Leah Sandals interviews New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz

The best lesson I ever had in art criticism-prior to encountering the writings of Jerry Saltz--just happened to be my first-ever lesson in art. It was in a small photo class at a general-ed. state university. The teacher's day-one assignment was "Go find a photo you like. It can be any kind of photo, but just find one. Then sit down and write a page's worth about what this photo makes you think and feel, what memories it reminds you of."

I admit, shamefully and 12 years on, that my mode of writing and talking about art, whether in undergrad crits or glossy art mags, has wavered little from that first, simple directive: look at the work; if you see something you respond to, sink into it, write what it makes you think about, what memories, feelings and associations it conjures. While I've studied art history a bit, I have, for fear of obscuring honest personal reactions, not used it much.

Reading Jerry Saltz's writing, however, is the first thing that has made me want to know, and show, my art history better. That's because Saltz, in his witty, direct and, unsurprisingly, twice-Pulitzer-nominated prose, does something most critics find disturbingly difficult: he shows it's possible to stay close to the core of one's emotional and intellectual reactions to art while recognizing its context.

Lately, Saltz has had as much Gawker-esque attention as any critic of our era can get. In April, he left the Village Voice, where he'd written since 1998, for New York magazine. Though the shift seemed amicable, it offers a handy entry point for interviewing Saltz about the life experiences squeezed between his spare Web bio lines, which note that, in addition to having been an advisor on a Whitney Biennial, he has been a truck driver and an artist.

The resulting discussion (personal prying weathered graciously by Saltz at my behest) gives some sense of where one of our era's best art critics has come from, where, to his mind, the New York art world is going and whether anyone would travel across water to see it.

Q: So, it's not immediately apparent how one gets from Figure Drawing II and lot lizard-type environs to, say, snagging a Pulitzer nom. How did you get started?

A: Well, I don't think anybody when they're a kid raises their hand in class and says, "Ooooh, I want to be an art critic." It's something you back into.

In high school, I looked around and noticed that the people who seemed to be having sex were either in theatre or art. I knew that I couldn't go into theatre because it just seemed a little demonstrative for me. So I thought, OK, art, art would be a good way to meet people. And that was just a thought in high school. Nothing else really happened except I pretended I liked art so I ended up liking all the standards--people like Dali, Modigliani, Michelangelo, your absolute popular heros.

Then I went to art school, the Art Institute of Chicago, and immediately dropped out. I thought, "Oh no, I know way more than these people" I thought I was just a smarty-pants and I left.

I did start making art around that period. Then I opened an artist-run gallery. This should've been the first warning sign that I was not an artist. The reason that should've been a clue is it meant I was happier outside the studio than inside the studio. But all through that period I was making and exhibiting art, and I got a National Endowment for the Arts grant, with the huge sum of $2,500, which was eventually the money I used to move to New York. And I sold my work and I was reviewed in Artforum, but all of this is just a pathetic way of telling you that I could've been a contender


A deeper truth was I had demons. And the demons were telling me the same things they tell every artist, any person who makes anything, they were telling me, "You can't do this, you don't really know how to do this, you don't have enough time to do this, you don't have enough money, you can't schmooze with people, blah blah blah." So I tuned in to those demons and said, "Oh yeah, you're right." When I moved to New York, I stopped making art.

Q: Is this where the truck driving comes in?

A: Yes. I became a long-distance truck driver, driving from New York to Florida or New York to Texas once a month. Mind you, I was not driving eighteen-wheelers, but rather a m-wheeled truck that was loaded not with steel but with art. I am Jewish, after all; I don't think my people are allowed to drive eighteen-wheelers hauling steel through the rust belt.

Q: So it was an art-crating company.

A: Yes, but ultimately it was a way to go into exile and have, I don't think a nervous breakdown, but have a walking semi-nervous breakdown in private. I spent huge amounts of time alone in the trucks, thinking, "Well, I looooove art" which I did by that time, "and I looooove the art world," which is terrible and embarrassing to admit. But I really did, and I thought, "I've got to find a way to stay in the art world" And somehow, some way, I thought, "Gee, I bet being a critic is easy. I could just teach myself to be an art critic" And that's where I began.

