- Good evening everyone, welcome,
thank you for coming.
It's really great to see a bunch of
friends of the department in the audience,
some students from MFA art practice,
some faculty from MFA art practice
and other programs, including Tim Rollins,
Steven Madoff, the chair of the
curatorial practice program,
so welcome everyone.
It's my pleasure tonight to introduce
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve,
she's an art writer and interviewer
active in the field of
contemporary art and culture.
Her writing has appeared in Art Forum,
Art in America, Camera Work, Parkett,
The Village Voice, and
numerous other publications,
museum catalogs, and book anthologies.
She's the author of
How Like A Leaf: An
Interview With Donna Haraway,
which was published by Routledge in 1999,
and she's published interviews and essays
on a who's who of contemporary artists
including Vito Acconci, Matthew Barney,
Ellen Gallagher, Ann Hamilton,
Andrea Fraser, Tom
Friedman, Matthew Ritchie,
Yvonne Rainer, The Quay Brothers,
and Carol H Neiman, and many others.
She is the program coordinator for
Micah Summer Intensive here in New York,
and she's also taught at NYU, RISD,
San Francisco Art Institute,
Whitney Independent Study
Program, and a few other places.
From 1995 to 96 she was
a research associate
on the American Sentry Project at the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
She has a PhD from the HisCon,
the History of Consciousness
program at UC Santa Cruz,
an MA in cinema studies from NYU,
and a BA from Sarah Lawrence.
She's been teaching here at SVA since 1999
in various programs
including MFA art criticism,
and writing, MFA art practice,
and MFA computer art,
and also in the BFA
program in art history,
and she joined our faculty last year
and we're very glad to have her,
so please join me in welcoming
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve.
(audience clapping)
- Thank you, Mark.
Welcome everybody, thank you for coming.
Tonight I'm gonna do a combination,
introduce you to who I am and then
a little bit about, basically,
why I call myself and art
writer and not an art critic.
My prologue was just to keep you occupied
while you were sitting here and
I don't know if you read this,
but I'm not gonna comment on it,
it's just one of the great
pieces of art writing
that I've wanted to share.
So, my first statement is
let me say at the outset.
I am not an art critic.
And this is not a polemic arguing
that there is something called art writing
that's separate from art
criticism and art history.
Obviously it's all art writing.
I don't want this to become something
where people think I'm, you know,
carving out something
special called art writing.
It's really just me talking
about, or describing,
what it is that I do, and
it's as simple as that.
That's why I changed the talk from
The Task of The Art Writer to
The Task of This Art
Writer, me, thank you.
So, I repeat, and I only say this
because I, a lot of times
I'm called different things.
Sometimes I'm called an art historian,
I've never studied art history.
I'm not really a theorist,
although I use theory.
I sort of left academia a long time ago,
but this doesn't mean, as I say,
at times, what I write
isn't art history or theory,
or even part of an academic conversation.
So, thumbnail sketch.
This is just one way of
describing what I do.
I write with and from
the artist and the work,
I seek to crawl into it.
I am not out to tell
you if it's good or bad
but more to listen to it
and share the layers and
associations that I find in it.
In this sense as a writer,
I am a reader as much as
a viewer and a looker.
So, for instance, I published
an article last year
in The Brooklyn Rail on
Matthew Barney's drawings,
and I actually called it a
possible reading of his drawings.
So, let me tell you why I don't
call myself an art critic.
My dear friend Jerry
Saltz whose Facebook page,
how many people are on
Jerry Saltz's Facebook page?
Usually, you know, he keeps bragging about
how he's broken the
record for various times.
So, I had this interesting
and somewhat embarrassing,
I guess it's an altercation,
or whatever you call it,
on Facebook, where I was looking--
I really love Jerry Saltz and
we're good friends, and we like to joke,
and he had been writing all
this stuff about Jeff Koons,
and I wasn't really clued into the fact
that it was because there was
the Whitney show coming up.
So I wrote this comment saying, oh Jerry,
you know, I love all your
little medieval little,
he puts these wonderful
little medieval images on,
and I said, but oh, god,
enough with Jeff Koons.
So, Jerry then whammed me,
and I don't think you can
see what it says here.
Basically what he says is, he quotes me,
and he says Thyrza Goodeve, you say this,
this tells me you know nothing
about what an art critic does.
Wham.
And so, then there were 10 likes, too,
that made it even more painful.
(audience laughing)
So then I read Jerry's piece on Koons,
and I really realized, I thought,
yeah, it's true, he's a
critic, you know, I'm not.
If I had to write about the
Koons show I certainly would,
but I don't think it would be
my best writing necessarily,
and I loved the way, you know, he did it.
For instance, he was able
to do both the criticism
and, you know, taking into consideration
all the crabbiness of all
the artists on Facebook
who were going, yeah,
Jeff Koons, Jeff Koons,
and him, at the end, saying,
"We live in a starker, harder art world
"than we did before Koons.
"As perfectly executed
as 'A Retrospective' is,
"it is also a cumulative,
a last hurrah of this era--
"even as the era keeps going.
"It's the perfect final show
for the Whitney's building.
"Artists in Koons's category no longer
"even belong to the art world.
"In fact, 'A Retrospective'
confirms that the art world
"doesn't belong to the art world anymore."
And I just thought that was, you know,
a wonderful, you know, it
comes at the very end of it.
So, who am I?
I am a product of (laughs)
a theoretical time.
Basically the 80's when theory was, what--
You know, it was really sort of the,
I don't know, it wasn't a high point,
but it was the moment when
that's really what you did
and that's what you studied
when you were in graduate school.
In fact, the graduate program I went to
called The History of
Consciousness program,
and please don't think that means
that I know the history of consciousness,
it's just the name for a theoretical
and interdisciplinary
program that was started
in the 60's actually, and
then kept the name to it.
