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  • The Last Woman’s Panel?

    Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want?
    Monday, March 31, 1975
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Despite Barbara Zucker’s accusations of “boring” or maybe because of them—this was a lively event, and the two responses stirred things up a bit more. Perhaps now that we have lived another sixteen years, anyone of us would respond differently. For Zucker’s afterthoughts, expressed at, yes, another woman’s panel, also at A.I.R [Gallery], see the Afterword.1

    Moderator: Corinne Robins
    Panelists: Joyce Kozloff, Barbara Zucker, Nancy Spero, Phoebe Helman, Howardena Pindell, and Mary Beth Edelson

    Judy Seigel, “Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (November 1975): 1.

    I think the best thing A.I.R. could do would be to have men. I hope there won’t be any more women’s panels and I hope this is the last one I’m on. You get what you want in this world by surprise, by doing the unexpected. They expect us to continue the way we are…. I don’t think feminism is the real world any more. The point was to get women artists taken seriously. Women still aren’t as equal as men, but I don’t think women’s galleries are helpful any more. I don’t think it helps to be in A.I.R.2

    —Barbara Zucker

    That statement came midway in a brisk discussion by six well-known women of the art world, speaking to a full house at the Soho Exhibition Center, an audience which included the video eye of Ingrid and Bob Wiegand, and a noticeable proportion of men.

    Moderator Corinne Robins began by noting that the six women artists “all benefited from the women’s movement, as every woman has. But what happens when ‘The Year of the Woman’ is over? Feminism is getting to be a tired issue to many people.” (Robins’s added, however, that “the abuses are still there.”)

    The six women showed slides of their work and described their artistic concerns, which could have been an evening in itself. The perception of six disparate and developed sensibilities was already a dense experience. The transition from Nancy Spero’s Body Count and Torture in Chile to “How much has the women’s movement influenced the direction of your painting?” was as difficult as Spero could have wished. But then the discussion swung into matters of practical, political and social concern, and the visual experience faded.

    Howardena Pindell: Without the women’s movement I wouldn’t have shown so soon. If I weren’t part of the gallery [A.I.R.], I don’t know if I’d be showing yet.

    Mary Beth Edelson: I was dealing with feminist subject matter before the movement, but I don’t think I understood why. Now I’m dealing in an overt way with feminist subject matter—pulled out and clarified by the movement.

    Phoebe Helman: I think the women’s movement, even though it was helpful in some ways, has nothing to do with my work. I haven’t been affected in the studio at all.

    Zucker: It’s much easier for the work to grow if it’s out there being shown….

    Nancy Spero: The feminist movement won’t fizzle out. We could never go back to the old standards. The new knowledge is too pervasive … it’s in our bones.

    Helman: It took outrageous things like dirty Tampax at the Whitney to get attention—then, hopefully, the pendulum swings.3

    Joyce Kozloff: I can’t imagine what my work or my life would be like if I hadn’t gone through the women’s movement. My work and the movement are very connected—they developed together. I see many feminist women whose work has grown, expressing their own growth and new confidence and sense of themselves as women.

    Robins: Some of the work in the Women Choose Women show [1973] struck me as very timid. Then those women got more exposure. That gave them the guts to take chances—to be less timid, no longer second-hand artists.

    Will there continue to be a need for A.I.R. and women’s galleries?

    Spero: Eventually there will be a reconciliation, but we still need outposts of independence.

    Edelson: I still see a need for A.I.R. and Soho 20, but we need to go on to another plateau. [U]ntil we integrate, we won’t have the main money and the main power.

    Helman: It’s a heterosexual world. There comes a time when this kind of support becomes a crutch.

    Spero: It’s not a heterosexual world. The art world is still male dominated. To join the system is to join the same old stuff. I’d still be excluded from commercial galleries…. There are still under 23 percent women in the Whitney Annual. We still talk about “good artists” according to male standards. Our standards for all artwork are male controlled.

    Robins: As a writer and reviewer, I have more chance to speak and write about women’s art because AI.R. and Soho 20 exist…. In 1973, as a critic, I thought Women Choose Women was a major disaster.

    Zucker: It’s time for a major museum to do a major show of women—not one started and paid for by the women—but started and paid for by the museum. [Quoting Vivian Gornick in the Village Voice]: “No one of us has the truth or the word or the only view or the only way….” It would be very comfortable for me to still be with A.I.R. I feel very fragile now. I left with great difficulty, but it was very important for me to leave.

    Audience: The world is so sick, it seems to me our only hope is bastions of what we’d like it to be—don’t corrupt yourself with that other “reality.”

    Helman: Don’t talk about Utopia! Are you aware of the politics that went on with the Women Choose Women show? That was politics!

    Zucker: It takes a great toll on an artist to always have to do everything yourself, to schlepp, and call, and carry and photograph…. To survive, and do well, a gallery needs a lot of money. We got certain grants at A.I.R., but those were tokens.

    Robins: But that’s part of every cooperative gallery.

    Edelson: I like doing some of the work you object to, but I’d like to have someone do a little of it. I have a dealer too, but he makes so many incredible mistakes…. It’s nice to have a little control.

    Man in Audience: What is women’s art?

    Panel: Art done by a woman.

    Man: Renoir dealt with the subject of women. Is he a woman artist?

    Spero: That’s a male’s view. [W]omen are supposed to conform to his view. We want to see how we see ourselves.

    Judy Seigel, “Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (November 1975): 2.

    My first comment is that, while the men never seemed to complain about the absence of women during all those years of “men only” galleries, many women found something missing in women’s galleries almost from the start. Is that because it’s a man’s world, or a basic difference in the needs of men and women?

    But the gallery in question, A.I.R., seems to have had a rather remarkable and nearly instantaneous success, considering that it is a cooperative and was initiated without “stars” or powerful patronage. It earned the respect and attention of the art world and the media from its inception and has had consistent review coverage that could be the envy of many a commercial gallery, let alone cooperative. Many of its artists have achieved prominence in the “establishment” and/or moved on from A.I.R. to “important” commercial galleries…. What do women want?

