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Tag: Jo Baer

  • Next Question: Is Art Dead?

    Is Painting Dead?
    Friday, May 16, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    This early painting panel was one of the best—real feeling on urgent issues expressed to an audience of peers. Today we may smile complacently at the title question. At the time, art’s higher authorities had declared painting dead and buried. Perhaps it was only some sense of a coming rebirth that gave painters courage to ask the question out loud. But when Nicholas Krushenick says “I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS!” we hear the voice of the votary since the Renaissance. (Will video artists some day say how they love clicking in that cassette and watching the little light come on?)

    One other note: artists reading this report in 1975 would have known that “The Article” referred to “The Painted Word,” an article by Tom Wolfe which had recently missed the point about painting in Harper’s Magazine. Shortly thereafter it was published as a book, achieving wide notoriety, if not acclaim. Today I had to think a moment to identify it.

    Moderator: Burt Chernow
    Panelists: Nicholas Krushenick, Stuart Shedletsky, Shirlann Smith, and Robert Wiegand

    Judy Seigel, “Is Painting Dead? Artists Talk on Art May 16,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3

    The subtitle of this panel, “Is Jerking Off Getting Out of Hand?,” could mean anything from, “Once you’ve seen one jerk-off in an art context, you’ve seen them all, so a painting renaissance is inevitable,” to “Painting itself is the equivalent of jerking off, so why paint?” In either case, if you’ve been waiting tensely for the verdict, the panelists agreed that painting is not now, nor is it likely in the foreseeable future to be dead. In fact, one assumes that the four painters convened exactly in order to reach that conclusion. It did, however, take them three-quarters of the evening to start to explain why.

    For openers, the now-infamous query was projected onto the screen: “Artforum wishes to ask you as a painter what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. [T]hose understood to be making the ‘inevitable next step’ now work with any material but paint….” A show of panelists’ slides with commentary by each was followed by talk of The Letter, The Article, The Critics, Other Painters, and The Situation.

    The Letter

    Shirlann Smith: It’s a love letter from Artforum—the kind you’d write at the end of a long marriage. But the language is so literary—intellectual, not words I’ve ever heard artists use.1

    Robert Wiegand: Is Artforum dead? They never had to fish before. They came on Bang! Bang!

    The Article

    Stuart Shedletsky: It’s a tantrum by an essentially literary person who doesn’t “get” art.

    Wiegand: There was a bit of truth on some levels and that made everybody a little uncomfortable, but he stretched it.

    Nicholas Krushenick: I have never been to a party at Ethel Scull’s.

    The Critics

    Krushenick: I’ve enjoyed a certain amount of honesty from Harold Rosenberg. He admitted the critic is finished. Greenberg [apologetic tone] has been a constant champion of die abstract idea in art.

    Shedletsky: The critics can tie up Brice Marden with Fragonard.

    Wiegand: Rosenberg said, “It may be time to abandon, not art, but art criticism, which has become little more than a shopping list.”

    Other Painters

    Burt Chernow: Who are the painters today that keep painting alive?

    Krushenick: Jasper Johns hasn’t given us a new image in years. (My wife will kill me for saying this.) Stella is still about making art, and I respect him tremendously for that, whether it succeeds or fails. A lot of people just give us bricks and bunny rabbits. Noland is still making a fantastic try at making art…. Richard Lindner, Alfred Jensen, Yrisarry, Jo Baer.

    Wiegand: D’Arcangelo, Chuck Hinman.

    Audience: I don’t hear any names of new people keeping painting alive.

    Wiegand: There doesn’t have to be something new every week.

    Shedletsky: Heroes don’t come along as often as Artforum would have us think. They change geniuses every week.

    Krushenick: Work today is all intellect, no passion. Anyway, all artists are not created equal.

    The Situation

    Chernow: Will new technology replace painting, or coexist?

    Wiegand: No one got excited when Rauschenberg got involved with dance. No one’s going to get excited when I get into video.

    Smith: There’s a tendency to want to perform, to go where the action is.

    Shedletsky: I sit in front of all those tapes and get terribly bored. I want to go home and watch television.

    Audience: If painting is dead, it’s dead in the colleges.

    Krushenick: On 50 percent of any given faculty you have this meatball who makes a (lousy) watercolor every two years. And he has an enormous amount of power.

    Audience Q&A

    Audience A: Is art dead?

    Audience B: That’s next week!

