the garden. Duncan’s sudden question in the hospital, “Who is Hosephat?” put Susan and me on the floor laughing because of our experience of reading the Iliad in Greek with Duncan over seven years’ time.12
σϕατ is an oft-repeated Homeric beginning, meaning “So he spoke”— σ the “adverb of manner,” so or thus, and ϕατ or ϕατo is the aorist of ϕηµ, to speak. The latter shares with ϕαѵω the common sense of “bringing to light, making known.” In asking “Who is Hosephat?” Duncan was asking “Who is the one who is speaking thusly?” or really, “Who is the one who is delirious?” The question blasted us out of the delirium and we exploded in laughter.13 Back of the question “Who is Hosephat?” is also David Melnick’s perverse, hilarious homophonic translation of the Iliad, Men in Aïda, written in some great measure for Duncan’s amusement. Duncan was Men in Aïda’s ideal reader. Duncan’s “stalwart young men on trains” in Russia recalls Schreber’s “fleeting-improvised men,” when he was convinced that everybody was dead and that he saw around him only pale images of men. Duncan reversed this, making them “stalwart.” His time in Russia was also a glimpse into the world “Before the War” of Ground Work I.

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As for Duncan’s referring to my notebook as my “wooden shoes,” I’m still puzzling over that. At one point it seemed he was saying “woden shoes” (shoes of Woden). Woden, the one-eyed patriarch (he gave up one of his eyes for a drink from Mimir’s well of knowledge), was the god of war, yes, but also of poetry and magic. On his shoulders (seated on his throne in Valhalla) perched his two ravens, Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory), whispering in his ear. At his feet lay his two wolves, Geri and Freki, to whom Woden gave all the food that was set before him, because he had no need of food. At the time Duncan said this he was also making fun of the hospital food and was soon to refuse all food. I also know that “wood” once meant “violently insane,” related to the Gaelic “gwyld,” whence comes our “wild,” meaning “of the forest.” And the paper on which I wrote was of course made of wood. There is also this exchange from Ella Young’s recounting of the Fionn legends and the Celtic bard Finnegas (in her Tangle-Coated Horse) that Jess uses in his “Translation #3”: “‘What help is there in words?’ said Finnegas. ‘You could not teach me how to snare the Salmon: I could not teach you more woodcraft than you know already.’ ‘You could teach me poetry,’ said Fionn.”14 I thought of this wooden shoes business recently when reading Edmund White’s biography of Jean Genet, where White describes Genet’s life as a child ward of the state: “Public Welfare would provide the children with a uniform and wooden shoes, or sabots. . . .” And he quotes Genet from an interview recalling those days: “There were no proper shoes set aside for us; we wore wooden shoes every day, even Sunday.”15 So wooden shoes were orphan shoes, for children like Duncan.16 The traditional Scottish ballad “A Lyke-wake Dirge” reflects the belief that if you give shoes to a poor man when you are alive, an old man will meet you when you die with those very shoes, to protect your feet from the rough path ahead: If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon, Every night and alle, Sit thee down and put them on, And Christe receive thye saule.

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My French dictionary tells me that sabot can mean either wooden shoes (the first act of sabotage was the clattering of wooden shoes to disrupt work, and later, a clog thrown into the works) or horses’ hooves, and the horse brings me back to Blaser’s “the big gift, a Trojan Horse: the materiality of language.”17 For Duncan, in délire, was letting go. Letting go of language, of writing, of Logos (reason), of “So he spoke.” He looked forward to this letting go again and again in his writing. In “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” he refers to “the proposition of letting go, back to the visceral process.” And of Finnegans Wake he wrote, “Here meanings are being churned up, digested back into the original chaos of noises, decomposed.”18 But it was not just language (in Duncan, it was never “just language”) being let go. And it was not only Duncan’s “I,” the one Blaser has described as that sometimes “awfully autocratic I.” Not only the materiality of language, but materiality itself was being let go in Duncan’s practicing for death. At the end of “The Self in Postmodern Poetry,” Duncan writes: The Self, with a capital S, this Atman, Breath, Brahma, that moves in the word to sound I so love I also would undo the idea of, let it go. The theme increases in recent years, and back of it hovers the dissolution of the physical chemical universe which I take to be the very spiritual ground and body of our being. Something more than Death or Inertia comes as a lure in this “Letting go.” Here again it comes into the poem as it appeared as a command in dream: “Let it go. Let it go. Grief ’s its proper mode.” This whole grand idea of Self—a sublime Undoing. In the coda of the Dante Etudes in Ground Work: Volume I such a rapturous prayer for dissolution appears: AND A WISDOM AS SUCH And a wisdom as such, a loosening of energies and every gain! For good. A rushing-in place of “God”, if it be! Open out like a rose that can no longer keep its center closed

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but, practicing for Death, lets go, let’s go, littering the ground with petals of its rime, “and spreads abroad the last perfume which has been generated within”— sweet warning the heart, the rose hip, knows of how soon the rapturous outpouring speech of self into the silence of the mind comes home, and, even the core dispersed, in darkness of the ground is gone out from me, the very last of me, till I am rid of every rind and seed into that sweetness, that final giving over, letting go, that scattering of every nobleness . . . “the seed of blessedness draws near despatcht by God into the welling soul.”19

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Heraklion Museum, Crete (1984) by Sterrett Smith; courtesy of the artist

Radial Asymmetries ON GUY DAVENPORT

When the great essayist and fiction writer Guy Davenport died just after the first of the year in 2005, at age 77, Robert Kelly came over from Bard College to “my side of the river” (High Falls in Ulster County) to talk about Davenport’s life and works. Kelly and I first met in 1981, when Robert Duncan invited him to visit the Poetics Program in San Francisco, and our friendship grew when I moved to the Hudson Valley in 1993. David Levi Strauss: Guy Davenport’s book of essays The Geography of the Imagination appeared in 1981, at the height of the Poetics Program at New College in San Francisco, where I was then studying with Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Duncan McNaughton, Michael Palmer, and other poets. The book came as a revelation to me. Here was someone who wrote on many of the poets that I cared about—Pound, H.D., Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan— and also about Pinocchio, and Grant Wood, and Van Gogh’s Japan, and the ox rib at Sarlat, and Brancusi, and Buckminster Fuller, and . . . everything else. When you read an essay by Davenport, you learn things—extraordinary things. I quickly came to trust him as a source. A lot of what the Poetics Program was really about was finding these sources in poetics that you could draw on for the rest of your life. And

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Davenport was “meticulously responsible as to information,” as he said about Thoreau. In Every Force Evolves a Form, he wrote: “When painting freed itself from (or was abandoned by) patrons, paintings began to cease illustrating texts. All of Renaissance painting, for instance, refers to texts; scarcely any twentieth-century painting does.”1 When I read this, I knew it was true, but I had never heard anyone say it before (I hadn’t yet read Leo Steinberg). That often happened to me with Davenport. I’m struck now, when I go back and read the essays, by how much I got from Davenport: the insistence on the imagination, the potential of telling detail, a certain and very particular relation to the reader, the spice of occasional bombast, an American practicality and directness . . . In the essay I wrote on Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (“Approaching 80 Flowers,” published in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, edited by Michael Palmer, in 1983),2 I was certainly influenced by Davenport’s essay on Zukofsky in The Geography of the Imagination. And a couple of years later we had him in mind also when Sterrett Smith and I collaborated on Ruins, written in Greece and illustrated with her artifactual drawings, which were inspired by Davenport’s drawings, such as the drawing of the “E on the stone,” the epsilon carved into the navel stone or omphalos at Delphi, which appeared as an illustration to Davenport’s essay on Charles Olson in The Geography of the Imagination. Robert Kelly: The letters I had from him over the years, from maybe 1962 or ’63 to the seventies, were full of drawings and paintings. His letters were extraordinarily formal. He would criticize me for writing with fountain pens, rather than with the “proper” dip-pens. His color drawings of Egyptian cattle and Greek images made me understand, and delight in him for all of his “Southernness,” all of his “Americanness”—strange and hard to deal with in the beginning. You have to understand that I first knew him through his poems, and through his advocacy of Stan Brakhage’s films. I met Davenport through Brakhage. Brakhage came to a reading of mine in 1963, and we got to know each other very well—very quickly, and very intensely. It was a two or three year “romance” that ended abruptly and strangely.

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Strauss: How did Davenport know Brakhage? Kelly: Well, they had been in connection through Robert Duncan. Remember that Brakhage lived with Duncan for a long time—in the basement of his house—I can’t say “with him.” But, whatever the lines that led them together, Davenport saw in Brakhage something that he saw nowhere else in the movies. I don’t think he was interested in movies very much. What he was interested in was that Brakhage was an utter ephebe. He never lost that. He is the initiate about to be, he is the young man, even the old young man, in search of the initiatic experience, which he was, as a filmmaker, prepared to make for himself, since nobody was giving it to him. He had mastered aesthetic skills (through Gertrude Stein and Duncan preeminently) but when it came to film he had no master but himself. He wrote about great filmmakers, but when you look at Brakhage’s words on them, you see he’s being emblematic and pious, dutiful, respectful, but he’s not pointing out his father and his mother. And I think his father and his mother came, as Davenport points out about Renaissance paintings, from the text. Those films of his are profoundly, in a way, textual, and I think that’s what got Davenport. Strauss: When you co-edited the anthology A Controversy of Poets in 1965, you included Davenport in the list of poets “currently producing distinct and original work,” and as one of the . . . Kelly: One of those I wasn’t able to get through the gate. I knew him also as a classicist, and that’s what took me in, that Davenport had translated Archilochus so beautifully. And in his recognition of Greek fragment as contemporary Whole, just as in his drawings—it seemed to me that Davenport was always after what I want to call the compositio. We talk about synthesis, and if you map the Greek synthesis literally into Latin, “syn,” is “com,” with, and “thesis” is positio, placing; so “syn-thesis” literally is compositio. We take synthesis, because of our Hegelian childhoods, as somehow doing something to opposites or contradictions, whereas the Romans see compositio as bringing things together to make a stability, not by denying the differences, or somehow changing them . . .

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Strauss: Putting them in relation. Kelly: . . . by putting them in relation. The Romans’ greatest technological achievement, as you know, is concrete; they were able to build with concrete, and concrete is a spectacular example of compositio, it seems to me. We still use the word “composition” to mean man-made materials, when we don’t want to call them “artificial.” I think that’s what Davenport was extraordinary for in his essays, which are, I think, strictly accurate, insofar as I’m able to judge. What’s interesting about them is not the accuracy, but the compositio, of bringing things from all over into one thing. And by doing that he emphasizes what is the most urgent thing about his essays and his fiction; namely, a sexiness, and I understood this specifically as the sexiness of information. I think Davenport, more than anybody I know, even more than Olson, understood information as inherently sexual. The information that he gives us— or doesn’t really give us, he gathers it together and makes it spill out a narrative, with blond Danish boys and lakesides and cool weather. This man who came from hot South Carolina privileged the cold Baltic, the way some of us might fantasize about the South Seas. Strauss: That rings true to me, this sexiness of information, and he writes about it, too, I think in relation to Poe at one point. I haven’t read all the stories, but the ones I have read are often almost like William Burroughs’s Wild Boys, but in Davenport it’s always teachers and students. He said that his essays were really written for students. In the introductory note to The Hunter Gracchus, he writes, “The way I write about texts and works of art has been shaped by forty years of explaining them to students in a classroom. I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.”3 It’s the affinity between teacher and student that comes across in the essays. Kelly: And all the more so in the fiction, I think, where you really have the paiderastes, the older man adoring the younger one, and the younger one learning from it. He paints this utterly Greekish picture, this utterly fantasized sort of picture, in which the only time

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we touch ground, or touch earth, is through bodily functions, bodily intimacies. It’s all about the young man and the old man, the young man giving pleasure to the old man—just the grace and comeliness of his body, of his movements. There’s very little penetration. It’s not about penetration, it’s about admiration, and admiration is, again, admirare, to look at. He’s such a classicist in that way. He wants to behold these children, and perhaps he wants to embrace them too, but the embrace is always quite discreet. Strauss: And also “textual.” I mean I know that he never learned to drive, that he walked to work all the time. I get the sense that his experience was primarily of the library. Kelly: He moved from one part of Lexington, Kentucky, to another, and that experience was a huge adventure for him. Some of his young men got him to go to Greece by essentially saying, “You know, we’ve heard all this Socratic, Hellenic stuff, now come bathe with us naked”—and he did, and they celebrated that, but I think he was glad to get home. He was a man of American tastes, in his personal life: simple food and simple clothing. On the way over here to see you, you know we passed a Davenport nursery (on Route 209, in Stone Ridge, New York). That was a good omen. He once told me about how he had a nanny who took him out into the woods whenever he was colicky and fed him blue clay. This nanny knew where the blue clay was. And this business of earth-eating, geophagy, is a big part of Southern medicine, and it was something that Davenport felt was very defining for him because the “geography of the imagination” is also the “geophagy of the imagination,” in the way he has eaten the earth. His first experience of recovery from illness came from eating the blue earth. Strauss: When I began reading him, I had this sense that he had some power as a bridge between poetry and the officialdom of the academy. Did he play that role or was that just wishful thinking on my part? Kelly: It’s hard to know. The University of Kentucky where he taught was not a school that has ever been involved with the avant-garde or anything like it in any respect other than through him. He certainly

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didn’t create the kind of situation that Charles Olson did at Buffalo with Robert Creeley, or that Robert Duncan did at New College in San Francisco. There was no sense of a tradition growing there, as far as I can tell. He was very much a man by himself. I don’t think he was like Olson, valuing the willful political sagacity. I don’t think he thought in those terms. Strauss: But because of him, some people found themselves reading about Louis Zukofsky or Ron Johnson who might have been surprised to find themselves doing that. Kelly: You can tell me something about this: I’ve never understood, in a way, why people read Davenport. The taste for his essays and his stories seems highly refined to me. You have to know so much and care so much about certain kinds of what most people would think of as pettifogging details of cultural and linguistic history for those stories to come alive at all for you. I think they’re wonderful, and I love them! But, at the same time, I can’t understand why anybody else likes them. I feel as though he’s writing them just for me—you probably think he’s writing them just for you, too. Strauss: I did, I do. But, I think many people feel that same thing. Kelly: What makes him able to do this? Strauss: I think it certainly has to do with what you were describing: composition, placement, putting things in relation. There’s a real pleasure in apprehending that. And somewhere you also allude to his fondness for superlatives, and making declarative statements about things. There is a pleasure there, that I associate with Pound: just go all-out and say something. Maybe it can be supported, maybe it can’t, but go all the way with the assertion. Don’t be tentative. Give them something to dispute. Kelly: “The village explainer,” just pushing it, hoping to get some reaction. Strauss: Well, yes, and, especially when you’re young, there’s a definite attraction to direct assertion. Davenport was only 25 when he went to visit Pound at St. Elizabeth’s, after being in the army but he

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picked up on that assertion and trust. A good deal of the pleasure in his essays really derives from the form of address. I like being that person that he’s talking to, and I think that carries across for many readers. Readers want to be embraced. Kelly: How do you think he does that? What do you think is the technique of his embrace? Strauss: I guess you could say this was an American “democratic” embrace: not at all condescending, not enforcing divisions, or reminding one of the separations between him and me, even though they’re obviously there. He knows more than I do, but in the writing it doesn’t come across that way. Hugh Kenner said that Davenport was “the best explicator of the arts alive, because he assumes that the artists—painters, poets, describers of natural wonders—have the sort of mind he has: quick, unpredictable, alert for gaps to traverse toward the unexpected terminus.”4 And there’s a visceral excitement in that compositional element, in that “placing of things in relation,” that is infectious: it makes you want to do it as well. In that way, it opens up a world. The generosity of his writing is the same kind of generosity that he apparently had in teaching, where, you know, he was willing to give it away. Kelly: And, you know, like that good paiderastes of the ancient Greek time, that giving away was very focused, but it’s not focused in the writing, and that’s the funny part about it. That is, in the fictional pieces, even when he’s talking about that very relationship between the mentor and the young student—the young student is always giving just as much as the mentor is— and not just in some trivial sexual way at all, but rather an aesthetic response is there as part of the gift. And I think one of things that made him work as a human, let him work as a human, was his ability to value and be fed by aesthetic response, so that when his students respond to him, that in itself is a fulfilling thing. They don’t have to go to bed with him, they don’t have to write a masterpiece, they don’t have do anything special, they have to be present with him. Strauss: Those are the terms of the exchange.

