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I think art magazines are perhaps taken more seriously everywhere other than those places where art is made, exhibited and sold, where they tend not to be regarded as authoritative but are instead seen as instruments necessary to one's career and to the acquisition of power. What I want to concentrate on here, though, are the educational implications of the possibility that art magazines may no longer be places where one actually sees very much of the art that's being made at any given time. What one sees instead is a particular art world, an institutional system which simulates that to which it refers and thereby symbolically administers.
Even some of the current administration's followers seem dimly aware that there may be a problem with this. Having showered praise upon Hal Foster's most recent hagiographical rationale for the status quo -- aptly if awfully entitled The Return of the Real -- in a recent book review in (p. 30-34, Nov. `96), Charles Harrison nonetheless felt obliged to conclude with a respectfully demure aside to the effect that the pool of examples on which the author based his argument was rather small. From the point of view of practicing artists, certainly, but also from that of the art school, this is a pressing question, suggesting as it does that while the official language is one of inclusion in practice its effect is to exclude.
There are more art magazines now than there were 30 years ago when Artforum was founded, and in the past 20 years they have sought to become more continuous with the general culture than hitherto, in a word to be inclusive rather than exclusive. I recall Jon Borofsky telling me more than ten years ago that he'd been at a magazine stand in Beverly Hills and two cops had pulled up and one of them had bought a copy of Artforum. All that was required was an art that addressed the concerns of the populace at large, which is to say consumerism and resentment, which in art means art about commodities and art about power, art about products and art about ideas, and such art has accordingly become ubiquitous and is what art students see in the art magazines.
Contemporary art journals mirror the general culture inasmuch as they do not regard art as mysterious and alien, but as transparent and exhausted, and they converge with it in their desire to see and enjoy the subordination of the art object to that which it is said to have once been indifferent. In confirmation of this belief, most of the contemporary art that gets exhibited and written about is suspicious of art as such and is grounded in a counter-esthetic of, usually, one of two sorts -- Pop or Conceptualist.
These are Duchampian arguments, and as I've said elsewhere, Duchampianism provided the `80s art world with a version of postmodernism that galleries can sell. The art world wanted postmodernism in the sense that it was sick of modernism, but it couldn't afford to want what postmodernism implies, which would be something like the end of an art history describable in Hegelian terms. Duchampianism preserves modernism by demystifying it, thus prolonging it through critique. Such demystification always presents itself as metacritical, which is its commercial strength and the basis of its appeal to art historians.
Moreover, the art of the `80s raised no questions about Duchamp's definition of art's problematic while attaching it wholesale to the aspirations of the Frankfurt Institute. The crucial text was Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, which permitted the art of the `80s to make the ready-made into a lens through which to look at the question of high and low culture and to maintain that question in a persistent condition of artificial resuscitation. The art magazines conspire in that artificiality and derive sustenance from it. Thus has the ready-made been assimilated to what might be described as a social realism of the symbolic, the constant theme of which is that art is dead but its ghost is a populist and very productive.
Following Calinescu, I'd agree that once one has Warhol one doesn't need Duchamp. Following that, I'd suggest that Baudrillard is right and that where Warhol "made nullity and insignificance into an event where it was transformed into a fatal strategy of the image," his successors "have nullity only as a commercial strategy, to which they give the form of publicity, the sentimental form of merchandise, as Baudelaire said" ("Le complot de l'art," Liberation, 20 Mai 1996).
The social realism of the symbolic proceeds from the notion that art is dead but has an afterlife as its own critique, which takes the form of a redemptive engagement with the everyday. The latter proceeding from the assumption that there's nothing wrong with the everyday but art is beyond redemption. Therefore, one does not find in contemporary art magazines any arguments about the success or failure of works or larger projects. Appearance in print renders success presumptive. What is discussed instead is what the work is about in the old-fashioned sense of its subject matter, the importance of which is already presumed for the same reason.
It's in this sense that I'd summarize the recent history of art magazines as a passage from art to everything else. In the `60s there was a lot of formalism in the art magazines. Artforum's square format said a lot about its founders' interests. This, by the way, raises a question which can't be pursued here, which is that the exfoliation of art journals comes after the heroic era of Greenberg and Rosenberg and so forth--there was no Greenberg magazine, but there was a question about the extent to which Artforum should be a Greenberger magazine. In respect to which there was plenty of hostility to formalism, however conceived, already present in the Artforum of the `60s, all of which had to do with the need for a ritual victory over the absent but thus more present Greenberg rather than with anything that was going on in a work of art.
In the `70s this kind of resistance to what we'd now call "theory" won its victory in a convergence of populism with the marketplace that would set the tone for the rest of the century. "Theory" was by and large banished from the art magazines and obliged to find refuge elsewhere, including in October, which was invented for that purpose. The art magazines would henceforth retain "theory" for guest appearances only. Persons reputed to be important theorists would sometimes be asked to write something, not too long, about a specific cultural event or phenomenon like Disneyland or Documenta or somebody's retrospective.
