Forty-One False Starts (38 page)

Edit deAk lives on Wooster Street in a loft (clearly not designed by an architect) with a shabby, functional, and only slightly—and rather haphazardly—funky appearance. She herself is a striking, good-looking woman of thirty-eight, with shoulder-length bright-red hair worn in bangs, who dresses in vivid, interesting clothes that have a sense of quotation marks around them. She speaks with an East European accent in a low, melodious voice, and as she speaks she has a trick of moving her stiffened right hand up and down in a tender chopping gesture. She likes to play Nabokovian games with language (her speech and writing are filled with terms like “ego beaver” and “tour de farce”), though when she did gallery reviewing for
Artforum
in the seventies, she curbed her Pninisms and confined herself to straight, opaque Artspeak. But now, under Sischy's permissive reign, she denies herself very little and writes pieces entirely composed of epigrammatic, near-scrutable paragraphs such as the following, which appeared in an article entitled “The Critic Sees Through the Cabbage Patch”:

In the contrast of scale, small imagery in large surroundings becomes all powerful when it is happening and speedily traversible when it is not. Tiny gland-sized figures, capable of being fondled, emphasize their secret porno charm as tiny emblems of hidden desires. Like makers of Oriental porn, the Italian telescopes, allures, and funnels with a sense of security in codes which give comfort like the reliable conventions of the geisha. The German closes up; shoved in your face is a violent eruption reflecting our Judeo-Christian body guilt. They just can't mix. Sandro Chia has spread his work too thick. Dial
Q
and
A
(like in Questions and Answers) for Quotation and Appropriation. Dial
T
for Terminal Terminology. Again the terms engender a limitation on thinking about the issues. “Quotation” is anchored as a quicky, and Appropriation as mere antics. These terms are not comprehensive enough to deal with the realm involved: it makes it all seem like a klatch of bourgeois plagiarisms. We should be contending with counterfeit gestalt (Gesamtkunstpatch, in cabbage-patch terms). Asking, where has the original of the whole world disappeared to? Has Rammellzee taken it to the Van Allen Belt?

During the seventies, deAk and Walter Robinson, an artist, coedited a magazine named
Art-Rite
, a messy, impudent sort of in-house organ of the New York avant-garde. Printed on newsprint, published irregularly, and run with a kind of ironic amateurism (“Unsolicited manuscripts are welcome, and you don't even have to enclose a self-addressed and stamped envelope to get them back,” an editorial notice read), it observed the large and small movements of the advanced art scene of the seventies at a very close, somewhat blurring range. Although Sischy's
Artforum
is more formal, more professional, more like a real magazine than
Art-Rite
ever approached being, it has never entirely abjured the samizdat quality of
Art-Rite
and the other rakish little magazines of the period, such as
Heresies
and
Just Another Asshole
, whose spirit Sischy immediately recognized as her own. Attempting to characterize this spirit, and not doing too badly, Rene Ricard once remarked, “Ingrid put cheapness into
Artforum
.” My own point of reference for the special demotic strain that runs through Sischy's magazine is the cover of the summer 1981 issue, which she herself conceived. Other Sischy covers have made a bigger stir—for example, a famous cover featuring a sulky model wearing a remarkable long black evening dress (by the Japanese designer Issey Miyake) whose bodice was a kind of rattan cage—but this one shows Sischy putting the cheapness into
Artforum
in a particularly artful way. At first sight, it looks like a work by a postmodern conceptualist; in fact, it is an arrangement of twelve blue-and-white paper take-out coffee containers. Eleven of them show a lumpish discus thrower posed beside a Doric column that supports a bowl containing the Olympic Flame; the twelfth container, centrally placed, is turned to show its other side, which bears the message
IT'S OUR PLEASURE TO SERVE YOU
. Ricard's piece “Not About Julian Schnabel” appeared in that issue, and while Sischy was selecting the illustrations for it, she was suddenly struck by the preposterous similarity between a Schnabel painting called
Blue Nude with Sword
and the picture on the coffee container she was drinking from; the cover was the result.

When I visit deAk in her loft, she brings out a bottle of wine and two glasses and says, “I always thought I did
Art-Rite
to defy the idea of art magazines. I spent the best years of my life doing it, for free. In my mind, it was a project to undermine art. Mine is an anarchistic, negative feeling. I don't believe in anything until it is proven—and I don't like proving.
Artforum
is a magazine that comes out every month. My mentality is not used to that. I spent my entire life not being anybody, defying schedules, not having a job. At a moment when you are what job you do, people are constantly saying to me ‘Who are you?' and it's a question I can't answer.”

