Max Kozloff

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  print September 2012

  Max Kozloff on his “The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle”

  WOE TO THE CRITIC who lets fly with absolutes! I occasionally did that, decades ago, alarmed that some then-current artistic tendencies might lead to repellent outcomes. A specialist in worry, I was capable of turning lamentation into kvetching, vitriol, and rant. Such was the case with “The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle,” a piece I wrote for these pages in October 1971.

  In the event you don’t remember or never heard of an essay published forty-one years ago, let me say it was in protest of an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a show that presented the results of an

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  print November 2009

  James Ensor

  AMONG THE FOUNDERS of modern Western art, James Ensor created work that stands out as an indictment of bourgeois society—to a point of scathing derision. While many advanced artists kept their distance from the subject of the tawdry capitalist present, he took it on. This was in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend, in the 1880s, where Ensor painted in a studio above his family’s curiosity shop. There—still in his twenties—he developed an insolence of pictorial statement comparable to his anarchist sympathies in politics. Figures of authority were his special bêtes noires, while

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  print March 1998

  MASS HYSTERIA: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF WEEGEE

  It is not enough to be exceptionally mad, licentious, and fanatical in order to win a great reputation; it is still necessary to arrive on the scene at the right time.
  —Voltaire
  

  Paparazzi are notoriously ruthless characters who trade in visual exposure and derision. In the photographs taken by Weegee for the New York tabloids of ca. 1935-45, those paparazzo effects of sensationalism and impudence are crossed with laughter, which destabilizes everything. Though his methods are often expeditious in themselves, they are so charged by conflicting drives as to produce strikingly incongruous emotional

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  print November 1997

  “Sunshine & Noir: Art In L.A. 1960–1997”

  Los Angeles artists enjoy the unique yet dubious privilege of living in the lap of mass culture. But if they feel proprietary toward the mythmaking machine of movies and television, their closeness has also encouraged a psychological remove from it. Though they often allude to frenzies on the screen, their central concern is with pop dramas of the mind. As a vehicle for our collective fantasies that give a less than social pleasure, the movie is to them as inevitable a theme as nature is to “landscapists.”

  Such an overview is offered by “Sunshine & Noir,” a deliberately potluck exhibition of Los

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  print April 1997

  CRITICAL REFLECTIONS

  IT WAS PROBABLY SOMETIME in 1963 that the founder of a struggling, funny-shaped, and at that point very new art magazine out of San Francisco came across the writing of a young critic in Art International whom he obviously decided he admired. That, at any rate, was the year John Irwin invited Kozloff to contribute to Artforum from New York. Though barely aware of the journal at the time (“I was in France on a Fulbright—I think a magazine with an odd format devoted to art had appeared before I left”), Max was delighted to do so. Decades passed, and publishers and editors came and went (Max himself serving as executive editor for a few years); today, Max Kozloff is surely the only writer regularly publishing in Artforum who would recognize John Irwin if he passed him on the street.
   
  Veritable tsunamis have broken and receded in art and art criticism since 1963, and Max has watched them wash in, and then out, with a certain curmudgeonly glee. Meanwhile he has stuck fiercely to the standards enforced by his own intelligence, by the rigorous care with which it is his habit to inspect the visual images that engage him, and by the searching way he combs his own responses to them. Max would probably frown at the idea that those responses should be grounded in any particular theoretical camp, and I think he feels this has put him out of step with a lot of the thinking that has been applied to art and photography during his lifetime. I also don’t think he minds. Call it the camp of Max: ferociously learned, voluminously wide-ranging, humanistic, tender at heart, but not at all forgiving of anything sensed as doctrinaire or narrow-minded. So far this camp has only one critic, and given Max’s views on simulations and simulacrums in art, I doubt he would tolerate cloning. Editorially if not scientifically speaking, this is a pity.
   
  Simultaneously elegant and stubborn, Max’s writing has appeared in most of the art and photo magazines I can think of and others besides, and he has published a civilized shelf—full of books (one of which, Lone Visions, Crowded Frames, has just been reissued by the University of New Mexico Press). But I first met him when he allowed me (at first rather begrudgingly, as I remember) to edit his articles for Artforum, and his conversation was one of the perks of employment there, so the magazine you are reading is the experience we share. A poltergeist that has haunted this publication for eons has been the mysteriously persistent impression that its text is impenetrable—technical, obscurantist, cabalistic. People seemed to enjoy floating that notion by me when I worked at the magazine, but if I challenged them on it, which I naturally tended to do, they would sometimes try to duck by pinning the blame on Artforum’s earlier history—at which point I usually found myself thinking, Now I know they’re bluffing: That was when Max was here! The essay I am honored to introduce shows how this critic’s writing has always worked: a challenging, closely argued statement, it has both breadth and style.
   
