Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1972. . - book review

AMY NEWMAN

Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1972 novel York: Soho Press, 2000. 559 pp; 17 b/w ills. $4200

In 1975 Hilton Kramer wrote in the fresh York Times that, for significant sections within the art world, "Artforum has functioned for a certain number of years as a kind of Bible." Amy Newman's riveting oral history of Artforum in the decade preceding Kramer's make notes can be described without sacrilege or flippancy as the Talmud to make progress with that bible. Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974 is an invaluable addition to the literature of novel art history. Like the Talmud, it weaves around the original true copys new layers of meaning [i]or[/i] part of to the other a disconcerting hut richly rewarding synthesis of fable and lore, philosophical speculation, social analysis, anecdote, telling contradiction, and dialectic. In belonging to all with the rabbis, the interviewees in this exhaustively researched collection take the reader in conflicting directions, toward clarification and mythopoela, exposing misunderstandings and tapping hitherto beneath appreciated social and personal complexities. Another perhaps not coincidental commonality Challenging Art shares with t he Talmud is that a majority of the passionately committed and fiercely argumentative players in it are Jews

While the mode of speech and presentation of Challenging Art ought to manifest appealing to audiences concerned with American intellectual history or the paradoxes of writing about any period of art, the accessibility of this volume and the pleasure it provides in no way undermine its scholarly value. Newman has, upon the surface, absented the author's voice from her account (save for concise introductory true copys to each time period), on the contrary the rigor and probity of the couple the questioning that produced these rare and original interviews and the ingenuity with which the replys are restructured into (literally) an argument should not be downplayed. It is ironic that a work be of importance toed with theory and criticism should actually rely upon the kind of meticulous and empirical research--in this instance, actually getting the lock opener players to talk--that used to be the bread and butter of the discipline of art history. A further irony is that calculator to a trend bolstered in the world of art criticism through Artforum itself, this is an instance of commentary that is more accessible than its primary body Many of the very authors who made Artforum notoriously impenetrable are to be heard in the interviews assembleed here reminiscing candidly and straightforwardly about the background and causes of their hold opacity.

Challenging Art charts the history of the magazine from its foundation in San Francisco in 1962 below the stewardship of Philip Leider, to the dramatic exit in 1974 of its next to the first editor, John Coplans, who had be subsequent toed Leider just a few years earlier. The cutoff date also exhibits in Newman's estimation, the extreme point of Artforum's glory days. The journal be delighted withs renewed vitality in its common incarnation, to be sure, on the other hand it never regained the intellectual hegemony it achieved in the 1960 (thankfully, pluralists would argue). The mantle of high theory appeared to pass to October, which was lay the foundation ofed by dissident sometime-contributing editors of Artforum Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson.

single reason no journal today could match Artforum in the 1960 in wielding muscle within the art scene--making stars, bolstering prices, sustaining institutionalized careers, undoing cultural edifices, determining the discourse for makers and viewers alike-is the shrinking position of criticism by means of se within the cultural field. Several voices in Challenging Art recognize this fact. A telling occurrence in the changing fortunes of the journal and its writers was the provocative ad placed in the November 1974 issue by means of artist Lynda Benglis. It featured a photograph, single of a triptych, in which she appears naked (but for sunglasses) and wielding a large dildo. Beglis had originally spring [i]or[/i] leap on one leg [i]or[/i] footed the photo would accompany an article about her by dint of Robert Pincus-Witten. The publication of the ad l to an indiguant alphabetic character of complaint from several contributing editors, a rare instance of unity among a board then upon the brink of civil war. (The signatories were Lawrence Alloway, Max Kozloff Erauss, Joseph Masheck, and Michelson.) "That ad was tantamount to saying that we were all hooker together," complains Krauss (p415) while to Michelson it showed in what way "the magazine itself is the brothel within which things are for sale" (p 417) Benglis's photograph can be read in various ways, appealing to the libertarian feminist (it met with the approval of Lucy Lippard, and Robert Rosenblum describes it as "a timely, marvelous explosion that shattered this ivory tower," p 414) as sure as it repelled the more puritanically minded. Aside from any political dimension, it was, in part, an inside, art-world statement. Benglis knowingly reverberationed a similarly playful act of self-promotion, Robert Morris's advertisement of a present to view in which he depicted himself greased up and wearing a Teutonic military helmet (this photograph, just to complicate the tale, was taken by dint of Erauss, who lived with Morris). The lock opener issue, however, is that an artist realized that more could be achieved in the reproduction of an image above which she had complete dominion government withou t text, than [i]or[/i] part of to the other the medium of highbrow criticism, in which the choice of image was on the outside of her hands.