So, as I say, my time is
a very theoretical time,
and in fact, the 80's
I've started to realize
has become a rather forceful moment of key
originary text and authors
since so much today is still
relevant and read by students.
Now I'd love to have a talk about theory
(laughs) and what that is at some point,
but I won't do that here.
I just want to plug theory and say
it is a lovely space, it
is a generative space,
and, as this quote,
if you've had a chance to look through it,
is just a basic Wikipedia
beginning of what theory is.
The only thing I would
change at the very bottom
is where it says the idea
that a theory is thoughtful
and rational explanation of
the general theory of things.
Irrational theories are good too.
So, my statement about
theory is, it's not a drag,
it's not irrelevant, it
can be fun and creative,
most of the time bad theory is just
the product of bad
writing or bad teaching.
So that's part of one of the sort of
polemics behind my talk,
but I'm very much not a
fan of theory as bludgeon,
you know, theory as illustration,
right, or power play.
In fact, I'm not a fan of theory
which alienates or separates.
For me, theory is full
of play, simply put,
I like stuff that makes
sense of the world I live in,
because theory and practice
are not oppositional.
We have said this many times,
but it's like we can't
seem to remember this,
it keeps coming up, so we
need better language here.
So I teach in the art practice program
and I have a wonderful
colleague named Stefan,
Stefan, whoops, kitties.
Well that's to show you
that theory's about play.
I like cats, of course.
Stefan, while he was teaching
his seminars this summer
to art practice students,
he started to get very frustrated by
people complaining yet again,
oh, we have to read so much, oh my god,
you know, how can we make
our art and blah blah blah,
and it's obviously a real dilemma, right?
But, he, I love it,
he decided to create
our logo for the program
which is called minking,
or mink differently,
or something, or mink different,
I guess would be the way to do it.
So, in tongue in cheek, I want to invoke
that what I do as a writer as well
is also a form of minking.
Alright.
Now, in terms of writing,
I just found this wonderful quote, that,
again, you can, I won't
read the whole thing,
but I want you to be
able to read it because
it sums up a lot of the reasons why
I've come to call myself a writer
aside from the fact that I write.
It's actually from a film historian,
which is interesting because
I have a Masters in cinema studies,
but, so you wouldn't really think
that this would be where you
would hear about writing.
But the quote comes from a book,
actually, that was written
about the Brothers Quay,
and in it he says,
"The writer is not tied
"to the physical concreteness
of a given setting;
"therefore, he is free to
connect one object with another
"even though in actuality the two
"may not be neighbors
either in time and space.
"And since he uses as material
not the actual precept
"but its conceptual name,
"he, or she, can compose
his images of elements
"that are taken from
disparate sensory sources.
"He does not have to worry
whether the combinations
"he creates are possible
or even imaginable
"in the physical world.
"We understand now why the writer can fuse
"the rustling of the wind,
the sailing of clouds,
"the odor of rotting leaves, and the touch
"of raindrops on the skin
into a genuine unity."
So writing is obviously a form of making.
It is ever producing.
One can write about anything,
especially in contemporary art,
that's why I got really excited about
writing about contemporary art
because it's a way to write
about anything and everything.
Writing does not end, writing is always
a place of beginning and continuing,
and writing is always,
but for me very much,
the writing is always about the word,
the specific word, it is
not just about message.
It is not about content, I mean it is,
but not necessarily, it's
not just information,
but it's all about the way
that message is articulated.
In other words, to state the
obvious, it's about writing.
Writing is an activity of making
as a kind of sinuous snake that takes you
where you never thought you would go
because you couldn't get
there until you were writing.
It is why I think artists
should write in graduate school.
I think that we, in our practice,
we make the students write
a lot during the year,
read and write and post,
and I think it's really
become quite fruitful
for people to start being able
to articulate their ideas,
and in honor of that I was really happy
to get this response last week
from one of the people in
the art practice program
where, basically what he says is that
all of this reading and
the stream of associations
is too much for me to apprehend.
I find myself wishing more and more
that I had taken more
time earlier in my life
to learn, to practice and
learn the art of writing.
The irony is this is one of those people
who really can write, but that's usually,
those are always the people who then think
that they can't because they
know how complicated it is.
Maybe it's not the words
per se that that fail me,
maybe it is more accurately
my inability to assemble
them so as to conjure,
and this is what I liked,
the sense of electric
urgency that forces them out.
The idea that that's why,
you know that's why I write,
that electrical urgency and
trying to articulate it,
not always to say that
you can articulate it,
but that's where writing, for
me and for others I think,
is very productive for artists, as well,
and not just for people who are writing.
So, but how did I get here?
Little autobiographical interlude.
I was always writing,
but I was never thinking I was a writer.
I was the one, as a kid,
who would tell ghost stories
to others over campfires,
I'd get my play put on that I
wrote in eighth grade class,
or published in school literary journals,
but in general I was a
kid without an identity.
I never really thought of what I would be,
nobody really asked.
The mother of one friend
thought I was funny
and would be an actress,
I always wore outrageous
clothes, surprise surprise,
I was very theatrical, my dad
thought I might be an artist,
my mom figured I'd marry
someone with money, poor soul.
Ambition was something
I knew nothing about.
I was a drifter adapting to my meilleur,
which was comfortable but by no means
an intellectual, artistic environment.
If anything, it was sporty.
To be honest, my one god
given talent was skiing,
and my dream was to be a ski bum
and ski the Tasman Glacier.
I don't think I could stand
on skis now for very long,
but that's the truth.
So, everything changed when I was 17
and was fortunate enough to go
on a term abroad in high school
to the American School of Tangier.
At 17, you are at that critical moment
when, for the first time,
you have to make a decision
about who you are going to be,
or what college you're going to,
it's that, you know, that nervous year
that some of you still remember,
or parents who are taking
your children through it,
it's sort of like where I go to college
is gonna mean every--
It's gonna be the whole, my whole life,
and if I don't get into this and that,
and so on and so forth,
it's not necessarily true.
But I was clueless during
the fall of my senior year.
I was an okay student but there was no
particular college I was striving for,
I was basically just doing rock climbing
and, you know, hanging out with my friends
and doing crew, and opening up all their
letters of acceptance to all
of the Ivy League schools.
So by my senior year I came back
when I returned from Morocco,
and I was a totally different person.
It's where I became who I am today.
I was surrounded by adults,
mostly ex-patriot writers, by all my luck,
to be introduced to Paul Bowles.
I would go to his apartment every night,
and I met this character
named Mohammed Mrabet,
who of course fell in love with me
because I was a sweet,
chubby, virginal blondie girl
who was clueless, absolutely clueless,
because he's really quite handsome, right,
and I was always like oh, no no.
Mrabet told endless parables and
he translated them into books.
He took me around Tangier and I would sit
watching him play Parcheesi
in beach cafes smoking keef.
In the evenings I would go
back to Paul's apartment
and Mrabet would tell me a
story translated by Bowles.
He and Paul wrote to me for
several years after I left,
it was really quite sweet, I mean,
it was really because I was so naive
and had no idea who he was,
that we had a lovely correspondence,
and then the more I found out who he was,
the more I read about him,
the more awkward my letters became,
more, kind of, pretentious and, you know--
- [Man] Thyrza, there are probably people
who have never heard of Paul Bowles.
- Oh, sorry.
Paul Bowles is one of the great
writers of the 20th century,
(laughs) and composers, he,
there's a terrible film
called The Sheltering Sky
that was based on his brilliant
book called The Sheltering Sky,
and he hung out with
Gertrude Stein in Paris.
Gertrude Stein told him to
come to Morocco in the 20's,
and he stayed there ever since,
so he died there in the 2000's.
And he, he was a man who
many people went and saw,
and many people have corresponded with.
It was part of his quality.
As a person, he was very
diffident, very unemotional,
you know, warm, but (mumbles), sort of,
nothing was gonna kind
of rattle him very much,
but he had this amazing
capacity to connect with people,
and especially young writers.
And he's one of the few
people I mention who,
along with Christopher
Hitchens and Truman Capote,
is able to write, was able
to write a first draft
and not edit it, he just
typed out his stories
and that was it.
But as I said, too, he
was also a composer,
so thank you for letting me clarify that.
So, it was the social context of
being around writers and storytellers
because writers were making from
the world that we were living in.
Before that I was kind of living life,
and all of a sudden I went, oh,
life can be something you can make from.
So I began to keep a compulsive journal,
I began to write in a different
way for a different reason,
and I also began to
read, and read, and read,
and begin to mink.
So, how do I become an art writer
without studying art history or
even knowing about, much about art?
Resume building, this is the stuff
that you heard from the opening
so I won't go through it,
but this is sort of my pedigree,
and what happened was
in 1989 Donna Haraway,
because this was the, as I said,
this was the era of theory
was very hot in the art world
and many people thought
art form was, you know,
had just gone to the dogs because
they were having people who
were theoretical, right,
like Paul Virilio and so on and so forth.
So they asked her to contribute
to this wonderful issue
that was called Wonder, and Donna said
I really don't have anything,
but I have this graduate student.
It was just an incredibly
gracious, wonderful moment.
So, I wrote my first essay for Art Forum.
So this is how complex it was,
where they were playing with all sorts
of graphic design at this point,
but you can sort of see where the
different people that are in it
and I'm at the very very bottom
with this insanely long title
that goes on, and on, and on,
and they also did me a great disservice.
I put this up here because
I've never been able to
xerox this and pass it out
even though it was the first
piece of writing that I did,
because it was, you know, so, anyway,
someday it will be published
and it will be different.
So it's very significant
for a lot of reasons
that this is what I published.
I really wasn't a writer yet, and so,
even though I'd always
been told I wrote well,
in graduate school I wrote well,
but I wasn't really a writer yet,
so it was a great experience
to work with the editors there.
I sort of came in with these
fragments and these things
and they sort of, we stitched it together,
and I started to understand
what writing entailed,
and I have learned so much
from working with editors,
and continue, and now,
myself, have become one,
and find it a wonderful skill.
So if ever you're asked
to rewrite something,
don't take it personally, you're not
Paul Bowles or Christopher Hitchens.
So everything I have learned, actually,
about writing comes
from writing for others
as opposed to writing for myself,
in other words, not
caring what others thought
except in terms of the
ideas, as in graduate school.
I mean, the worst writing I
ever did was in graduate school.
Just embarrassing stuff, right.
And for some reason, in graduate school,
they don't teach writing, or
work with writing very much,
even in English programs, it's
a very interesting conundrum.
So I learned how what I
thought, I said, and I put down
were not always the same thing.
The process of elucidation and perfection
was exhilarating to me, but here's where,
ironically, writing this
article made my destiny.
Because I was published in Art Forum,
suddenly I was asked to write on art.
In other words, it is why,
when I became an art writer,
but my essay had nothing to do with art.
It was an essay on postmodernism,
lobotomy, and multiple
personality disorder.
It's so 80's, right?
So, but luckily I did,
I continued to publish
and was asked to write more and more.
I wrote about Rosemarie
Trockel's animal videos,
I wrote an essay on wounds in Art Forum,
you know, by 1994 I had left Santa Cruz,
moved back, in 1994 I
finished my dissertation
and I moved back to New York, and I was,
damn it, I was an art writer by then,
and that's when I--
I was gonna show you a
picture of my dissertation
but I forgot.
- [Woman] Is that it?
- Yes, that's it, that's what I wrote.
So, 1995, another moment
when things changed.
I was asked by Jack Bankowski of Art Forum
to interview Matthew Barney,
who I had absolutely no
idea who he was at the time.
He was very young then,
he was just starting out,
and some of my best work is usually
with something I'm not familiar with
because it's that process
of discovery that I love.
And I continued to write
about Matthew Barney
for a long time, I've
written about eight or nine
different things on his work.
He challenges me as an art writer because,
I was actually asked, I
was actually supposed to do
the main essay in the
Guggenheim retrospective
that Barney had, but a
couple of things happened,
one 9/11 happened and my brain was mush,
and two I couldn't figure
out how to write an essay,
his Cremaster series if you don't know it,
is, (mumbles) you know, it's
this epic piece of artwork
that goes from 1994 to 2002,
it involves videos, it
involves sculptures,
it involves books, it's
extraordinarily complex
in terms of the imagery
and on, and on, and on,
and I, and it's about the
idea of art as potential.
It's about the evolution of something
to the moment just before it is formed,
so he uses in that the
metaphor of biology.
The Cremaster muscle is what
you guys have and I don't,
it's what controls the rising
and lowering of the testicles.
And to write an essay about that,
which was Matthew Barney's
Cremaster cycle is about,
really was something I felt I couldn't do,
and so I tried writing dialogues,
I tried all these things and they were,
you know, not at all
appropriate for the catalog,
so I got kicked out.
But it's really fun, I'm
still seen as an author
on a lot of the Amazon
sites, so that's kind of fun.
So I wrote about Matthew for Parkett,
and this was another moment
when things changed for me.
Louise Neri, who now is, I don't know,
director, deputy director at the
Gagosian whatever we call it,
was the best editor I've ever had
because she was very creative.
She would come to me and say,
you know I'd be babbling about the
research I was doing at
the Whitney on Vaudeville,
I became obsessed with
Vaudeville for some reason,
and she was like I want you to write about
Cady Noland and Vaudeville.
Now, oh, this is my
Matthew Barney first piece.
This is Cady Noland.
Now, who in god's name would ever put
Cady Noland and Vaudeville together?
But it became really fascinating.
So, she then continued to
ask me to write (mumbles)
about Raymond Pettibon,
Jeff Koons, Sarah Morris,
all sorts of different things,
and I really loved that
period of writing for Parkett.
It was a very creative time.
So I branched off from Parkett and wrote,
probably one of the crazier things I wrote
was in this insane magazine called Trans,
which, this issue came with all sorts
of bells and whistles and balloons
and different sort of toys with it,
it was quite crazy.
And I wrote an essay, which,
I don't know if you can really see,
but it's called Archives and Gyms
and Muscles and Archives,
oh it's in Spanish,
so, of course.
It's basically about sports in the work
of both Matthew Barney and Vito Acconci,
and I had great fun because it's an essay
that's quite visual, that writing you see
is Vito Acconci kept his own,
wrote his own sports magazine
when he was around eight,
and this is from his sports magazine,
and I have pictures in there
of these baseball players
that he wrote, I mean,
it's just to die for,
it's just wonderful stuff,
so I was able to do that.
Into the 20th century
I've started to, you know,
write, continue to write
on artists and subjects
and if you wanna know more or care to,
you can look at my stuff at academia.edu,
I'm in the process of
putting my stuff together
to put it into a volume
of writing at some point,
but until then.
So, then something started to happen.
The more I wrote as an art
writer, the more I wondered,
if I'm an art writer, what does that mean?
What is my task?
Why do I not call myself an art critic?
Remember me and Jerry,
remember the Arnheim quote about writing.
The writer, as he says,
is able to connect things
that don't normally go together,
or don't have to be
present at the same time
in the physical world,
and one of the great things
that writers can do is,
you know, make these
preposterous arguments
and if they're clever
enough and they can do it,
it's convincing, but sometimes,
you know, they're pushing
the envelope, right,
but it's through the process of writing.
So this idea of to connect things
that don't usually connect.
Why surrealism has always been
something that's compelled me so much
and as an achievement I've always loved it
because of it's literary
and cinematic forms.
I'm very sorry to say that I think the
art historical surrealism
is the weakest aspect
of this very extraordinary
movement that is international,
there's so much to talk
about, it's so unlimited.
Anyway, so just to show you,
I wrote an essay on Mariko Moris called
Cyborg-Surrealism which is a little bit,
kind of, gimmicky, it
was based on a concept
that came from Donna Haraway and this is
because I've taken out the
English version of the article
for my--
Parkett, Parkett is wonderful,
it publishes in German and English,
this is how you say
Cyborg-Surrealism in German
in case you need to know that.
So, the task.
I'm sure many of you by now
have gotten my allusion to
Walter Benjamin's essay,
The Task of The Translator.
It's an essay you might
read in graduate school,
if not, it's available online,
and it's very interesting
because, for him,
the translator is not
there to mimic or copy
what he's translating
or she is translating,
but is out to transform language.
In particular here she uses the language
that they are translating
to transform the language
in which the translation takes place,
so I have this quote,
"The task of the translator consists
"in finding that intended
effect..." or intention,
"...upon the language into
which he is translating
"which produces the echo of the original."
So that intended effect.
You might want to take a look at
John Ashbery's recent translations
of Rimbaud's Illuminations and look at
various translations of Illuminations
to see what different
kinds of translations are.