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Kelly: Exactly. So that the exchange can be a “let there be commerce between us” kind of exchange, where there’s no coin, just the flow. You know his work much better than I do—certainly I haven’t read all of his books, by any means. Sometimes they irritate me, sometimes I get annoyed as I read because I see him taking the world and making it too small, the composition gets too crowded into the corner. But most of the time I feel a joyousness in him, which seems to me, and I don’t want to push this just to be topical and relevant and “modern” about it, but it strikes me as very mycelial, or rhizome-like. Very antiauthoritarian, antihierarchical, even though he seems to most people to be a hierarch, in that he’s teaching all this stuff, he has grand opinions, he’s constantly invoking the Great Ones, the Greeks, and how can you be so “Greek,” and yet he is trying, I think, to bring the Greeks back to the body, back to us, their face our face. So in that resistance to the hierarchical, in the text, everything was the same—the sand, the skin, the book, it’s all the same. One book of mine was called Flesh Dream Book, trying to pay homage to the three sources of my imagination, in that order: flesh, dream, and book. I think Guy might have ordered them: flesh, book, dream. But there was in him the utter nonhierarchical assortment or composition of knowledge, fact, judgment, aesthetic, data, skin, desire—all operating in the same plain. He writes about the seashore and the lake. Not the wild sea, but the calm Baltic, and his imagination peopled that shallow sea, cold, of Nordic languages. Strauss: But that seashore is a violent place, too. It’s not all calm. Kelly: It’s where the Vikings come, up that very coast. The creatures who come across the shallow sea. They never go very far, they never leave sight of land. They worked their way down through Denmark, Holland, England—never going away from the sight of land, those blond, literal people. Strauss: I’d like to hear more about your irritation. Is it in the essays? Kelly: No, it’s more in his fiction that I feel it. As if he’s taking all that into a story, rather than letting it remain in the broth of the composition. It’s like overinterpreting a Renaissance

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painting so that it becomes all about its “subject,” and that’s all we can think about, and we lose sight of the masterful array of inconsequential details, which become magisterial because of the composition. It’s like turning Renaissance paintings into Rembrandt. Like trying to turn everything towards some single, moral pressure. Strauss: Yes, he is often looking for that key, and I guess that’s what I meant about the assertiveness—you leave it behind and go on to other things, but there is a certain amount of pleasure in stopping briefly at those certainties. Someone who’d known Grant Wood told Davenport that Wood wasn’t thinking about any of the things Davenport brings up in relation to his paintings, and Davenport replied that he didn’t have to, because the paintings were thinking about them, which is the right answer. But the other criticism that could be made is that, in carving it down to one key to that work, he has to deny and turn away from the multiplicity of things that are going on there, and there’s a violence in that. Kelly: Interesting the way you use the word “violence.” Twice you’ve mentioned it. Once as literal violence and once with a violence that we do to complexity when we argue a key. Strauss: Yes, it’s a violence of language: the violence of interpretation. Kelly: I remember once telling Guy a dream I had, a dream about photography, and he used it later as a title for his own story “The Invention of Photography in Toledo.”5 I dreamt photography was invented in the late Renaissance in Spain, in Toledo. At the moment in the Good Friday service when the straw burns, and the world’s glory passes, suddenly that burst of fire was enough to cause a photographic image of the event to form on the silver altarpiece. And the image was then developed by the nitrous exhalations from the crypt below. To me, it meant photography was a natural fact, not a technology created at a certain moment, like a typewriter, but a discovery, a perception of something that was already there in the world, that nature has always been making photographs and we had to learn to see them. That got carried by him into quite a different direction, into a kind of historical whimsy. I found myself irritated—

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a narrative instead of trying to understand what the dream was gesturing towards in its own terms—that photography is far more natural than painting or drawing. That those things are highly abstract and that obviously the cave people with their tracing and all the rest of it were responding to the photo/graphs—the situation light had left on the wall. I was a little vexed that it wasn’t my dream anymore. Which of us dare own a dream? But that’s the peril, the peril of the compositional method is whimsy. Sometimes you just get a table full of cute things. Strauss: Davenport wrote a book on still life (Objects on a Table: Harmonious Disarray in Art and Literature). In it, he wrote that the history of still life is “an ongoing meditation on where matter ends and spirit begins, and on the nature of their interdependence.”6 Kelly: Masters like Botticelli and Giotto understand the body as part of still life. La Calunnia is a great example of that, where the human images are arrayed, frozen. In focusing on that, the whole world stands still into that gesture. As opposed to the kind of Géricaultlike, it’s all happening right now, you can see the muscles quivering as you walk. Fantastic power comes from the alchemical act of slaying the living into an image—which then comes to life in a different way. Not everyone can make a Joseph Cornell just by taking a shoebox and putting things in it. Sometimes I think of Cornell and Davenport as kin. But tell me about your disagreements with his pictorial sense. Strauss: I tend to agree with his choices of poets most of the time, but not always his choices in visual art. Sometimes I get the sense that he’s not really looking or not just looking. That’s certainly a problem with anyone trying to write about pictures. He goes in and out, but most of the time I get the feeling that there’s a text in the way of his looking—a text forming as he’s looking, or a text that he’s read or is writing that gets in the way. Kelly: How can you cure this? It’s my disease too, of looking at a picture and thinking, having the mind full of, what can I say about

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this? What text can I make from this apprehension? Is there a way of looking wordlessly at a picture? I wish I knew it. Strauss: It requires taking more time, looking at something very closely, over time, until those rare moments arise when you are just looking. Kelly: So you have to deny the story? Strauss: It falls away. I don’t think it works to deny it, but if you’re just looking, over time, something else opens up. I think Davenport could do it, but he doesn’t always. He’s good on photography. I wish I could have sat in on Davenport looking at Ralph Eugene Meatyard’s photographs and just talking about them. Meatyard recognized that Davenport was really seeing his images, and so never tired of showing them to him and hearing him respond directly to them. Kelly: I’m guessing that if you and I and he had sat down to talk about poetry for a long time we might have come up with some comparable issues of poets whose importance was considerable to him, but not perhaps to us. You called it democratic and I called it nonhierarchical. But, for example, a poet I found utterly useless from my point of view and whom he valued very very highly was Buckminster Fuller. Davenport thought the world of that untitled epic of Fuller’s, and that seemed to me just blah blah blah. It may have been interesting as a bunch of ideas, but poetry is more than just a bunch of ideas to me. And it wasn’t more than that. I have the deep-down belief that what Davenport liked was poetry that “said stuff,” and a lot of people feel that way. I don’t think he took very much thrill from the sheer tremor of little differences, which I think forms a lot of the power of poetry and I know is a lot of the power of painting. Otherwise it’s just a naked lady, you know, or a flower. Strauss: Davenport did give me new things, but he also recovered lost things. He wrote a little review of a book on John Burroughs, “The Sage of Slabsides,” and it gave me a way into Burroughs.7 He said don’t expect Burroughs to be Whitman or Thoreau, because he’s not them, he’s something else. He’s a better ornithologist than Thoreau was. His descriptions of certain things are better.

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Kelly: Davenport was a wonderful connoisseur and perceiver of excellences. Strauss: Yes, he could tell you where to go if you wanted to get a little bit of the best of a certain thing. And he was very generous in his recommendations, which has a poignancy to it, given the fact that he was, after all, writing in the ruins . . . Kelly: “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” in the primal Waste Land, again the primal modernist claim. . . . Strauss: In the obituaries and eulogies, writers were split over whether Davenport was a disciple of modernism, or was postmodern. Kelly: I think he’s actually post-pre-modern. I feel he would have been most at home in the 1895–1910 era, just as modernism was getting started, and that his natural conversation would have been with T. E. Hulme, and Wyndham Lewis, when they were still optimistic enough to reach out and grab all that. Because he was so optimistic, wasn’t he? Strauss: He believed in the power of the imagination, and in literature. But he believed they were occluded. Did you see his list of “worthy and influential works that are almost never read even by those interested in literature and ideas?” It includes Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, Horace Traubel’s Conversations with Walt Whitman in Camden, Thoreau’s Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and the Bible. When I went back and read essays from The Geography of the Imagination, I remembered how much I came to trust Davenport. When he wrote (in the middle of a piece on John Ruskin) that Ezekiel’s description of Tyre is “the most glorious description of a city in all of literature,” I dropped everything and ran to Ezekiel to find this.8 Kelly: And were thrilled to learn it, and yet you feel you’ve always known it. As you were saying before, it’s not condescending at all. But I could imagine that in correspondence, he was always hectoring and a bit bellicose, not so different from the instructor that he

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perceived himself to be to all mankind. And I was shocked, you know, when this poet and classicist, who had done nothing but Archilochus, and some rather soft and gentle, thoughtful poems, suddenly, while my back was turned, it seemed to me, became a famous writer, among the young. Why were all these people talking about Davenport? Then to realize he had gotten all that together— and the world was ready for it! But he never got to Brooklyn . . . Strauss: He went to Greece, but never to Brooklyn . . . Kelly: He would have been happy at Grand Army Plaza, I think. He would have enjoyed the radial asymmetries of the place.

Portraits of Harald Szeemann (top) and Walter Hopps (2006) by Phong Bui

The Bias of the World CURATING AFTER SZEEMANN AND HOPPS

WHAT IS A CURATOR? Under the Roman Empire the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing. The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the 14 regions of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts. In the Middle Ages, the role of the curator shifted to the ecclesiastical, as clergy having a spiritual cure or charge. So one could say that the split within curating— between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest. That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity, Commodity, the bias of the world— —Shakespeare, King John1 For better or worse, curators of contemporary art have become, especially in the last ten or fifteen years, the principal representatives of some of our most persistent questions and confusions about the

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social role of art. Is art a force for change and renewal, or is it a commodity, for advantage or convenience? Is art a radical activity, undermining social conventions, or is it a diverting entertainment for the wealthy? Are artists the antennae of the human race, or are they spoiled children with delusions of grandeur? (In Roman law, a curator could also be the appointed caretaker or guardian of a minor or lunatic.) Are art exhibitions “spiritual undertakings with the power to conjure alternative ways of organizing society,”2 or vehicles for cultural tourism and nationalistic propaganda? These splits, which reflect larger tears in the social fabric, certainly in the United States, complicate the changing role of curators of contemporary art, because curators mediate between art and its publics, and are often forced to take “a curving and indirect course” between them. Teaching for five years (2001–5) at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, I observed young curators confronting the practical demands and limitations of their profession armed with a vision of possibility and an image of the curator as a free agent, capable of almost anything. Where did this image come from? When Harald Szeemann and Walter Hopps died in February and March 2005, at age 72 and 71, respectively, it was impossible not to see this as the end of an era. They were two of the principal architects of the present approach to curating contemporary art, working over 50 years to transform the practice. When young curators consider what’s possible, they are imagining (whether they know it or not) some version of Szeemann and Hopps. The trouble with taking these two as models of curatorial possibility is that both of them were sui generis: renegades who managed, through sheer force of will, extraordinary ability, brilliance, luck, and hard work, to make themselves indispensable, and thereby intermittently palatable, to the conservative institutions of the art world. Each came to these institutions early. When Szeemann was named head of the Kunsthalle Bern in 1961, at age 28, he was the youngest ever to have been appointed to such a position in Europe, and when Hopps was made director of the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) in 1964, at age 31, he was then the youngest art museum director in the United States. By that time, Hopps (who never earned a college degree) had already mounted a

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show of paintings by Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Jay DeFeo, and many others on a merry-go-round in an amusement park on the Santa Monica Pier (with his first wife, Shirley Hopps, when he was 22); started and run two galleries (Syndell Studios and the seminal Ferus Gallery, with Ed Kienholz); and curated the first museum shows of Frank Stella’s paintings and Joseph Cornell’s boxes, the first U.S. retrospective of Kurt Schwitters, the first museum exhibition of Pop Art, and the first solo museum exhibition of Marcel Duchamp, in Pasadena in 1963. And that was just the beginning. Near the end of his life, Hopps estimated that he’d organized 250 exhibitions in his 50-year career. Szeemann’s early curatorial activities were no less prodigious. He made his first exhibition, Painters Poets/Poets Painters, a tribute to Hugo Ball, in 1957, at age 24. When he became the director of the Kunsthalle in Bern four years later, he completely transformed that institution, mounting nearly 12 exhibitions a year, culminating in the landmark show Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, in 1969, exhibiting works by 70 artists, including Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long, and Bruce Nauman, among many others. While producing critically acclaimed and historically important exhibitions, both Hopps and Szeemann quickly came into conflict with their respective institutions. After four years at the Pasadena Art Museum, Hopps was asked to resign. He was named director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1970, then fired two years later. For his part, stunned by the negative reaction to When Attitudes Become Form from the Kunsthalle Bern, Harald Szeemann quit his job, becoming the first “independent curator.” He set up the Agency for Spiritual Guestwork and cofounded the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) in 1969, curated Happenings & Fluxus at the Kunstverein in Cologne in 1970, and became the first artistic director of Documenta in 1972, reconceiving it as a 100-day event. Szeemann and Hopps hadn’t yet turned 40, and their best shows were all ahead of them. For Szeemann, these included Junggesellenmaschinen—Les Machines célibataires (“Bachelor Machines”) in 1975–77, Monte Veritá (1978, 1983, 1987), the first Aperto at the Venice Biennale (with Achille Bonito Oliva, 1980), Der Hang Zum

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Gesamtkunstwerk, Europaïsche Utopien seit 1800 (The quest for the total work of art) in 1983–84, Visionary Switzerland in 1991, the Joseph Beuys retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1993, Austria in a Lacework of Roses in 1996, and the Venice Biennale in 1999 and 2001. For Hopps, yet to come were exhibitions of Diane Arbus in the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1972, the Robert Rauschenberg midcareer survey in 1976, retrospectives at the Menil Collection of Yves Klein, John Chamberlain, Andy Warhol, and Max Ernst, and exhibitions of Jay DeFeo (1990), Ed Kienholz (1996 at the Whitney), Rauschenberg again (1998), and James Rosenquist (2003 at the Guggenheim). Both Szeemann and Hopps had exhibitions open when they died—Szeemann’s Visionary Belgium, for the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, and Hopps’s George Herms retrospective at the Santa Monica Museum—and both had plans for many more exhibitions in the future. WHAT DO CURATORS DO? Szeemann and Hopps were the Cosmas and Damian (or the Beuys and Duchamp) of contemporary curatorial practice. Rather than accepting things as they found them, they changed the way things were done. But finally, they will be remembered for only one thing: the quality of the exhibitions they made; for that is what curators do, after all. Szeemann often said he preferred the simple title of Ausstellungsmacher (exhibition-maker), but he acknowledged at the same time how many different functions this one job comprised: “administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.”3 I have heard curators characterized at different times as: Administrators Advocates Auteurs Bricoleurs (Hopps’s last show, the Herms retrospective, was titled “The Bricoleur of Broken Dreams . . . One More Once”) Brokers Bureaucrats Cartographers (Ivo Mesquita)

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Catalysts (Hans Ulrich Obrist) Collaborators Cultural impresarios Cultural nomads Diplomats (when Bill Lieberman, who held top curatorial posts at both the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, died in May 2005, ARTnews described him as “the consummate art diplomat”) And that’s just the beginning of the alphabet. When Hans Ulrich Obrist asked Walter Hopps to name important predecessors, the first one he came up with was Willem Mengelberg, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, “for his unrelenting rigor.” “Fine curating of an artist’s work,” he continued, that is, presenting it in an exhibition—requires as broad and sensitive an understanding of an artist’s work that a curator can possibly muster. This knowledge needs to go well beyond what is actually put in the exhibition. . . . To me, a body of work by a given artist has an inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts you in a certain psychological state. I always tried to get as peaceful and calm as possible.4 But around this calm and peaceful center raged the “controlled chaos” of exhibition-making. Hopps’s real skills included an encyclopedic visual memory, the ability to place artworks on the wall and in a room in a way that made them sing,5 the requisite personal charm to get people to do things for him, and an extraordinary ability to look at a work of art and then account for his experience of it, and articulate this account to others in a compelling and convincing way. It is significant, I think, that neither Szeemann nor Hopps considered himself a writer, but both recognized and valued good writing, and solicited and “curated” writers and critics as well as artists into their exhibitions and publications. Even so, many have observed that the rise of the independent curator has occurred at the expense of the independent critic. In an article published in 2005 titled “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” Mark Spiegler opined that “on the day in 1969 when Harald Szeemann went freelance by leaving the Kunsthalle Bern, the

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wind turned against criticism.”6 There are curators who can also write criticism, but these precious few are exceptions that prove the rule. Curators are not specialists, but for some reason many of them feel the need to use a specialized language, appropriated from philosophy or psychoanalysis, that too often obscures rather than reveals their sources and ideas. The result is not criticism, but curatorial rhetoric. Criticism involves making finer and finer distinctions among like things, while the inflationary writing of curatorial rhetoric is used to obscure fine distinctions with equivocating language. The latter’s displacement of the former has a political dimension, as we move culturally into an increasingly managed, postcritical environment. Although Szeemann and Hopps were very different in many ways, they shared certain fundamental values: an understanding of the importance of remaining independent of institutional prejudices and arbitrary power arrangements; a keen sense of history; the willingness to continually take risks intellectually, aesthetically, and conceptually; and an inexhaustible curiosity about and respect for the way artists work. Szeemann’s break away from the institution of the Kunsthalle was, simply put, “a rebellion aimed at having more freedom.”7 This rebellious act put him closer to the ethos of artists and writers, where authority cannot be bestowed or taken, but must be earned through the quality of one’s work. In his collaborations with artists, power relations were negotiated in practice rather than asserted as fiat. Every mature artist I know has a favorite horror story about a young, inexperienced curator trying to claim an authority they haven’t earned by manipulating a seasoned artist’s work or by designing exhibitions in which individual artists’ works are seen as secondary and subservient to the curator’s grand plan or theme. The cure for this kind of insecure hubris is experience, but also the recognition of the ultimate contingency of the curatorial process. As Dave Hickey said of both critics and curators, “Somebody has to do something before we can do anything.”8 In June 2000, after being at the pinnacle of curatorial power repeatedly for over 40 years, Harald Szeemann said, “Frankly, if you insist on power, then you keep going on in this way. But you must throw the power away after each experience, otherwise it’s not renewing. I’ve done a lot of shows, but if the next one is not an adventure, it’s not important for me and I refuse to do it.”9

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When contemporary curators, following in the steps of Szeemann, break free from institutions, they sometimes lose their sense of history in the process. Whatever their shortcomings, institutions do have a sense (sometimes a surfeit) of history. And without history, “the new” becomes a trap, a sequential recapitulation of past approaches with no forward movement. It is a terrible thing to be perpetually stuck in the present, and this is a major occupational hazard for curators. Speaking about his curating of the Seville Biennale in 2004, Szeemann said, “It’s not about presenting the best there is, but about discovering where the unpredictable path of art will go in the immanent future.” But moving the ball up the field requires a tremendous amount of legwork. “The unpredictable path of art” becomes much less so when curators rely on the Claude Rains method, rounding up the usual suspects from the same well-worn list of artists that everyone else in the world is using. It is difficult, in retrospect, to fully appreciate the risks both Szeemann and Hopps took to change the way curators worked. One should never underestimate the value of a monthly paycheck. By giving up a secure position as director of a stable art institution and striking out on his own as an “independent curator,” Szeemann was assuring himself years of penury. There was certainly no assurance that anyone would hire him as a freelance. Anyone who’s chosen this path knows that freelance means never having to say you’re solvent. Being freelance as a writer and critic is one thing: the tools of the trade are relatively inexpensive, and one need only make a living. But making exhibitions is costly, and finding “independent” money, money without onerous strings attached to it, is especially difficult when one cannot, in good conscience, present it as an “investment opportunity.” Daniel Birnbaum points out that all the dilemmas of corporate sponsorship and branding in contemporary art today are fully articulated in [“When Attitudes Become Form”]. Remarkably, according to Szeemann, the exhibition came about only because “people from Philip Morris and the PR firm Ruder Finn came to Bern and asked me if I would do a show of my own. They offered me money and total freedom.” Indeed, the exhibition’s catalogue seems uncanny

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in its prescience: “As businessmen in tune with our times, we at Philip Morris are committed to support the experimental,” writes John A. Murphy, the company’s European president, asserting that his company experimented with “new methods and materials” in a way fully comparable to the Conceptual artists in the exhibition. (And yet, showing the other side of this corporate-funding equation, it was a while before the company supported the arts in Europe again, perhaps needing time to recover from all the negative press surrounding the event.)10 So the founding act of “independent curating” was brought to you by . . . Philip Morris! Thirty-three years later, for the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02, Szeemann designed a pavilion covered with sheets of gold, containing a system of pneumatic tubes and a machine that destroyed money—two 100-franc notes every minute during the 159 days of the exhibition. The sponsor? The Swiss National Bank, of course. When Walter Hopps brought the avant-garde to Southern California, he didn’t have to compete with others to secure the works of Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, or Jay DeFeo (for the merry-go-round show in 1953), because no one else wanted them. In his Hopps obituary, Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight pointed out that “just a few years after Hopps’ first visit to the [Arensbergs’] collection, the [Los Angeles] City Council decreed that Modern art was Communist propaganda and banned its public display.”11 In 50 years, we’ve progressed from banning art as communist propaganda to prosecuting artists as terrorists.12 THE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN It’s not that fast horses are rare, but men who know enough to spot them are few and far between. —Han Yü13 The trait Szeemann and Hopps had most in common was their respect for and understanding of artists. They never lost sight of the fact that their principal job was to take what they found in artists’ works and do whatever it took to present it in the strongest possible

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way to an interested public. Sometimes this meant combining it with other work that enhanced or extended it. This was done not to show the artists anything they didn’t already know, but to show the public. As Lawrence Weiner pointed out in an interview in 1994, “Everybody that was in the Attitudes show knew all about the work of everybody else in the Attitudes show. They wouldn’t have known them personally, but they knew all the work. . . . Most artists on both sides of the Atlantic knew what was being done. European artists had been coming to New York and U.S. artists went over there.”14 But Attitudes brought it all together in a way that made a difference. Both Szeemann and Hopps felt most at home with artists, sometimes literally. Carolee Schneemann described for me the scene in the Kunstverein in Cologne in 1970, when she and her collaborator in “Happenings and Fluxus” (having arrived and discovered there was no money for lodging) moved into their installations, and Szeemann thought it such a good idea to sleep on site that he brought in a cot and slept in the museum himself, to the outrage of the guards and staff. Both Szeemann and Hopps reserved their harshest criticism for the various bureaucracies that got between them and the artists. Hopps once described working for bureaucrats when he was a senior curator at the National Collection of Fine Arts as “like moving through an atmosphere of Seconal.”15 And Szeemann said in 2001 that “the annoying thing about such bureaucratic organizations at the [Venice] Biennale is that there are a lot of people running around who hate artists because they keep running around wanting to change everything.”16 Changing everything, for Szeemann, was just the point. “Artists, like curators, work on their own,” he said in 2000, “grappling with their attempt to make a world in which to survive. . . . We are lonely people, faced with superficial politicians, with donors, sponsors, and one must deal with all of this. I think it is here where the artist finds a way to form his own world and live his obsessions. For me, this is the real society.”17 The society of the obsessed. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Although Walter Hopps was an early commissioner for the São Paolo Biennale (1965: Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Richard Irwin,

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and Larry Poons) and of the Venice Biennale (1972: Diane Arbus), Harald Szeemann practically invented the role of nomadic independent curator of huge international shows, putting his indelible stamp on Documenta and Venice and organizing the Lyon Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale in Korea in 1997, and the first Seville Biennale in 2004, as well as numerous other international surveys around the world. So what Szeemann said about globalization and art should perhaps be taken seriously. He saw globalization as a euphemism for imperialism, and proclaimed that “globalization is the great enemy of art.” And in the Carolee Thea interview in 2000, he said, “Globalization is perfect if it brings more justice and equality to the world . . . but it doesn’t. Artists dream of using computer or digital means to have contact and to bring continents closer. But once you have the information, it’s up to you what to do with it. Globalization without roots is meaningless in art.”18 And globalization of the curatorial class can be a way to avoid or “transcend” the political. Rene Dubos’s old directive to “think globally, but act locally” (first given at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972) has been upended in some recent international shows (like the fourteenth Sydney Biennale in 2004, and the first Moscow Biennial in 2005). When one thinks locally (within a primarily EuroAmerican cultural framework, or within a New York-London-Kassel-Venice-Basel-Los Angeles-Miami framework) but acts globally, the results are bound to be problematic, and can be disastrous. In 1979, Dubos argued for an ecologically sustainable world in which “natural and social units maintain or recapture their identity, yet interplay with each other through a rich system of communications.” At their best, the big international exhibitions do contribute to this. Okwui Enwezor’s19 Documenta 11 certainly did, and Szeemann acknowledged this when I spoke with him in Kassel in 2002. At their worst, they perpetuate the center-to-periphery hegemony and preclude real cross-cultural communication and change. Although having artists and writers move around in the world is an obvious good, real cultural exchange is something that must be nurtured. Walter Hopps said in 1996: “I really believe in—and, obviously, hope for—radical, or arbitrary, presentations, where cross-cultural

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and cross-temporal considerations are extreme, out of all the artifacts we have. . . . So just in terms of people’s priorities, conventional hierarchies begin to shift some.”20 THE SILENCE OF SZEEMANN AND HOPPS IS OVERRATED “Art” is any human activity that aims at producing improbable situations, and it is the more artful (artistic) the less probable the situation that it produces. —Vilém Flusser21 Harald Szeemann recognized early and long appreciated the utopian aspects of art. “The often-evoked ‘autonomy’ is just as much a fruit of subjective evaluation as the ideal society: it remains a utopia while it informs the desire to experientially visualize the unio mystica of opposites in space. Which is to say that without seeing, there is nothing visionary, but that the visionary should always determine the seeing.” And he recognized that the bureaucrat could overtake the curer of souls at any point. “Otherwise, we might just as well return to ‘hanging and placing,’ and divide the entire process ‘from the vision to the nail’ into detailed little tasks again.”22 He organized exhibitions in which the improbable could occur, and was willing to risk the impossible. In reply to a charge that the social utopianism of Joseph Beuys was never realized, Szeemann said, “The nice thing about utopias is precisely that they fail. For me failure is a poetic dimension of art.”23 Curating a show in which nothing could fail was, to Szeemann, a waste of time. If he and Hopps could still encourage young curators in anything, I suspect it would be to take greater risks in their work. At a time when all parts of the social and political spheres (including art institutions) are increasingly managed, breaking out of this frame, asking significant questions, and setting the terms of resistance is more and more vitally important. It is important to work against the bias of the world (commodity, political expediency). For curators of contemporary art, that means finding and supporting those artists who, as Flusser writes, “have attempted, at the risk of their lives, to utter that which is unutterable, to render audible that which is ineffable, to render visible that which is hidden.”24

John Berger drawing on the beach in Connemara, photographed by Sarah O’Flaherty in 2004

Father and Daughter FLESH

Where would any of us be without the example of John Berger? I mean any of us who care about the conflicted relation between art and politics, and who crave a radical criticism that is both accessible and deep, embodied and informed. Berger has survived and flourished for over 50 years as a radical writer outside of the academy, reaching a wide audience with his lucid prose. The key to his success has been his continued willingness and ability to approach works of art with a clear and questioning eye, sweeping aside a priori assessments to deal with what is actually before him. In a 1970 essay on one of his most influential forbears, Walter Benjamin, Berger wrote, “Works of art await use. But their real usefulness lies in what they actually are—which may be quite distinct from what they once were— rather than in what it may be convenient to believe they are.”1 In Berger’s writing, as in Benjamin’s, this radical realism has a political base. As a young art critic for the New Statesman in London from 1952 to 1962, Berger was the only Marxist art critic in Britain writing regularly for a wide audience. When his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, appeared in 1958, it was attacked so vociferously for its revolutionary content (Stephen Spender viciously compared it to Goebbel’s novel Michael) that the publisher withdrew it. When his novel G. won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1972, Berger used his acceptance speech to

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denounce the sponsors of the prize, the Booker McConnell Corporation, for their exploitation of the Caribbean, and gave half of his prize money to the Black Panther movement in London. He used the other half to finance his book A Seventh Man (1975), which exposed the exploitation of Europe’s migrant workers. And his BBC television series Ways of Seeing in 1972 was a polemical masterpiece, a dialectical antidote to Kenneth Clark’s Civilization and other universalizing schemas. Of his first collection of essays on art, published in 1960, Berger later said, “The title Permanent Red was never meant to imply that I would not change. It was to claim that I would never compromise my opposition to bourgeois culture and society.”2 At a time when there is so much confusion about the role of art and culture in society, with both liberal and conservative critics arguing for the autonomy of art, and some radical critics embracing the antiaesthetic and with it the ridiculous idea that beauty itself is a bourgeois value, one looks forward to any Berger book for the clarity it might offer. Titian: Nymph and Shepherd consists of letters written by Berger and his daughter, Katya Berger Andreadakis, who is a translator and film critic in Athens.3 The letters are accompanied by sumptuous reproductions of Titian’s paintings and John Berger’s sketches and drawings made as studies of these paintings. It is a book of correspondences in the root sense, a mutual responsiveness of both people and things. There is no way of knowing how fictive the correspondence is, how mediated, but its sprawling fragmentary incompleteness at least gives it the feel of an actual correspondence. The correspondence begins after Katya attends the big Titian exhibition in Venice in 1990. She sends her father a postcard: John, What do I think about Titian? In one word on a postcard: flesh. —Love, Katya In her first letter, Katya tells of wandering through the exhibition and encountering an old man, “alone and muttering to himself.” She tries to move away from him, but he keeps reappearing next to her. The first thing she hears him say, standing before Titian’s Christ Carrying the Cross, is this: “One uses painting to clothe oneself, to keep

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warm . . .” And then, “Jesus carries his cross, and, me, I carry the act of painting, I wear it like something woolen.” Katya again tries to avoid the old man, but she cannot avoid his words, and gradually she finds herself following him around the exhibition. He becomes her unkempt, vatic guide. At the Flaying of Marsyas, he says, “When you skin an animal, you touch the truth about flesh.” When Katya writes to her father to tell him about the old man at the exhibition, John immediately accepts her encounter with the old man as a visitation of the painter, and replies: “All that you say about fur makes me think of his dogs. Was the old man by any chance accompanied by a dog?” Referring to the Flaying of Marsyas, John points out that satyrs like Marsyas were “creatures who revealed how skin was like fur, and both were the outer coverings of a mystery. A kind of clothing which one couldn’t unbutton or unzip except with a killing knife.” As the correspondence continues, this concentration on the mystery of flesh intensifies. Katya responds with great insight into Titian’s Danaë as “a woman painted from the inside and only clothed in her skin afterwards. The opposite of what Goya did when he undressed the Maja. The old man first put himself inside—or behind—the canvas, and from there he burrowed his way towards the visible surface of the body.” The realization that flesh is a raiment, a covering that reveals, makes it a metaphor for painting, and painting becomes a metaphor for the mystery of incarnation itself. “So I have to tell you,” writes Katya, “I see him everywhere, the old man, I see him even in your granddaughter, who is more beautiful than light, sweeter than fire, gentler than water. Already she has won over our death. . . .” Although the content and cadences of Katya’s prose are obviously related to, even derivative of her father’s (this is undoubtedly exaggerated by the fact that we are reading John Berger’s translations of his daughter’s French), her own voice does come through. She is at turns playful and respectful, and not always so deferential to her father. When John wonders “Might it be that all flesh is feminine—even the flesh of men? Maybe what is specifically male are men’s fantasies, ambitions, ideas, obsessions. Could their flesh be female?” Katya will have none of it. “Of course, flesh is not only feminine!” she replies.

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If women throughout the centuries have remained desirable and you haven’t grown tired of it, this is partly the result of the little lie, as old as the world, which proposes that all flesh is feminine. It’s a pure convention whereby men use the bodies of women to speak of their own passive desires, their desire to behave with abandon, to lie suppliant on a bed. Men have delegated to women this aspect of desire. The woman’s body has become, not only the object but also the ambassador of masculine desire. Or rather, simply of desire, regardless of gender. The skin of men, where it is soft—have you noticed?—is softer than the skin of women. Touché, mon père! As the correspondence moves along, Katya’s voice becomes ever stronger and more confident, and at the same time more demonstrative of her love for her father. In describing a certain type of person in which “there remains something untreated and unconscious,” she writes, When they listen, they are like wells; when they speak, they do so like fountains. When they move, it’s like hearing a voice, and when they concentrate (shaving or tightening a screw or copying a poem), they give off the same mystery as a priest does performing a liturgy. The old man I met was like this. And you are, too. (Here I give away the clue to our correspondence.) Katya then makes a point about there being two kinds of intimacy. The first, “a way of listening to one’s internal sense, of listening to one’s own dialogue between the said and the unsaid”; and the other, a “jubilant intimacy, the one which is (occasionally) shared, implies two listenings, two dialogues which overlap and couple.” Though she tries to tie this in to Titian’s late paintings (as an example of the former kind of intimacy), and challenges her father to show her a painting that is the fruit of the latter kind of intimacy, she seems to be alluding to something else, perhaps the difficulty of being intimate with a master, whether artist or father, or both. Perhaps a bit embarrassed by his daughter’s words of admiration, John Berger becomes suddenly, uncharacteristically, analytical. He lists examples of paintings “in which we see or are allowed to feel a shared, double intimacy—that of painter and model, simultaneously.”

