print April 1994

Introduction

IF WE LOOK TOO HARD—or better, hard enough—at “masculinity,” its meaning dissipates, “as when a word is repeated over and over.” This image is from an essay by filmmaker Todd Haynes that appears in this special section of Artforum. Several decades of feminist, gay and lesbian, and race studies have subjected the masculine imperative to sustained inquiry, simultaneously challenging the fixity of gender designations and exposing them as vaporous propositions; nevertheless, it remains difficult for us to talk about our power as men. Looking hard at masculinity is what Haynes does in his text (as

print April 1994

A Clown’s Coat

THE DEMAND FOR LOVE. Thus Roland Barthes captions the odd photograph of his mother holding him. He is perhaps six or seven. He is almost as tall as she, almost too big to be held in this way. The adult Barthes can already be read in his face: the pale skin, the thick blond hair, the anxious, deeply set eyes, the large nose, the full lips. His limbs are attenuated; his feet and hands are delicate. He clings longingly, even desperately to her. His head sweetly touching hers, they both gaze directly into the lens of the camera. Is he demanding love from her, we wonder, or is she demanding it from

print January 1993

THE FUTURE OF THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS

Last November, the Democratic National Committee asked New York gallerist Ronald Feldman to submit documents to the transition team of President-Elect Bill Clinton in support of the National Endowment for the Arts. To write the proposal Feldman enlisted Maurice Berger, a frequent contributor to Artforum. The proposal, which we are happy to publish below, was sent to the president-elect in early December with supporting signatures representing a broad spectrum of the nation’s cultural communities.
—The Editors

OVER THE PAST 12 years, our country has faced a serious crisis as a powerful minority of religious and political activists has attempted to stifle cultural freedom. For artists and other cultural figures, no form of interference has been more dramatic than the destructive limitations imposed on the National Endowment for the Arts since 1981. During the past decade, the NEA, an organization established to further the availability and excellence of the arts in the United States, has been under attack, its programs and awards subject to arbitrary acts of censorship and repression. The Endowment’s

books January 1993

Richard Bolton's Culture Wars

Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts, edited by Richard Bolton. New York: The New Press, 1992.

WHEN PATRICK BUCHANAN proclaimed at the Republican National Convention this summer that America was in the midst of a “cultural war,” it became clear that he had gone too far in allowing the venomous bigotry of the far right to slip out in full view of America. As with the crazed Joseph McCarthy at the end of his reign of terror, one could detect desperation in Buchanan’s sneering tone. After all, he was speaking to a nation that has grown increasingly weary of manipulation

print November 1992

Harper's Bazaar

FOR SEVERAL MONTHS this summer, New York busses and bus stops sported ads showing supermodel Linda Evangelista voguing for Harper’s Bazaar. The ad turned out to be a slightly altered version of the fashion mag’s September cover—a much studied text in that it announced the arrival of HB’s new editor-in-chief, Elizabeth Tilberis. Against an all-white ground, the striking Evangelista peered at us from behind a raised arm sheathed in a black beaded-net bodysuit by Donna Karan. In a neat design gimmick, the third a in Bazaar slipped from the magazine’s logo into the model’s hand, cupped in an ambiguous

print September 1992

the NEA

IN THE LATE SPRING of this year, local and state arts groups received their copies of a promotional film sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The purpose of this nine-minute movie, issued in anticipation of the agency’s Congressional reauthorization battle over the summer, is to reassure the country of the NEA’s wholesomeness. To the accompaniment of that supremely comforting public figure Walter Cronkite reciting clichés about the beauty and efficacy of the arts, Native Americans dance, students tour a museum, Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic, and Ray Charles

print April 1992

Oliver Stone's JFK

LATE IN JANUARY, Pat Dowell resigned as film critic for the Washingtonian magazine when its editor, Jack Limpert, pulled one of her reviews from the February issue. As Limpert saw it, the piece praised an “extremely dumb movie,” and left its “bizarre picture of Washington” unchallenged. He had a professional responsibility, he felt, “to protect the magazine’s reputation”—a reputation that presumably would have been jeopardized, at least in establishment circles, by Dowell’s description of the film as a “brilliantly crafted indictment of history as an official story.”

Much of the rest of the

print January 1992

Maurice Berger

DURING A RECENT, EXTRAORDINARY EPISODE of the CBS sitcom Designing Women, cast members engaged in an alternately horrifying and hilarious recapitulation of the divisive issues raised by the Hill-Thomas hearings. Mary Jo Shively, for example, an angry, newly committed feminist who wore a green shirt emblazoned with the words “He Did It,” wondered if Senator John C. Danforth’s off-the-wall theories about Professor Hill’s sanity were a reflection of his own mental problems. The preppy, uptight Allison Sugarbaker, donning a shirt that read “She Lied,” insisted that Judge Thomas was the victim of

print October 1991

Todd Haynes’ Poison

A child is born and he is given a name. Suddenly, he can see himself. He recognizes his position in the world. For many, this experience, like that of being born, is one of horror.¹

DURING THE OPENING CREDITS of Todd Haynes’ recent film Poison, a boy’s hand slowly riffles through the objects in his foster parents’ bedroom. The room is dark, and the camera wanders contemplatively along with the child’s fingers as they grasp seductive things—sequined fabric, a strand of pearls, silk brocade, a tassel, coins, a hairbrush, a porcelain box—and then, one by one, set them back in place. The

print Summer 1991

Black Power / White Fear

IN 1978, Boston’s public broadcasting station WGBH—ostensibly committed to politically provocative and liberal broadcasting—commissioned filmmakers David Koff and Musindo Mwinyipembe to produce Blacks Britannica, “a one-hour film documenting blacks in Britain speaking about the socioeconomic and political conditions in which they live.”¹ The film’s depiction of racism, economic exploitation, discriminatory jurisprudence, and police repression in England, and its overall antiimperialist and Marxist message—a “revolutionary message” that might speak forcefully to American blacks, who must often

slant February 1991

Reversal of Fortune

The effect is certain but unlocatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands in a vague zone of myelf; it is acute yet muffled, it cries out in silence. Odd contradiction: a floating flash.

—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1981

It is a bitterly cold night in Newport, Rhode Island, several days before Christmas 1980. The camera focuses on the lavish dining room of Clarendon Court, the palatial estate of Martha “Sunny” von Bülow and her second husband, Claus von Bülow. The attractive von Bülow family—Claus, Sunny, their teenage daughter Cosima, and Sunny’s 21-year old son

print November 1990

Yvonne Rainer's Privilege

SINCE ITS RELEASE FIVE YEARS AGO, Yvonne Rainer’s film The Man Who Envied Women has stood as an important challenge to the white, middle-class values of most academic theoretical feminism. The film’s narrative centers on Jack Deller (Bill Raymond and Larry Loonin)—a white college professor, “feminist,” and lover of women—and his estranged wife (not seen but narrated by Trisha Brown), whose words serve as a kind of Marxian-feminist counterpoint to Deller’s more hermetic appropriations from Foucault and Lacan. Deller is indeed complicated, as becomes clear when we see him doing what he presumably

print October 1989

WORLD FAIRNESS

AS THE 1980s DRAW to a close, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the guardians of first world culture to ignore the production of third world peoples and Western people of color. Sometimes the acceptance of the Other in mainstream contexts merely reiterates old exploitive patterns: the comfort with which white artists have appropriated the styles and forms of the “exotic,” for example—in “primitivist” high Modernism as in the ongoing confiscation of black musical idioms by white rock ’n’ roll artists—can certainly be collusive with a power dynamic that excludes, ignores, and steals. The

print February 1989

OF COLD WARS AND CURATORS

ON THE EVENING OF June 19, 1953, the journalist Bob Considine offered an eyewitness account from Sing Sing Prison of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Convicted of conspiracy to steal and then pass to the Soviet Union “the secret” of the atomic bomb, Ethel, 38 when she died, and Julius, 35, were the only American citizens ever given a death sentence for espionage by a United States civil court. Considine’s lengthy description, filmed by Hearst Metrotone News but never distributed, was alternately scornful, emotional, and rattled—not surprising for one who had just witnessed the gruesome

books December 1985

A Violent Life and Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation.

A Violent Life

By Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated from the Italian by William Weaver, New York: Carcanet, 1985 (published in Italy in 1959, and in England in 1968), 320 pp.

“I WOULD LIKE TO make it quite clear to the reader,” writes Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a prefatory note to A Violent Life, “that everything he reads in this novel really happened, substantially, and continues really to happen.” The subject of Pasolini’s slice of “reality” is the underside of Rome’s slums. The book centers on Tommaso, a snot-nosed member of a rowdy gang of juvenile delinquents. Tommaso’s hopeless world—the suffering,

books May 1985

The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers

The central thesis of this much awaited book is that Modern art emerged from a desire to represent the uncertainty and class tensions of Paris’ new urban ism. Concentrating on three figures of the late 19th century—Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Georges Seurat—T.J. Clark explores the convergence of form and content in early Modernism. He argues, for example, that Manet’s Olympia, 1863, through surface detail, signifies the subliminal connection between prostitution and class struggle, thus negating the myth of the courtisane perpetuated by the salon. Manet’s Un Bar aux Folies-Bergère, 1882, he

books May 1985

The Real World of the Impressionists: Paintings and Photographs 1848–1918

Yann Le Pichon’s intention to “recreate the intimate milieus” that shaped painting in France from 1848 to 1918 is unnecessary, given the number of extensive and well-documented studies of the Paris of early Modernism. This poorly researched and spare effort is organized into six chronological chapters, each covering a quartier of Paris (or a country site) that was significant to the avant-garde. In the foreword, Maurice Rheims of the French Academy echoes Le Pichon’s bankrupt thesis: “The vision of happiness . . . celebrated in these canvases is . . . a kind of salvation wrested from the work

books May 1985

Ficciones

“Obviously Borges and . . . LeWitt have traveled to the same remote and pristine territories by different, circuitous routes,” said Alastair Reid in the newsletter of the Limited Editions Club; it was Reid who suggested the pairing of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones (1945) with the drawings of Sol LeWitt. Alexander Coleman’s introductory essay for this elegant, limited-edition volume evades this most important convergence between Borges and LeWitt: the questioning of the models of reason that forms the basis of modern thought. Moreover, the rarefied, estheticized character of the presentation—the