Forty-One False Starts (29 page)

Rosalind Krauss pours tea from a clear-glass Bauhaus-design teapot into thin white porcelain cups and asks me if I have heard about “the Lynda Benglis thing.” I have. It is a famous incident. In the November 1974 issue of
Artforum
, an advertisement appeared—a two-page spread, in color—that caused readers to disbelieve their eyes. It showed a naked young woman, the artist Lynda Benglis, with close-cropped hair and white-rimmed harlequin sunglasses, standing with her breasts assertively thrust out, one arm and hand akimbo and the other hand clutching an enormous dildo pressed against her crotch. The ad not only caused a stir among the
Artforum
readership but impelled five of the editors—Krauss, Michelson, Masheck, and (for once aligned with Krauss and Michelson) Alloway and Kozloff—to write a letter, published in a subsequent issue, stating that they wished to publicly dissociate themselves from the ad, to protest its “extreme vulgarity” and its subversion of the aims of the women's liberation movement, and to condemn the magazine's complicity with an act of exploitation and self-promotion. An article about Lynda Benglis, written by Pincus-Witten, had appeared in the same issue as the notorious ad. According to the Alloway-Kozloff-Krauss-Michelson-Masheck letter, “Ms. Benglis, knowing that the issue was to carry an essay on her work, had submitted her photograph in color for inclusion in the editorial matter of the magazine, proposing it as a ‘centerfold' and offering to pay for the expenses of that inclusion. John Coplans, the editor, correctly refused this solicitation on the grounds that
Artforum
does not sell its editorial space. Its final inclusion in the magazine was therefore as a paid advertisement, by some arrangement between the artist and her gallery.”

Rosalind Krauss recrosses her handsomely shod feet, which are stretched out on the coffee table before her, and says, “We thought the position represented by that ad was so degraded. We read it as saying that art writers are whores.”

I had heard that in addition to the Benglis affair there had been a struggle between Coplans and some of his editors over the issue of “decommodified” art vis-à-vis advertising. Many of the most advanced artists of the seventies—the people doing conceptual art, performance art, film and video art, multiples—were deliberately creating work that had little, if any, market value. Their work constituted a kind of protest against the fact that unique, one-of-a-kind art objects, possessed of an “aura,” which could be bought and sold for huge sums of money—i.e., commodities—were still being made in our “age of mechanical reproduction” (as Walter Benjamin identified it in his classic essay). Coplans, who had become editor in 1972 and was trying to keep the magazine financially afloat (when he took over,
Artforum
could barely pay its printing bill), was felt to be selling out to advertisers by turning down articles on (unmarketable) film and performance and conceptual art in favor of articles on (marketable) painting and sculpture.

“Yes,” Rosalind Krauss says. “That's how we felt. And one of the things that Annette and I have done with
October
is to free ourselves from that. We've never had a single piece of gallery advertising. But our theory about John's courting of the dealers and gallery owners, which was certainly why Annette and I thought that various projects of ours were not acceptable to John—that theory failed in the light of what John subsequently did. Because John's policies in the last years of his editorship alienated every advertiser. He accepted Max's position and carried on in a way that had to do with becoming this—I don't know—this
Novy
-left type, dumping on the art market, and writing all kinds of attacks on it, and running the magazine absolutely contrary to the interests of the dealers and the advertisers, to the point that the owner, Charlie Cowles, simply sacked him.”

I ask Rosalind Krauss what she thinks of the present
Artforum
. She replies, “I just got so bored with it that I stopped subscribing. I've just not looked at it. I'm just not interested in it. Ingrid's sensibility just doesn't interest me.”

I ask her what she thought of Thomas McEvilley's critique of William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe's primitivism show at the Museum of Modern Art—to whose two-volume catalog she had contributed an essay on Giacometti. The controversial McEvilley article appeared in the November 1984 issue of
Artforum
.

“I thought it was very stupid,” she says. “I think Tom McEvilley is a very stupid writer. I think he's pretentious and awful. His piece seemed to be primarily involved in trying—as Tom McEvilley always seems to be trying—to present himself as some sort of expert while misrepresenting what the museum was doing.”