    Audience C: Art has never been more alive. It’s traveling in all directions. They’re waiting for that one direction, but we don’t have to offer it to them.

    Shedletsky: The impulse to make art is a very primal, basic human impulse, since the caves at Lascaux.

    Audience: Is the idea all important? Are the hands that produce the idea interchangeable, or does art lose in translation?

    Krushenick: They had assistants four hundred years ago. BUT I LOVE THE ACT OF PUTTING PAINT ON CANVAS! I even stretch and prime the canvases myself. There’s a delicious, beautiful factor to running a brush across a surface. I don’t want to relegate that to someone else. If I did, I’d be standing around all day watching the schmuck.

    Shedletsky: Works of a certain type, for example, Judd’s, don’t suffer from fabrication. But you couldn’t imagine getting someone else to do a de Kooning.

    About here a bona fide screaming match between Krushenick and a fellow in the audience who seemed not to care for abstract art attested to the success of the panel and the vigor of feelings about art.

    Krushenick and Fellow: (Incoherent)

    Krushenick: Fuck you.

    Fellow: Your art lacks passion. It’s an intellectual color exercise. It’s like wrapping paper.

    Chernow [calmly]: Do any of you ever sneak off into a room a do a little still life, or something?

    Krushenick: Figurative painting outsells abstract painting six to one. I turned from it and never looked back. I want to die with my finger on the pulse of the twenty-first century. In a strange way it’s the most delectable life style I’ve ever encountered. If you never get any success in your life, you could say on your deathbed, “I’ve had a wonderful life!”

    Conclusion

    Artforum can’t be dead because artists hate it so much and read it so much and painting can’t be dead because it gets reborn about every fifteen minutes.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 The full text of the letter appears below. The responses from artists were published in the September 1975 issue.

    Artforum wishes to ask you, as a painter, what you consider to be the prospects of painting in this decade. It appears that painting has ceased to be the dominant artistic medium at the moment. And we assume that the debates between its two major ideologies, abstract and representational, have outlived their usefulness to the current scene. Our thinking here refers to the fact that neither side has triumphed over the other in a historical verdict to which both had appealed. On the contrary, those understood to be making “the next inevitable step” now work with any material but paint.

    1. How do you think this has affected the need to do painting today and the general morale in the field?

    2. What possibilities, not found elsewhere, does this medium offer you as an artist?

    3. What energies and ideas in painting strike you as worth attention, and why?

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Next Question: Is Art Dead?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 3; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 13–15. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Male Critics Grilled and Toasted

    Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work
    Monday, June 2, 1975
    A.I.R. Gallery, New York

    This is the first of a pair of panels that well illustrate the dramatic change in attitudes toward “women’s art” that settled in during the next two years. The second event was in a grand institutional setting, and everyone felt as triumphant as, on this June night, they felt frustrated.1

    Moderator: Blythe Bohnen
    Panelists: Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff, Richard Martin, and Carter Ratcliff

    Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work – A.I.R. Panel,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2

    The fact that this panel of four male critics and editors drew the largest audience I have seen at any comparable woman’s event tells all about power and the perception of power in the art world today. Intellectual exchange was secondary, the audience being less interested in what the panel had to say than in what it had to say to the panel.

    Moderator Blythe Bohnen, perhaps better called moderator-advocate, was adroit and articulate, deftly catching some finely parsed qualifications on the fly and tossing them back in the same breath, asking point-blank, “What are critics going to do to increase women’s power in the art world? Can the decision-making that goes on be brought to consciousness? Can an equalization in articles and reviews be forced? Why is it that the women who have been developed as full artistic personalities are all dead, out of town, or nonexistent? Many young men have had the critical build-up to super-star status: why not women?”

    A similar insistent questioning came from the audience. May Stevens asked, “Why is there so little critical response to women’s art? This is a movement with tremendous energy and thrust. Do you think it isn’t intellectually or aesthetically significant? How do you justify remaining aside from this issue?”

    May Stevens, The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet), 1974, acrylic on canvas (artwork © May Stevens)

    Max Kozloff replied, “Feminism can’t be considered a movement in modern art.” Just as ethnic background or place of origin are factors in an artist’s work, sex is a factor which could only have “x” amount of relevance, he said. The feminist movement rightly insists on “the psychic origin of works of art,” but many other factors, including social, biographical, economic, and political ones, have also been slighted. Since they are in the majority, “it seems odd to have a separate category for women.” However, the effect of the movement is evident. “I look around this room and see work proudly exhibited that five years ago would have been called miniscule.” Moreover, “a consciously womanly style or feminine subject can cause an alteration of looking.”