Otherwise by the end of the `70s populism had become both the norm and normative. The stage was set, just as Carter set the stage for Reagan, for the `80s and `90s, where art itself would be regarded as both passé and too elitist for comment in art magazines, its memory and its critique instead serving as a base from which to address cultural production in general, and indeed as kinds of simulated cultural production themselves.
Here it should be said that once again Artforum set the tone and the pace. ARTnews, once the journal in which Barnett Newman and Panofsky traded letters about whether Newman should have written "sublimus" instead of "sublimis," has long since settled into being the CNN of contemporary art. Like CNN, it tells you only about money and power and simultaneously that they are the only things worth telling you about. Arts somehow failed to survive, I think because Paul Shanley and Barry Schwabsky liked art too much.
Every magazine that's emerged in the last 20 years has defined itself in relation to Artforum, which in turn apparently sought to resemble other magazines, like Rolling Stone and Interview, which cast a wide net in terms of topics covered while maintaining an unambiguous ideological position, known as an editorial policy. Like them, it usually has something on identity, film, style and politics. It locates these discourses in an art context by publishing them, and the process is reversible, art thereby being relocated within these discourses.
As to the educational question, some will remember when writing was frowned upon in studio classes. It was felt to get in the way of a direct experience of the object. Now the object is as likely to be writing itself as much as any kind of thing. Which is to say that the focus of art education nowadays is in some respects the language of (the) art (world). Were there a question about for what kind of school contemporary art might call, it would have to be one responsive to the fact that contemporary art itself recalls the French Academy of LeBrun, in that its dominant styles -- Conceptualism and Pop and their derivatives -- are nothing if not approaches to art which define it as an array of legible signs of stable, if periodically contested, meaning, which privilege the graphic and are about power, institutional and symbolic. That is why it is so well-suited to reproduction and the world of words.
If Pop and Conceptualism -- the two sides of the Duchampian coin -- lend themselves to dissemination in magazines in a way that other art can't, it's difficult to say which preceded which, Duchampian art or the Duchampian art journal. Conceptualism's success was in part predicated on its use of photography and print, and by the same token art about popular culture is likely to recycle what was a printed image to begin with. This is one reason why Andy Warhol's posthumous retrospective at the Modern was a bore but the catalogue is terrific. Pop and Conceptualism substitute legibility for visibility. And both -- the one because of its predilection for the oblique, the other because of its preoccupation with the banal -- provide for discussion which can go almost anywhere, thus allowing the visual arts to be accompanied by a discourse which seems to take in everything in the world.
Hypothetically, the art magazines are where art made within the gallery system may be found adjacent to that which at least rhetorically was not. The art magazine can contain that which can be contained by the system and that which is part of the system by not being a part of it. Museums have come to resemble the art magazine, containing some installation art inherently critical of or otherwise putatively indigestible by the gallery system (which of course doesn't mean that the artist doesn't have a gallery), some art which unquestionably could be sold in a gallery and once was, and has now entered the ether of art history, and some work by very young people exhibited in a manner analogizable to the review section at the back of Artforum or any of its competitors.
This would be one sense in which one may say that the art world exists to end up in an art magazine. Institutions simulate the scope of the magazine, the art works which are said to be the most critically significant are those which look best when reproduced. Art about reproduction is by definition what such a context requires and is bound to privilege. It is in this sense that it seems clear that the magazines, which have flourished as a result of the triumph of an approach to art which was especially suited to reproduction, were themselves what permitted it to develop in the first place.
Here one should note that the Warholian predilection for the already reproduced has eliminated a lot of misunderstanding, and that in art this always has mixed consequences. Once, students who didn't happen to live in New York responded to reproductions of Barnett Newman's work by making paintings more immaculate than any Newman ever was, with the result that all sorts of things happened, interesting local movements grounded in misunderstanding, local adaptations of an imperfectly transmitted cosmopolitan model. Reproductions made things look perfect, and people who were for example in Los Angeles and already thinking of the perfect finishes of automobiles were able to put this misreading together with their own interests in a productive sort of way, subsequently becoming enraged at the lack of enthusiasm shown for their work by people in New York.
This condition has been eradicated or at least seriously eroded by the rise to international popularity of art founded in documentation, the photographic, and the textual. Although the international style which this kind of art and its criticism have instituted has not entirely succeeded in eliminating local differences, it seems possible to say that nowadays people may work in different locales but they all start from the same place. Germans document young people with pimples differently than do artists in Los Angeles, who have more in common with them in this and nearly every other regard than with artists in New York. Everyone has a very clear sense of what everyone else is doing, everyone understands that pimples are important because they're disgusting, thus critical of the work of art and in the same breath affirmatively continuous with the desire to shock which characterizes youth culture while being in that reassuringly Hegelian. Everyone savors these differences secure in the knowledge that they share a common dogma.
