David Deitcher

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  print Summer 2010

  White Columns, Paula Cooper, and El Museo del Barrio

  A LITTLE MORE than a year ago, a variety of news outlets reported that an estimated 350 hopeful artists had lined up outside the entrance to fabled New York contemporary art space White Columns—the site of numerous groundbreaking exhibitions, including “Artist/Critic,” 1983, “The New Capital,” 1984, Group Material’s “Resistance (Anti-Baudrillard),” 1987, and Fred Wilson’s “The Other Museum,” 1990. As it happened, these people were not queuing up to see artwork; nor were they there to protest an exhibition or, more predictably, to talk with staff members about show proposals. Rather, these hungry

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  previews September 2009

  ACT UP New York

  The list of lenders for this exhibition reads like a who’s who of the outraged queers who over twenty years ago created art that helped galvanize the movement to “take direct action to end the AIDS crisis.”

  The list of lenders for this exhibition, subtitled “Activism, Art, and the aids Crisis, 1987–1993,” reads like a who’s who of the outraged queers—among them gifted artists, filmmakers, designers, even a hairdresser—who over twenty years ago created art that helped galvanize the movement to “take direct action to end the AIDS crisis.” In addition to some seventy works of mostly collectively produced agitprop by, among others, Fierce Pussy, Gang, Gran Fury, Donald Moffett, the Silence = Death Project, and Ken Woodward, the show includes sketches and

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  print May 2009

  Paul Graham

  HOW MIGHT WE ACCOUNT FOR the burgeoning interest in the British photographer Paul Graham—who, in addition to his solo debut currently at the Museum of Modern Art, recently had two concurrent commercial-gallery shows in New York? It is partly, no doubt, a consequence of steidlMACK’s publication of a shimmer of possibility, a deluxe, limited-edition, twelve-volume set of books presenting photographs Graham shot between 2004 and 2006 on trips throughout California, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Texas. These books, which one can look at but not touch, are at the entrance

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  print April 2005

  “How Do We Want to Be Governed?”

  It’s been more than a year since the announcement of Roger M. Buergel’s appointment as director of Documenta 12, yet many of the questions that first accompanied the emergence of this little-known curator from Lüneburg, Germany, on the international stage remain: Is Buergel a logical successor to Catherine David and Okwui Enwezor? Will he offer, as art historian Sabeth Buchmann wondered in these pages last February, “less political discourse in exchange for art with a capital A”? A recent visit to Buergel’s “How Do We Want to Be Governed? (Figure and Ground)” (cocurated with Ruth Noack) at Miami

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  print October 2004

  Spiritual America

  “Popisms,” the second section in this month’s special issue, examines ten defining moments in the history of Pop since the '60s, revisiting key interactions between art and mass culture and looking closely look at how they were written into Pop history. Here, David Deitcher remembers the late lamented Lower East Side gallery Spiritual America, while Graham Bader, Howard Singerman and Kitty Hauser recall three shows—“High & Low,” “Helter Skelter,” and “Superflat,” respectively—that have shaped the story of Pop after Pop.

  For twenty years I kept a rather plain postcard tucked away in a folder of

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  print February 2004

  “The Last Picture Show”

  The pictures in “The Last Picture Show,” a survey covering the “conceptual uses” of photography from 1960 to 1982, demonstrate an approach to the medium that contrasts sharply with the one Alfred Stieglitz and his progeny developed to attain for photography the exalted status of Art. The Conceptualists’ stripped-down aesthetic, which sought to document an action or fool the eye and evinced a resolute lack of interest in the subtleties of the print, remains startling to this day.

  Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, 1960, first printed in a decoy of the French newspaper Dimanche, occupies a central,

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  print April 2003

  Tim Rollins

  DAVID DEITCHER: We met at the slide library at the School of Visual Arts in 1980. I remember you as an energetic, engaging young man with an idiosyncratic fashion sense. You wore only red and black, right?

  TIM ROLLINS: [Laughs.] That’s right, for two reasons. First, economy. Second, I was infatuated with the Russian Constructivists and how they developed forms to serve revolutionary politics—abstract designs that projected enthusiasm, progress, affirmation, even joy, as opposed to the abject imagery of, say, the German Expressionists. The Russian avant-garde explored what a militant beauty might

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  print May 1993

  David Deitcher

  SCANNING THE BOOK DISPLAY in the reading room at the Whitney Biennial, I was dismayed to come upon the pale-green and pink slip case of Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which I happened to be enjoying at home. Its presence on the Whitney’s hit list felt unmistakably grotesque, if possibly revealing.

  Conceived as an educational supplement to the Biennial, this “space of reading” includes a corner reserved for a user-friendly compilation of press clippings about the artists in the show, a centralized block of tables furnished with chairs and

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  print October 1992

  THE LIBRARY IN YOUR GOOD HANDS: RAYMOND PETTIBON

  In 1978, Greg Ginn, of the California-based punk band Black Flag, asked his kid brother Raymond Pettibon to lend the group a drawing for the cover of a new single. Ever since, Pettibon’s images have appeared on records, fliers, and album jackets for bands as obscure as Super Session (among whose vocalists are Pettibon and Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley) and as familiar as Sonic Youth. Pettibon also started producing slim, photocopied compilations of his cartoonlike drawings in the late ’70s, (which he would occasionally intersperse with others by a nephew, whom he dubbed with the Dickensian

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  print April 1992

  The Story That Won't Go Away

  A friend of mine told me she didn’t find JFK particularly homophobic—its several gay men, after all, are not confined to the usual stereotypes. Consider how the imprisoned gay hustler Willie O’Keefe describes businessman Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) to Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner), the New Orleans district attorney who will try Shaw unsuccessfully for conspiracy to kill President Kennedy: “He’s not one of those limp-wrists,” instructs O’Keefe, “he’s a butch John.”

  Were the even more “straight-acting” O’Keefe not referring to a trick he’d once turned, he might have described Shaw more accurately

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  print January 1992

  ART ON THE INSTALLATION PLAN: MoMA AND THE CARNEGIE

  TWENTY YEARS AGO New York’s Museum of Modern Art initiated a series of modest shows, called “Projects,” to “keep the public abreast of recent developments in the visual arts.”¹ On the surface this sounds like proof of the Museum’s commitment to contemporary art, but it would be more accurate to say that the series only enabled the Modern to avoid a more substantial involvement with new work.

  The “Projects” series was launched after one of the most ambitious and controversial contemporary-art shows in MoMA’s postwar history, the “Information” exhibition of 1970. This broad, anarchic survey of

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  print February 1991

  BARBARA KRUGER: RESISTING ARREST

  I’m interested in making art that displaces the powers that tell us who we can be and who we can’t be.
  —Barbara Kruger, 1989

  IT SOMETIMES SEEMS as if curators, critics, and journalists alike are doing their best to eradicate “critical” post-Modernist art from the historical record. This can happen even when the opposite effect is intended: the organizers of the “Image World” exhibition, for example, at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989-90, lavished upon works by Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Allan McCollum, and others such a heady blend of museum formalism and disco pyrotechnics that this art’s social and discursive implications were all but obliterated. It was not