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“I cannot explain this,” he concludes, clumsily, “I just know that it’s true, which is why it’s disconcerting.” Katya begins her final letter with mock surrender: “OK. You win.” But she continues, “I still insist, however, that . . . the one who is looking, just as much as the one being looked at, has to be in a state of harmony, of grace, yes.” Then follows an eloquent passage about life in Greece (where “the butchers simply display dead flesh”) that may be read as a gentle rebuff to her father’s analytical tone: “Greeks start from the principle that they know themselves (not with their brains, like the French, but because they’ve lived).” And she concludes, “Just as our brain likes to follow lines traced by rational thought, so our senses and our soul need the communion which begins with the rubbing out of those lines, and the abolition of any frontier between inside and outside, the self and the world, the sea and the earth, the Creation by God and the creation by a simple titan.” This book of letters between a father and a daughter is not a profound work, but it is a delightful one. The larger philosophical issues arising from Titian’s work are only hinted at, and are left to take their place among a wealth of casual commentaries on the consolation of dogs, the Plague of 1575, pomegranates and peaches, Pan and Panofsky, a bus accident on Akadimias Street, Vienna as “the capital of reincarnations,” an unfinished film called Walk Me Home, serpents, Adam and Eve, Sunday picnics in the Jura, an inscription on a monastery on Mount Athos, the immutability of jewels, red crystal glasses, Polish emigrés in Paris, “the intimacy from which images may be born,” weather and democracy in Athens, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, Mayakofsky, Fellini, and the bitterness of our century (“always searching for rage and wisdom rather than harmony”). The fact is that all of these disparate things do have to do with Titian, and with looking at Titian’s paintings, because the artist, the work of art, and its viewers are connected through an intricate web of correspondences, and if one is really inside of that relation, everything corresponds. And one cannot really deal with a work of art without dealing with its correspondences, including one’s own life and its relation to others. It is a simple truth, but one that is so regularly obscured in practice that it has become a kind of mystery to us. This little book is a celebration of that mystery.

Man of Sorrows (1532) by Maerten van Heemskerck; courtesy of Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent

It Has to Be Danced to Be Known ON LEO STEINBERG

Is art history any longer relevant to contemporary American culture? Though reports of its demise are exaggerated, the discipline is certainly in crisis and has been under attack for years, both from within the profession and without. In Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (1989), Donald Preziosi characterized the tenor of these attacks in suitably apocalyptic terms: What art historians do is changing—certainly too slowly for some and far too precipitously for others. Some would seem to lament that art historians today wander over a bleak and darkening landscape increasingly threatened from below by the rumblings of new taxonomic technologies and from above by new theoretical developments hovering like lowering storm clouds, portending some idealist-materialist Armageddon. . . . What is left of the art historical hortus within the humanities has understandably come to seem like a narrow, trackless, and weed-filled space with fewer and fewer comforting vistas apart from the silent quiddities of one’s favorite objects. All the old road signs seem to have been effaced by adolescent graffitists or rewritten in extraterrestrial hieroglyphs by ivory-tower

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academicians whose heads swirl about in a starry semiological firmament. Disciplinary boundaries—the divisions of intellectual labor into discrete fields—are being rejected in favor of new theoretical methods that range across disciplines. Defenders of the old borders are characterized as recalcitrant relics. “The art historian,” writes Preziosi, “is as much an artifact of the discipline as are its ostensible objects of study.”1 The new generation of art historians is directed to look at advances in other interpretive fields as painful reminders of the inadequacies of its own discipline. In his structuralist treatment of art history, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983), Norman Bryson observed: It is a sad fact: art history lags behind the study of the other arts. . . . While the last three or so decades have witnessed extraordinary and fertile change in the study of literature, of history, of anthropology, in the discipline of art history there has reigned a stagnant peace; a peace in which—certainly—a profession of art history has continued to exist, in which monographs have been written, and more and more catalogues produced: but produced at an increasingly remote margin of the humanities, and almost in the leisure sector of intellectual life.2 Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550) is often called the foundation stone of art history. It established the idea that art progresses through identifiable stages of development toward classic perfection. This myth of progress in art has proven hard to shake, no matter how much contrary evidence accumulates around it. Even today, when a close look at the 30,000-year-old paintings recently discovered in the Chauvet cave should be enough to put the myth of linear progress to rest forever, it persists in art history. And along with this belief in progress in art comes a reluctance to rethink established hierarchies and judgments. Art history is a fundamentally conservative institution, and Renaissance art history is the most conservative of all. Academic art history arose in the twentieth century, built on the work of historians such as Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), the father

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of the modern objective historical school, who brought scientific method to historical analysis and believed it possible for history to present the past “as it really was,” free of complicating subjectivity. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) developed a critical framework for evaluating, dating, and authenticating works of art based on formalist analysis in his Principles of Art History (1915), and the Englishmen Roger Fry and Clive Bell would later promote post-Impressionism on mostly formalist grounds. But it was really in the 1930s, when the great refugee-scholars Fritz Saxl, Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, and Ernst Gombrich fled Germany and Austria to end up in England and the United States, that the discipline became popular as an academic subject. At this point and for a while after, it was still possible to conceive of the history of art as a more or less orderly procession of masterpieces, based on a more or less reliable consensus about which artworks should be included in this history and even about how they should be seen. Objectivity was the attainable goal. As long as this unified theory of culture still held, the influence of the relative position of the viewer was not seen as a significant factor. We were all (or all of us who were thought to matter) still in the same story. That is no longer the case. Art history is criticized for using obsolete and invalid methods to defend values that no one takes seriously anymore, from positions of imagined authority that are no longer recognized outside the field—in short, for being woefully out of touch. But the most serious challenge to the practice of art history is the reported loss of faith in the underlying principles on which it depends. In his influential essay The End of the History of Art? (1987), Hans Belting described this crisis as a “loss of faith in a great and compelling narrative, in the way that things must be seen.” That is, we are no longer all in the same story, and we are rapidly losing the will to imagine it. The real difficulty, Belting claims, is that “contemporary art indeed manifests an awareness of a history of art but no longer carries it forward; and that the academic discipline of art history no longer disposes of a compelling model of historical treatment.”3 Some of the most vehement critics of the discipline seem to be saying that the only way to save art history is to destroy

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it—to convince it to abandon its only real reason for being; namely, the imagination of continuity in art. Given this dire state of affairs, it is perhaps not so surprising that one of the most persuasive advocates for the continuing relevance of art history (and, by extension, of the humanities as a whole) to contemporary life and thought is a scholar born in 1920 who feels himself to be regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility, by a significant portion of the art history establishment. Although Leo Steinberg has received an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Letters (1983), the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism from the College Art Association (1984), and a MacArthur Fellowship (1986), he has always had a conflicted relationship with the art history establishment. For much of his long and distinguished career, he has often been treated as an apostate, a cantankerous and deluded exegete, even a dangerous heretic. When the great art historian Meyer Schapiro died in 1996, the critic and philosopher Arthur Danto wrote that Schapiro had been “too brilliant to ignore but, from the perspective of the establishment, too radical to accept.”4 This has also seemed to be Leo Steinberg’s predicament, though for different reasons. To one approaching Steinberg’s work from outside the profession of art history, say, as a contemporary art critic, Steinberg seems at first an unlikely controversialist. Rather, he appears to be a steadfast defender of the traditional values of art historical analysis, using the old tools of iconography and iconology handed down to him by his teachers rather than the newer ones favored by postmodernist theory. It is the way he uses these tools, and what he makes with them, that is different. But Steinberg’s work over the last 50 years has frequently drawn outraged responses and censorious remarks from defenders of the faith—forcing us to ask, Just what faith is being defended? Leo Steinberg was born in Moscow in 1920 and lived in Berlin and London before emigrating to the United States in 1938. Having studied at the Slade School of Art in London, he entered the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University in the mid-1950s (Ph.D., 1960), where he studied art and architecture with, as he later wrote, “two great masters, Professor Richard Krautheimer and Professor Wolfgang

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Lotz.” In 1958 and 1959 he was a guest of the American Academy in Rome, where he researched and wrote his dissertation on the first major work of the baroque architect Francesci Borromini (1599–1667). Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism looks forward, both in style and substance, to Steinberg’s later writings. “Our study,” he wrote, has attempted to lay a heavy symbolic burden on S. Carlino— heavier perhaps than any building will bear. What we imply is that Borromini, being called on to build his first church, had asked himself—what is a church; what does it stand for? His answer—if our hypotheses are at all credible—is that the church building is a microcosm of the Church universal; therefore it stands for the See of St. Peter and the mystic Body of Christ, for the world’s circuit suffused by the Cross, and—in the singleness of its substance and its manifold forms—for the nature of God.5 Eighteen years later, when this work was published in a series of outstanding dissertations in the fine arts, Steinberg introduced it as “my old polemic and disguised manifesto, belaboring a proposition nobody would now contest, to wit, that the bravest baroque architect made his first building structurally contrapuntal in the service of a symbol; and that the building’s message could be read in the eloquence of its forms, if only these were read closely enough” (emphasis added).6 That last pendant clause is a significant qualification, one that would expand in importance throughout Steinberg’s subsequent career. The seeds of Steinberg’s heresy, glimpsed in his dissertation, can be seen more clearly in one of his first published essays, “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind” (1953), which he later called “a rite of passage, a declaration of independence from formalist indoctrination.”7 In this essay, first published in Partisan Review, Steinberg took on the reigning orthodoxy of formalist art history (represented by Roger Fry and Clive Bell), its institutional inheritors (such as Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art and Albert C. Barnes, who formed the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia), and the contemporary critics who brought its methods to bear on modern art (led by Clement

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Greenberg, who championed American abstract art as superior to, and purer than, the previous art of Europe). One of the central tenets of formalism was that representation had little to do with advanced art. Steinberg’s essay attempted to show “that representation is a central esthetic function in all art; and that the formalist esthetic, designed to champion the new abstract trend, was largely based on a misunderstanding and an underestimation of the art it set out to defend.” “What matters,” Steinberg wrote, “is the artist’s intent to push the truth of his representation to the limits of what is felt to be depictable. The changing pattern of these limits is the preoccupation of the history of art.”8 Steinberg was not arguing against abstraction in favor of representational art. Rather he was objecting to reductive approaches to art, abstract or not, that treated it as detached from the sensible world of which it is a part. His main objection was that this kind of thinking is patently ahistorical. To treat abstract works as “simply painting,” he wrote, as though they had no referent outside themselves, is to miss both their meaning and their continuity with the art of the past. If my suggestion is valid, then even non-objective art continues to pursue art’s social role of fixating thought in esthetic form, pinning down the most ethereal conceptions of the age in vital designs, and rendering them accessible to the apparatus of sense.9 This cogent description of art’s social role could be usefully applied to Steinberg’s own work as scholar and critic, teacher and lecturer, over the subsequent four decades. He taught drawing and art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York from 1961 to 1975, and ended his teaching career as Benjamin Franklin Professor at the University of Pennsylvania (1975–91). His lectures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Studio School, Columbia University, and elsewhere are legendary among artists and art lovers. Few scholars of our time have so enlivened the traditional art history magic lantern show (lecturing with slides) as has Steinberg.

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When Steinberg focuses his attention on a work that everybody thinks they know, such as Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietá, or works that experts have agreed are lesser ones, such as Michelangelo’s last paintings, he brings new insight and analysis to these variously occluded works, making them once again visible. This often involves the radical questioning of long-held views. Reviewing Steinberg’s 1975 book on Michelangelo’s last paintings, New York Times art critic John Russell wrote: Professor Leo Steinberg is before all things a rescuer. To the discipline of art history he brings a chivalric intent and, with that, a depth and a density of emotional commitment which are quite exceptional. When we read him we feel ourselves in the company not of one of art history’s accountants, but of an ardent and vulnerable nature which is stretching itself to the utmost. He excels on disputed ground. If it is (or was) the general opinion that Jasper Johns is an impudent prankster, or that the substance of late Picasso is glib and repetitive, or that there is only one right way to look at a new painting, then Leo Steinberg will get right in there and straighten things out. In dealing with older art (as he more usually does) he likes, equally, to tussle with a subject to which injustice has been done. In such cases, and without shirking any of the drudgeries of pure scholarship, he invests his summing-up with insights that belong to our generation alone.10 Otherwise, why bother to write about a work that has already been so exhaustively scrutinized? Introducing in 1981 his extraordinary work on Velázquez’s Las Meninas, first written as a lecture in 1965, Steinberg notes: Writing about a work such as Las Meninas is not, after all, like queuing up at the A&P. Rather, it is somewhat comparable to the performing of a great musical composition of which there are no definitive renderings. The guaranteed inadequacy of each successive performance challenges the interpreter next in line, helping thereby to keep the work in the repertoire.

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Alternatively, when a work of art ceases to be discussed, it suffers a gradual blackout.11 Although Steinberg is primarily known for his masterful writings on historical subjects—especially the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Mantegna, and Velázquez—his writings on modern and contemporary art are models of engaged criticism. The works collected in Other Criteria (1972) range from short reviews to polemical essays and extended considerations of particular works by selected artists, including Jasper Johns, Picasso, and Rodin. The reviews all date from the same, unfortunately short, period of time. “In those days, the mid-1950’s,” writes Steinberg, practicing art critics were mostly artists or men of letters. Few art historians took the contemporary scene seriously enough to give it the time of day. To divert one’s attention from Papal Rome to Tenth Street, New York, would have struck them as frivolous—and I respected their probity. . . . With each passing month, these pieces got harder to do. Commenting on a life’s work in a week’s writing became a preposterous challenge. Tom Hess is right—it takes years to look at a picture. I succumbed to exhaustion after ten months and never reviewed again.12 This early retirement must be counted as one of criticism’s signal losses. Though no longer writing reviews, Steinberg continued occasionally to address works and issues of contemporary art. In a brilliant and prophetic essay from 1962 that grappled with the difficulties of Jasper Johns’s early work, Steinberg articulated the values of criticism in its relation to history: A work of art does not come like a penny postcard with its value stamped upon it; for all its objectness, it comes primarily as a challenge to the life of the imagination, and “correct” ways of thinking or feeling about it simply do not exist. The grooves in which thought and feelings will eventually run have to be excavated before anything but bewilderment or resentment is felt at all. For a long time the direction of flow remains uncertain, dammed up, or runs out all over, until, after many

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trial cuts by venturesome critics, certain channels are formed. In the end, that wide river which we may call the appreciation of Johns—though it will still be diverted this way and that— becomes navigable to all. Most people—especially those who belittle a critic’s work— do not know, or pretend not to know, how real the problem is. They wait it out until the channels are safely cut, then come out and enjoy the smooth sailing, saying, who needs a critic?13 In the light of such engagement, Steinberg came to see formalist criticism as a form of aggrieved eremetism, a retreat into aesthetic protectionism. As criticism moves away from the world into a defense of art for art’s sake, Steinberg believes it moves also away from art. In the title essay of Other Criteria, based on a lecture first given at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968, Steinberg wrote, “I find myself constantly in opposition to what is called formalism. . . . I dislike above all [its] interdictory stance—the attitude that tells an artist what he ought not to do, and the spectator what he ought not to see.”14 This concern for the rights of artists and spectators was more than a momentary polemical stance. Steinberg has always addressed in his writings not only other art historians but also artists and viewers of art. In so doing, he has refused to retreat behind the disengaged superiority of the specialist, or an imagined “objectivity.” In railing against the constraints of formalism, he was also striking out against the concomitant “disdain of subjectivity” that underlies it. In “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self,” he says, With the disdain of subjectivity goes the demand that value judgments be eliminated from serious investigations of art since they cannot be objectified. . . . In protecting art history from subjective judgements, we proscribe the unpredictable question into which value and personality may surely enter, but which pertains to art because of art’s protean nature.15 If art history (and also art, it must be said) is to be relevant outside its own sphere, Steinberg realized, it must continue to ask these “unpredictable questions.”