  —David Frankel

  MAX KOZLOFF

  Twenty-one years ago, after having switched my field from art criticism to writing on photography, I started to make photographs as well, and in earnest. It afforded a surprised insight into the process from “behind” a medium I had previously regarded only from the front. But there was no reason that this new intimacy should require the sacrifice of a previous distance. I was beguiled by picture-making and attached to writing about the art of others. Why not—like a few colleagues—be responsible for both? Back then, one who let it be known that he simultaneously practiced an art and

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  print October 1996

  “In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present”

  Photography brings us news of appearances, always; of events, often; and of personal approaches, sometimes. When considering “In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present,” at the Guggenheim, I was greeted by a spectrum of familiar genres with unexpected points of view. Instead of having to look from the “outside” at African subjects, a viewer was given perspectives from within their diverse cultures—and such interior horizons offered news to a Western public. Though some of its exhibitors have been shown in France and England, “In/sight” broke ground here, offering practically all its

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  print May 1996

  TIME STANDS STILL: THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF ROY DeCARAVA

  WHATEVER ELSE IT GAINED in the years following World War II, by the ’50s New York had lost some of its vitality and innocence. In the photographic record, the physical look of the city changed little, but its mood was much altered. Though the city’s retail buzz and signage were jazzier, its spirit was sadder. There remained little trace of the excited leveling and strut that had galvanized the city in the ’40s. Looking back at vintage shots of wartime New York, one got the impression that everyone then, of whatever origin, was engaged in a huge enterprise that united them in expansive defense

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  print September 1993

  Gilles Peress’ Cajamarca, Peru, 1991

  IT HAS ALL, maybe more than I would want, from a photograph of this world. André Breton spoke of the beauty of the “convulsive,” a quality he didn’t necessarily associate with photographs, though the Surrealists liked them. Somewhere there exists a Surrealist map of the world, and Peru figures on it as a place alarmingly swollen in comparison with its neighbors, a Peru of the mind as well as the earth, and the site of this convulsive image.

  I first came upon it a few months ago, in a color Xerox made from a slide, one of about 20 such pictures shown to me by the photographer, Gilles Peress. He

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  print Summer 1993

  STILLED LIVES

  THOUGH WE USE, HANDLE, AND observe objects of every sort, with the widest range of feelings, they seem placid when set beside the channeled dread we have of corpses. The chief reason we can look at most inorganic objects without horror is that they never lived. That’s an odd way to consider things, I know, but human death puts it in mind. The pathos sometimes evoked by objects when abandoned or ruined stems from the mortality of those who lived with them, and is always associated with past lives. These objects act upon the mind as surrogate bodies, possibly charged with memories, but nothing to

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  print November 1991

  LUNA PARK: A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

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  print October 1991

  JULIO GALÁN'S MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

  GONE ARE THE DAYS when artists in third world countries were helpless to define themselves except by their distance from the artistic center. For the center has lost faith in its centrality, and no longer knows how to lord it over a torrent of diverse inputs, as it once did through the graded culture of Modernism. That imperious belief system, based on a supposed transnational canon of forms, has been humbled—done in by both the runaway success of the ultra-American mass media, soaked up over the world, and the incoming waves of cultures from the colonized margins.

  Significantly, the outward

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  print May 1991

  CITY OF CROWDS, CITY OF RUINS: NOTES ON JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY

  But why are people so interested in ruins, unless there is a need to destroy an aesthetic order which has been dominant heretofore. Erotic energy aims at exciting cold violence. So long as this passion exists, ruins will exist all around you.
  —Arata Isozaki, 1988
  

  OF ALL THE WORDS we have to describe the thing: mob, throng, mass, horde, or swarm, each with its own inflections, the most social is the term “crowd.” After it decisively manifested itself as a revolutionary force, 200 years ago, the crowd in enlarged mercantile cities tended to be perceived as a phenomenon of spectacle. That