    As for feminism being a “tired issue”—American culture does use up and throwaway issues as rapidly as last week’s TV Guide. But feminism seems to have more than a few twists and turns left before subsiding into its long-prophesied demise.

    A Panelist’s Reply

    Panelist Kozloff wrote a rebuttal to panelist Zucker, which ran in the same issue as the panel report. Aside from reviewing the controversy, which was a most urgent one at the time, Kozloff’s commentary is interesting today for having forecast much art of the ‘80s.

    I felt pained to hear copanelist Barbara Zucker say that “women’s panels are boring,” “women’s shows are boring,” and “women’s galleries are boring.”

    Clearly feminism is not boring and women’s art is not boring—quite the contrary. Then why are these attitudes suddenly around? One reason is that the approaches to talking about and showing women’s art have become repetitious and unimaginative. Why is it that women artists are always expected to talk only about “Is There a Feminine/Feminist Sensibility?” or “Do Women Artists Want to Be Part of the System or Make Alternatives?”—with panels divided between those who say “yes” and those who say “no,” so there is no possibility for the development of ideas and theory?

    I have observed that women who have been through consciousness-raising and the political activities of the last five years have become strong, highly individualized artists. Their work reflects (in many different ways) a sense of personal and group identity. I see new kinds of imagery and content emerging: exploration of female sexuality, reflections on personal history, fresh approaches to materials, new concepts of space, a reexamination of the decorative (and the so-called decorative) arts, a reaching out toward non-Western sources and a nonpaternalistic attitude toward the “primitive,” direct political approaches to art making, and art which consciously parodies male stereotypes.

    These are all vital subjects and none of them precludes the others. What is exciting to me is the diversity of ways in which women’s art is emerging. We should not be confined to generalities and tired rhetoric. Let’s talk about the art and the ideas around the art.

    —Joyce Kozloff

    Letter to the Editor

    Over the years we received a number of angry letters-to-the-editor about such matters as having said a speaker was hard to understand or having run a cover cartoon in the style of a male artist. Therefore Zucker’s letter seemed only mildly contentious. In any event, we duly printed it—and my reply:

    Barbara Zucker, Judy Seigel, and Sylvia Sleigh, “Letters to the Editor: What Do Women Want?,” Women Artists Newsletter 1 (December 1975): 2.

    I would like to clarify some points which were not accurately presented in the last issue of Women Artists News [“Women Artists: What Have They Got and What Do They Want”]. I was quoted by Judy Seigel as saying “You get what you want in this world by surprise, by doing the unexpected.” Out of context, it sounds absurd. I amplified the remark to explain that (in political circumstances) guerrilla tactics, or constantly changing actions, are often those which produce results. I also said that I feel Feminism in Art has become a safe harbor, not only for the artists themselves, but for those who criticize it, or, even more reprehensibly, dismiss it. It has become an easy, predictable target. I do not believe our strengths will be reinforced by staying in this polarized oasis. Rather, I feel one’s individual tenacity and visibility in the male and female world is more relevant.

    I wish to also bring to light a fact Seigel excluded from her discussion of A.I.R., which is that, as a cofounder of the gallery, I know quite well it did not have the “remarkable and nearly instantaneous success” it allegedly enjoys without one solid year of slavish preparatory ground work and devotion on the part of all twenty women who first comprised its stable. In other words, A.I.R. didn’t “happen,” it was “made.” I do not know what kind of effort women must now make in order to push for continued change and recognition. I do know that in comfortably pursuing the familiar, we talk only to ourselves.

    —Barbara Zucker

    Editor’s Reply

    “You get what you want by surprise, etc.,” doesn’t sound absurd to me, in or out of context. The amplifications Zucker supplies are, I think, implicit. It’s not possible to repeat a two-hour panel verbatim.

    As for her second point, I never meant, and doubt if the reader would think I meant, that A.I.R.’s success was unearned. I meant rather to admire a notable achievement. Obviously a project of this order, whether a gallery or a publication (even, for that matter, dinner-on-the-table), requires endless work, much of which never meets the eye.

    So far as I know, by what I consider the relevant standards, A.I.R. has had an exemplary success. My question was whether Zucker’s expectations for such an endeavor might not be unrealistic. My guess is that a mixed, or men-only gallery of similar provenance, would not have fared so well.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Judy Seigel, “Afterword,” in Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 323–25.

    2 Howardena Pindell, Mary Beth Edelson, and Nancy Spero were members of the women’s co-op gallery, A.I.R. Barbara Zucker was a former member. This statement of Zucker’s was a shocker at the time. It wasn’t just that A.I.R. was getting much attention. [See above.] The love affair between the women artist’s community and A.I.R. was still going strong—much of the sympathetic art world, male and female, convened regularly at A.I.R. panels and openings. In retrospect, Zucker’s remarks suggest that what she had in mind was a larger effect than, so far as I know, has been obtainable in a co-op, whatever its membership.

    3 Lucy Lippard noted in a subsequent letter to Women Artists News that those were clean tampons.

    Source

    Written by Judy Seigel, “The Last Woman’s Panel?” was originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 6 (November 1975): 1–2, 5. Barbara Zucker’s letter and Seigel’s response were originally published in Women Artists Newsletter 1, no. 7 (December 1975): 2. Both texts were reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 18–20. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • End of Bohemianism

    Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?
    February 19, 1987
    College Art Association, 75th Annual Conference
    Marriott Hotel, Salon E, Boston, MA

    The title question of this panel is the sort that rarely gets asked unless the answer is meant to be yes—and the answer for this one did seem to be “Yes, but….” Yes or no, the panel articulated feelings about “success” that had ripened in the ’80s.