Q: How did you teach yourself?

A: I thought, OK, I will read art criticism. So I began to read the hip magazine of that period, which was Art-forum. And I would read it religiously, almost from cover to cover, and, of course, I barely understood a word that I read. It was a time when the art world was exciting, but criticism, with a couple of notable exceptions, was beginning its mind/body split. There was a lot happening upstairs, but not a lot happening downstairs for me. And it all got very jargon-filled, very theoretical.

This was also a time when the first translations of French theory were appearing in America. And everyone was reading the same 12 authors. Of course, the problem is they're still quoting the same 12 authors. Anyway, I started to quote the same people too. And I would write these reviews that I had no idea what I was talking about, but I was using the right words so that seemed to be pretty good. It was simulacra this, post-that. That's what I was writing, and it was fun. But I really wasn't writing about what I was seeing, and I think I secretly knew that.

Q: How did you start actually looking at the work?

A: I began this column in Arts Magazine where I wrote on a single work of art for the whole column. I did it about once a month for three or four years. That was really good training for trying to look harder at the object and then look also at my own reactions and try to record them. Mind you, all of that was all positive all the time. So even when I was going deeper, I was only going deeper into half my reactive, generative self; only into the happy.

Q: Which you now say critics shouldn't do.

A: Yes, I think that's dishonest if you're only writing from half of yourself. I don't believe anyone is happy all the time.

Q: And somewhere along the way you advised the 1995 Whitney Biennial.

A: Yes. And that's where I learned I had absolutely no interest in or gift for curating. Absolutely no interest. Speaking to the artist about what the artist said their art meant--what the artist said their work was, how the work should be exhibited--I thought, well, I don't want to care about that, I want to look at the art myself and say simply what I think and then you can disagree with it.

Q: Hmm. I was wondering if you wanted to do more curating, but ...

A: Do not call and do not ask.

Q: OK. How did the Voice thing happen?

A: Well, the biggest change for me was being invited to work for Time Out New York, which was a great opportunity. I only did it for about a year, but that's where I learned about weekly criticism and I saw what a great opportunity that can be, to have a review out while the show was up. You're in the conversation in the present. I love magazines, I get them all, I read them all, but they're usually published after a show. I'm interested in the during, in "a rhetoric of presence."

Q: So ... about that rhetoric. What's your weekly routine?

A: I see about 40 or 50 shows a week in New York City. The Voice didn't pay fares to go to Brooklyn and considered itself a very local paper. So my beat was New York City. New York magazine, I'm not sure yet. Maybe the same but that's OK with me; there's over 300 galleries in Chelsea. There's probably that many galleries spread around New York, too, so I've got my hands full and I'm happy about that. I see the shows every week and I'm just going through them thinking about my own reactions. And looking and thinking and thinking and looking and reacting, until something sort of gets my attention, positive or negative, and then I will start to sift through my reactions and say, "Maybe I have something to say about this."

Seeing the shows is really sort of thrilling. You're in public and it's like being in combat, you know, there's things flying left and right. Opinions, people yelling at you, people saying "This stinks!" and "This is great!", and you're in the middle going, "Wow," and it's all very exciting and then you go home and you're completely alone. And sort of cut off from everything except your own reactions and the echoes of voices in magazines and newspapers and books, and so on. And then I sit down and I try to write about what I'm thinking.

Remember, all of this has to happen in six days. So if I get a big catalogue on a show on Byzantium, I think, "Wow, yeah, Byzantium! Thrilling! I'm all about Byzantium!" and I open the catalogue and I read about a paragraph and I look at my watch and say, "Gosh darn, I've got to get to work." I can't read much to do it.

Q: You say that you're a "trench critic," grounded in personal reactions. Still, you're adept at balancing art-historical awareness with that.

A: I think it can be dangerous to be either all one or all the other. If I'm only making it up out of myself and not paying attention to other voices or other ideas, that's not right. That becomes ideology too. When people say, "I have no theory," this is the worst theory of all, because it is the most blinkered and self-righteous.

Q: You've noted--quite humourously--that "few are further from the epicentre of action than an art critic at an art fair." How much do you think critics are outside the art world?