And then he has this great
moment where, Benjamin says,
"... aiming at that single spit where
"the echo is able to give,
in it's own language,
"the reverberation of the
work in the alien one."
So he's getting at the
reverberation of it.
And then he has thins
long but lovely quote,
"Fragments of a vessel which
are to be glued together
"must match one another
on the smallest details,
"although they need not
be like one another. In--"
(laughs) Do you disagree?
- [Man] No, it's just amazing.
- Oh. (laughs)
Thank you.
Yeah, he's pretty great.
"In the same way a translation,
"instead of resembling the
meaning of the original,
"must lovingly and in detail..."
and this is really important,
"... incorporate the original's
mode of signification,
"thus making both the
original and the translation
"recognizable as fragments
of a greater language,
"just as fragments are part of a vessel."
Now, I'm going to skip to, (mumbles)
you know, I'm going to turn this
into an essay at some point,
and I talk about a class I taught
and I talk about (mumbles)
and I talk about Walter Benjamin,
but I think it's a little bit too much
to go into here so I will pass over that
and ask the question of how do I
characterize what I do?
What is that I might
be seeking to describe
or translate when I'm writing on art?
Now, obviously to say an
art writer is a translator
is gonna cause all sorts of problems,
so, you know, we can--
Don't take me literally on that,
but in some moments I think
that is what is happening,
but what we're trying to
translate is something that,
who better than our friend
Marcel Duchamp has come up with,
and it's his way of
describing the creative act
and what art does.
So he has this concept called infrathin,
and Alex Hammond, because
you were writing about it
in your AP thesis.
- [Alex] I think (mumbles) is.
- Yeah, I know, he is too,
but when you were reading about it
that got me interested in
it, right, so thank you.
I actually didn't know about it
which, probably, see, it shows
I didn't study art history.
And infrathin is this concept that
is impossible to define, which is great,
one can only give examples
of it, as he says.
"The infrathin is, in general,
"a separation, a gap, the
difference between two things."
It is about delay.
So the infrathin is, in
general, a separation,
a gap, the difference between two things,
and he gets these wonderful,
this wonderful example
which is it's the warmth of the seat
after someone has gotten up from it.
I think that's what art is, right?
It's sort of what the, what
that is, that warmth thing.
And he also says it's
when tobacco smoke smells
also of the mouth which exhales it,
the two odors marry by infrathin.
It's a separation between,
this is amazing too,
the detonation noise of a gun, very close,
and the apparition of the
bullet hole in the target.
So if you're shooting at a gallery fair.
So he wrote in his essay
The Creative Act in 1957,
and you can get this, you know,
there's this wonderful
thing called Brain Pickings,
it's a wonderful blog that this woman,
who's incredibly, she reads constantly,
and she takes apart things
and she puts them on
for all of us to digest,
and she has the entire
talk that he gave in 1957
and she also has it recorded,
so if you wanna go see it,
it's wonderful to hear him speaking it.
So in that article he
writes about that art is
the difference between
intention and realization.
"'What art is in reality,'
he later commented,
"is this missing link,
not the links which exist.
"It's not what you see that
is art, art is the gap.'"
And then I was reading
about it in another blog
and this person had a
nice way of putting it.
The gap in between, the
liminal, the non-retinal,
stretch the limits of articulation.
When the definitive properties
of known words fail,
there is always the
possibility of invention,
and that's the exciting part.
Art stretches the limits of
articulation, I love that.
The art writer, or what I'm interested in
is working in that gap in the
stretches of articulation.
One of my favorite pieces by monsieur.
So simply put, and I'm
coming towards my end,
good, because I didn't
wanna talk too long,
this is a space in which I write.
It's that minuscule difference
that makes an artwork art,
that the art writer as
opposed to the critic
grasps and tumbles into, and again,
I don't mean to make it like
there's critics that do this
and art writers do this,
but everybody's an art writer,
but the moment that you're being a critic,
you may be doing this, and you may not,
but it's not necessarily your task.
Your task is to make judgements,
is to come to terms with the artwork.
So I'm interested in grasping
and tumbling into the art,
not to decode it but to ride along
with the artist and the artwork.
"Simply put: search for the warmth
"of the seat left by the artist
"after the artist has gotten up."
Simply put, sorry, peed myself.
As I said, seek for that
minuscule difference,
grab and try to stretch, even mimic,
the limits of articulation that
that piece of artwork is about.
Tease it, chew on it, tickle it,
and see if it will come out.
Allow the art that I am writing about,
and I think this is the most important,
to affect and force me to invent
how I will write about it,
and that's why writing
about Barney's Cremaster
was so difficult, and I did
a, done a lot of research
on writings on Barney and they often
are very experimental because his work
sort of lends itself to that,
and that's a whole other conversation,
but there's a lot of
incredibly interesting writing
that's been done.
So, art writer as minker, as medium.
"I write with, rather than
on or about art and artists."
That's how I describe what I do.
So, final thoughts.
So of course, this has been my way
of introducing you to
what I do, to my minking,
but is also something else.
For one, I wanna thank
Mark for including me
in the artist talks because, often,
art writers aren't part of this, you know,
I've really never had to do this,
and it's been really
wonderful to have to come
together and talk about it because
to use that word, writing is my practice,
(laughs) but I think that by virtue
of Mark inviting me here,
he's starting to break down that boundary
that I'm so frustrated by,
that writing's over here,
and thinking's over here,
and theory's over here,
and art's over here
and makers are over here,
and blahdy blahdy blah.
Certainly that's true and
many people do do that,
but it doesn't have to be that way.
As I said all of this can be, I mean,
another way to think about
reading and writing and thinking
is, you know, it's creative
intellectual imagination
and that's a way to think
of theory or philosophy.