    Moderator: Hilton Kramer
    Panelists: William Bailey, Sylvia Mangold, Sidney Tillim, and Robert Pincus-Witten

    The most talked-about art writing of 1987 College Art Association week was Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile of Ingrid Sischy, editor of Artforum. Hilton Kramer, introducing “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?,” explained how Malcolm found Sischy not “profilable” and so profiled instead a “Cook’s tour of the seamy aspects of the world [Sischy] is obliged to move in.” We, apparently more accustomed than Kramer to the ways and means of artists, thought the scene sounded like just folks and began to wonder anew about Kramer’s sense of the fitness of things.

    From there he segued into a depiction of the runaway art world of the last five to ten years—the proliferation of art critics, the inflation of indifferent art, and the turning of art into a commodity for the moneyed middle class.

    Kramer traced the blame for the decade’s art sickness to his years at the New York Times. Something happened in the ’70s art world that was expressed by his editors: the burning question asked every week at editorial meetings was “What’s New?” But, as Kramer saw it, the impetus for this question, and what changed American journalism, was New York magazine. It was New York that advised readers each week where to buy the ten best hamburgers, see the ten best exhibitions, find the ten best artists, discover the ten newest movements.

    So Kramer’s editor at the Times wanted to know what was new that week in art. The high point of his career at the Times was the week he answered that “no new trend was discernible in the last seven days,” and the editor asked, “Is that a trend?”

    Kramer advised his audience to resist sentimentalizing the “old art world,” reminding us that those now-famous artists were impoverished at the time, had no public, only hostile and ignorant response (if any), no solo exhibitions until they were 40 or 50 years old, and sold at outrageously low prices. Was the American art world a finer place in the “good old days,” he asked, when Willem de Kooning didn’t have an exhibition until he was 42 and Milton Avery sold his paintings for $50?

    William Bailey had pondered the question “Has Success Spoiled the American Art World?” and was prepared to say “Yes, in the sense of a spoiled child.” Then, with carefully weighed words, he added that the problems of the art world emanate not from success but from a sense of failure. As the successful get more successful, the unsuccessful get, in comparison, even more unsuccessful. The gap between them widens, rending the art community. Bailey also disdainfully likened today’s success for artists to the success of rock stars and movie stars. (But why not? We have lived to see moments when even women artists were mobbed by fans at openings. We’d like more—more famous women artists, more mob scenes.)

    Bailey said that when he started out, “art” was what came from Europe; he himself had no expectations of “success.” He made the point that most painters today still live marginally and under increasingly difficult conditions, especially in New York. The community of artists has broken up; it is no longer possible even to share poverty. Bailey knows young and old artists who have never had the kind of success heaped today on the art world’s darlings but are instead involved in the daily conflicts of the studio and haunted by a sense of failure. The talk now in SoHo is only about money, while at the old shrines (museums) curators are preoccupied with enticing the fun people, as though to a disco. Bailey asked if all this “presages the decline of the West.” However, it was reassuring to have him tell us this is not just New York, but all over.

    Sylvia Mangold, the only woman on the panel (added, we understand, as token, at the insistence of Natalie Charkow, chair of the conference studio sessions), said success means money. She enjoys being able to live off her art. Though she lives apart from the New York world of careerism, she still faces her own problems in the studio.

    In preparation for the panel, Mangold had read Suzi Gablik’s Has Modernism Failed? and works by Willa Cather. From Cather she came away with the reassurance that success is never as interesting as the struggle (though there might be some argument on that from the strugglers), and that every artist needs to find some motivation other than money. Money brings problems, Mangold observed, expressing her certainty that most artists she knows care more about their work than about making money. But sensitive, gentle Sylvia, doubtless selected because of her friendship with the moderator and the knowledge that she wouldn’t make trouble, was no match for those macho image-makers on the platform—though one wished it were otherwise. A scrappy hard-hitting woman puncturing some of the blather would have been refreshing.

    If Sidney Tillim had some gift as a raconteur, his garrulous drawn-out tales might have been more appreciated. He, too, assured us, in case we didn’t know, that most artists don’t work just for the money, and that he, personally, doesn’t have enough of it. He, too, harked back to the art world of thirty years ago. Asking himself “Why am I here?” (at the panel), he concluded it was for his career. Tillim resumed writing some four years ago, after a lapse of fourteen years, because he wasn’t showing. “I just couldn’t get a dealer.” He was surprised when an article he wrote, “The View from Past 50,” got an enormous response, mostly from people under 30. Then, in an attempt to share his thoughts on the subject, he launched into a soliloquy, “The Art World Today Is Like Baseball,” an extraordinarily boring ramble on his life-long interest in baseball, which may of course have been less boring to a person with a life-long interest in baseball.1

    The passive among us grabbed forty winks, the decision-makers got up and left; the masochists toughed it out. Finally back to the subject at hand, Tillim proposed to document changes in the art world, as, for instance, the evolution of the Whitney Museum of American Art from humble beginnings on Eighth Street to MoMA’s backyard to Madison Avenue and its present postmodernist imbroglio. These changes, showing the movement of money and upward mobility, have occurred, he said, not just in art but throughout modern culture. Then, before relinquishing the mic, Tillim got in yet another personal anecdote. He had sought advice from Robert Pincus-Witten about how to approach the art magazines. His first submitted article was rejected (by an unspecified publication). He next decided to approach Betsy Baker, an old friend who happens to be editor of Art in America. His call was fielded by a young man who asked what he wanted to talk to her about, explaining that it was necessary to “prioritize topics.” Tillim’s topic evidently didn’t make it to the top ten because he didn’t get through. Next he approached Artforum, where he finally got published. Running into Baker at a later date, he described his failure to reach her. She told him, “Next time just say you’re returning my call.”

    Robert Pincus-Witten was introduced by Kramer as “the kid” but admitted to being not much younger than the others present. My neighbor whispered to me that she’d been in his class at art school and they were the same age: 52. Pincus-Witten, simultaneously arch, pleasant, and snide, smiled and demolished all previous nonsense. The basic situation has not changed, he said. All artists want as much as they can get and good-looking lovers, and always have. But this has no effect on art. For example, “Has success spoiled Hilton Kramer?” No, Pincus-Witten assured us. “Whatever he does is not affected by his being a successful man.” Reading from a column by Kramer, he quoted statements about the lack of talent among this year’s famous—David Salle, Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and company—can’t draw, can’t paint, etc. He added that success is very revelatory of character; in fact, you can’t tell what a person is until they get what they want.

    Kramer then shifted the discussion to museums and their keepers, describing the enormous pressure on curators and directors to be first with the new stars and to beat the Europeans to it. Mangold questioned who holds the power, and Pincus-Witten said power is in the hands of those who make the newest art—small groups acting in concert. This led to a diatribe against the gang of four: Fischl, Schnabel, Salle, and Mary Boone (speaker unidentified by now-sleepy reporter). Kramer tossed in the fact that MoMA is an ailing museum and no longer representative, quoting Harold Rosenberg’s phrase about “the herd of independent minds.” Everyone, Kramer explained, thinks they’re making “independent decisions,” but they turn out to be identical with all the others.

    Mangold said she found the volume of art being produced frightening, but another panelist reassured her that two kinds of business will surely prosper—storage and conservation.

    Assorted Quotes and Choice Lines from the Panel

    Pincus-Witten: Agnes Martin’s withdrawal can be seen as a strategy for self-promotion.

    Bailey: Critics don’t see very well; that’s part of today’s problem. There is the question of how well Picasso draws and how badly Salle draws. [Bailey added that he regretted having to speak ill of another artist but was driven to it.]

    Kramer: The problem with Salle isn’t that he doesn’t draw well, but that he draws.

    Pincus-Witten: Although we think of certain galleries as central emporia for significant artists, art actually moves into the world as a function of stylistics. Hype doesn’t sell art, stylistics does. Work enters the marketplace because it sells itself, and that’s what the consumer wants. Significant collections are made up of works bought by people who don’t have to have things “sold” to them.

    Kramer: The shift to Neo-Expressionism was the result of a strong sense by a new generation of what was missing in art; something more important than fashion and avarice, a sense that the vitality of art should be restored. Also, there are now so many artists, dealers, museums, curators, and collectors, that it’s tougher for an artist to get a serious review than to sell a picture.

    Unidentified: At least we are finally rid of the mythical bohemianism of the lonely painter living in isolation and neglect.

    Unanswered Questions from the Audience

    Are these phenomena of “success” aspects of some larger cultural decay? Does the success of young artists, like the success of young ballplayers, inspire other young artists? Who markets the artist?

    And Answered Questions

    Audience: Aren’t artists involved in object commodification, as opposed to writers or dancers?
    Kramer: There’s a whole new group of short-story writers similar to the Schnabels of our time.

    Audience: How does one achieve fame and fortune quickly?
    Answer: It’s easier if you start young.

    Audience: Would you prefer to be a successful Picasso or an unsuccessful van Gogh?
    Answer: One lived three times as long as the other.

    Audience [referring to the breakdown of the star system in Hollywood]: Can it happen in the art world?
    Kramer: We all liked it better when the movies had stars, but it’s not a true comparison.

    Gossip

    We heard that the panel originally included Robert Hughes and Alex Katz, with the expectation of a face-off between them. Hughes, it seems, had disparaged Katz in print, and Katz was furious. When Hughes cancelled his panel appearance for a trip to Australia promoting his latest book, Katz cancelled, too. The large sensation-hungry audience was disappointed.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    1 Apparently painter Clyfford Still also had a lifelong interest in baseball and also drew analogies between art and baseball, which he shared with his students in California, but their response is not on record.

    Source

    Written by Cynthia Navaretta, “End of Bohemianism” was originally published in Women Artists News 12, no. 2 (June 1987); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 266–68. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Alice Aycock, Storm Chaser

    Alice Aycock: On Her Work
    Tuesday, November 11, 2014
    Evening Lecture Series
    New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, New York

    Alice Aycock, Cyclone Twist, 2013, painted aluminum, 27 x 14½ x 13½ ft. Temporary installation on Park Avenue in New York (artwork © Alice Aycock)

    “Tornadic, whirling movement is something I’ve been involved in right now,” said Alice Aycock. “I’m not really into peaceful things.” This New York–based artist, who turns sixty-eight on November 20, said she trusts turbulence, not balanced or harmonious things, which is typical of her recent work, in particular Park Avenue Paper Chase, a series of seven sculptures on view in the median of an Upper East Side thoroughfare from March to July 2014. During her lecture at the New York Studio School, she talked about this work, her approach to art making, and more to a surprisingly half-full room of rapt listeners. (The audience was mostly middle aged and elderly—where were all the kids?) Aycock is positive, confident, and self-assured despite the precarious nature of the public-art commissions for which she regularly applies.

    Aycock began the talk by reciting a condensed version of “The Aleph,” a short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, but with her own twists: “I’ve changed it to say the things I want to say.” For her, the story exemplifies how Borges compares himself to Dante, his touchstone artist, as both an admirer and a competitor. Borges wanted to be as good as—or better than—the medieval Italian poet. The story also emphasizes the “tear,” which Aycock described as a breakthrough (in literature, visual art, or whatever) that pushes the discourse forward and creates a new thought. Creating such tears has been her goal throughout her career. She didn’t indicate that she has succeeded in making a tear—Aycock is a terrific but not highly influential artist—but her relentless pursuit of the tear is commendable.1

    Alice Aycock at the podium (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Aycock aims to make an image in her work, not specific but generic. A seed image, she called it. Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog (1994–2000), she gave as an example, offers a precise image: the shape of a dog created from twisted, inflated latex. Further, she pursues a state of becoming and transforming in her work, and not settling down. A recent outdoor work for the University of Cincinnati Medical Science Building in Ohio, Super Twister (2013), is meant to evoke tornados and whirlpools, and another, Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks (2005–7) in Nashville, Tennessee, took its inspiration from the bridges and trusses on the Cumberland Riverfront.