    Perhaps one day, Kozloff suggested, “we’ll find ‘tough’ or ‘virile’ painting ugly, and say ‘what a tough painting—ugh!’’’ But, as he sees the issues, critics are not the ones to obtain “social justice” for women. Critics’ prime concern is “the laborious process of reacting to a work of art.” Look to curators and chairpersons of art departments for justice, he said.

    Carter Ratcliff: “I have shied away from political issues in art and I think feminism is a political issue…. I’ve written about a lot of women artists (e.g., Agnes Martin, Jo Baer, Joan Mitchell) but they were artists before the feminist movement. If women come along with a theory of what significance in women’s art is, it will be in order to get accepted, to get prestige. So far the definitions don’t stand up, but they may gain support and become self-fulfilling prophecies. The problem is to find a good self-fulfilling prophecy for those women who feel that their self-interest or self-fulfillment lies as members of a group…. Specifically feminist conventions may be building, but that would ‘conventionalize’ women’s art, as in art ‘conventions.’”

    Agnes Martin, Untitled #10, 1975 (artwork © Estate of Agnes Martin)

    Those critics who repudiate the old Greenbergian criticism would be more interested in women’s work, which is outside the power structure, than formalist critics, as Ratcliff saw it. “The sensibility that makes one suspect that whole ‘certification’ process would respond to feminist consciousness, which also unhooks one from the power structure. [B]ut I can’t think of any woman who presents herself as a woman artist who presents work that would seem to be of quality to a hardline formalist critic.”

    Richard Martin: “Being a Quaker, I was aware of the women’s movement before I was aware of art criticism.” The feminist movement was instrumental in breaking down the stereotype of the personal in art as “trivial.” However, “I would consider it a mistake to orient the magazine Arts toward one particular point of view. The priorities are to act as medium of record and to discriminate between various forms of art.” It isn’t possible to take a self-conscious equalizing attitude toward women, but “an ardent antifeminist would not be engaged to do reviews.” As Martin sees it, when women are properly represented with exhibitions, “recognition in other areas will follow.”

    Billy Al Bengston, Big Jim McLain, 1967, polyurethane and laquer on aluminum, 60 x 58 in. (artwork © Billy Al Bengston)

    Lawrence Alloway: “I hesitate to formulate general factors common to women’s art, perhaps a theory may come later. There are proposals for a feminist aesthetic, something inherently feminine. That used to be considered sexist—now the women are saying it!” Alloway pointed out that none of the proposed criteria applies to more than a few small groups, but what matters is what’s intended.

    For instance, “Judy Chicago’s painting reminds me of Billy Al Bengston first, and female genitalia second, but there can be specific feminist iconographies if women artists say they are.” In other words, “the circle has been sexualized or politicized, but these things don’t add up to an inherent sensibility.” Of course, “I think of women’s art in sociocultural terms, but I think of everyone’s art in sociocultural terms.” As for power, Alloway said, “I don’t think the writer is so insignificant. Not only does he have the power to write, but the power to withhold. I’m writing four pieces about women now. I’m preoccupied. If I had a brilliant idea about Brice Marden or Richard Serra, I wouldn’t write it.” And, on changing the system: “I’d like to see an expansion of co-ops.”

    Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Look at Women Artists’ Work – A.I.R. Panel,” Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2

    Lucy Lippard’s question-statement from the floor addressed the paradox which haunts these discussions: “Women’s art is used as a synonym for feminist art, but they’re not the same thing…. Can you tell the difference?”

    The answer was not clear. Meanwhile, we see that when the women say, “Write about women’s art,” the men say, “There is no feminine aesthetic.” When the men say, “There is no feminine aesthetic,” the women say, “But the movement is what’s happening.” And then the men say, “Feminist art is of no formal interest.” So the women say, “Then write about more women artists.”

    Obviously, there’s enormous pressure to make “women’s art” into an aesthetic as well as a political development, and the more useful “women’s art” is as a political configuration, the more likely it is to become an aesthetic one. Some women would benefit enormously, but the rest would be worse off than before, having undertaken the struggle in the first place to escape stereotyping.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 A panel called “Contemporary Women: Consciousness and Content,” took place at the Brooklyn Museum on October 23, 1977.

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “Male Critics Grilled and Toasted” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 3 (June/July 1975): 1–2; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 16–17. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.