“Did you read the exchange of letters that Rubin and Varnedoe had with McEvilley?”

“Yes. And I must say I found it very unpleasant, because you couldn't tell which side was the more horrible. On the one hand, you had Rubin and Varnedoe sounding like complete assholes and, on the other, you had McEvilley doing his hideousness. I have never been able to finish a piece by McEvilley. He seems to be another Donald Kuspit. He's a slightly better writer than Donald Kuspit. But his lessons on Plato and things like that—they drive me crazy. I think, God! And I just can't stand it.”

John Coplans's loft, on Cedar Street, has the look of a place inhabited by a man who no longer lives with a woman. There are ill-defined living and work areas (after being fired from
Artforum
, Coplans became a photographer, and the loft serves as his studio and darkroom as well as his living quarters), punctuated by untidy mounds of things on which a gray-striped cat perches proprietorially. The furniture is spare and of simple modern character. Coplans is a man of sixty-six, with curly gray hair and with black eyebrows that give his eyes a kind of glaring gaze. He speaks with a British accent in a vigorous, incisive, almost military way. (I later learn that he was in fact a British Army officer.) At the same time, there is something ingratiating and self-depreciating in his manner. Coplans leads me to a table strewn with papers and books, brings a bottle of seltzer water and two glasses, and talks about the early history of
Artforum
, in California.

The magazine, he says, was founded in San Francisco in 1962 by John Irwin, a salesman for a printing company who had formed the desire to start an art magazine—“a sweet, naive guy, in his early thirties, who had very little idea of what he was doing.” Coplans had recently come to San Francisco—he had gone to art school in London after leaving the army and was now a painter and occasional art teacher—and he was with the magazine from the start, serving as an adviser to the wide-eyed Irwin and writing reviews and articles. But Irwin's most important recruit was a brilliantly intelligent young man named Philip Leider, a law-school dropout who had briefly been the director of a San Francisco gallery that showed Coplans's paintings and was now employed as a social worker in the San Francisco welfare department. Within a few months of his joining the magazine, Leider was asked by Irwin to become the magazine's managing editor (and its only paid staff member), and then its editor—a position he held for the next seven years. But even as early as 1964 the magazine was failing financially. It was rescued the next year by the publishing magnate Gardner Cowles and his stepson, Charles Cowles, who had just left Stanford and was looking for something to do. Charles Cowles became publisher. (Irwin, when last heard from by Coplans, was running a dry-cleaning business in Cleveland.) “Gardner Cowles provided the magazine with an annual subsidy and Charlie with a job and a position in the world,” Coplans says. “But Phil Leider couldn't stand Charlie, who was concerned with social position and with the prestige of being publisher, and was indifferent to the everyday minutiae of publishing. Phil was the kind of intense human being who could sit for five years in this tiny office next door to Charlie Cowles and never say a word to him. Phil came out of a quite poor, nonintellectual Jewish immigrant family—Jewish immigrant in the most traditional sense: high morality and very involved with Jewishness itself. He got through college by writing papers for other people, at five or ten dollars apiece. He got a master's degree in English and then served in the army, where he worked as a typist—he was one of the fastest typists the army had. Later, he went to law school, but he sheered off from that. Phil was always wary, alert, and skeptical. He had no personal ambition; he was not a careerist in the American sense. He wanted nothing to do with power or money. He lived with his wife and children in the simplest way. Furniture was just plain, straightforward furniture, like mine—whatever could be bought cheap, like office furniture. He loathed and hated decoration, social ambition, careerism, making money. He dressed simply but neatly, in a black suit. The whole orientation of his life was his family. I've rarely come across a man so involved with his wife—they used to read together every night—and with his children. His only aberration was that every year he and his wife would drive down to Las Vegas, and he would take maybe a hundred dollars and gamble as long as the money lasted. Then he would come home; he had purged himself of frivolity for the year. He was an enormously articulate man, and he couldn't stand inarticulateness in others. He was offended by it, by the dumbness of artists. His best friends eventually were the artist Frank Stella and the art historian Michael Fried, two of the most articulate men in the American art world. I took to the guy tremendously; I really liked him, and he saw in me someone deeply strange and felt that there could be some dialogue between us. I have to say that he didn't trust me, really, because as time went on he thought—and he may have been right—that I was too interested in power. He saw in me some aspect of worldly ambition that he backed away from.