    The artist described her process: working mostly through competitions, she researches images of phenomena online; develops a design for a sculpture on the computer, with an assistant; finalizes the image; makes a pitch (to a municipality, business, or school); and, if accepted, builds the work. At certain points she employs a structural engineer to ensure her idea can be realized. “I would rather dream up these things and not construction manage,” Aycock lamented, but she does so anyway. She also explained that she plays with and ruminates on a work’s design digitally—there are no maquettes or working drawings. Once she finalizes a piece on the screen—it’s done.

    Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, ca .1517–18, pen and black ink with wash, 16.2 x 20.3 cm. Royal Collection Trust (artwork in the public domain)

    Returning to a discussion on her influences, Aycock said that “Leonardo was my Dante, in a certain way,” pointing to his series of deluge drawings in particular. She admires the Renaissance artist’s curiosity: “There’s nothing that’s taboo [for him]. There’s nothing he won’t think about.” Another touchstone work is Vladimir Tatlin’s architectural designs for the unbuilt Monument to the Third International (1919–20). “I love every time I see it remade,” she said. Later in the talk she described recent visits to eighteenth-century astronomical observatories: the Jantar Mantar in Delhi (1724) and in Jaipur (1727–34). These scientific structures, Aycock explained, allowed an stargazers to find a certain celestial bodies during particular times of year, but the Rajput king who commissioned their construction had actually wanted to know his fortune. Here, she continued, we have an interface between rational/science and desire/magic, which is also among her artistic pursuits.

    The artist described important themes in her work, such as her longstanding interest in wind. Her first show, at 112 Greene Street in SoHo, featured Sand/Fans (1971). The piece recently sold at an art fair in Dubai, she noted, forty years after its initial appearance. Fashion is another influence, especially ruffles, lace, high collars, and petticoats. Rollercoasters are a third interest: she grew up near Hershey Park in Pennsylvania, which has the Super Duper Looper. The visual qualities of war strategy intrigues Aycock, as well as the idea that you plan so extensively only to see the fight erupt into chaos. These various qualities—including tornadoes, turbines, and a “small origami dress”—came together in Park Avenue Paper Chase, for which she created a visual narrative that progressed from East 52nd to 66th Street. “The wind creates forms,” she said of the painted aluminum and fiberglass works, “and also scatters them.”

    The seven works—commissioned by the Sculpture Committee of the Fund for Park Avenue and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, and funded by Galerie Thomas Schulte in Berlin and an unidentified German investor—are still for sale: “If you want one for your garden, I’d be happy to drop them off—tomorrow, in fact.” Later in the talk she hinted that the series didn’t turn a profit. Aycock said she loves to win competitions, to sell work, and get out of debt, but she makes art because she has to, to come to grips with what she doesn’t understand. She joked that Frank Stella always wins the commission when both artists compete for the same prize. Stella won’t talk to her, she joked, not even when riding together in an elevator. “If he could just say ‘Hey Alice, I won!’”

    Alice Aycock, Maelstrom, 2014, painted aluminum, 12 x 15½ x 67 ft. Temporary installation on Park Avenue in New York (artwork © Alice Aycock)

    Despite having recently erected outdoor sculpture all over the country, Aycock said, “If you do them on Park Avenue, you’re suddenly back in the game.” Her presence in Manhattan is understated, to say the least, even after Alice Aycock Drawing: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating, a two-museum retrospective that took place last year at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Parrish Art Museum on Long Island, which admittedly are not the highest-profile venues in the area.2 “I love New York,” she said, “but it’s a really hard town.” People will pay attention to you “maybe for five minutes, maybe for ten.”

    It’s certainly not easy when you’re making public art, an area in which even prominent artists such as Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, and Vito Acconci spent years struggling. She admitted that her work is placed in banal locations, such as schools, community center, and airports. Aycock recently faced a legal battle with the custodians of John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 1, which wanted to dismantle her work Star Sifter (1998). Despite getting press about the fight in spring 2012, the artist said, when the decision was to relocate and reconfigure the work, no article was written.3

    During the Q&A, an audience member asked about the difference between drawing on computer and by hand. “On some level I cannot draw,” Aycock conceded, recalling her “knee-jerk rejection of perspective” when she was younger. Besides, she said, her teachers had been Fluxus artists, so you know technique was thrown out the window. At New York University, however, she took a class in which students were instructed to draw in the style of particular artists. “I was okay at it,” she said but eventually fell in love with compositional systems.

    Aycock taught herself drawing in isometric projection, an architectural style that emphasizes scale, measurements, rules, and templates. Knowing precise measurements for her sculpture has helped her tremendously when ordering materials at the lumber store. In the mid-1990s, Aycock noticed that draftsmen began moving to computers, where a designer can enlarge or shrink an object, or rotate it, with tremendous ease. Adopting digital tools years ago, she can alter an image easily to “get exactly what I want.” Aycock never shows her shop drawings in exhibition, but instead makes hand-colored drawings for display, such as those in the Parrish Art Museum show, which covered 1984 to the present.[4] “I want the control back,” she said.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    1 Aycock is a longtime professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York, as well as at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, so her influence may be more pedagogical than aesthetic.

    2 The exhibition traveled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where it was on view from January to April 2014.

    3 See James Barron, “Arbitrator to Hear Artist’s Plea over Airport Sculpture,” New York Times, May 7, 2012; and James Barron, “At Kennedy Airport, an Artist Fights to Save Her Sculpture,” New York Times, April 23, 2012.

    4 The Grey Art Gallery showed her work from 1971 to 1984.

    Read

    Dennis Hollingsworth, “Alice Aycock Lecture at the NY Studio School,” Dennis Hollingsworth, November 12, 2014.

  • Night of the Shamans

    This text is the second of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the first report.

    Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
    Friday, April 29, 1983
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    The event evoked another, allegorical commentary.

    Moderator: Craig Owens

    Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe

    Once upon a time in a constantly collapsing and re-rising city, the inhabitants made buildings with large spaces where people sweated to make things for others to sell. But one day they painted the spaces white and displayed mysterious and precious objects there. At last, on a night in spring, 1983, many people gathered in such a space to hear messages from shamans who made the precious objects. They worried about a tool producing these objects quickly and easily, and wondered if the new objects would be precious in the old way. So they gathered to DEFINE THE DIFFERENCE. On the walls were canvases with scenes of the Far West painted by a person with a new kind of organ transplant—50mm lenses permanently in both eyes.

    The shamans sat down on chairs on one side of a long skinny table with glasses of water on it and were lit by spotlights. The rest of the people sat on the floor on the other side of the table in the dark. A scribe who wrote important words about shamanism sat with the shamans and said the people on the floor were probably there to enjoy dissension between shamans who used brushes and those who used the new tool, but he was there to make peace and had personally picked these shamans to address the issues.

    However, the first shaman, an acclaimed user of the brush, hadn’t brought his magic objects with him, saying that, anyway, holy objects made with a brush were now meaningless, and even worse, decorative, but unscrupulous folks attributed false values to them so people who had lots of money but inadequate wardrobes would buy them and feel like emperors.

    The other shamans showed their precious objects and told of their powers, but no one could define the difference, because they had forgotten or never knew the old way of making something unique yet universal. Mostly they talked shaman shop talk and complained that there was too much of an abundance of their product and that they were saturated, alienated, repressed, politically “other,” and lost in multiplicity, while yearning for singularity or maybe irregularity and had a headache that night.

    Because of these feelings, they used images they just found lying around. They ripped off some and copied some onto canvas in a larger size. The one who did that was so demoralized he said he didn’t trust his intuition any more, which may have been why he didn’t make the copies himself, but hired others to do so. Learning that this fellow had helped himself to images, like fruit in the Garden of Eden (denying existence of originality and authorship), one hopeful questioner from the other side of the table asked if these were political acts. This might be a very brave and principled shaman who denied, not only authorship, but also ownership and the putting of price tags on holy objects. But that one was very silent about the authorship of his bank account.

    It turned out that all the shamans had, in one way or another, been using the new tool or its products. One modest shaman in rumpled Ivy League jacket and tie (although the evening was hot), who told in a low voice of changing photos into paintings and putting old shamans into new paintings of old paintings, had evidently seen Woody Allen frightening Susan Sontag. Another shaman harked back to the Russian Revolution. She advised that the propaganda of the culture should be turned against it and warned that in times of political repression people lose sight of the pleasures of multiplicity. She herself seemed to have suffered this loss because, although she uses the camera-tool and the printing-press-tool, her magical objects are nevertheless, one of a kind. She also stressed the importance of increasing the number of spectators with her kind of reproductive organs. The last shaman made no bones about it. He said he used the camera instead of a brush or a chisel. He thought he was good at helping his subjects show their fantasy or reality. And then he showed his work, which reflected his life: outrageous rock stars, men with magical erections, famous androgynous women, flower studies, and male members of the races embracing. Even a few children, although he admitted to not liking them. It wasn’t Rembrandt’s Saskia as Susanah, but there was an echo of the same process. “For whom do you do your work?” someone asked. Robert Mapplethorpe replied, “For the people I love.” And put his dark glasses back on.

    Then everyone went out onto the sidewalk where a loud argument had earlier made it hard to hear the proceedings, much of which had been mumbled, as if the shamans found it very hard to communicate.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Gladys Osterman, “Night of the Shamans” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 222–23. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Repainting the Battle Lines

    This text is the first of two that reviews a panel on photography and painting, held in 1983. Read the second report.

    Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference
    Friday, April 29, 1983
    Artists Talk on Art, New York

    Richard Estes,
    Richard Estes, Diner, 1971, oil on canvas, 40⅛ x 50 in. (artwork © Richard Estes; photograph by Lee Stalsworth)

    As I recall the moment, Photo-Realist painting had become so well accepted it was passé; painting on photographs was still tacky, or anyway naughty, at least in New York—in the West or Southwest it was a regular style. But “discourse between painting and photography” was not yet so obvious and popular a topic as it soon became. (I was amazed, amazed, the other day to see Art and Photography, Aaron Scharf’s excellent book on the subject, in B. Dalton!)

    Having myself recently switched from painting to photography, and being then on the Program Committee of Artists Talk on Art, I thought a “Difference between Painting and Photography” panel would be timely, and began casting about for a brainy moderator. Someone suggested Craig Owens, who not only agreed cheerfully, but turned out to be a committee person’s dream, conjuring up an all-star cast on time, not just for the announcement, but for the event itself, without so much as a reminder.

    The panel Owens conjured up became one of those special SoHo events, measurably enhanced by the overflow gang on the sidewalk outside pounding on the plate-glass window. These were reportedly motorcyclist friends of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work, by the way, looked smashing in the evening’s format of slides projected onto a portable screen. I suppose it hardly needs to be added that nobody defined anything, let alone the difference, though since then I have heard others make a stab at it. (Ben Lifson presented a two-part theory at a photo conference in 1990. The part I remember was that the photograph has an absolutely even surface.) Another difference occurred to me that night: photographs probably mutate less in slides than do paintings.

    Carol Steinberg’s report, which came in “over the transom,” precisely and eloquently defined the ways discussants begged—or fogged—the issues.

    —Judy Seigel

    Moderator: Craig Owens

    Panelists: Joseph Kosuth, Jack Goldstein, Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Kruger, Mark Tansey, Robert Mapplethorpe

    Luca Del Baldo, Craig Owens, 200
    Luca Del Baldo, Craig Owens, 2012, acrylic, colored pencil, and watercolor, 30 x 40 cm (artwork © Luca Del Baldo)

    Craig Owens, senior editor of Art in America, sat with the six panel members and spread his hands, butterflylike, cigarette dangling from the long fingers. We, seated on the floor of the crowded gallery, were, mercifully, not permitted to smoke, having squeezed in while others less fortunate clamored at the entrance and pressed against the window to see—an Artists Talk On Art panel!

    True, it was, at $1, a cheap Friday night and an interesting topic: “Painting and Photography: Defining the Difference.” Owens’s hands seemed to point to two points of view even while he hoped those who had come for the latest installment of the historical battle would be disappointed. They were there, he said, to “define difference,” not define or create false oppositions.

    Joseph Kosuth, in his perennial black outfit (is he making an unconscious statement about being in mourning, does black flatter his figure, or is it some kind of ’60s minimalist, conceptualist, artist’s statement?), read a tract about how the institutions of gallery, critic, market, etc., create what we think “art” means. He showed no slides, not to be arrogant, he said, but because those familiar with his work didn’t need to see them and those not might fall into that tendency people have of thinking they understand something after they’ve seen slides. No one told the audience he is a conceptualist. I guess he wasn’t on the side of painting or photography. Next, Jack Goldstein showed us a slide of his painting of a [Margaret] Bourke-White photograph of a Kremlin air raid. He jocularly read an interview and some comments on the dilemmas of quotation and authorship. He also said he was “not interested in Painting.”

    jackgoldsteinuntitled
    Jack Goldstein, Untitled, 1981, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 132 in. (artwork © Estate of Jack Goldstein; photograph by Brian Wilcox)

    Sarah Charlesworth said she was “freaked out” that day about having to do the panel and that she would read to us from a letter she had written to a friend. She even began, “Dear Rudy,” but I was not convinced her friend really wanted to hear about the gap between the subjective/presence of oneself of painting and the objective/absence of self-presence of the other in photography, which I found difficult to hear and understand. She showed a slide of a photo of a photo of a photo which had been ripped up and some other manipulated photographs.

    Barbara Kruger spoke about the potential for creating feelings of richness or poverty in the spectator face-to-face with the artist’s image and the importance of understanding the politics of images, as well as her attempt to provide for a female art spectator. Her work consisted of photos with words collaged together, making political statements. I think one said, “You destroy what you perceive as different.”

    Mark Tansey showed his joke paintings. Each got a laugh from the audience, as with the National Geographic photoboat crew on the edge of a waterfall, entitled, Take One, or a woman lying in bed pointing a gun at a man pointing a camera at her, entitled Homage to Susan Sontag.

    marktansey
    Mark Tansey, On Photography (Homage to Susan Sontag), 1982, oil on canvas, 54 x 90 in. (artwork © Mark Tansey)

    Robert Mapplethorpe took off his dark glasses to tell us he really hadn’t prepared anything to say, just brought slides of his photographs, which he related more to sculpture than painting. The photos included Lisa Lyon (the bodybuilder) in the nude with graphite powder covering her body to emphasize its statuesqueness, portraits, a black guy who we were told could achieve erection at a moment’s notice, men embracing, children (whom he doesn’t particularly like, he said), flowers.

    The most wonderful commentary on the difference between painting and photography came unexpectedly from the audience, when Cynthia Mailman, whose works adorned the walls of the Soho20 Gallery, was moved to shout, “Don’t Touch My Painting!” as another member of the audience on her self/unconscious way out was about to put her hand through one of the paintings to support herself. As the audience laughed at the serendipity of the moment, Mailman became a bit defensive and added, “Mine are only one of a kind, you know.”

    robertmapplethorpe
    Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon, ca. early 1980s (artwork © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation)

    I couldn’t decide whether this was more fun than realizing that the woman across the room I’d been admiring all evening was probably Lisa Lyon, as she left in her sleeveless white mini-dress with her beautiful arm and leg muscles bulging out just a bit more than one is used to seeing on the average woman.

    Someone in the audience asked about the power of painters to paint what isn’t there. Mapplethorpe answered that, as a photographer, he feels his best work is that in which he sees what he hasn’t seen before.

    Another member of the audience began to explain his understanding that, in light of the panel, “aren’t painting and photography the same thing except for content?” Sarah Charlesworth assured him that form was content and Craig Owens cautioned not to go from one extreme to the other, that is, from saying they’re opposites to saying there’s no difference.

    Too late, I tremblingly raised my hand, shocked by this question, and burning with something to ask, if only I could figure out what it was, something, something about the process of painting—by its nature longer, with more potential for discovering relationships, meanings, ideas, feelings, images, subconscious meanderings, the way we perceive. Don’t most of us feel we must study a painting for longer than a photograph? How long do we study photographs, and for what purpose? Isn’t there some major difference between the act of painting and the act of photographing? And then, can we escape evaluating that difference, at least for ourselves?

    I don’t know. I don’t know. I almost didn’t dare to write this and I didn’t dare to ask so I had to write. These ideas need deep questions and deep answers. Where were the painters, process painters, painters who discover ideas through their painting, not start with a pre-fixed idea or image and paint it? Where were the paintings, real paintings, not slides of photos of paintings, of paintings of photos, photos of photos. Slides are photos. Form is content. The panel was weighted, the sides were uneven, and the difference was never defined.

    In Terms Of count: unknown.

    Source

    Written by Carol Steinberg, “Repainting the Battle Lines” was originally published in Women Artists News 8, no. 5–6 (Summer 1983); and reprinted in Judy Seigel, ed., Mutiny and the Mainstream: Talk That Changed Art, 1975–1990 (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1992), 221–22. In Terms Of thanks Midmarch Arts Press for permission to republish this review.