The place they start is the magazine, where they mean to end, and which itself is no longer in the business of striving to discuss the irreproducible, but in presenting and discussing images made for representation and dissemination. Walter Benjamin was obviously wrong, reproduction and reproducibility guarantee the contemporary work's aura rather than subverting it, and for this reason it's tempting to believe that that which reproduces best is best. There's little question that magazine editors think so.
The art magazines have become places where one learns what the people who have power in the art world are thinking about. And what that is is a kind of art that is wholly academic in conception and is therefore bound to put itself forward as the last word in anti-academicism. Which is to say, as many last words, some about popular culture, some about art institutions as the conceptual foundations of art objects or events, and which is in that the kind of art best suited, as a series of reconsiderations of signs of already established meaning, including graphic techniques considered for the way in which they may be said to signify in themselves, to the format and resources of the art magazine. The difficulty for the art student, and for art education, is to recognize the place of the art magazine in the game considered as a whole at a time when the magazines are active players in it.
Because if the hegemony of anti-retinal art and its theory which is characteristic of the contemporary situation is reinforced by, and also a product of, art magazines, then art magazines are part of that structure or network or condition which, in being the one which defines the current situation, is equally by definition that beyond which art students should be struggling to get, the means to do which being what art school should be seeking to provide. That a kind of social realism, variously manifested but always founded in Conceptualism and Pop at the level of style, and in a for the most part unstated reconciliation between Habermas and the Frankfurt Institute and Foucault at the level of critique, should have been in charge for so long means that it's probably time for a change.
If so, the situation to be changed would be one in which the magazines are complicit and which would therefore present them with a certain challenge. On the other hand it is not clear whether they would notice its taking place, because they've largely already become contexts for the discussion of almost everything but art, which means they posit a structure in which art has a fixed and immutable identity as the position from which one discusses cultural change in general. If Diderot used to make up paintings and then describe them, now one doesn't have to do that because every object or substitute for an object opens up onto the same themes: the death of the object; the conditions of its appropriation; culture as exclusion and the art world as a place for symbolic redemption through an inclusion which will bring with it redefinition, or the other way around.
Art itself, which is to say the Kantian art object, plays a role in all this comparable to the spectral role Derrida has shown Marx to play in any discussion which wants to believe that history is over. But art itself is what art students go to school to learn to make, or unmake, and some of them may seek to make it be other than what the magazines currently say it is. And even though they are themselves incarnations of that power through weakness or slackness which allows everything to become folded in to what the market -- in either things or ideas, or in either as either -- can use, it isn't clear that the magazines could accommodate that which might be made in response to them but which treated them not as the means by which information is disseminated but as part of that which has in some way to be got past or around. Doing so would require editorial policies that saw the currently prevailing dogma as representative only of one position among many rather than as the one which summed up all the others.
Art schools have always sought to adjust their curriculum to what was fashionable. It is after all probable that most people seeking MFAs are stimulated to do so by something which is actually happening, and being reported upon, in contemporary art. But I have suggested that art magazines no longer tell anyone about art as such, so much as they tell one what those who administer the art world are thinking about, which includes quite a wide range of subjects. That is what art students and others read them for. If they want to find out something about art they read a book, or, possibly, in a journal like October or Critical Inquiry, an essay which would be far too long for consideration by any art magazine and what's more might mention Derrida.
Which brings me to a concluding remark. It's about the art galleries. I have said elsewhere that it troubles me that art history has become a matter of historians interpreting shopkeepers' decisions, by which I mean to suggest that people with PhDs should perhaps be less acquiescent than they are in letting people with bachelor's degrees tell them what's important. I think this is unfortunate because it leads to a lot of interesting writing which finds itself breathing life into uninteresting things.
I've also suggested that art magazines may be taken more seriously everywhere other than those places where art is made, and it's in this sense I think that one might nowadays look as much to the demystification of the magazine as to the magazine for demystification. Demystified, it remains a valuable institution. It lets one know clearly what the power elite wants to talk about. It is, however, prevented from addressing the instability of artistic production because it long since became committed to a semiotic of absolute reproducibility and equivalence, where the magazine grants the object an aura by confirming its viability as an object suitable to a discourse of, not surprisingly, reproducibility. A world of signifiers with entirely stable signifieds.
The academicism of the contemporary art magazines is inscribed in their faith that art doesn't change -- because it's over and what's more it was wicked -- but the world changes around it, and art magazines record the art or substitute for art that records that change. For this reason art magazines are quite unlikely to help anyone to find a way out of the academy of which they are an integral part and whose language they share, but for exactly that reason they remain indispensable guides to moving around within the involuntary hermetic semiotic of the contemporary art world.
This paper was originally given at the 85th annual conference of the College Art Association in New York, Feb. 12-15, 1997, on a panel titled "The American Art World and Mass Art Magazines from 1945," organized by Jennifer Way of the University of Texas at Austin.
JEREMY GILBERT-ROLFE is a painter who teaches at the Art Center, Pasadena. His most recent book is Beyond Poetry; Critical Essays on Visual Arts, 1966-1993.
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