“I am a self-educated man. I was raised in South and East Africa, in a Russian-Jewish family, and I left school when I was sixteen. I joined the British air force and then the British Army, for a total of eight years of military service. I didn't go to college, but I wanted to learn everything. I was curious. I became an art historian. I taught art history at the University of California at Irvine. I became a curator at the Pasadena art museum, a writer, an editor. When I was editor of
Artforum
, I had half a dozen editors on my board. They were always quarreling with each other. They all hated each other. They were strong people, all academically very well trained, all extremely knowledgeable, the most experienced writers and critics in America, who had all gone through the various evolutions of art since the fifties. And now here's this young lady Ingrid Sischy, who goes in at about twenty-five and has been learning everything on the job and trying to find out what to do. She has no background in American art—this moment in art is all she can deal with—and she doesn't have the range of people I had. She's got a little board. She's got Germano Celant, who's a European, hardly ever here; and this Frenchman whom I simply don't know; and Edit deAk, a young woman like herself; and Thomas McEvilley, who is first-rate, absolutely first-rate; and a books editor who is a lightweight.”

As Coplans talks, my eye is drawn to a large black-and-white photograph on the opposite wall of a male torso and genitals. It is part of a series of photographs that Coplans has taken of his own naked body, which are soon to be shown at the Pace/MacGill Gallery here and have already been exhibited in Paris. Coplans gets up and shows me other pictures in the series: brutally searching examinations of an aging, sedentary, hirsute body, which refer both to ancient sculpture and to twentieth-century art and photography and have an appearance of monumentality and solemnity that almost obscures their underlying, disturbing exhibitionism. I am therefore not surprised by Coplans's subsequent unrepentant recollections of the Lynda Benglis incident:

“The ad was in response to Robert Morris's photograph of himself as a macho German, wearing a steel helmet and iron chains over bare muscles, which he used as a poster for a show of his work at Castelli/Sonnabend. This was her message to him. She wanted it to run in
Artforum
, and I said to her, ‘Look, the editorial content of the magazine can't be interfered with in any way. We don't allow any artist to have a role in what is published. I'm sorry, but you just can't have this in the magazine.' So she said, ‘Well, can I do an ad?,' and I said, ‘There is a publisher, and you'll have to ask him. I don't interfere with him, and he doesn't interfere with me. Go to Charlie Cowles and ask him.' Then Charlie came to me and said, ‘What do I do?' I said, ‘Charlie, make a decision. I will not be put in the position where you don't make a decision. You have to face the art world and the artists. I'm not saying anything. Make a decision.' After about three days of heavy sweating, Cowles came to me and said, ‘I can't
not
publish it. They would hate me.' I said, ‘That's right, Charlie.' So he said, ‘All right, we'll run it.' I made up the magazine and sent it down to the printer, and the printer refused to print the ad. So Charlie said to me, ‘It's solved. I'm off the hook.' And I said, ‘No, Charlie, you're not off the hook. Those printers have no right to refuse to print, and our lawyer will tell them so. They can't select what's going to appear in the magazine.' So I went down to the printer, and the head of the printing firm was a former brigadier general in the U.S. Army, and I'm a former army officer, too, and I said, ‘Come on, General, you know you can't do this.' He was a nice guy, actually. I said, ‘We have a contract with you. Don't let's have to go to law.' So the general said, ‘All right.' I went back to Charlie, and I said, ‘Charlie, it's going to be printed. I insisted that it had to be printed as a matter of principle.' Now, I was obviously interested in seeing that ad get published. My position was that every woman had the right to make her individual choice as to how she faced her womanhood. This was an artist, and she had made this choice, and I was determined to protect her choice. Annette Michelson and Ros and Max thought it was obscene, that it was too sexually explicit. They were wholly opposed to me. Whether I was right or wrong I don't know.”