  • Real Estate: Living and Working

    On the Needs of Visual Artists: A Roundtable
    Monday, March 19, 2001
    Artists Space, 38 Greene Street, Third Floor, New York, NY

    On March 19, 2001, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and the Judith Rothschild Foundation cosponsored a roundtable discussion on the needs of visual artists. Irving Sandler and Robert Storr, members of the Artists Advisory Committee of the Sharpe Art Foundation, facilitated the discussion, which was hosted by Artists Space in New York. The event was also a follow-up to a discussion held on the same topic in 1988. Below is a short section on gentrification and real estate from the 2001 roundtable.

    Real Estate: Living and Working

    Artists get gentrified out of the neighborhoods they’ve rescued. Can real-estate professionals and activists be hired or made available to advise artists? Can mortgages or loans be made available to make ownership possible? Is the dispersal that gentrification creates necessarily bad, or can it be renewing?

    Fred Wilson: Certainly housing is an important thing. I think one of the most stabilizing things for me was buying my loft. Having something of your own does mean a bit more longevity and more time for your work.

    Alison Saar: Many artists still have convertible kitchens that they’re working out of. But, I think, especially for a sculptor it becomes more of an issue: you want your studio space to be accessible, but it usually can’t be in your neighborhood or in your home because other people just go berserk.

    Bruce Pearson: About twenty years ago I moved to Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Over a period of about ten years, more and more and more artists started moving into this neighborhood. And after I had been there for seventeen and a half years, having a nice affordable loft, the building got sold. I lost my loft. I couldn’t find a space in my neighborhood; it’s become a very popular neighborhood and the rents have just skyrocketed and a lot of artists that have been over there for many years are getting kicked out and they have no place to go. I had thought that you could always find an affordable new artists’ neighborhood, that there was always a community of younger artists starting up new neighborhoods. But during that time I found that there wasn’t; it was getting really scattered all over the place: Red Hook, Harlem, Queens. I was stuck into exile up in Greenpoint. There are a lot of buildings that are being threatened right now and it seems that the loft laws just aren’t strong enough. It will be really interesting to see if artists that have developed communities throughout the years could find some way to secure their situation when they do develop something.

    Nancy Bowen: I had a loft in TriBeCa for many years, moved my studio to Williamsburg, which seemed like the middle of nowhere about eleven years ago, and I’m just now facing having to move out of that studio because it’s being developed for luxury living lofts.

    At this point in my life I don’t want to move somewhere for a year or two years. So with a group of people I’m trying to get a long-term lease on a building or possibly buying one. But how do you go about doing all this? It’s all stuff I don’t know anything about—things like zoning issues and mortgages and legal issues. Clearly there are already people who know how to do all this. It would be great to have a clearinghouse of real-estate information for artists’ needs. It could be made available in one place that artists could come to and save a lot of time that doesn’t need to be spent in the real-estate business. This could be information added to the Hotline.

    Also, it could be very helpful to somehow set up a way to help artists get mortgages, since we often don’t look financially good on paper.

    Alexander Ross: What if an individual who was an organizer was paid for a period of time, a year, say, to go into a specific neighborhood, say Williamsburg, and figure out on a grassroots level the actual needs of the artists, and do the work of creating a new loft law there, or developing resources? Someone who was paid to devote time, because we need all the time we have to work on our work.

    Janet Fish: If a group of artists found an empty building and wanted to convert it to work space—which doesn’t require all the kinds of things that you need for residential—they would probably not be able to get a loan from a bank. For a long time I had hoped that some foundation might turn up that would be willing to help in this way: if a group of artists made a presentation they could get a loan and then slowly pay it back, and that money could go to another group, and it could just sort of work around the country. It wouldn’t have to just be New York.

    Alexander Ross: There should be some way that artists could stay permanently in the places that they carve out. The dispersal of culture in New York is a huge problem: if it gets spread too thin and people get pushed out too far, the energy and the vitality of the art scene is diminished. There should be some way that individual artists could get on the road to having a mortgage for their studio, and to actually own and be able to stay put in the location instead of being blown by the wind to one neighborhood and the next.

    Bruce Pearson: Every generation of artists needs space to work. And they generally go to areas where they can find cheap large spaces or warehouse spaces. For a while it was SoHo, Chelsea, Tribeca, and then Williamsburg and now Greenpoint. And it seems like it is spreading like crazy now. I think that artist communities are just developing in a natural manner.

    Irving Sandler: So we’re in a situation of dispersion and we’ve got to begin thinking of how, with this dispersion, we create communities again.

    Bruce Pearson: Well, it’s really interesting because, right now, I don’t know where the community is. It seemed like it used to be that each generation was kind of localized. And now the real-estate market seems to have forced young artists all over, everywhere from Newark to Red Hook.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Source

    “Real Estate: Living and Working” was originally published in Amy Newman, ed., On the Needs of Visual Artists: A Roundtable 2001 (Colorado Springs: Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, 2002), 14–17. In Terms Of thanks the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation for permission to republish this text.

    Read

    Elizabeth Flock, “Artists Want to Stay Put by Buying a Building Together. This Is Their Blueprint,” Bedford and Bowery, February 24, 2014.

    Alexandra Glorioso, “Bushwick Artists: Maybe We Should All Just Buy a Building Together?,” Bedford and Bowery, June 20, 2013.

    Vera Haller, “In Bushwick, Artists Try to Rewrite Gentrification’s Usual Story,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013.

    Arit John, “Gentrifying Artists Whine about Gentrification,” Wire, August 2, 2013.

    Whitney Kimball, “Ten Takeaways on Rent Reform: ‘Talk to Your Neighbors,’” Art F City, April 1, 2014.

    John Powers, “New Ideas Need Tall Buildings: Gentrification vs Integration – Flying Wedges vs Rooted Anchors,” Star Wars Modern, November 13, 2013.

    William Powhida, “Redefining the Role of the Artist,” Art F City, April 4, 2014.

    William Powhida, “There’s Always a Problem, Sometimes There’s a Solution: Internal Thoughts from a Collective,” Big Red and Shiny, October 15, 2013.