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Steinberg distrusted the claims that Clement Greenberg and others made for modern art at the expense of historical art, in effect separating modern art from everything that preceded it. “Greenberg’s theoretical schema keeps breaking down because it insists on defining modern art without acknowledgment of its content, and historical art without recognizing its formal self-consciousness,” Steinberg writes. Considering Jasper Johns’s use of given designs (the American flag, targets, light bulbs, cans of Ballantine Ale), Steinberg compared this recognition of prestructured forms to the way “artists formerly accepted the anatomy of the body.” Responding to those who would accuse Johns of insufficient originality for using these prestructured forms, Steinberg points out that “the best storytellers, such as Homer and Shakespeare, did not, like O. Henry or Somerset Maugham, invent their own plots.” And Steinberg counters Greenberg’s reduction of Old Master painting to an impure “illusionism” or slavish mimesis with historical examples: Some of the Old Masters overruled the apparent perspective by dispersing identical color patches as an allover carpet spread (Pieter Bruegel, for instance). Some worked with chromatic dissonances to weave a continuous surface shimmer like mother-of-pearl. Many—from Titian onward—insured their art against realism by the obtrusive calligraphy of the brush— laying a welter of brush-strokes upon the surface to call attention to process. Some contrived implausible contradictions within the field, as when the swelling bulk of a foreshortened form is collapsed and denied the spatial ambience to house it. All of them counted on elaborate framing as an integral part of the work (“advertising the literal nature of the support,” as Greenberg says of Collage)—so that the picture, no matter how deep its illusionism, turned back into a thing mounted there like a gem. It was Michelangelo himself who designed the frame of the Doni Madonna, an element essential to the precious-mirror effect of its surface.16 In “Other Criteria,” Steinberg challenged the idea of the separation of modernism from all that had come before it, and so sought to head off the crisis to come in art history. In suggesting (in 1968)

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that “Modernism may have to be redefined—by other criteria,”17 Steinberg presaged the claims of postmodernism, and 20 years later this early opposition to modernist theory helped make Steinberg one of the few art historians embraced by theorists of postmodernism such as Hal Foster and Craig Owens. The most astute critic of Greenbergian doctrine, Rosalind Krauss, has long been a champion of Steinberg’s work, and published two of his most influential essays in the journal October. One of these essays, published in October in the summer of 1983 and subsequently as a book by Pantheon in 1984, appeared in a second “revised and expanded” edition from the University of Chicago Press: The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1996). This beautifully produced edition includes the original essay and what Steinberg calls its “Excursuses” (including “collateral matter, additional illustrations, and expanded quotations, as well as polemics, digressions, and unseasonable interruptions I could not resist”), followed by a “Retrospect,” nearly as long as the original essay, in which Steinberg further expands on the original work and addresses the criticisms it engendered when first published. As one artist friend told me after reading the new edition, “The first part changed forever the way I will look at Renaissance art, and the second part made me see why.” The original essay examines in voluminous detail (aided by more than 250 illustrations) the prominent display of Christ’s genitals in Renaissance painting and sculpture—a recurrent “ostentatio genitalium” to complement the ostentatio vulnerum (the ritual showing forth of the wounds) of Christ. In picture after picture, the penis of Christ—as an infant, on the cross, and in resurrection—is not merely visible but ostentatiously displayed. In many examples, this ostentatio genitalium is the principal focus of the composition. The Madonna displays the infant Christ’s genitals to the inquiring eyes of the Magi, or the wealthy donors who commissioned the paintings, or to any other viewer who might doubt that Christ was incarnated as fully human and complete in every detail. In paintings of the crucified Christ there is a special emphasis on the extravagant knots and flights of his loincloth, and there are all those pietàs, with Christ shown

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holding his groin. There are even a sizable number of Christs ithyphallic in death. “All of which,” Steinberg points out, “has been tactfully overlooked for half a millennium.” Why? How? And most important, What does it all mean? While revealing this long overlooked aspect of Renaissance art, Steinberg speculates on its theological significance as evidence of the humanation (Steinberg resuscitates the older term as preferable to its replacement, “incarnation”) of Christ. “In celebrating the union of God and man in the Incarnation,” he writes, Western artists began displacing the emphasis, shifting from the majesty of unapproachable godhead to a being known, loved, and imitable. . . . Realism, the more penetrating the better, was consecrated a form of worship. . . . To profess that God once embodied himself in a human nature is to confess that the eternal, there and then, became mortal and sexual. Thus understood, the evidence of Christ’s sexual member serves as the pledge of God’s humanation.18 Even before the Renaissance was over, this new realism employed by Western artists prompted censorial actions by ecclesiastical conservatives. Michelangelo’s Risen Christ, carved in marble for the Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome in 1514, showing a Christ “complete in all the parts of a man” was “disfigured by a brazen breechclout,” as Steinberg puts it, added by church officials. All two- and three-dimensional sixteenth-century copies of the statue added aprons to cover the offending member. In Steinberg’s view, this misplaced modesty effected a denaturing or de-humanation of Christ that has continued into the modern age. “If Michelangelo denuded his Risen Christ,” writes Steinberg, he must have sensed a rightness in his decision more compelling than inhibitions of modesty; must have seen that a loincloth would convict these genitalia of being “pudenda,” thereby denying the very work of redemption which promised to free human nature from its Adamic contagion of shame.19 It is this “possibility of a human nature without human guilt” that has been obscured in the “modern oblivion” Steinberg decries in his book.

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Steinberg’s address in The Sexuality of Christ, as always, is generous, directed toward any intelligent reader. What is not so apparent to the nonspecialist reader is the revolutionary content of the essay in terms of art history. Such a reader is somewhat surprised to learn that the book was greeted by a storm of protest from some art historians (and at least one formidable philosopher) when it first appeared. As one commentator noted, “No subject is more taboo in art history than the sexuality of Christ.” Or, one might add, in Christianity itself. But we are told that theologians were generally convinced or at least intrigued by Steinberg’s analysis. It was the art historians who were outraged. A number of them took Steinberg’s thesis as an affront to the profession. In his “reintroduction” to the second edition, Steinberg writes: Gladly would the present publisher have issued this book in a second edition without doubling its size, but I said no; I would not deprive it of the interest accrued since 1983. The book had elicited questions that could not be dodged without gross discourtesy, especially those posed in goodwill or in good-natured banter, and more especially those intended to kill. These last were the more intriguing to deal with, but I have tried to resist playing favorites. . . . To review judgmental decisions, to make judges accountable for their opinions, seems only just. It is also good sport.20 Steinberg’s retrospect is in great measure a reply to one particular criticism leveled at The Sexuality of Christ by the eminent British philosopher (and author of the magisterial Painting as an Art, 1984) Richard Wollheim. Reviewing the original book for the New York Times Book Review, Wollheim called Steinberg “one of the sharpest intellects working in art history,” and the book “an exotic feast for which we should be grateful.” But he also warned readers to be wary of Steinberg’s proofs. “The most disturbing aspect of this strange, haunting book, with its great boldness of conception,” wrote Wollheim, “is the resolute silence it maintains on all alternative views.”21 In other words, the great man had lost his objectivity, and therefore compromised his professional authority. The striking of this velvetcovered mallet had the effect of calling Steinberg to order.

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In his retrospect, Steinberg the advocate sets out to answer each and every counterargument ever made in print to refute his original findings and interpretations. (He mentions the many positive responses from colleagues and other reviewers only briefly, in a footnote.) Such a text might have read like a legal brief, and there are times when the litigious intent does threaten to overwhelm both reader and writer, and the relentless rehearsal of evidence to induce a kind of penis ennui. Responding to the comments of the British Renaissance specialist David Ekserdjian, Steinberg wryly characterizes his own excessiveness in this way: “The charge was made in one sentence—and I now answer in six long-winded pages, like an exegete expatiating on a scriptural verse.” What redeems this obsessive “antirrhetikos” (an answering back)22 is the astonishing clarity, insight, and humor of the writing. No matter how complex the arguments and counterarguments become, and no matter how often they are repeated, Steinberg’s language is always fresh—an enactment of the truth that clarity and depth are complementary. For an innocent (nonexpert) reader, the pleasures are considerable. Steinberg’s writing has always been remarkably accessible, coming as it does out of a generosity of address that is especially rare in writing on art. Unfortunately, the general reader for whom Steinberg writes has lately become an endangered species, due (among other factors) to the impoverishment and consolidation of the publishing industry. (By the time Panofsky’s Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer was reissued in 1971, the great humanist already found it necessary, in his preface, to enclose the “general reader” in quotation marks, signaling the precariousness of its referent.) In addition to its other attractions for a general readership, The Sexuality of Christ is a glimpse into art history’s internecine conflicts. Charles Hope, of the prestigious Warburg Institute in London, reviewed The Sexuality of Christ in the London Review of Books in 1984. In his “answer back” to the dismissive review, Steinberg describes Hope as “an art historian widely admired for his zeal in policing the field.” Downplaying the significance of the ostentatio genitalium, Hope wrote, “There is nothing special about the fact that Christ’s genitals are depicted in so many paintings of the Madonna. In Renaissance art virtually all babies are shown naked, or at least naked below the waist.

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The genitals are, in a sense, the attribute of babyhood, and for many people they are also rather cute.”23 To which Steinberg replied: No doubt; and this must be why the high-throned Madonna in Figs. 5 and 82 presents her boy’s penis to the protégés of the Theological Virtues, as if to say, “Cute, don’t you think?” The remark about genitals being the attribute of babyhood is a surprise. One expects to hear protests that babyhood pervades an infant’s whole mind and body, so why pick on the penis? Has Hope succumbed to SC’s [The Sexuality of Christ’s] insidious fetishism? On the contrary; the observation is designed to resist it. If we can be persuaded that all babyhood is (“in a sense”) defined by the genitals, we shall have further reason to deny special status to the Christ Child’s. But that is a hopeless task. No appeal to babyhood’s alleged attribute, to naturalism or stylistic coherence, to Renaissance fashions in putto dress or the cuteness of teeny penises—no amount of such baby talk explains what we are given.24 But it is the blandishments of The Sexuality of Christ’s two principal accusers, Richard Wollheim and the medieval historian Caroline Bynum, that drive Steinberg close to the edge of professional decorum. Following Wollheim’s criticisms, Bynum wrote that “Steinberg’s reading of a number of pictures of the adult Christ in which he sees an actual erection under the loincloth is questionable.” Later on she refers to “some of the legitimate questions critics [i.e., Wollheim] have raised about Steinberg, such as the question of how much of the artistic attention to genitals is simply naturalism, or doubts about what certain painted folds of drapery really conceal.”25 The reference is to Maerten van Heemskerck’s Man of Sorrows of 1532, in which Christ’s loincloth clearly delineates an erection. After a parenthetical sigh—“(What follows is written with a touch of exasperation; I hope it shows.)”—Steinberg offers a painstaking description of the plainly illustrated picture and then writes: Now if Wollheim and Bynum have “legitimate . . . doubts about what certain painted folds of drapery really conceal,”

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do they have an alternative, non-phallic candidate for this nuisance that detains the cerement before its last cadence? What sort of “stylistic feature” would they have us think lurks under that cloth? Stray undulation? Random updraft? Hot air? Renaissance draperies are spirited dialogues with the body, and to belabor them with description is tiresome. But it needs doing to call a pretentious bluff: the affectation of rigorous standards by hit-and-run scolds who pronounce the erection motif to be “questionable,” but frame no question and stay for no answer.26 The polemical vociferousness in the retrospect will surprise those who still think of art history as a gentle profession, but it will delight those who have had enough of art history’s “stagnant peace,” and who recognize what is really at stake in such conflicts. The subject of Christ’s sexuality and humanation is a compelling one, and it emerged as a part of what may be seen as Steinberg’s subject at large, something that has recurred throughout his work and grown more incisive and insistent over time; namely, the evermysterious relation between the erotic and the spiritual, and between sensual apprehension and mental understanding or verbal articulation. Steinberg’s deep understanding of art comes out of his physical experience of actual works, never out of books (although he is one of the most erudite scholars working today). His impatience with art historians who develop bookish theories about works of art without ever really looking at what is before them is palpable. To him, these art historians and critics are like the late-sixteenth-century writer Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, whose comments on Michelangelo’s Roman Pietá Steinberg once dismissed in a lecture with the line “But he was writing from memory, after having gone blind.” One of the most persistent criticisms leveled at The Sexuality of Christ was that Steinberg relied too much on the evidence of the pictures themselves and not enough on more “authoritative” substantiating texts. The hapless Charles Hope claimed the art historian’s task is to “understand what the art of the Renaissance meant to people at the time by reading what they said about paintings and about their faith” (Steinberg’s emphasis),27 to which Steinberg adds, “What

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we ourselves think we see in the pictures is most likely capricious.” While of course drawing copiously from historical written sources to support his theological speculations, in The Sexuality of Christ and elsewhere Steinberg treats pictures themselves as primary sources. This is apparently something that is just not done in “reputable” art history, especially in Renaissance art history. Any conclusions about the meaning of pictures must be supported by contemporary written texts, and texts always trump pictures if the two differ. This textual prejudice becomes a special target of Steinberg’s scorn. Textism as I define it is an interdictory stance, hostile to any interpretation that seems to come out of nowhere because it comes out of pictures, as if pictures alone did not constitute a respectable provenance. . . . To my mind, the deference to farfetched texts with mistrust of pictures is one of art history’s inhibiting follies. It surely contributed to the obnubilation, the Cloud of Unseeing, that caused Christ’s sexual nature as depicted in Renaissance art to be overlooked.28 This insistence on looking rather than overlooking is Steinberg’s signature. The literature of art history is rife with interpretations of works of art that seem entirely plausible—until one really looks at the work itself. This is not to say that the eye, even Leo Steinberg’s eye, is always right. Like the mind of which it is a part, the eye is fallible. But it is always the point closest to the object under scrutiny. Steinberg’s conclusion to the original essay of The Sexuality of Christ is an appeal for just this kind of “objectivity”: I have risked hypothetical interpretations chiefly to show that, whether one looks with the eye of faith or with a mythographer’s cool, the full content of the icons discussed bears looking at without shying. And perhaps from one further motive: to remind the literate among us that there are moments, even in a wordy culture like ours, when images start from no preformed program to become primary texts. Treated as illustrations of what is already scripted, they withhold their secrets.29

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These lines—regarded as evidence of Steinberg’s impertinence and apostasy by art historians who disagree with him—are, on the contrary, an impassioned argument for the continuing relevance of art history. As a critic (it is really only an excuse to get close to works of art), I am drawn to works of art and literature that change the way I perceive the world. Leo Steinberg’s writings do this again and again. The overwhelming effect of his writing—on Michelangelo’s Pietá, or Picasso’s Sleepwatchers, or Hans Haacke’s installations—is to include the reader in his passionate seeing. In his imagination of a public for art, he recognizes that the relation between art and its public does not just happen; that the connection must be made. “Making things relevant is a mode of seeing,” he once wrote. Of this seeing, Steinberg has made a literature. And he has always been clear about what is at stake: “The objects of our enquiry depend for their sheer existence on admiration. Art is cherished, or it does not survive.”30 Leo Steinberg’s work arises from the radical belief that art involves a meaningful continuity of creative acts, rather than a discrete series of unrelated objects. We cannot know what things mean without knowing what they have meant. Art of the past informs the art of the present and vice versa. If this continuity is being abandoned in our time, it is not due to the failure of art history alone, but to our own failure of imagination.

Acknowledgments

“From Hand to Head and Back Again: Some Lines for Martin Puryear” was first published, in Italian and English, in Forma Lignea: Nunzio and Martin Puryear (Milan: Electa and the American Academy in Rome, 1997). “Sculpture and Sanctuary” was published in a different form and under a different title in Art in America, February 1993. “Laborare Est Orare” is previously unpublished. An earlier version of it was published in Polish under the title “Przejscia” in Pokaz: Pismo Krytyki Artystycznej (Warsaw, 1999). “Reanimating Matter: Raoul Hague’s Sculptures and Robert Frank’s Photographs” was first published in an exhibition catalogue for the show of the same name curated by David Levi Strauss at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York, New Paltz, in 2002. “Beuys in Ireland: 7,000 Oaks on the Hill of Uisneach” was first published in a flyer by The Academy of Everything Is Possible, Dublin, 2002. The flyer also included Peter Lamborn Wilson’s essay “Umbilicus Hiberniae.” Thanks to Gordon Campbell, who made it all possible. “Between Two Worlds: The Haida Project” is previously unpublished. Many thanks to Ann Hatch for commissioning the original work. “Signal to Noise: Between Image and Organizing Principle” was first published in the catalogue for a ten-year retrospective of Terry Winters’s paintings and drawings at the Irish Museum of Modern Art,

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Dublin, in 2009, published by Hatje Cantz. Thanks to Terry Winters and Raymond Foye. “The Memory of the Fingers: A Conversation between Cecilia Vicuña and David Levi Strauss” was first published in Cloud-Net (New York: Art in General, 1999). “In Praise of Darkness” was commissioned as an essay on a suite of drawings by Raquel Rabinovich and was printed in a small exhibition brochure by Trans Hudson Gallery in New York City in November 1998. “Why Move On from Illuminations That Haven’t Yet Been Understood?” was first published under a different title, in Norwegian and English, in Mike Bidlo: NOT Picasso, NOT Pollock, NOT Warhol (Oslo, Norway: Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, 2002), a catalogue for a retrospective of Bidlo’s work in Oslo, Bergen, and Reykjavik. “Her Plumbing and Her Bridges, in Sweet Assemblage: Donald Lipski’s Combinatory Art” was first published, in German and English, in the catalogue for an exhibition of Donald Lipski’s work at the Bawag Foundation, Vienna, in 2000. “Reverie and Luck, Incarnate” was first published in On Ron Gorchov, a limited edition book edited by Phong Bui (New York: Black Square Editions and The Brooklyn Rail, 2008). “The Fighting Is a Dance, Too” was first published in a limited-edition book (edition of 125, including five deluxe copies with original drawings by Leon Golub and Nancy Spero) by Roth Horowitz Gallery, New York, in April 2000. Many thanks to Andrew Roth for commissioning this work and for introducing me to Leon and Nancy. “Fallen Figures and Heads: Leon Golub’s Lists” was first published in Cabinet, May 2004. Thanks to Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi. “Remembering Golub” and “Spero’s Heart” were first published in the Brooklyn Rail, in September 2004 and December 2005/January 2006, respectively. Thanks to Phong Bui. “Hosephat and the Wooden Shoes: Duncan and Délire” was presented at the Robert Duncan conference “The Opening of the Field,” organized by Robert Creeley for the Poetry Collection at the State University of New York, Buffalo, April 20, 1996, and a version of it was published in the Edinburgh Review, Spring 1997, thanks to Eck Finlay. “Radial Asymmetries: Robert Kelly and David Levi Strauss on Guy Davenport (1927–2005)” was first published in the Brooklyn Rail, July/ August 2005.