A: Well, I think everyone is inside of it. No one is outside of it. If you're looking at the art world from your home and just in a magazine and not making any money at all and not having any shows at all, that is your relationship to the art world. But I'm not kidding myself. I'm on the inside. I know that I'm lucky enough to have this sort of pulpit where I'm spouting off every week.

Q: Well, it seemed accurate for an art fair, because you wouldn't be in the position of a buyer, and buyers are the ones catered to at fairs.

A: Yes, I don't buy art. I don't collect art.

Q: What do you have on your walls, then?

A: My wife [New York Times art critic Roberta Smith] and I buy a lot of stuff from thrift stores. We have a really nice collection of five-dollar ceramics and I've gone on Paint My Photos to make a copy of a painting that I like. So I'll pay twenty-five dollars and they'll make a copy.

Q: Are you serious?

A: Yes, I'm looking at one right now. I was pretty hard on Damien Hirst's last exhibition of photorealist paintings. And the most expensive painting there was of a green operating room. So I had an painter make a very small copy, two feet by one foot, of that painting. I figure Gagosian sold his for one million, and I got mine for twenty-five.

Q: That must bring some satisfaction.

A: Well, it made me appreciate Hirst a bit more. Mine isn't that good! I also went to a 99-cent store on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to retake the Gursky photograph. Because I thought, well, this is easy. I could really have my own 99 Cent. And I can't tell you how bad mine is. It really made me appreciate how difficult it is to make something up.

Q: We hear more and more about Berlin and London's art scenes. What do you think of the idea that these cities are usurping New York's role as an art centre?

A: New York was, in one time in the 1960s, the centre of the art world. But that centre lasted only briefly. As early as the 70s, New York seemed like the most provincial place in the art world. In the late 70s, there was a kind of painting that was only practised in New York--a kind of abstraction, painting about painting, painting about trying to save painting. So that's why in the 80s, when art started coming from everywhere, New York was really shook.

And the truth is now that New York is a centre, but it is the trading floor of the art world. And it is an expensive place to live. When I go to Berlin or elsewhere, I am just so jealous and amazed at how people live, because the key to any art centre is you must be able to be poor in style, and that is getting very difficult in New York. You can do it in other expensive cities, like London or Berlin or Los Angeles. So something's gotta give in New York. Something has to change and it's unclear what that is.

Q: Just checking: are you saying this because you're used to non-New Yorkers beating up New York?

A: Well, I love New York. But I know there's a death star on the horizon. The leases will come up in Chelsea in the next five to 10 years, and, I think, when rental spaces become too expensive for the dealers, where will they move? New York's great advantage has always been to have one or two very condensed neighbourhoods of galleries. And I wonder, since New York is an island culture, an island city, where will they go? New Yorkers have traditionally not crossed water for culture. They just won't do it. It's herd instinct.*

For more of Jerry Saltz's writings, look for his book Seeing Out Loud (The Figures Press, 2003) or check out his reviews ported weekly at nymag.com.

Leah Sandals is an art writer based in Toronto. Her writing has been published in Flash Art, Sculpture and Canadian Art. She has never been a truck driver.

Sandals, Leah

Canada's culture war

Because Canada is at war in Afghanistan, one shouldn't be too careless about throwing war metaphors around. But it doesn't detract from the noble intention of that endeavour to say there is another war happening, and its opening salvo has already been launched. As of April 1, the public diplomacy budget for Canada's network of consulates worldwide will be cut to zero. That is, from $11.8 million to zero. As Val Ross notes in the Globe and Mail (September 30, 2006), the focus of the cuts are discretionary funds for the promotion of culture. So it's a culture war, and Canadians need to decide whether they care about it or not.



Almost twelve million dollars is quite a saving. Especially if you can convince the public that the programs you cut were profligate in the first place. This is the Tories' strategy. A federal government press release of October 25, 2006 characterizes monies previously allotted to cultural diplomacy as "wasteful." In the public response to this the tendency is to debate the numbers--defending the value of Canadian culture, Ross writes, "Canadian cultural exports ... total almost $5 billion annually"--and of course this is right.