So, the more I teach MFA students,
the more I think writing and reading
is something misunderstood as if
it is not creative or isn't
an avenue to the creative,
and this is also the fault of the way
writing is often introduced to people.
Courses are usually structured as
writing your artist
statement, grant writing,
I mean this is all, I don't
mean to put this down,
this is all very important,
or, god forbid if you
have to write on something
that you've read and quote it,
you have to write an academic essay
and it takes your soul away, no,
you don't have to write that way.
That's what I'm here to, I hope,
help people with when they write.
You may, and you may not,
but in our theses we have in the--
Our practice program we've had, you know,
a lot of interesting experiments.
Things are still
researched, there's still,
you know, thinking behind it,
it's not impressionistic
just poetic thinking,
but you incorporate it in a creative way
that doesn't necessarily mean
you're making an argument.
Now this is harder to do, actually,
than write a straight
essay, so, just beware.
Like, poetry is much harder
to write than anything else
even though everybody seems to
think they can write poetry.
(audience laughs)
So, no, as the task of this art writer
is to write about the infrathin,
i.e. more as a collaborator,
or as I put it--
Who's talking?
(audience laughs)
I write with rather than on
or about art and artists.
So the task of this talk has also been
the hope that artists, too, will begin
to see writing as friendly,
even when critical.
Creative, or as Bill Berkson put it
in one of my favorite
pieces on art writing called
Divine Conversation: Art, Poetry,
and the Death of the Addressee,
so I thought I'd end
with reading parts from
an essay that is coming out soon
that I wrote about Bill Berkson,
he is a poet and art writer
who I think of as my mentor,
I love what he does because it's the way
he uses language that's so compelling
and so here's a bit just
from this piece I wrote,
I first heard Divine Conversation:
Art, Poetry, and the
Death of the Addressee
as a talk given at the
School of Visual Art
several years ago.
It is now republished and
for the ordinary artist
and serves appropriately
as the gateway to the rest of the book.
Since that time, I've read,
and I've reread this essay,
I've sent it to numerous friends,
and I've used it as the initial text
in one of my classes on art writing.
When I first heard it in 2008,
which is quite a long time ago now,
it was one of those talks that both
glued me and lifted me off my seat,
glued me to and lifted me off my seat,
and it was given here at SVA.
Not only did it intersect and affirm
so much of what art
had always meant to me,
but the opening paragraph unknowingly
tapped almost verbatim into a conversation
that I had been having that week
with an artist whose
work I had written on.
So here's a quote from Berkson,
this is how he starts it,
"My theme tonight is conversation.
"Conversation and its discontents.
"You might say, or discontents,
"of which I am maybe one.
"So tempting is it to become a scold,
"but I'll try to avoid that.
"Conversation may be the intense,
"extended talk people
generate among themselves,
"a kind of telepathy between the things
"some people do and those others
"who don't find them
interesting to confront.
"And then the things
that follow from that,
"and so on everywhere.
"I mean, the ongoing exchange,
"like of gasses in and out of the body,
"that you hope never ends
and know to be brief,
"unruly and meant to be enjoyed as such."
This is me continuing.
The theme of telepathy in
friendship of conversation
that you hope never ends as
gases in and out of the body,
was precisely what had been spoken
between me and the artist that same week,
as if our private ongoing
exchange between writer and artist
was now being channeled through Bill,
who is up there reminding
us all at that very moment
how art is not just
about looking at objects,
but looking within the context
of a series of relations.
And a phrase I love that comes
from an Yvonne Rainer film,
risks between you and me, a
field of social gathering.
As he put it,
"Continue the conversation
is a prompt I've heard
"more or less at my back
for most of my writing life.
"The phrase implies a continuum of art
"as a field or social gathering
"across which possibilities move, change,
"merge, and reduplicate over time,
"not necessarily in chronological order,
"and with the understanding that
"no mode, old or new, can
ever be said to be dead..."
I really like that because
it really makes me frustrated
when people say, oh that's just over,
you know, that kind of thing,
especially when it's like Freud or Marx.
So the conversation that never stops,
the readiness of response
within a field of others,
the open sociability
towards the addressee,
a continuum defined as a social gathering
where possibilities move, and merge,
and reduplicate over time,
where no mode, old or new,
can ever be said to be dead.
Divine Conversation brings together
everything that makes Berkson so singular,
remember this is an essay that's written
for a volume that's about him,
as well as what makes art
writing, at it's best, no--
And I don't mean to, I
think I have to change this,
I said no simple act of criticism,
well no act of criticism
is, by any means, simple,
so I do take that back,
but is an exegesis on our lives and art,
as well as the role art
has had in our lives
as an action, a behavior, a
moral image is what he calls it,
which is a phrase we learned
from the writer Edwin Denby,
that he uses again and again.
So, language, I start--
The whole article is, comes
off of this wonderful quote
that I use quite often from Roland Barthes
where he talks about
language is a skin I rub,
language is the tips, I rub
with the tips of my fingers,
so the name of this is called
Bill Berkson: Language At
The Tips of His Fingers.
So language is a skin that is rubbed,
fingers at the tips of
words, isn't that the best,
gasses in and out of bodies, art unfolds.
"As you look and as you look
to comment on it or listen
"to whoever is looking alongside
you at the same time too.
"Here is the readiness
and response to an object
"or situation as a quality of attitude."
He has a beautiful description of attitude
in (mumbles) work in one of his essays.
The attitude of the lover,
writer, and beloved,
language, art, friends, and
their everyday exchange.
And from this, what Berkson receives is,
"Beauty, order, and passion generated from
"talk and mutual contemplation itself."
So, in a way to summarize,
not power conversations,
not academic gamesmanship,
or art world finagling,
but looking with educated
eyes and with contemplation,
between and with self and
other, where mutuality,
cast in the everyday, is what produces
the vibratory suspense of revelation.
So I think we can end there,
in the vibratory suspense, the infrathin,
in that zone of stretching
the limits of articulation.
So, I thank you for coming.
(audience clapping)
That was was in, Brooklyn Rail
asks people to be a guest
editor at various times,
and I was asked to be the guest editor
for this specific issue that was
celebrating the year after
Sandy, the hurricane Sandy.
So I thought about, well,
what does a hurricane do
and what has it done to us?
And I thought, well, certainly
it makes us feel vulnerable,
so I probably wouldn't
have necessarily had that
as my topic if I, you know,
it wasn't for that issue,
because I got into some hot water
with my dear friend Mark Deary
who said he wanted to
come tonight but couldn't
and I wish he could, who was like,
I hate this vulnerability,
I hate when people talk about this,
and I wasn't meaning that,
it wasn't about, you know,
I'm vulnerable and I write,
it's the, you know, you
come across an artwork
that, in a way, it makes you vulnerable
because you don't quite get it,
so it's that kind of vulnerable,
and you can either choose
to say it's junk, I hate it,
or wow, that really fascinates me,
I think there must be
something else in there.
So that's what I was
talking about, you know,
the way that art can affect you that way.
I know, I'm not quite sure, I think,
but it's an image that this
writer Edward Denby uses
and it's the idea of
almost an ethics between
all of us who are in
the same social sphere,
a kind of moral image
that we carry with us
in terms of our attitude
towards art and each other.
It's from Elaine De Kooning as well,
it's all about that.
But, you know, I love it as a phrase,
but I'm not quite exactly
sure what it means, but...
I don't think it's anything as a contract,
it's more that thought
cloud that's behind us,
the kind of moral image
that we carry with us,
some of us, so, yeah.
So there was a question in the back?
Well, it's very good, because it's my way
of dealing with that gap,
and what I like about
it is it doesn't mean
there's an answer, that gap can be filled
by very many other kinds
of ways of articulating it,
so but that's the place
that I wanna move into,
but it's certainly not to say, oh,
this is the definitive, you know,
reading of this artwork but, you know,
it jiggles something in me, I mean,
when I wanna write about something
I just, it's sort of physical,
it's like, ooh, that makes
me wanna write about it,
and then it's sort of investigating
what that is at times.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, free associating, too,
but not necessarily decoding,
I mean, it can be, yeah.
You know, so I started to write dialogues.
I wrote a rather wacky dialogue
about Matthew Barney's work
where I had him play the part
of a hysterical testicle.
It's something I, you know,
I don't know if it's
successful, it's only short now,
but if I worked on it
more it might be fine,
but, you know, just
trying to find other ways
where you're not just saying, you know,
as I said, this art is about.
And the reason I'm saying all
this is because, you know,
sometimes I find it hard
to publish my art, writing,
where to, you know, publish
it, because, you know,
it's not really academic,
it's not really criticism,
it's not really whatever, I don't know,
so it was really me trying to figure out,
well then, what the heck
is it that I'm doing
that does feel like it
fits in a in between space.
So that's, I mean, that's
really the only reason
that I'm yakking on about this,
and also because Mark asked me to, so.
So, it's been great, it's
been very clarifying,
you know, to help, yup.
Oh, indeed, please come.
I had the best time with the best time
with the MFA fine arts
people as you all know
last year in that class.
Well, it's called, it's a theory class.
I do find that word, you
know, so off putting,
I don't, and I don't like that I've
become defensive about
it either, but I have.
So it, (mumbles)
I don't have in my head exactly what it is
that my syllabus contained,
but it's a combination
of reading, sort of,
things that you should know, you know,
sort of, things that are canonical,
and then things, theoretical elements,
that I think are particularly interesting
and fruitful for artists,
and what I like, what I do in the class
is we read these things as artists, right,
you pick out what works for you
and what stimulates you,
and it's to be inspired by this writing,
not to be bored, frustrated,
pissed off, angry.
So I make a point of only
assigning things where
I respect the writing.
I'm not, you know, jargony,
I call it graduate student
theory writing is horrible,
and as I said, it's usually
about bad writing, you know,
people are not really thinking about
the words that they're using,
and jargon becomes a very easy, lazy way,
and I did that all through
graduate school, so I know.
So it's about contemporary theory and art,
but it's also open, I
will introduce the class
by showing the syllabus,
and we did this last year,
and then we will all talk about
certain aspects of maybe,
there's certain things
that people want to
either read or know about,
because at this point there's so much,
it's impossible, right, so some people
might wanna do more on feminism,
some people might wanna
do more on science study,
some people might wanna
do Deluse, god forbid,
and, you know, on and on, and also
some new person who I
don't know, you know,
because there's always
new things coming up.
So there's plenty of room to do it,
so I try to have a good time.
Is the writing expected with the class?
Yeah, that's a good question,
because last year it was not
for credit, so there was none.
This year it is for credit,
so I haven't really thought about it.
I have a feeling I will probably
ask people to, we'll probably have a,
what we'll probably do is use canvas
and have a post where we
post and people share,
and it's almost like a journal.
And it's not to write essays,
but it's to all talk back and forth
about the work each week, and then
certain weeks I'll ask certain people
to be responsible for something
so that they come in with ideas.
And then I think the
final project would be
more doing something that's relevant
to you as an artist in
whatever way that is
and again, not to make like, you know,
some, there's just some
horrible illustrated
Deluse art that's just painful,
but, so, it's not to do that,
but to see what comes out of it, you know?
And it may not even seem like
it's coming out of the class,
I don't know, but it's
to keep you making art,
and at the same time
learning where writing,
like that student who I quoted said,
it really is helping me, you know,
if I could write better because
there's this force that comes out
when I'm seeing something,
when I'm feeling something,
when I'm reading something,
and I want to be able to get at that,
So the writing is very much
in note form, diary form,
whatever, you know.
I know because a lot
of artists are artists,
because they're not writers, so,
obviously I take that into consideration.
Artist writings that I love,
I love Roni Horn's writing, obviously.
(mumbles)
Writers, I mean, exactly,
there's a great generation
of Smithson and Acconci
and so on and so forth.
So I love the book that's the edited book
of collected artist writings that
Christine Styles put out, and I think
it's really wonderful for you
all to read artist writings
to see, you know, again, you know,
some are manifestos, I mean,
sometimes I make people write manifestos,
that can be a lot of fun,
and sometimes, you know, sometimes
it's just autobiographical.
Carol H Neiman I've gotten to know
and been reading, of all
things, her cat writing,
she has collected her
cat writing for 40 years,
and it's astonishingly well written.
She is a great writer, and it's not
something she's known for.
If you wanna see this, you see it
in this big fat collected letters
of Carol H Neiman that's
really kind of ugly and pink,
but it's very thick, but she has a way
and a facility with
language, Yvonne Rainer too,
you know, are wonderful writers, so.
Really, you know, I don't like all theory,
but the stuff that I like,
I like it because it makes sense
of the world that I'm living in,
it makes sense somehow to me,
so I try to get that across,
and I mean, Nietzsche
is a wonderful example
because as a philosopher,
you know, and as a writer
he opens up a space for the
way thinking can be playful,
funny, about affirmation,
about exploration,
so I mean I obviously include
philosophers within that,
but I applaud you for trying to do this
because it's very hard,
because there's such a
reaction now against theory,
and for good reason, you know,
because a lot of people
have been taught it
where it just doesn't seem relevant.
And maybe you don't need it, you know,
but it's also, my course is a place to
come to let your mind go, right,
because you're making all the time,
making, making, making, making, making,
and I think that in MFA
programs there's so much making
and critiquing that you almost, you know,
don't get to kind of look out the window
and think of something interesting
and that kind of thing.
Sergio was in the program
when I was an instructor,
and he's very surly,
and the last thing I
would ever have thought
was that he'd become a lawyer,
and he said he did it as
an art project, right,
and he's created this,
yeah, this wonderful
exploration of art and
law, and it's (mumbles)
it's the way he teaches it,
he came and gave a talk
to us in our practice,
and it was just fantastic, you know,
he made law really interesting.
So it's, maybe it's about teaching
from an artist's perspective in a way,
knowing you're teaching artists
and you're not teaching, I mean,
academics are in there
for a different reason,
and then you get into slicing
arguments down and stuff,
but the Whitney program was great
formative for me in the early 80's
and then when I went back to teach there
in the late 90's I got
into all sorts of hot water
because I, at that point,
was really sick of academia
and sort of the way
things were talked about
and the tenseness, and there was
a kind of theoretical right
and wrong in all of this,
and, god forbid, I wanted, you know,
that was when I first was interested
in Matthew Barney's work
because it was just like
whoa, what is this?
I mean, at the time it
was so different than
the kind of pictures generation worked,
the kind of art as
critical art kind of thing,
and I just was really freed by that,
and I know I was seen as a kind of enemy
or a, you know, not rigorous any longer,
not political any longer,
all of these things.
So the Whitney program
is fantastic, you know,
if you get in, it's great,
but I think there's, you know,
it's only for a certain kind and I think
now can be, you know, really,
can really be (mumbles)
gives things a bad name.
Sorry, wrong.
I hope it isn't about that
it stops you from making,
I hope that you can join it
with your making in some way.
And even if you can't
this is what I always say,
when you read Virginia
Wolf, do you then go
I gotta apply this to my art?
No, so you're just reading this stuff
to exercise muscles, that's
also how I think of it, right.
So it's really that, you
know, it's really that.
Well, I think they shouldn't be separate
because anybody who's writing should
always be thinking about
the craft of writing
and what they're saying
and how they're saying it,
so it's a kind of obvious point.
I really brought up the theory stuff
because I knew I was gonna
be teaching a class here
and that's why,
but I think it's very important
because if you're using,
because theories like art,
you're often trying to get at something
that's very hard to articulate,
so that's why people come up with words
and sometimes you really need that jargon,
it's the only thing you can use,
and that's great, use it judiciously,
but it's that same, you know,
trying to create a concept, right,
or whatever it is, yeah, so.
I would say like the people who I respect,
like, you know, serious,
like somebody like Derrida
I mean obviously it's all about writing
and I read him more as poetry then,
I'm not a philosopher,
so they go together.
I don't know if this
is interesting to you,
but I know that the way I
was taught a lot of theory
was all about you read the text
and you're not supposed to
do anything about anybody,
and I've learned, I've
been learning so much
about the intellectual
history and the background
of especially all the people, you know,
that, the French theorists
of the 80's and 90's,
and it's so fascinating and it makes
so much sense out of their work,
so I try to bring that in, too,
it's very, you know, not cool to do,
but I do it, like the fact that Derrida
is an Algerian Jew, you know, (mumbles)
it's very interesting in
terms of what he ended up
creating in terms of deconstruction,
and so I like to make the writer
a person with a pedigree, too,
and where do they come
from, what are they doing,
so, it just helps, you know,
or to know that (mumbles) was a student,
was the teacher of Derrida,
you know, I didn't know that.
Anyway, lord I don't really
wanna talk about all that,
so, but it's there, I mean,
it's a good conversation to have,
and I'd like to have it more but.
Thank you everybody, thank you Mark.
(audience clapping)