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“The Bias of the World: Curating after Szeemann and Hopps” was first published in Cautionary Tales: Critical Curating (New York: apexart, 2007). Many thanks to Steven Rand for the invitation and conversation. “Father and Daughter: Flesh” was first published as “Correspondents: On Titian: Nymph and Shepherd, by John Berger and Katya Berger Andreadakis,” in The Nation, February 3, 1997. “It Has to Be Danced to Be Known” was published in a modified form and under a different title in the Wilson Quarterly, Summer 1997, edited by Jay Tolson. I am grateful to New Directions for allowing me to reproduce a portion of Robert Duncan’s “The Self in Postmodern Poetry” from Fictive Certainties: Essays by Robert Duncan (New York: New Directions, 1985), pp. 233–34. And I also want to thank my editor at Oxford, Shannon McLachlan, who first asked for this book and was steadfast in her belief in it; her assistant, Brendan O’Neill; and all the other good people at Oxford University Press who did the hard hand work to bring it to fruition.

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Notes

from head to hand and back again The epigraph to this chapter is from Charles Olson, “The Praises,” in The Distances (New York: Grove Press, 1950), p. 26. 1. César Paternosto, The Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, translated by Esther Allen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), p. 156. 2. Olson, The Distances, p. 28.

sculpture and sanctuary 1. “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture” was curated by David R. Collens, director, and Maureen Megerian, associate curator, at Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, May 18–October 31, 1992. 2. Judy Collischan Van Wagner, “Ursula von Rydingsvard: Interview,” in Judith Murray: Painting, Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture (Greenvale, N.Y.: Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus, 1985), p. 46. 3. W. S. Piero, Out of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 128. 4. Translated by Rolfe Humphries, in The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, edited by Francisco García Lorca and Donald M. Allen (New York: New Directions, 1955), p. 97. 5. Avis Berman, “Studio: Ursula von Rydingsvard, Life under Siege,” ARTnews, December 1988, p. 97. 6. Unpublished interview with the artist, November 21, 1990.

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7. Elizabeth Avedon Editions, Bourgeois: An Interview with Louise Bourgeois by Donald Kuspit (New York: Vintage, 1988), p. 45. 8. Artist’s statement printed in the catalogue Capp Street Project 1989– 1990, edited by David Levi Strauss (San Francisco: Capp Street Project/ AVT, 1991), p. 24. 9. Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 553. 10. Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 83. 11. Lucy Lippard, quoted by Robert Pincus-Witten in “Eva Hesse: Post-Minimalism into Sublime,” Artforum, November 1971, p. 37.

laborare est orare 1. Martin Friedman, “Von Rydingsvard: Mining the Unconscious,” in Ursula von Rydingsvard: Sculpture, catalogue for an exhibition held at the Madison Art Center, Madison, Wisconsin, and three other institutions between March 1, 1998, and June 6, 1999 (Madison, Wisc.: Madison Art Center, 1998), p. 25. 2. Michael Brenson, “Ursula von Rydingsvard’s Cutting Edge,” in Ursula von Rydingsvard, a catalogue for an exhibition held at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and two other institutions between August 30, 1997, and April 30, 2000 (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1997), p. 16. 3. Dore Ashton, “Ursula von Rydingsvard,” in The Sculpture of Ursula von Rydingsvard (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p. 9.

reanimating matter 1. “Paula Giannini and Raoul Hague: An Interview,” Art International, August/September 1986, p. 17. 2. Ionel Jianou, Brancusi (London: Adam Books, 1963), p. 68. 3. Michael Brenson, “Sculpture, Private and Public,” New York Times, December 23, 1988. 4. Leo Steinberg, “Torsos and Raoul Hague” (1956), in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 274. 5. Ibid., p. 276. 6. Ibid., p. 416n1; Donald Kuspit, Artforum, January 1998. 7. Thomas B. Hess, “Introducing the Sculpture of Raoul Hague,” ARTnews, January 1955.

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beuys in ireland The first epigraph to this chapter is from Joseph Beuys, on 7,000 Oaks, in Johannes Stüttgen, Beschreibung eines Kunstwerkes (1982). The second is from Joseph Beuys, “Interview with Richard Demarco,” in Energy Plan for the Western Man, Joseph Beuys in America: Writings by and Interviews with the Artist, compiled by Carin Kuoni (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1990), p. 111. 1. Quoted in Lukas Beckmann, “The Causes Lie in the Future,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, edited by Gene Ray (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2001), p. 95. 2. Quoted in Grégoire Müller, The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies (New York: Praeger, 1972), p. 128. 3. Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, p. 96. 4. Otto Reicher, Tauernreise (Florence: Stamperia del Santuccio, 1938). 5. Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, translated by Barbara Bray (London: Harville Press, 1995), p. 23.

between two worlds 1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Art of the Northwest Coast at the American Museum of Natural History,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 24 (Paris/ New York, 1943), pp. 175–82. 2. Marjorie Halpin, The New Scholar 10 (San Diego, 1986), p. 433. 3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Bill Reid: A Retrospective Exhibition, catalogue for exhibition from November 6 to December 8, 1974, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. 4. Bill Reid, foreword to George F. MacDonald, Chiefs of the Sea and Sky: Haida Heritage Sites of the Queen Charlotte Islands (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1989), p. 7. 5. “The Haida Project Fact Sheet,” distributed by the sponsors of the Haida Project in San Francisco, September 1990. 6. Margaret B. Blackman, During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, A Haida Woman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 7. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 42. 8. Donald Kuspit, “The Unhappy Consciousness of Modernism,” in The Critic Is Artist: The Intentionality of Art (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), p. 227. 9. Robert Bringhurst, The Black Canoe: Bill Reid and the Spirit of Haida Gwaii (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992), p. 80.

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10. Ibid., p. 52. 11. Unpublished interview with the artist, October 11, 1992. 12. Interview with Jim Hart and Reg Davidson conducted by Jennifer Dowley at the conclusion of the Haida Project, on December 19, 1990, published in the catalogue edited by David Levi Strauss, Capp Street Project 1989–1990 (San Francisco: Capp Street Project/AVT, 1991).

reverie and luck, incarnate The epigraphs to this chapter are from Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, 2:810, quoted in Jean Starobinski, “The Natural and Literary History of Bodily Sensation,” translated by Lydia Davis, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, vol. 2, edited by Michael Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 372; and Sappho: A Garland. The Poems and Fragments of Sappho, translated by Jim Powell (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993), p. 16.

in praise of darkness 1. Raquel Rabinovich, The Dark Is the Source of Light (Barrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill, 1996), p. 39. 2. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 17.

why move on from illuminations that haven’t yet been understood? 1. Carlo McCormick, “Steal That Painting! Mike Bidlo’s Kleptomania,” in Art Talk: The Early 80s, edited by Jeanne Siegel (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), p. 194. 2. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 168. 3. The distinction can be found in the history of the word forgery, which originally referred to the action or craft of forging metal, or to something made in a forge and, figuratively, to anything made or fashioned. The Latin root is fabrica, meaning a smithy or forge. So forgery is a fitting trade for the grandson of a blacksmith (as Bidlo is). The leap from making to counterfeiting, or “making it up” came much later, and accounts in part for the whiff of fraudulence that has always hung around modern art, as an aesthetic confidence game put over on a gullible public. 4. McCormick, “Steal That Painting!” p. 195. 5. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 111.

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6. Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), p. 196. 7. Marcel Duchamp: Interviews and Statements, edited by Ulrike Gauss (Stuttgart: Sammlung der Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1992), p. 85. 8. “In Dialogue: Arthur Danto, Francis Naumann, and Mike Bidlo,” in Mike Bidlo: The Fountain Drawings (Zürich: Edition Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, 1998), p. 38. 9. Wayne Koestenbaum, “The Best of 1998,” Artforum, December 1998, p. 100. 10. McCormick, “Steal that Painting!” pp. 192 and 194.

her plumbing and her bridges, in sweet assemblage The quotation from The Blind Man in the epigraph is from an anonymous editorial assumed to have been written by Beatrice Wood (but often attributed to Marcel Duchamp), defending R. Mutt’s Fountain (The Blind Man, vol. 2, May 1917, New York, p. 5); the quotation from Berger is from “The White Bird” in The Sense of Sight (New York: Pantheon, 1985), p. 9. For the source of the Sommer quotation, see note 5 below. 1. The term came into wide use in the United States after the exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1961, but the designation has always seemed a bit arbitrary. Is the relic believed to contain the actual blood of Christ that is incorporated into Tilman Riemenschneider’s Holy Blood altarpiece a “found object,” and does its inclusion make the altarpiece an “assemblage?” 2. Duchamp’s bicycle wheel can be seen as his first “modification” of a work by Leonardo da Vinci, who some believe drew and perhaps even built a bicycle in the Renaissance. Duchamp’s upended homage was followed by his bearding of the master’s Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q., in 1919. Thirty years after Duchamp’s bicycle wheel, Picasso used two other parts of a bicycle to form his bull’s head. In this light, it is perhaps not insignificant that before Donald Lipski abandoned all else to practice the combinatory art, he was expected to take over his father’s business, selling bicycles. 3. Marcel Duchamp: Work and Life, edited by Pontus Hulten (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 29. 4. The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Batchelors, Even: A Typographic Version by Richard Hamilton of Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box, translated by George Heard Hamilton (New York: Jaap Rietman, 1976), unpaginated. 5. Frederick Sommer, The Constellations That Surround Us: The Conjunction of General Aesthetics and Poetic Logic in an Artist’s Life, surveyed and

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edited by Michael Torosian (Toronto: Lumiere Press, 1992), p. 20. The quotation from Sommer in the epigraph to this chapter is from the same source, p. 29. 6. David S. Rubin, “Donald Lipski and the Poetics of Plausibility,” in Donald Lipski: Poetic Sculpture, catalogue for an exhibition from March 13 to April 22, 1990, at Freedman Gallery in Reading, Pennsylvania. 7. Marjorie Welish, “Waxmusic and Candelabracadabra,” in catalogue for Donald Lipski exhibition from February 27 to April 11, 1992, at Galerie Lelong, New York. 8. The title was an allusion to Barnett Newman’s 1966–70 quartet of paintings “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” Newman’s title was a jibe at Mondrian and others who, by insisting on the use of primary colors, “have put a mortgage on red, yellow and blue, transforming these colors into an idea that destroys them as colors.” Barnett Newman, statement written for Art Now: New York, vol. 1, no. 3, March 1969, unpaginated. 9. Quoted by Marion Boulton Stroud in Donald Lipski: Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue? catalogue for exhibition from November 9 to December 21, 1990, at the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia, Penn. 10. The piece has found a permanent home outside the Denver Central Library’s children’s wing. 11. Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, translated by Felicitas Goodman (London: Blackwell, 1985), p. 285n5. 12. Roger Cook, The Tree of Life (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 18. 13. Ibid., p. 87.

signal to noise 1. Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The quotation from Stan Brakhage in the epigraph is from Philip Taaffe, “A Conversation with Stan Brakhage,” in Composite Nature, edited by Raymond Foye (New York: Peter Blum Edition, 1997), p. 141. 2. “Terry Winters: An Interview by Nancy Princenthal,” Art in America, February 2009, p. 97. The quotation in the epigraph to this chapter is from the same source, p. 94. 3. Terry Winters, Zeichnungen/Drawings, edited by Michael Semff (Munich: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München and Pinakothek der Moderne, 2003), p. 11. 4. “Terry Winters: An Interview by Nancy Princenthal,” p. 97.

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5. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 83. In his afterword to the second edition of this book, Hubertus von Amelunxen writes, “This book is of prime interest to anyone studying the effects of the information society on the basic structures of human existence.” The quotation in the epigraph to this chapter is from the same source, p. 14. 6. Homer, The Iliad, translated by A. T. Murray (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924). The gates of Olympus are described in book 5, line 749, and the tripods of Hephaistos in book 18, line 376. 7. “The more questioningly we ponder the essence of technology, the more mysterious the essence of art becomes.” Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 317. 8. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, pp. 73–74. 9. Ibid., pp. 81–82. 10. Ibid., pp. 74–75, 82. 11. Ibid., p. 14. 12. David Levi Strauss, “Where the Camera Cannot Go: A Conversation with Leon Golub on Painting and Photography,” in Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), p. 150. 13. Ibid., p. 154. 14. Klaus Kertess, “Drawing Desires,” in Terry Winters, catalogue of exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992), p. 29. 15. John Rajchman, “Painting in the Brain-City,” in Terry Winters, Graphic Primitives (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1999), p. 7. 16. Ibid., p. 10. 17. Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, p. 9. 18. Ibid., p. 83. 19. Terry Winters, Computation of Chains, conversation with Adam Fuss (New York: Matthew Marks Gallery, 1997), p. 9.

the fighting is a dance, too 1. Katy Kline and Helaine Posner, “A Conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero,” in Leon Golub and Nancy Spero: War and Memory (Boston, Mass.: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 1994), p. 24. 2. Leon Golub, catalogue statement, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 1967, in Do Paintings Bite? edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1997), p. 175.

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3. Nazli Madkour, “Spero’s Hieroglyphs,” in the catalogue produced by the United States Information Agency for Spero’s exhibition from December 1998 to February 1999 in the Seventh International Cairo Biennale, pp. 14–17. 4. Kline and Posner, “A Conversation with Leon Golub and Nancy Spero,” pp. 28 and 30.

fallen figures and heads The epigraph to this chapter is from Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1983), p. 69. 1. Theodor Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” translated by Susan Gillespie, Raritan 13, 1993, pp. 103 and 105.

remembering golub 1. David Levi Strauss, “Where the Camera Cannot Go: A Conversation with Leo Golub on Painting and Photography,” in Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003), p. 152. 2. Donald Kuspit, Leon Golub: Existential/Activist Painter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985). 3. John Berger, ”Giacometti,” in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 173.

hosephat and the wooden shoes The first epigraph to this chapter is from Robert Duncan, “A Letter to Jack Johnson,” in The Years as Catches: First Poems (1939–1946) (Berkeley: Oyez, 1966), p. 20; the second epigraph is from Jonathan Swift, “The Accomplishment of the first of Mr. Bickerstaff ’s Predictions. Being an Account of the Death of Mr. Partridge, the Almanac-maker, Upon the 29th Instant. In a Letter to a Person of Honor,” in Jonathan Swift (The Oxford Authors), edited by Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 209. 1. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court Press, 1985), p. 6. 2. Ibid., p. 158. 3. Ibid., p. 40. 4. Robert Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth: An Essay in Essential Autobiography (Fremont, Mich.: Sumac Press, 1968), p. 7. Reprinted in Fictive Certainties: Essays by Robert Duncan (New York: New Directions, 1985). 5. Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass, p. 26. 6. Ibid., p. 95.