It is important to counter the bizarre supposition that culture is somehow not a real industry. It is also important not to accept the terms of the debate as the Harper government has set them. The argument does not begin and end with the idea that culture traveling beyond our borders is not our concern. There is a wider issue at stake. Writing on the subject, also in the Globe (January 27, 2007), Margaret Atwood puts it succinctly: "If these things can be done in a minority government, lo, I say unto you, what things shall be done in a majority?" A government with only a tenuous mandate to rule that slashes the budget for cultural promotion so precipitously appears extremely narrow in its worldview, if not extremist. As Atwood further notes, we can only speculate what kind of ignorance and hatred motivates cuts like these.

A more measured and, indeed, humane view of the value of cultural diplomacy can be found in the pages of this issue of C. Candice Hopkins, director of the Vancouver artist-run centre Western Front, interviews Lida Abdul, an artist from Afghanistan. The two first met while both were participating in residencies at the Banff Centre, and a portfolio of Abdul's work was recently published in the Toronto glossy Prefix Photography. Canada's networks of cultural exchange are working well, in other words. And, significantly, Abdul's participation in the last Venice Biennale was financed in part by the Canadian consul in Kabul. Canadians should be proud that we could make this small contribution.

As Hopkins notes, Abdul was the first Afghan artist to represent her country at the Biennale. It takes incredible courage to make art when your country is a war zone. But as Abdul herself says, "You can't give up even in the face of massive destruction and tragedy. You have to affirm life. For me it is life-affirming to create work, to move on"

The Canadian diplomacy cuts are taking place in a cultural climate which has recently seen the suspension of publication of Parachute, the only Canadian magazine of any format that has a significant public profile abroad. That's no small achievement. The Canada Council spent 30 years investing in the development of this profile and in Parachute's impressive reach into international networks of magazine distribution. In recent years, however, they have been withdrawing their support. C and many other magazines are being subjected to the same series of cuts. Although unrelated to Harper's budget measures, the rationale is roughly the same: the Canadian magazine industry, like Canadian culture as a whole, should be able to fend for itself on the open market. It's a dubious argument and one that is contrary to global trends, as many people have pointed out. (Ross: "England, Germany, France and Italy all spend about $1 billion a year on cultural diplomacy") Other factors may have contributed to the decision to stop publishing Parachute, but the magazine's press release on the topic makes it clear that deteriorating levels of government subsidy were a determining factor.


Harper thinks Canadians don't care about culture. And maybe he's right about that. As of March 7, after circulating for over four weeks, a petition against these cuts had 6,134 signatures. Not a very impressive number. Multiply that number by 10 and you know a real cultural constituency is speaking. Taking an optimistic view, perhaps it's just a slow burner and not sputtering out.

WITHOUT HERMENEUTICS

Since standing before that picture, I have reconsidered the types of bodies that populate Shearer's work. For all the cultural anthropology embedded in his project, what often gets overlooked is the artist's interest in bodily presence. Dieter Roelstraete puts it aptly when he surmises, "Whereas the guitar and metal archives obviously purport to stage (and thus also reinforce) the clear-cut, anxiously patrolled gender lines that apparently come custom-made with American lumpen culture, [Shearer's] Cassidy & Garrett archival works paradoxically seem intent on breaking down those very same barriers, most notably by bringing into play the slippery, positively threatening notion of 'male beauty'--the great Unspoken of Western art history." The unspoken quality of the bodies Shearer presents, or their beauty, can be partly identified with the blank, stoic (or stoned) attitude of icons, though not in any conventional religious sense. The satanic overtones and cultish figures signal an upended devotion. But what is retained from the religious context is a yearning for a world where images play a more powerful role.

Shearer's art, I think, draws its greatest strength from its keen ability to intersect with the body. At times, his images seem to be all body. Faces are often at least partially obscured or look so relaxed in depiction that they provide no key to the subject, giving the rest of the body a greater role in the construct. If in this respect Shearer has left behind the enigmatic tradition of medieval icons marked by the face-forward stares of Jesus, Mary and the saints, the enigma of the icon remains--as the image that is a body as much as it depicts one. It is this notion of presence that allows a picture to come alive.