Another of deAk's nonremunerative activities was serving on the board of Printed Matter, which is where she met Sischy. “Ingrid sort of stabilized everything at Printed Matter,” deAk recalls. “She got it out of chaos, out of the bowels of the board. There's no ‘no' to her. When she was at Printed Matter, the two of us used to go and see if we could get corporate support for certain projects. I'll never forget the time when we went to the Xerox Corporation, in Rochester. I got up that morning to dress, and I was scared to death. I didn't know how you go in to see a corporation, so I put on the best dress I thought I had—all frills and shiny—and I looked like some kind of overdressed person who hadn't gone home the night before. As for Ingrid, she was wearing this badly cut three-piece man's blue suit. We were staying with Ingrid's parents, and when Ingrid's mother saw us coming down the stairs in the morning, ready to go on our executive trip, she just broke down laughing.

“Ingrid's father is one of the three doctors I've met whom I actually think of as a human being. He considers the totality of a person. The mother is brilliant, kind of filigreed, and fast, but with a soft edge, never stabbing. They're radical thinkers. Their ideology is really complex. They know so much. Their way of thinking is so much more contemporary than mine that I would have expected them to be weirdos, but they're not. They're completely regular people; they completely fit into society. They're exquisitely civilized.

“I had written for
Artforum
for four or five years before Ingrid came, so I knew the other regimes, and they were very different. Ingrid centered the whole operation on herself. The previous editor didn't. He was a very quiet person who sat at his desk, and the office was very quiet, and the manuscripts came in. He regarded the job as, sort of, ‘Okay, here is my desk, and here comes a manuscript, and I'll take care of it.' When Ingrid got into the office, there was no desk left unturned. She checked everything. The smallest note didn't leave that office without her checking it. She was even friends with the night cleaner. But when I say that she centered the whole operation on herself I don't mean that she was building herself up. If you look at the jobs that Ingrid has had, they were always concerned with the projects of others. She's just the opposite of a hustler. She's not going to hold up a cue card and say, ‘This is what I am.' She will not guide you to her. She will show you the irrigated areas of the Nile. Her achievement is like that of the Nile—the fertilization of a certain area of culture.”

A week after the summer issue has gone to press, Sischy takes me to the fifth-floor studio—in a commercial walk-up on Canal Street—of a pair of Russian-Jewish émigré artists named Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar, who collaborate on satiric paintings done in the style and employing the iconography of socialist realism. Melamid, a slight, thin, dark, quick man of around forty, wearing hornrimmed glasses and jeans and running shoes, looks like any number of boyish New York Jewish or New York Italian men. Komar is fat, looks much older than Melamid but isn't, has a dark beard and small, cunning green eyes and red lips—a minor character out of Gogol, probably a horse trader.

The studio is bright, noisy from the traffic on Canal Street, and bare. Several large canvases are propped against a wall, their faces inward. (A year later, at a large SoHo gallery, I see them unveiled: brilliantly sharp-sighted pastiches of old, modernist, and last week's postmodernist paintings, with an occasional Stalin or Hitler thrown in as a kind of signature.) Komar and Melamid lead Sischy and me to a group of wooden chairs near the Canal Street window and bring a bottle of seltzer water and white plastic cups, and a basket of red apples that immediately evoke Mother Russia. After a minimal amount of desultory small talk, the two men abruptly plunge into a philosophical argument about the nature of time. Do we live in a space between past and future or are we perpetually in the past? Melamid argues that the present exists. No, Komar says, the present does not exist; there is only the past and the future. They argue back and forth, speaking very rapidly in accented English and gesticulating vehemently. Then, like a pair of house cats aimlessly walking away from a fight, they simply stop arguing. Melamid shrugs and says, “We always argue like this.” Komar smiles benignly. He speaks worse English than Melamid, who often corrects his pronunciation in a brotherly way.

Melamid tells us of the great discovery that he and Komar made in Russia before emigrating here, in 1978. While other Russian artists publicly did socialist realism and secretly worked in advanced modernist styles, he says, “it dawned on us that socialist realism could itself be a vehicle for avant-garde art.” Komar tells of an American friend in Russia who brought them a can of Campbell's soup as a work of conceptual art. “One day, there was nothing in the studio for a snack, so we ate the soup,” he says. “It was not a bad snack.” “It was bad,” Melamid says. “It was not bad,” Komar says. They start another animated debate, one that soon gets into art theory, the condition of art today, the situation of art in New York. As this argument, too, begins to peter out, Melamid sighs and says, “We sit here, and we talk, and I think, Where is
life
in all this? Life! Life! We go at things obliquely, to the side,” making a gesture of ineffectuality with his hand, “instead of straight, like this,” pounding his fist into his palm. He continues, emotionally, “Last year, I woke up in a hotel room in Amsterdam. There was a woman in my bed. I looked in the mirror and saw that my eyebrows were gray. I saw that I was forty.”

