A recent talk by the Brooklyn-based critic Naomi Fry was as wide ranging—one could even say scattered—as both her cultural interests and her curriculum vitae. “I always have to remind myself that I’m a writer,” she said, reflecting on her roles as a professor who teaches writing at the Rhode Island School of Design and New York University and also as a copy editor for the New York Times. Like many critics Fry must do other things to earn a living, which creates a shaky self-perception. At a lecture for the School of Visual Arts’ MFA program in art criticism, she didn’t have a paper to read, just notes, and thus spoke off the cuff for a small crowd of students, alumni, sympathizers, and friends.
Asked beforehand to talk about her challenges and successes, Fry began by discussing a favorite piece of writing, her contribution to the series “See Something Say Something,” published by the Brooklyn-based journal Paper Monument in 2012. This five-hundred-word essay examined a photograph, taken by Brad Elterman in 1980, of the emerging actor Nicollette Sheridan at age seventeen with her then-boyfriend, the television and pop-music heartthrob Leif Garrett. This “check out my young girlfriend” photo, as Fry called it, “encapsulates everything that’s been interesting to me, ever … ever.” It was quite a surprise to hear this coming from a critic who has published in top art publications like Frieze and Artforum and other important cultural forums, such as the London Review of Books, T Magazine, n+1, and the Comics Journal. In both the essay and the lecture, Fry teased out what intrigued her about the image, which I understood to be celebrities, television, literature, sex, music, interior decorating, and politics. Putting the serious subject matter aside, how did she gravitate toward such vapid and vulgar things?
Born in Israel to left-leaning academic parents, Fry spent a significant amount of time in the United States and grew up with American popular culture. She was also an educational product of the 1990s, a time when, she said, William Shakespeare and chewing gum wrappers were worthy objects of scholarly attention, and when books, movies, and art formed the core of interdisciplinary studies. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Tel Aviv University, Fry studied literature at the PhD level until 2007, and since then has always tried to throw references to nineteenth-century novels into her writing. D. H. Lawrence and Theodore Dreiser make appearances in her Paper Monument article, and Honoré de Balzac and Horatio Alger are name-dropped in a recent Los Angeles Review of Books piece. The latter essay, “‘Till They Choke on It’: On Wolf of Wall Street,” rages against Martin Scorsese’s newest, much-maligned film about “the disgusting people of Wall Street,” a project that many criticized as being complicit with the 1 percent. “I’m this incredibly angry, bitter Marxist,” she snarled, who has “psychological problems with morally repugnant artifacts” such as The Wolf of Wall Street and Harmony Korine’s debaucherous 2013 flick Spring Breakers.
After leaving Johns Hopkins, Fry worked as a fact checker for the glossy celebrity magazine Us Weekly from 2007 to 2011 while indulging her passion for writing. “You’re dancing with the devil,” people told her—or did she tell herself that? (My notes from the lecture are unclear.) At the time Fry was happy that someone had employed her, so when someone at an art opening asked her if she felt guilty about the real-world consequences of working at the gossip rag, she went ballistic on him. “By the time you read Us Weekly, you’re already fucked,” she explained. “I don’t feel like I was feeding babies poison.” Conversely, the work gave her endless material with which to work. “The trashy place is my happy place,” she said.
The cast of Spring Breakers on the set
An audience member asked her about writing a “deliberately negative” review. Fry responded by saying she can be negative about things backed by money and power—such as books and films produced by publishing houses and production studios—but would hesitate for an exhibition, as long as that artist was “sincerely trying,” she said. I would argue that the work of any artist takes not an insignificant amount of capital—from purchasing artist’s supplies to paying rent on a storefront space—but her point was taken. My larger concern was what the questioner meant by “deliberately,” which would indicate a critic purposefully and nefariously trashing an artist.
Naomi Fry wears many hats (photograph by Christopher Howard)
The writing process is hard for Fry, but she has a routine, a unit system, in which she writes for forty-five-minute chunks of time. During this time she’s offline—no Facebook, no Instagram—and doesn’t get up or talk to anyone. Fry briefly acknowledge that people write for little or no money these days, which makes it hard for critics who, as she mentioned at the lecture’s beginning, were not born wealthy and did not marry rich. Did she have advice for current SVA students? “I couldn’t really come up with anything,” she conceded. What makes her hopeful? Fry admitted that although she might sound like a “middle school art teacher, I think about being creative. The work—I told you I was a Marxist.”
An audience member called Fry “intrepid” after the critic told a brief story on how she started getting assignments despite being a former academic without the usual writing clips. “The more things you put in your sack,” she said, “the more it grows. Before you know it, you’ve got a really big sack.”
9.5 Theses on Art and Class with Ben Davis and Special Guests Thursday, September 5, 2013 Housing Works Bookstore Café, New York
Ben Davis, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013)
At the end of the first chapter of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, the New York–based art critic and editor Ben Davis writes that a “theory of class might provide the missing center of the debate about art.” Indeed, the use, value, and status of art—especially in relation to politics and economics—have been the subject of a constantly flailing conversation since the Occupy moment, since the Great Recession, since the Bush years, since the rise of the biennial, since the Culture Wars, since Reagan, since Conceptual art, since Duchamp—okay, you get the point. It’s exactly this kind of exasperating, roundabout conversation that Davis wants to displace, and his new book does exactly that with resounding success.
Much of this success comes not from confrontation and agitation but rather through reason, logic, and clear thinking, which is perhaps why the book launch with a five-person panel last week was such a cordial affair. After giving a brief autobiography, Davis declared that the book comes from a new place, without the usual art vocabulary, and that he wants to bring together the art and activist communities. (The left-leaning Haymarket Books, known for titles on radicals and revolutionaries, published 9.5 Theses on Art and Class.) Many of its thirteen chapters had appeared over the years, in rougher forms, at Artnet.com, but the material also came from vigorous conversations with artists, dealers, critics, and activists. A significant moment for the author was #class, an exhibition cum seminar cum think tank cum rant room that was held in early 2010 at Winkleman Gallery. Davis’s contribution to the event was the enumerated “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” a cumulative list of Marxist-informed positions that illuminates much of what is wrong—and what could be right—about the contemporary world of art. “So you’re calling for a Reformation?” the art dealer Edward Winkleman asked him at the time. Apparently so, and it’s about time.
In his talk, Davis summarized the distinctions and misconceptions among proper definitions of working, middle, and capitalist classes, which are elegantly covered in the first chapter. It’s not quite accurate to identify the middle class as based on income, education, or culture, but instead by the nature of a worker’s relationship to his or her labor. A middle-class person, Davis said, has agency, independence, and the ability to be one’s own boss. As an example he selected the mother of a Chicago-based activist and friend who runs her own cleaning business and employs two workers. Despite the type of work she does—maid service, really—this woman is middle class when compared to someone else in the same job at, for example, a hotel.
Taking the subject of a chapter in Julia Bryan-Wilson’s book Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (2011), Davis provided a second anecdote of class perception in art. For his solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970, Robert Morris turned the museum into a construction site, bossing around the workers who moved large pieces of timber, concrete, and steel. Despite an intention to appear as a working-class construction worker, he actually became a supervisor—a middle- or even ruling-class position—of a process piece involving forklifts, cranes, and pulleys, burning through hours of hired manpower. (Later on Davis proclaimed that blue-chip stars like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have exited art and become company floor managers.) Last, the author described a tension between the middle-class, noncommercial artist who fears of selling out (i.e., making money) compared to the working class, which purposefully fights for a bigger piece of the pie. This dual identity, hyperbolically described by some as schizophrenic, was a strong undercurrent for the panelists.
The class of 2013 (from left): Blithe Riley, Jennifer Dalton, William Powhida, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Ben Davis (photograph by Christopher Howard)
Starting the discussion, Blithe Riley, an artist, activist, and member of a collective that founded Interference Archive in Brooklyn, considered 9.5 Theses on Art and Class to be inspirational while raising important questions. The book, she felt, unwittingly presented the identity of artist as totalizing; it also doesn’t reflect the experiences of the museum and gallery workforce. Art is an “opaque economy,” Davis responded, acknowledging that a primary problem is that an artist, whose creative labor is middle class, must sometimes identify simultaneously with the working class through a day job (that dualism again). With New York in mind I thought immediately of artists working as art handlers and in entry-level positions and internships at commercial galleries and nonprofit organizations.
Jennifer Dalton, an artist whose work addresses sexism in the art world and an organizer of #class, had a problem with thesis 2.8: “Another role for art is a symbolic escape valve for radical impulses, to serve as a place to isolate and contain social energy that runs counter to the dominant ideology.” Not all art is radical, said Davis, whose observations in theses 2.0 to 2.9 explicate the roles of art for the ruling class, which of course do not foreclose other possibilities for creative labor. Dalton wanted to know about the political responsibility of artists and how it affects their practices: “When is an artist a citizen?” A better question, I think, would be “When is a person an artist and when is he or she a citizen?
A veteran instructor for New York City public schools, the artist and #class conspirator William Powhida had started teaching this week and grumbled about the excessive time spent on administrative and evaluative duties that inevitably come with the position. He then conveyed his experiences as an artist with limited capital, which can be strained when studio accidents break expensive materials. With a corporate credit card for his practice—which is smartly registered as a limited liability company—Powhida has become that artist who produces work for art fairs, yet the majority of his income, he said, is derived not by selling his work with a gallery but through part-time teaching.
Powhida is well known for creating art that is abrasive to the upper echelons of the art world but wonders about the effect his work has on this elite. For instance, what is he supposed to do when the Greek shipping magnate and art collector Dakis Joannou buys a print of a drawing called How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality that he designed for the cover of the November 2009 issue of the Brooklyn Rail, which satirized a decision by the downtown institution, on whose board Joannou serves, to let Koons organize an exhibition comprising only his holdings? After laboring in his studio throughout the early days of Occupy Wall Street in fall 2011, Powhida later attended meetings of the Arts & Labor working group but after a couple months decided that his satirical and parodic approach didn’t fit in with it. Undeterred, he has recently partnered with a few Bushwick artists and scenesters to investigate purchasing a commercial building to provide affordable studios for artists in an effort to slow down gentrification.
Like Dalton, Naeem Mohaiemen, an artist, activist, and member of Gulf Labor, found thesis 9.0, which states that “The sphere of the visual arts is an important symbolic site of struggle; however, because of its middle-class character, it has relatively little effective social power,” to be contentious—if only as a call to arms to prove it wrong. He said that even a struggling artist has cultural capital and reiterated the evening’s recurrent notion of a person with multiple identities that cross class lines. To which group does an artist have a natural affinity, he asked, working or middle class? The answer is hard to produce here, but in other countries, he continued, divisions among classes are clear cut. Gulf Labor focuses on working conditions for migrant labor in the Middle East, that is, the ones who build the physical structures that house the institutions in which the art world works, such as the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in the capital of the United Arab Emirates. People [in America] dismiss the subject, Mohaiemen said, because they believe that it is too complicated and that workers should be happy to have jobs. To people over there, a New York artist is part of an aloof elite.
52 Weeks of Gulf Labor announced at the Venice Biennale
Everyone seemed to agree that artists have tremendous amounts of symbolic power but not enough to mitigate rapidly growing inequality. What is the centralized institution against which to strike, Davis asked. Artists will keep making art, he proceeded, whether they sell it or not. Dalton contended that artists should boycott, not strike: “Don’t participate in what you don’t believe in.” The power of saying no is certainly one implicit goal of a group like Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Similarly, Mohaiemen offered this advice to artists: “withhold and engage.”
Circling back to the gentrification issue, a man in the audience with a British accent propounded that artists never exercise community power in their neighborhoods, like immigrants do. It is true that certain cultures have roots while others don’t. Powhida reminded him that his current interest—collectively buying and operating a studio building—would not displace residents; it’s an endeavor that aims to take advantage of underused commercial property—and therefore give the participants an important stake in the community. The questioning continued: Would the artists sequester themselves from the community? Should they teach computer classes to their neighbors? To me, these lines of thought obscure the larger picture, and Powhida has the right idea. Gentrification in New York can generally be mitigated in two ways: by owning property and through rent stabilization. The focus of advocacy efforts should be on education and action, in particular, guiding residents through the legal, financial, and governmental landscape of property ownership while helping enforce the rights of those facing eviction and displacement. The encroachment of hipster bars and restaurants, and galleries and boutiques, is consequential but beside the point. We need lawyers and social workers, teachers and those with political connections, not artists.
One audience member contented that 9.5 Theses on Art and Class collapses politics into activism. “Professional revolutionaries” like Leon Trotsky or Hannah Arendt, he argued, would not think of themselves as activists. “Is activism your ultimate goal?” he finally asked. Davis briefly discussed his involvement with anti-racist, anti-prison, and anti-death-penalty groups, which he admitted has a narrow, limited scope. Yet helping people on a case-by-case basis, he hoped that this activity would have a larger impact. Powhida observed that Occupy Wall Street started large and fractured into working groups. The movement no longer has a discernible physical presence, amplified by the media and through confrontations with police, like it did in 2011, but instead operates on a smaller scale. I was reminded how Occupy Sandy mobilized relief efforts much quicker than established charities following the November 2012 hurricane.
Looking beyond New York, Riley has noticed, through conducting professional-development workshops with Creative Capital across the country, that people all over have different solutions. The “professional art world,” she implored, needs to “think bigger.” She also encouraged people to step away from the art world and get involved in social-justice issues. “There are a lot of wins,” she said, that just “may not be visible” to someone with a passing interest in activism and politics. Dalton wanted people to “hesitate less” and “pick up a shovel.” Ultimately, Davis’s book makes its readers dig deeper, asking them—us—what they value in art and in life.
The “Marxist” viewpoints are familiar. What surprises is that in 1976 we could still print the term “social man” without comment—although whether the usage is Lippard’s or the writer’s is not clear.
Moderator: Patricia Hills; Panelists: Kevin Whitfield, Kay Brown, Alan Wallach, May Stevens, Lee Baxendall, Lucy Lippard, Amiri Baraka, Carl Andre, Leon Golub.
Carol De Pasquale, “And Then We’ll Dissolve the State,” Women Artists Newsletter 2, no. 2 (May 1976): 7
The panelists did not all profess to be Marxists, but each addressed the question of being an artist, art worker, or cultural within a class system. The function of art and its translation from a visual object to a Marxist statement were treated from various political and art-world points of view. As with most forums of this kind, alternatives were debated, but no course of action was ratified.
[Patricia] Hills enumerated three options for the artist in a system: Acquiesce (produce what will sell); ignore the situation (work in the studio untouched by the needs of the working class); or fight (organize other artists, eliminate gallery middlemen, expand the art audience).
Kevin Whitfield said the class struggle will not succeed until we demolish the myth of superiority of the high priests and teachers who reign over all our cultural domains. The ideals of education are used to defend hurdles which block all but the most gifted, he said, while artists hustle without thought.
Kay Brown said that, as a black woman, she is reluctant to respond to either Marxism or feminism—white ideologies. For black women, single motherhood and women as heads-of-households have been givens for years, she pointed out, whereas for white women these are causes.
Alan Wallach discussed the ideological mystifications of art and class and the social institution of art, in which the art experience is a social practice, fulfilling social needs.
May Stevens introduced herself as a theoretical Marxist by presenting her family background. Her politics could be inferred from accounts of her government-employed “sexist, racist” pipefitter father, as well as her quotes from Susan Sontag.
Lee Baxandall said that, although the artist’s vocation is voluntary, oppression is experienced from the first arrival of the work in the market, a market which changes the artist’s labor into a commodity. He favors revision of the present U.S. Communist Party to advocate action within the American political system to dissolve the state.
Lucy Lippard considers herself first and foremost a feminist, not a Marxist. She spoke of “idea art” as a function of social man, tied to both life and the environment. This “art for separation and a certain audience” reflects a social function, and has little contact with other audiences, she said, adding that street art dragged into the gallery is no solution.
Amiri Baraka (the former Leroi Jones) advocated an art for the working masses which would raise the level of the people’s consciousness. With quotes from Mao Tse Tung and other non-artist Marxists, Baraka offered no specific means of promulgating such non-gallery art, only a vague notion of more buttons and posters. Using the rhetoric of violence, he proposed the seizure of power by revolution, with artists taking an active role, literally fighting machine guns with machine guns. The violent wipe-out of the ruling class is necessary for change, he said: “Revolution first and foremost!”
Carl Andre presented an analysis of his own class position: worker and petty capitalist interested in his own product, member of bourgeoisie and working class. But, he said, he is a Marxist nonetheless. Andre, who sees no particular art as morally or politically correct, does not consider art a form of communication. He finds art’s power to be the art, conveyed as it is meant.
Leon Golub said all Americans participate in the reward system of imperialist power. All art reflects its social origins; the success of American art is related to the success of American society. He discussed art as derived from surplus, which in turn becomes a commodity in the sale process, and speculated that much of the artist’s familiar claim to freedom of action is bought at others’ expense. The artist is “but a server, working in the cracks of the system.”
Source
Written by Carol De Pasquale, “And Then We’ll Dissolve the State” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 2, no. 2 (May 1976): 7; and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 39.
In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.
Robert Storr “Making It Visible” Thursday, September 22, 2011 School of Visual Arts, New York
Robert Storr (photograph by Lyle Ashton Harris)
When in 2001 the curator Robert Storr mentioned to his friend, the German painter Gerhard Richter, that the Bonn Kunstmuseum was hosting an exhibition of work by the abstractionist Robert Ryman, they jumped into Richter’s Mercedes and sped at ninety-five miles per hour on the autobahn to see it. After arriving, Storr recalled, Richter was a leisurely but deliberate looker, as unhurried moving through the galleries as he had been fast on the road. When Storr broached Ryman about a possible comparison of his work to Richter’s, the American artist became puzzled and impatient. Storr described Ryman’s reaction to Richter—a clever chameleon, in Storr’s words, known for his pendulumlike swings in style—in this way: “How can he make all those different things?” Richter feels the opposite, interested in the things that he cannot do.
Challenging, contradictory, and incommensurable art interests Storr, hence his talk that compared and contrasted an unlikely “odd couple”: the poised and restrained Ryman and the bold, complicated, diffident Richter. Both figures have long engaged Storr—he organized retrospectives for both, in 1996 and 2002 respectively, at the Museum of Modern Art, where he was a curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture for many years. His presentation at the SVA Theatre at the beginning of fall seemed like an essay in progress, but already well developed.
Before the lecture began, a crowd packed the lobby of the former movie house in anticipation of “Our Rob Storr,” an artist, scholar, and dean of the Yale School of Art known best for years of thoughtful, scholarly exhibitions as well as his independent thinking with no apparent alliances to partisan journals or particular schools of theoretical thought. Not one to pull punches, Storr had famously jousted with Okwui Enwezor, Francesco Bonami, and Jessica Morgan in the letters section of Artforum during the first half of 2008, after their caustic reviews of his 2007 Venice Biennale.
After an introduction by David Levi-Strauss, chair of the MFA Art Criticism and Writing Program at the School of Visual Arts, Storr admitted that he had accepted the invitation to speak with the understanding that his audience would comprise students, and he directed his words to those young learners “scattered among you.” Yet he only gave a few remarks about writing and criticism, stating that his approach is neither theoretical nor philosophical nor _________ (I missed the third term). Also, “being right is far less important than being engaging.” Many of us would agree.
Storr’s actual purpose was to present his thesis on Ryman and Richter, attempting, as usual, to wrest these artists from critics and historians, namely Douglas Crimp and Yve-Alain Bois, who have used them to serve their own ends. Crimp had propagated the end of painting with Richter, and Bois used Ryman as the fall guy in his elegiac theory on the collapse of modernism. Ideological regimes like these are seductive and destructive, Storr later warned. They take away the ability to experience anything outside that ideology. As an alternative, he said that forgotten or mislaid ideas energize the study of art, especially the rediscovery of ideas once thought to be used up. Where some lament an end, Storr sees a beginning, a point of view shared by Norman M. Klein in a recently published essay, “Notes on the Arts: Curating the Past Fifty Years as Ruin,” in East of Borneo.
Painters don’t solve case studies, Storr conveyed, and solutions don’t push art. The painter’s job is to creating something truly visible, memorably visible. It’s a tall order. Ryman, an eminent self-taught artist who has continually explored the material nature of white paint, among other issues, does it well. Like Philip Guston in the 1970s and Willem de Kooning in the 1980s, Ryman paints with an awareness of his own history. Storr revalues the terms “realist” and “materialist,” thinking hard about what those terms mean. Ryman is optimistic, creating territories that you can cross. He does not establish teleologies, which other writers do and thus effect the “will of history,” but instead creates territories for viewers to cross and extends discourse on the grid.
Storr revealed that many of Richter’s abstractions cancel representational scenes—so that x-ray photographs of the former works might reveal traces of those earlier paintings. In a way, the reverse also happens, with abstraction silently integrated into figurative art. In the portrait of his daughter showing the back of her head, for example, she looks back at an ominous gray monochrome behind her, which Storr claims doubles as the fraught history of Germany in the twentieth century. Richter’s paintings of family members indicate his connections to the persecutors (Uncle Rudi) and the persecuted (Aunt Marianne) in World War II. He also painted the capitals of Europe—Madrid, Milan, Paris—in which, Storr explained, everything new reminds you of what was there before. Richter also painted Titian’s Annunciation five times, with each iteration showing further degradation of the original image—perhaps because of the artist’s unbelief in religious miracles. His recent paintings of the World Trade Center, which I had never seen before, are the size of a flat-screen television. The artist dissolves the building to create a phantom or ghost image. As astonishing as the events of September 11 were, they did not register significantly outside the United States—many parts of the world had experienced sustained and pervasive violence. According to Storr, Richter asks himself what subject matter can or cannot be painted or is impossible to paint.
Ending his presentation, Storr revealed that he does “talks as a predicate for conversation.” The floor was open for questions. An audience member tried to connect the Madrid painting to the Franco regime, an interpretation that Storr deflected. Someone else asked him to recap a recent inspirational talk given at Yale, which he summarized as using your time in graduate school wisely, establish communities, make mistakes, live the day-to-day life of an artist, and learn how to sustain that life in the real world after graduation. Jennifer Raab, who earned a doctorate in art history at Yale, questioned Storr about his use of the words “materialist” and “realist.” Storr said that for Ryman, “painting” refers to all his materials, even the nonart ones such as fiberglass, wax paper, and masking tape—thus he is a materialist (and not in a Marxist sense). Storr encouraged Raab to press new meanings into old terms, with dialectical tension, and to energize stale ones. Be associative and suggestive, he recommended, which is unlike the evasive Richter, who contradicts himself in interviews that take place years apart. This lack of complicity, however, has its own rewards—there’s nothing wrong with being an intellectual tease.
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