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7. Ibid., pp. 165 and 192. 8. David Levi Strauss, “The Poetics of Instruction: Robert Duncan Teaching,” in Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, edited by Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). 9. Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass, p. 107. 10. Ibid., p. 127. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens, p. 93. Quoted in Lecercle, Philosophy through the Looking Glass, p. 113. 12. The Homer Group was spun off of the Poetics Program at New College, out of Duncan’s classes, and met nearly every week for seven years, from 1981 to 1987, to read the Iliad in Greek. In the beginning there were eight of us: Duncan, Aaron Shurin, David Melnick, Susan Thackrey, Steve Anker, Diane di Prima, Noel Stack, and myself. Over the years many others came in and out: Michael McClure, Dawn Kolokithas, David Doyle, Tom Fong, Dan Blue, Edith Hartnett, Jim Powell. None of us (except Noel and later Jim Powell) had Homeric Greek when we began. We scanned, sang, and translated each line. We picked up the grammar slowly, as we needed it, and the vocabulary as children would, through use. Duncan devised a method of intoning the lines, using the diacritical marks as pitch indicators. We got to be pretty good at it. “Robert & the Rhapsodes.” 13. I thought of this while reading Peter Quartermain’s wonderful essay on Robin Blaser, “The Mind as Frying Pan,” where he quotes Catherine Clément to say that “laughter deprives the body of its obedience to the mind,” and David Appelbaum: “The laugh . . . makes the name that I call myself . . . the butt of laughter. That a person is known in essence as such and such a name, is born, dies, is acclaimed, upbraided, cajoled and vilified by a particular phonemic assemblage—and believes himself to be that name—is a joke of such magnitude that only a full-blooded laugh can explode it.” Peter Quartermain, “The Mind as Frying Pan: Robin Blaser’s Humor,” in The Recovery of the Public World: Essays on Poetics in Honor of Robin Blaser, edited by Charles Watts and Edward Byrne (Toronto: Talonbooks, 1999), pp. 57 and 56. 14. Jess, Translations (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1971), p. 4. 15. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 20. 16. Duncan was orphaned at birth. He was born in Oakland, California, on January 7, 1919, to Edward Howard Duncan and Marguerite Pearl (neé Carpenter) Duncan. His mother, weakened by influenza, died when he was born, and Duncan believed that he was responsible, because his head

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NOTES TO PAGES 132–45

was so big. His father, a common day-laborer, was too poor to take care of all the children (Duncan was the seventh), so Duncan was handed over to the Native Sons and Daughters Central Committee on Homeless Children in San Francisco, where he was adopted at the age of eight months by Edwin Joseph Symmes and his wife, Minnehaha Harris, who gave him the name Robert Symmes. The Symmeses were theosophists associated with the Hermetic Brotherhood. Before adopting Robert, they consulted astrological charts that told them, among other things, that he belonged to a new Atlantean generation “that would see once more last things and the destruction of a world.” Helen Adam once related that when Duncan began to write poetry as a child, his Rosicrucian aunt scolded him, saying, “This is very lazy of you. You have been a poet already in so many lives.” 17. In a letter, Susan Thackrey added these thoughts: “Those ‘wooden shoes,’ you know, are not just poor peoples’ shoes, but really peasant shoes— with a function of being able to walk in heavy muddy soil without getting clogged (no way to keep from punning in this territory) or wet—a way of walking in the field, in the furrows and not being bogged down—and what else are notebooks and writing?” 18. Robert Duncan, “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” in Fictive Certainties (New York: New Directions, 1985), p. 73. 19. Ibid., pp. 233–44.

radial asymmetries 1. Guy Davenport, “The Critic as Artist,” in Every Force Evolves a Form (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987), p. 104. 2. David Levi Strauss, “Approaching 80 Flowers,” in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, edited by Michael Palmer (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 1983), pp. 79–102. 3. Guy Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature and Art (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), p. xi. 4. Hugh Kenner, jacket blurb for The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981). 5. Guy Davenport, “The Invention of Photography in Toledo,” in Da Vinci’s Bicycle (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 121–30. 6. Guy Davenport, Objects on a Table: Harmony and Disarray in Art and Literature (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1998), p. 102. 7. “The Sage of Slabsides,” in Davenport, The Hunter Gracchus, pp. 320–23.

NOTES TO PAGES 146–56

199

8. Guy Davenport, “Ruskin,” in The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2003), p. 43.

the bias of the world 1. Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, act 2, scene 1, lines 573– 74. Cowper: “What Shakespeare calls commodity, and we call political expediency.” Appendix 13 of my old edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, edited by G. B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), pp. 1639–40, reads: “Shakespeare frequently used poetic imagery taken from the game of bowls [bowling]. . . . The bowl [bowling ball] was not a perfect sphere, but so made that one side somewhat protruded. This protrusion was called the bias; it caused the bowl to take a curving and indirect course.” 2. Daniel Birnbaum, “When Attitude Becomes Form: Daniel Birnbaum on Harald Szeemann,” Artforum, Summer 2005, p. 55. 3. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Interviews, vol. 1, edited by Thomas Boutoux (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2003), p. 427. 4. Ibid., pp. 416 and 417. Hopps also named as predecessors the exhibition-makers Katherine Dreier, Alfred Barr, James Johnson Sweeney, René d’Harnoncourt, and Jermayne MacAgy. 5. In 1978, at the Museum of Temporary Art in Washington, D.C., Hopps announced that, for 36 hours, he would hang anything anyone brought in, as long as it would fit through the door. Later, he proposed to put 100,000 images up on the walls of P.S. 1 in New York, but that project was, sadly, never realized. 6. Mark Spiegler, “Do Art Critics Still Matter?” Art Newspaper, no. 157, April 2005, p. 32. 7. Carolee Thea, Foci: Interviews with Ten International Curators (New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, 2001), p. 19. 8. Dave Hickey, “Response,” in Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/ Public Responsibility, edited by Paula Marincola, proceedings from a symposium addressing the state of current curatorial practice organized by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, October 14–15, 2000 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001), p. 128. Both Szeemann and Hopps passed Hickey’s test: “The curator’s job, in my view,” he said, “is to tell the truth, to show her or his hand, and get out of the way” (p. 126). 9. Thea, Foci, p. 19 (emphasis added). 10. Birnbaum, “When Attitude Becomes Form,” p. 58. 11. Christopher Knight, “Walter Hopps, 1932–2005: Curator Brought Fame to Postwar L.A. Artists,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 2005.

200

NOTES TO PAGES 156–58

12. After four years of spurious prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice, artist Steven Kurtz, Professor of Visual Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo and cofounder of the art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble, was finally cleared of all charges against him. On April 21, 2008, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara dismissed the government’s case against Dr. Kurtz as “insufficient on its face.” Kurtz’s ordeal began in May 2004, when his wife, Hope, died of heart failure, as the couple and their colleagues in Critical Art Ensemble were preparing an art project about genetically modified agriculture for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call decided that the materials for this project might be used for bioterrorism and called the FBI. The next day, Kurtz was detained on suspicion of terrorism while agents for the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, ATF, and other agencies raided his home and seized his belongings. When a federal grand jury refused to charge Kurtz with terrorism, the Department of Justice attempted to prosecute him for mail and wire fraud in acquiring harmless bacteria. Under the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, the maximum sentence for these charges was increased from five to twenty years in prison. After the charges were dismissed in 2008, the coordinator of the Critical Art Ensemble Defense Fund (http://www.caedefensefund.org), Lucia Sommer, released this statement: “This ruling is the best possible ending to a horrible ordeal—but we are mindful of numerous cases still pending, and the grave injustices perpetrated by the Bush administration following 9/11. This case was part of a larger picture, in which law enforcement was given expanded powers. In this instance, the Bush administration was unsuccessful in its attempt to erode Americans’ constitutional rights.” 13. Epigraph to Nathan Sivin’s Chinese Alchemy: Preliminary Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968). 14. Having Been Said: Writings and Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968–2003, edited by Gerti Fietzek and Gregor Stemmrich (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), p. 315. 15. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps—Art Curator,” Artforum, February 1996, pp. 60–63. 16. Jan Winkelman, “Failure as a Poetic Dimension: A Conversation with Harald Szeemann,” Metropolis M. Tijdschrift over Hedendaagse Kunst, no. 3, June 2001. 17. Thea, Foci, p. 17 (emphasis added). 18. Ibid., p. 18. 19. With his cocurators Carlos Basualdo, Uta Meta Bauer, Susanne Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya.

NOTES TO PAGES 159–73

201

20. Obrist, “Walter Hopps Hopps Hopps,” p. 430. 21. Vilém Flusser, “Habit: The True Aesthetic Criterion,” in Writings, edited by Andreas Ströhl, translated by Erik Eisel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 52. 22. Harald Szeemann, “Does Art Need Directors?” in Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, edited by Carin Kuoni (New York: Independent Curators International, 2001), p. 169. 23. Winkelman, “Failure as a Poetic Dimension.” 24. Flusser, “Habit,” p. 54.

father and daughter: flesh 1. John Berger, “Walter Benjamin,” in The Look of Things, edited by Nikos Stangos (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 90. 2. John Berger, preface to the second edition of Permanent Red (London: Methuen, 1969), p. 10. 3. John Berger and Katya Berger Andreadakis, Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (Munich: Prestel, 1996). All quotations that follow are from this edition.

it has to be danced to be known 1. Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. xi–xii. 2. Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), p. xi. 3. Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? translated by Christopher S. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 58 and 3. 4. Arthur Danto, “Meyer Schapiro, 1904–1996,” in The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 203. 5. Leo Steinberg, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (New York: Garland, 1977), p. 444. 6. Ibid., p. iii. 7. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. vii. 8. Ibid., pp. 291 and 416n2. 9. Ibid., p. 306. 10. John Russell, “Confessing to Il Papa by Painting Paul and Peter,” New York Times, November 23, 1975.

202

NOTES TO PAGES 174–84

11. Leo Steinberg, “Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas,’ ” October 19, Winter 1981, p. 48. 12. Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. vii. 13. Ibid., p. 23. 14. Ibid., p. 64. 15. Ibid., pp. 310–11. 16. Ibid., pp. 31, 71, and 74. 17. Ibid., p. 68. 18. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 14–15. 19. Ibid., p. 21. 20. Ibid., pp. 219–20. 21. Richard Wollheim, “An Emphasis on Humanity,” The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1984, p. 14. 22. Steinberg notes that “Antirrhetikos, or ‘How to Answer Back’ is the useful title of a diary kept by the fourth-century Desert Father Evagrius of Pontus.” Ibid., p. 224n9. 23. Charles Hope, quoted in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 353. 24. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 354. 25. Caroline Bynum, quoted in Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 312. 26. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, p. 314. 27. Ibid., p. 349. 28. Ibid., p. 220. 29. Ibid., p. 106. 30. Steinberg, Other Criteria, p. 311.

Index

abstract art, modern, 88, 171–72 abstraction, 2, 10, 11, 16, 63, 73, 88, 124, 172 Adams, Alice, 16 Adams, Jill Weinberg, 27 Age of Forgetting, 57 allopathy, Duncan’s delirium, 129–30 American Museum of Natural History, Pacific Northwest Coast, 39 American Women Sculptors, Rubinstein describing Rydingsvard, 16 Anaktoria (Gorchov), 62 Andreadakis, Katya Berger, 162–65 Animal Associations (Winters), 91 apparatuses (Flusser), 89–90 apprenticeship, Haida art, 43–44 “appropriation,” property crime, 71, 73 Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers (Spero), 120 Artforum, on Hague’s sculptures, 30 art history academic, 168–69 disciplinary boundaries, 168 Hans Belting and crisis in, 169–70 Preziosi, 167–68 Steinberg, 171–74, 176, 184 Vasari, 168

artifact collecting, “salvage paradigm,” 40 Art Students League in New York, 23 Artwork (Lipski), 78, 79 Ashton, Dore, 21 “assemblage” (Lipski), 77–78 “assisted readymade” Duchamp, 78 Lipski, 78–79 authenticity Haida, 52 question of, 44, 45, 71–72 autonomy, 13, 159, 162 balance, Haida pursuit of, 47 Bearing Witness (Puryear), 7 Beckwourth, Jim, 3–4 Belting, Hans, on crisis in art history, 169–70 Berger, John art and politics, 161 art critic, 161–62 Booker Prize for G., 161–62 Giacometti’s death, 117 letters by, and daughter Katya, 162–65 photographed drawing on beach, 160 “White Bird, The,” 77

204

INDEX

Beuys, Joseph art understanding labor in creation, 34–35 materials, 11 Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland, 35 7,000 Oaks, 32, 33, 34, 35 Social Sculpture, 34, 35 Bidlo, Mike attraction to Duchamp, 75 copying, 72–75 Duchamp’s readymade urinal, 73 “Fountain Drawings, The,” 74, 73–75 interview, 71 Not Duchamp (Large Fountain, 1917), 70 Big and Little Same (Puryear), 2 Black Canoe, The, on Haida culture, 47 Black Panther movement, 162 Blind Man, The, 77 bodily organs, 19–21 Borges, Jorge Luis on blackness, 69 director of National Library of Argentine Republic, 67 In Praise of Darkness, 68 Bottle Rack Bidlo’s replicas, 74 Duchamp, 78, 85 Bourgeois, Louise, 16 Bower (Puryear), 3 “Brain of Europe, The” (Ireland), 35 Brakhage, Stan, 136–37 Brenson, Michael, 21 Bringhurst, Robert, 47 Bui, Phong, 148 Burroughs, John, 145 Calumet City (Gorchov), 62, 63 candles (Lipski), 81 Cantina (Gorchov), 62 Capp Street Project Rydingsvard, 14 sponsoring Haida Project, 42 Cask Cascade (Puryear), 3 Catholic Church, 10 Cauldron, The (Lipski), 84 cedar beams (Rydingsvard), 10, 15

Chase Street Lounge (Gorchov), 63 Chateau d’If (Gorchov), 62, 63 Chestnut Torso (Hague), 25, 26 Chief Skidegate, at mortuary ceremonies, 48–49 Christ, humanation of, 177–78, 182 “clod,” creation of word “cloud,” 56 cloud-net (Vicuña), 54, 55–59 Codex Artaud (Spero), 102 Colony (Winters), 86, 93 contemporary art, Steinberg on, 174–75, 176 conventional art, traditional vs., 46 Cook, Roger, 84–85 copying area of art, 72 Bidlo, 72–75 learning, 75 Count of Monte Cristo, The (Gorchov), 63 cow stomach (Rydingsvard), 20 Cri du Coeur (Spero), 118, 119–20 Crow Nation, 4 Cul de Sac (Gorchov), 62 curators and curating description, 149–52 globalization and art, 158–59 Harald Szeemann, 150–52, 159 “independent curating,” 155–56 respect for and understanding of artists, 156–57 responsibilities, 152–56 Walter Hopps, 150–52, 159 darkness (Rabinovich), 67–69 Davenport, Guy admiration, 139 Buckminster Fuller, 145 compositio, 137–38 exchange, 141–42 Geography of the Imagination, The, 135, 136, 146 geophagy, 139 John Burroughs, 145 looking, 144–45 paiderastes, 138, 141 photography, 143–44 Stan Brakhage, 136–37

INDEX

still life, 144 Strauss and Robert Kelly discussing, 135–47 Davidson, Florence Haida elder, 43, 51 Haida Project, 38 Davidson, Reg art, culture and spirituality, 51–52 artist vs. craftsman, 46 cousin of Jim Hart, 43 designs on Yaalth Tluu, 49–50 Haida carver, 43 Haida Project, 38 stereotypes in San Francisco, 44 Davidson, Robert, apprenticeship of, 43–44 délire inquiries, 124 linguistics of, 126–27 “reflexive delirium,” 124 delirium (Duncan), 127–30 Demarco, Richard, 33 Desire (Puryear), 2–3 difference, questions of identity and, 2, 44 “digital,” use of term, 58 Dla Gienka (Rydingsvard), 20 Dreadful Sorry (Rydingsvard), 11, 20 Dream of Pairing (Puryear), 2 Duchamp, Marcel “assemblage,” 77–78 “assisted readymade,” 78 Bidlo’s drawings, 73–75 Bottle Rack, 78, 84 Green Box, 78 readymades, 78 Duncan, Robert delirium in hospital, 127–30 Ground Work: Before the War, 123 Homer Club, 122 In the Dark, 123 “Letter to Jack Johnson, A,” 123 letting go of language, 132–33 “Self in Postmodern Poetry, The,” 132–33 “Who Is Hosephat?” 130 “wooden shoes,” 131

205

Eagle, Haida, 48 eccentric abstraction, 16 Eco, Umberto, 110 Edenshaw, Charles (Haida carver), 41 Egan Gallery, 30 Empire’s Lurch (Puryear), 3 Endgame (Puryear), 2 Ene, Due, Rabe (Rydingsvard), 14, 14–16 Evers, Alf, on Hague’s work, 27 “Explicit Explanation” (Spero), 100–101 Extreme Examples (for Leon & Nancy) (poem), 111 Extreme Examples, Etc. (poem), 112 facture, fine, of Puryear’s works, 2 Fischbach Gallery, 16–17 Five Cones (Rydingsvard), 13 Flannagan, John, 23 flat-bed picture plane, problem of, 93 Flusser, Vilém apparatuses, 89–90 “art,” 159 defining image, 94 “magic,” 94 “technical images,” 87, 89–90 For Artemis Who Heals Woman’s Pain (Spero), 103 For Beckwourth (Puryear), 3–4 forgery, question of, 71–72 form-language Puryear’s, 2–3 in Self (Puryear), 3 For Paul (Rydingsvard), 8, 14, 16 “Fortress, The” (Rydingsvard’s For Paul), 16 For Weston (Rydingsvard), 12 “found objects” (Lipski’s medium), 77–78 “Fountain Drawings, The” (Bidlo), 74, 73–75 Frank, Robert photographing Hague’s sculptures, 28–29 Raoul Hague and, 28 at Woodstock house, 22 Free International University, 34, 35 Friedlander, Lee, 29 Fuller, Buckminster, 145

206

INDEX

G. (Berger), 161–62 Galería Rioboo, 67 Gathering Dust (Lipski), 80 G.A.Z. (Gruene Aktion Zukunft) (Green Action for the Future), 34 genitals of Christ, Steinberg on, 177–78 Geography of the Imagination, The (Davenport), 135, 136, 146 Gesture III (Golub), 96, 100 Giacometti’s death, 117 Gift, The (Mauss), 45 “Gigantomachy” paintings (Golub), 99–100, 104 Gigantomachy IX (Golub), 99 Gigantomachy V (Golub), 99, 104 Giono, Jean, 36–37 giornata (fresco painter term), 62 Giotto, 11, 14, 71, 144 global instability, political and economic, 87–88 Golub, Leon character similarities, 98–99 Gesture III, 96, 100 “Gigantomachy” paintings, 99–100 Gigantomachy IX, 99 Gigantomachy V, 99, 104 joint exhibition with Spero, 97–98 lists of image files, 112–13 painting and photography, 91–92 photographic images, 111 portrait by David Reynolds, 114 radical artist, 97 remembering, 115–17 style, 98 Gorchov, Ron Noli Me Tangere, 60, 63 paintings, 61–63 Graham, Brian, 28 Grand Central Market, 83, 83–84, 85 Greenberg, Clement, 171–72, 176 Green Box (Duchamp), 78 Green Party, 34 Ground Work: Before the War (Duncan), 123 Guston, Philip, 30

Hague, Raoul abstract artist, 29 Chestnut Torso, 25, 26 John Flannagan, 23 large tree trunks, 24 Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, 25, 26 masculine and feminine, 25 and Robert Frank, 28 “tango sensation,” 27–28 William Zorach, 23 wood as sole material, 24–25 at Woodstock house, 22 Haida context, “mastery of purity,” 47 Haida culture Black Canoe, The, 47 children in missionary schools, 40–41 Rainbow Creek Dancers, 49 Raven or Eagle, 48 Haida Project balance, 47 cross-cultural exchange, 52–53 cultural difference, 44 organization and sponsorship, 42–43 payment of commissions, 45–46 photographs, 38 Haida society, traditional, 45 Halpin, Marjorie M., 40 Hart, Jim apprenticeship, 44 cousin of Reg Davidson, 43 Haida carver, 43 Haida Project, 38 stereotypes in San Francisco, 44 story pole of Rock Pole, 50 Headlands Center for the Arts, sponsoring Haida Project, 42 “heirloom,” 58 Henson, Matthew, 4 Heraklion Museum, Crete (Smith), 134 Hess, Thomas B., on Hague’s sculptures, 30 Hesse, Eva, 16 Hill of Uisneach, 32, 33, 36 Homer Club, 122 Hopps, Walter conflict, 151–52 cultural exchange, 158–59 death, 150

INDEX

encouraging young curators, 159 fundamental values, 154 Pasadena Art Museum, 150–51 portrait, 148 respect for and understanding artists, 156–57 risks, 155–56 skills, 153 Hours of the Night, The (Spero), 101, 102 I Am on My Way Running (Spero), 96, 102–3 identity, questions of, and difference, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 52, 158 Iggy’s Pride (Rydingsvard), 13–14 Ignatz Comes Home (Rydingsvard), 20 images, manual and machinic, 89, 90, 91, 94, 111 incarnation of Christ, 177–78, 182 “In Cold Hell, in Thicket” (Olson), 5–6 “independent curating,” 155–56 Indians of Pacific Coast, art by Bill Reid, 41–42 Information Age, 57 In Praise of Darkness (Borges), 68 In the Dark (Duncan), 123 Ireland, 35 It Is So Dark It Is Transparent (Rabinovich), 66 Johns, Jasper designs, 176 stencils, 68–69 Joyce, James, 25 Kelly, Robert, discussing Guy Davenport with Strauss, 135–47 “Knotted Graphs” (Winters), 93 Koszarawa (Rydingsvard), 12 Krauss, Rosalind, 71–72 Kuspit, Donald defining modernism, 46 Golub’s work, 117 Hague’s sculptures, 29–30 laborare est orare (labor is prayer) (Rydingsvard), 19–21 Lace Mountains (Rydingsvard), 13 Land Rollers (Rydingsvard), 13

207

language, letting go of, 132–33 Las Meninas, Steinberg on Velázquez’s, 173–74 Lévi-Strauss, Claude original Haida art, 40 Pacific Northwest Coast exhibits, 39 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques linguistics of délire, 126–27 Philosophy through the Looking Glass, 124, 125 Violence of Language, The, 124 Lennon, Weinberg Gallery, 25, 26 Licit Exp (Spero), 100–101 Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth, Mountaineer, Scout, and Pioneer, and Chief of the Crow Nation of Indians, The, 4 Lippard, Lucy, 16–17 Lipski, Donald Artwork, 78, 79 “assisted readymade,” 78–79 attention to color, 80 Cauldron, The, 84 contemporary postindustrial society, 80–81 Gathering Dust, 80 Half Conceals, Half Discloses, 82 medium, 77–78 relation between symbol and object, 81–82, 85 Sirshasana, 83, 83–84 untitled pieces, 78, 79, 80, 81 version of bottle-rack, 78 wall pieces, 80 Yearling, The, 76, 82–83 lists, 105–9, 110 Eco’s work, 110 Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (Vasari), 168

“magic” (Flusser’s use of the word), 94 magic arts (Spero’s use of ), 101–2 Maglownica (Rydingsvard), 18, 20–21 Man of Sorrows (van Heemskerck), 166, 181 Man Who Planted Trees, The (Giono), 36–37

208

INDEX

“mastery of purity,” pursuit of, 47 Mauss, Marcel, 45 Maverick Horse (Flannagan), 23 Medea (Gorchov), 63 Michelangelo Risen Christ, 178 Steinberg on, Pietá, 173, 184 minimalism Lipski’s work, 80–81 “solemn and deadset,” 16 minimalist sculpture, 7 Mistral (Gorchov), 63 modern art, Greenberg on, 171–72, 176 modernism, definition of, 46 Modern Man in Search of a Soul ( Jung), 46 mortuary ceremonies, Haida, 48–49 Mother’s Bonnet (Rydingsvard), 11 mourners in Spero’s Cri du Coeur, 118, 119–20 Museum of Modern Art, Hague’s work in, 27 naked eye, technical images, 90–92 Noli Me Tangere (Gorchov), 60, 63 Northwest Coast collecting artifacts of, 39 European interest in art, 42 Not De Chirico (Bidlo), 72 Not Duchamp (Large Fountain, 1917) (Bidlo), 70 Not Yves Klein Anthropometries (Bidlo), 71 object and symbol, in Lipski’s work, 81–82, 85 objectivity, art, 169, 175, 179, 183 Odyssey, “cloud-gatherer,” 57 Oj Dana Oj Dana (Rydingsvard), 20 Old Mole (Puryear), 3 Olson, Charles “In Cold Hell, in Thicket,” 5–6 “Praises, The,” 1 Onandaga (Hague), 27 organ incorporation (Rydingsvard), 19–21 originality, question of, 71–72, 74, 176 Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths, The (Krauss), 71–72 Other Criteria, Steinberg on, 174, 175

Pacific Coast Indians, art by Bill Reid, 41–42 “Pacific Cultures,” Golden Gate International Exposition, 42 Painter of Our Time, A (Berger), 161 paintings of Golub, 99, 100, 102, 111, 112, 116 of Gorchov, 60, 61–63 of Rabinovich, 66, 67–69 Renaissance, 136, 137, 177, 180, 182 of Spero, 119, of Winters, 90, 93, 94 Parkman, Francis, 4 Paternosto, César, 5 Paul’s Shovel (Rydingsvard), 11 Peekamoose (Hague), 27 “Peg’s House,” hymn to modernism, 111 Permanent Red (Berger), 162 Philip Morris, 155–56 Philosophy through the Looking Glass (Lecercle), 124, 125 photography Davenport, 143–44 relationship with sculptures, 29 Picasso, copies of, 72 Piero, W. S., 11 Pietá, Steinberg on Michelangelo’s, 173, 184 plagiarism, question, 71–72 poetry, of Vicuña, 55 Portrait of Leon Golub (Reynolds), 114 potlatch, Haida culture, 41, 45, 48 Powell, Jim, 122 “Praises, The” (Olson), 1 Preziosi, Donald, 167–68 Puryear, Martin Bearing Witness, 7 Big and Little Same, 2 Bower, 3 Cask Cascade, 3 constraints of identity, 3 craft in sculptures, 1–2 Desire, 2–3 Dream of Pairing, 2 Empire’s Lurch, 3

INDEX

Endgame, 2 For Beckwourth, 3–4 form-language, 2–3 metaphorical structures, 5 Minimalist sculpture, 7 Old Mole, 3 red-tailed hawk, 1 Self, 3 Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth, 4–5 Some Tales, 3 Vessel, 2, 6–7, 7 Queen Charlotte Islands, Haida culture, 39, 40, 47 quipu, 5, 57 Rabena, Glen, 52–53 Rabinovich, Raquel It Is So Dark It Is Transparent, 66 paintings, 67–69 stencils, 68–69 radial asymmetries (Davenport), 135–47 Raging Earth, power of clouds, 57 Rainbow Creek Dancers, Haida culture, 49 Rajchman, John, 93–94 “Raoul & Maria, the Tango Sensation,” 27–28 Raven, Haida, 48 Raven and the First Man, The (Hart and Reid), 44 reciprocity, Haida vs. European systems, 45 Reid, Bill apprenticeship, 43 Haida artistic legacy, 41 heritage, 41–42 Reynolds, David, 114 Risen Christ (Michelangelo), 178 Rock Pole Davidson and Hart, 43 photograph of, 51 story pole, 50 Rubinstein, Charlotte S., 16 St. Eulalia (Rydingsvard), 13 St. Martin’s Dream (Rydingsvard), 12

209

Salt Box (Psychiatrist’s Couch) (Lipski), 78–79 “salvage paradigm,” artifact collecting, 40 Savitri (Sri Aurobindo), 56 Sculptures of Raoul Hague, The, 29 Secret Block for a Secret Person in Ireland (Beuys), 35 Self (Puryear), 3 “Self in Postmodern Poetry, The” (Duncan), 132–33 Seven Mountains (Rydingsvard), 12, 13 Seventh Man, A (Berger), 162 7,000 Oaks project (Beuys), 32, 33, 34, 35 Sexuality of Christ, The (Steinberg), 179–83 Shurin, Aaron, 122 signal and image (Winters), 92–94 signal-to-noise ratio, 92 Sirshasana (Lipski), 83, 83–84 Sky Goddess/Egyptian Acrobat (Spero), 101 Smith, Sterrett, 134, 136 Society for Arts Publications of Americas, 42 Some Lines for Jim Beckwourth (Puryear), 4–5 Some Tales (Puryear), 3, 5 Sommer, Frederick aesthetics, 79–80 Constellations That Surround Us, The, 77 Song of a Saint (Rydingsvard), 12, 13 “Spade with Two Handles” (Beuys), 36 Spero, Nancy Artemis, Acrobats, Divas and Dancers, 120 character similarities, 98–99 Codex Artaud, 102 Cri du Coeur, 118, 119–20 “Explicit Explanation,” 100–101 For Artemis Who Heals Woman’s Pain, 103 Hours of the Night, The, 101, 102 I Am on My Way Running, 96, 102–3 joint exhibition with Golub, 97–98 language and symbolism of images, 100 Licit Exp, 100–101 magic arts, 101–2

210

INDEX

Spero, Nancy (continued) radical artist, 97 Sky Goddess/Egyptian Acrobat, 101 small panels, 101 style, 98 Sri Aurobindo, 56 Steinberg, Leo art and architecture, 170–71 award in literature, 170 contemporary art, 174–75 flat-bed picture plane, 93 general reader, 180 Hague’s sculptures, 27, 29 heresy in art history, 171–72 humanation of Christ, 177–78, 182 incarnation of Christ, 177–78 Las Meninas, 173–74 masterful writings on historical subjects, 174 modern art vs. historical art, 176 objecting to reductive approaches, 172 “Objectivity and the Shrinking Self,” 175 opposition to modernist theory, 176–77 “Other Criteria,” 176–77 questioning long-held views, 173 Sexuality of Christ, The, 179–83 Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, The, 177 social role of art, 172 textism, 183 stencils (Rabinovich and Johns), 68–69 still life (Davenport), 144 Stone and the Thread: Andean Roots of Abstract Art, The (Paternosto), 5 Storm King Art Center, 9, 10, 16 story pole (Rock Pole), 50 Strauss, David Levi discussing Guy Davenport with Kelly, 135–47 Homer Club, 122 Vicuña and, 55–59 Swift, Jonathan, 123 symbol and object (Lipski), 81–82, 85 Szeemann, Harald conflict, 151–52

death, 150 exhibition-maker, 152 freelance, 153–54 fundamental values, 154 globalization and art, 158–59 Kunsthalle Bern, 150, 151 portrait, 148 respect for and understanding artists, 156–57 risks, 155–56 Seville Biennale, 155 utopian aspects of art, 159 “tango sensation,” 27–28 “technical images” (Flusser), 87, 89–90 textism (Steinberg), 183 Thoreau, 2 Three Bowls (Rydingsvard), 13 Titian’s works, 162, 163, 164, 165 Titian: Nymph and Shepherd (letters between Berger and daughter), 162–65 totem poles, 40 traditional art, conventional vs., 46 tree trunks (used by Hague), 24–25 Tunnels on the Levee (Rydingsvard), 12 Ulster County, 24 Undo (Rydingsvard), 13 Untitled (Seven Mountains) (Rydingsvard), 12, 13 urinal, Bidlo’s drawings of Duchamp’s, 73–75 Urszulka (Rydingsvard), 11 van Heemskerck, Maerten, 166, 181 Vasari, Giorgio, 168 Vessel (Puryear), 2, 6–7, 7 Vicuña, Cecilia cloud-net, 54, 55–59 David Levi Strauss and, 55–59 Violence of Language, The (Lecercle), 124 von Ranke, Leopold, 168–69 von Rydingsvard, Ursula attitude toward labor, 15 bodily organs, 19–21 cedar beams, 10, 15

INDEX

Dreadful Sorry, 11 Ene, Due, Rabe, 14, 14–16 family and church, 10 Five Cones, 13 For Paul, 8, 14, 16 For Paul in studio as “The Fortress,” 16 Giotto pilgrimage, 11–12 Iggy’s Pride, 13–14 Land Rollers, 13 Maglownica, 18, 20–21 Mother’s Bonnet, 11 outdoor sculptures, 14–16 Paul’s Shovel, 11 Storm King Art Center, 9, 10 tools and materials, 15 Undo, 13 Urszulka, 11 Zakopane, 10 Wallkill Walnut Frank photographing, 29 Hague, 27 Warhol, Andy, 73, 152 “Who’s Afraid of Red, White & Blue?” (Lipski), 81–82

Winters, Terry Animal Associations, 91 Colony, 86, 93 naked eye, 90–91 painter, 91–92 show “Knotted Graphs,” 93 signal and image, 92–94 signal to noise, 92 technical images, 90–91 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 169 “wooden shoes” (Duncan), 128, 131 Woodstock house, 22 writers, lists of, 110–11 Yaalth Tluu (Raven Canoe) Davidson and Hart, 43 Davidson describing designs, 49–50 Glen Rabena assisting Reg, 52–53 Yearling, The (Lipski), 76, 82 Zakopane (Rydingsvard), 10, 20 Zeus, “cloud-gatherer,” 57 Zorach, William, 23

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