Having proposed that Shearer's work carves out a physical course for the encountering of images in our rapidly dematerializing culture, I'd like to leave this religiously tinged interpretation behind and, by way of conclusion, engage differently with the bodies that I continue to encounter throughout the artist's work. In other words, I have no intent here to follow the path of religious scholars and many an art historian in insisting on a hermetically sealed explanation for Shearer's "iconic imperatives:' In her seminal essay "Against Interpretation" Susan Sontag concludes, "In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art." No neat, well-rounded hermeneutic circle can reconcile girly boys like Leif Garrett with the all-male guitar aficionados and long-haired androgyny pictured in Larry in Germany (2004). To do so would be to leave behind the erotics of these bodies and of the images created for us to encounter them in.

VI. AFTER LIFE

As Shearer's project continues to take different forms, I tend to think that this is how the artist keeps us aware of the various embodiments of images available in our culture. If he is increasingly devoted to painting, it is perhaps because paint's variable consistency affords the most varied of all imaging techniques. The intensifying dialectic of the image and the body in african wall art and decor (in particular) reminds us that if images have a variety of embodiments available to them, so do people. If there is a god to invoke here, then it should be Eros (the god of life). The enumerable references to death and "the unholy" will dissuade only a literal viewer of Shearer's work. To propose an erotic encounter with his art in place of a hermeneutics is to engage in the life of his images, and it is also to consider how people can feel alive when they engage with them.

Excerpted from a speech on the Modellschau

Excerpted from a speech on the Modellschau, an event organized in 1915 to promote Viennese fashion, Vetter's comments make clear that the Werkstatte salon had not succeeded in its goal of bringing modernist fashion design to a broad public. Because of their originality, high quality, and exorbitant prices, these avant-garde clothes ultimately could not enter the everyday routines of the average metropolitan woman but remained exiled in the remote realm of high art.

It was not simply their status as art, however, that prevented most Viennese women from adopting the clothes of the Floge salon and the Wiener Werkstatte. The stylistically provocative designs proved to be too unusual for the average Viennese woman, who would not have been able to afford the garments had they conformed to her tastes, as well as for the women of the aristocracy, who would have had the financial resources to patronize these salons. Middle and upper class civil servants and members of the bureaucracy (professions which were barred to Jews) generally wore ready-to-wear clothing that conformed to the swiftly changing tastes of mass-produced fashion, while the women of the aristocracy followed the standards set by the Parisian designers of haute couture. Aside from isolated champions like Zuckerkandl, the clothing produced by the Wiener Werkstatte was still viewed with skepticism by much of the press, and most critics maintained that these dresses simply remained too bizarre for everyday use.

Part of the discomfort contemporary observers exhibited towards the new fashion may be traced to the vigilant message of the reform dress movement which had heavily influenced modernist clothing design in Vienna. The clothes created by the Schwestern Floge and the Werkstatte feature the basic characteristics of reform dress, eliminating the corset and utilizing loosely draped fabrics to allow freedom of movement. Reformist designers sought to gain the physical liberation of women by designing clothes which would not constrict the free, healthy movement of the body by subjecting it to the debilitating cage of a corset. German and Belgian attempts at clothing reform, such as those by Paul Schultze-Naumburg and Henry van de Velde, began to attract attention in Vienna as early as 1902, but its views were by no means conventional. Although Schultze-Naumburg declared in 1903 that "Corsets are out!", the "S-line" figure--a form produced by a corset which eliminated the stomach, pushed the bust forward and raised the buttocks--continued to dominate Viennese fashion. In 1908, women wore a hip belt over the corset and, in 1909, the long corset came into fashion, which laced away the hips to produce an extremely slim contour. his extravagantly slender silhouette reached its high point in 1911, when the skirt's narrow shape became so exaggerated that the woman could hardly move. Dress reformers' renunciation of the corset signified political as well as physical emancipation, and went hand in hand with the demand for women's rights. The Schwestern Floge and Wiener Werkstatte did away with the corset during a period in which it was still very much the standard in contemporary dress, and in which the liberationist agenda of the reform style coincided with an intensely threatening feminist movement. At a time in which Otto Weininger's startlingly popular book Sex and Character proposed the essential degeneracy and baseness of women, a style of dress associated with women's independence and intelligence was not going to find broad, unproblematic acceptance with the Viennese public.