You got that from Chekhov, I say to myself. I am no longer charmed by this pair. I find their performance tiresome, calculated. I look over at Sischy, who is enjoying herself, who thinks they are “great,” and I ponder anew the question of authenticity that has been reverberating through the art world of the eighties. The feeling of mistrust that Komar and Melamid now arouse in me is the feeling that has been repeatedly expressed, within and without the art world, about the work of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and the other new stars who have emerged into prominence during the past five years. In a long poem, published in
The New York Review of Books
in March 1984, that was modeled on Pope's
Dunciad
and entitled “The Sohoiad: or, The Masque of Art, A Satire in Heroic Couplets Drawn from Life,” Robert Hughes, the art critic of
Time
, brought this feeling to a brilliant, splenetic apogee. Lashing out at artists, dealers, critics, curators, and collectors alike, he offered a vision of the contemporary art world as a Bosch-like inferno of greed, fraud, hype, and vacuity. After dispatching “Julian Snorkel,” “Jean-Michel Basketcase,” “David Silly,” and “Keith Boring,” among others (and treating Snorkel—“Poor SoHo's cynosure, the dealer's dream, / Much wind, slight talent, and vast self-esteem”—with special savagery), Hughes went on to mordantly inquire:

Who are the patrons whose indulgent glance
The painter craves, for whom the dealers dance?
Expunge, young Tyro, the excessive hope
Of gathering crumbs from
Humanist
or
Pope
:
No
condottiere
holds his exigent sway
Like
MONTEFELTRO
upon West Broadway—
Instead, mild stockbrokers with blow-dried hair
Stroll through the
soukh
, and passive snuff the air.
Who are the men for whom this culture burgeons?
Tanned regiments of well-shrunk
Dental
          Surgeons . . .

When I showed the poem to Sischy, she was not amused. “Forgive my lack of a sense of humor,” she said, “but what I see in that poem is just another reinforcement of stereotypes about the art world. It's like a Tom Stoppard play, where you have an entire Broadway audience snickering about things they haven't understood. It makes outsiders feel clever about things they know nothing about.
The New York Review
is a magazine I really respect—I respect its editors and I respect its audience—but this poem reflects the gap that exists between the serious literary audience and the serious art audience. Hughes's overwhelming message is that all of today's art is worthless, that the whole art world is a bunch of frauds and grotesques. I would agree with him that about half of what is being produced today is worthless, but I get worried when everything and everyone are lumped together and jeered at. That's too easy.”

Sischy's fascination with what's difficult sometimes leads her into incoherence and opacity, as in a recent special issue of
Artforum
called “the light issue.” It was conceived (according to an editorial by Sischy and Edit deAk) as a response to “the failure of the recent spate of big international shows to intelligently meet the development of contemporary art, and . . . their tendency instead to carelessly throw all ‘the names' together in an expensive but cheap hanging spectacle of so-called international pluralism.” The alternative it offered its readers was a survey of international art (the issue had no articles and was made up entirely of reproductions of paintings and photographs, some of them created specially for the issue) based on the common denominator of light. The issue left its readers utterly mystified. Since light, perforce, is the common denominator of
all
visual art, something other than the mere statement of this truism must have been intended—something less obvious and more particular to contemporary art—but to this day no one knows what it was. The light issue included, among other works, photographs by Joel Meyerowitz of moonlit water; ink-and-watercolor drawings by Agnes Martin of horizontal bands and lines; a neo-Expressionist painting by Enzo Cucchi of a piano playing itself on a vast white plain; a cryptic five-panel figurative work by Komar and Melamid; a foldout four-page spread by Francesco Clemente showing a pair of monstrous creatures emitting a sort of white gas from their posteriors; a photograph by Weegee of lightning in Manhattan; photographs of a set from Paul Schrader's film
Mishima
; a photograph of a starving African child vomiting. These were followed by a page of “shadow captions,” whose explanatory texts only deepened the enigma of what all these works were doing together and what they were saying about light. The caption for Clemente's contribution, for example, read: