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I might end up a right-winger: writing counterpublics for the eighties

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I might end up a right-winger: writing counterpublics for the eighties

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I MIGHT END UP A RIGHT-WINGER:
WRITING COUNTERPUBLICS FOR THE EIGHTIES

by

Zachary Kaplan

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES

May 2012

Copyright 2012 Zachary Kaplan

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without the patient and precise advice of Rhea Anastas and Noura Wedell, this
thesis would not exist. I am grateful for the time they have spent on my ideas and writing.
Many thanks to Michael Brenson for joining my thesis committee—his considered
responses tested and improved my readings and reasoning. Over the past year and half,
Elizabeth Lovins has managed to make life at IFT exceedingly easy, I am much
appreciative of her daily efforts. I am indebted to my colleagues, particularly for their
willingness to swim through pages and pages and pages of in-process writing, always
proposing helpful ways forward. Thank you to Santiago Vernetti for helping me access
rare issues of wedge. Joshua Decter made this graduate program what it is today; he has
been and will continue to be a guide for my critical work.
Finally, I need to extend sincere thanks to my family and friends. To my father,
Roger Kaplan, for his unwavering support of my education, career, and, well, life in
general. To my siblings Aaron and Caitlin and their partners Julie and Dan, and to Lucas.
To my mother, Patricia Kaplan. To Nicholas Gitomer, Susan Estrada, and Max
Podemski. To Julia Kramer.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................. ii
List of Figures ....................................................................................................................... iv
Abstract ................................................................................................................................. v
Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Contexts and Conditions
Art/Criticism—A schematic arc, 1939-1976 ........................................................................ 8
Reagan’s iconicity and apocalypse left ................................................................................ 15

Chapter 2: Writing Counterpublics for the Eighties
October, Haacke, and the Limits of Modernism .................................................................. 20
Radical subjectivities at wedge ............................................................................................. 29
Political Art Documentation/Distribution’s Upfront and an activist majority ..................... 41
Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion and the persistence of the symbolic .................................. 51

Conclusion: Remainders ....................................................................................................... 59
Postscript ............................................................................................................................... 68
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 70

iv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Excerpt from “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression,” October 16 .......... 26
Figure 2. Cover of October 30 ............................................................................................. 27
Figure 3. Description of Hans Haacke’s U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 ...................... 28
Figure 4. Documentation of and Script from Robert Longo’s Empire in wedge 1 .............. 38
Figure 5. Cover of Kathy Acker’s Implosion ....................................................................... 39
Figure 6. Cover of wedge 7/8 ............................................................................................... 40

Figure 7. Installation view, PAD/D window project, 1982 .................................................. 49

Figure 8. Cover of Upfront, December/January 1981 .......................................................... 50

Figure 9. Cover of the New Criterion, April 1984 ............................................................... 58

v

ABSTRACT

This thesis reframes the history of the politicized artworld of the 1980s by centering on
the writing of artists and critics and the way this writing produced oppositional publics.
As traditional image-making seemed compromised by theoretical problematizations of
representation and the peaking of Ronald Reagan’s overwhelming publicity strategies in
the elections years of 1980 and 1984, criticism and publication projects took on new
relevance. This thesis addresses four efforts emblematic in their distinctive
positionalities. The preeminent journal October attempts to integrate politicized theory
and activism into its art historical discourse; the short-lived and theoretically-minded
periodical wedge aims to produce evasive subcultural subjects; the collective Political Art
Documentation/Distribution bolsters its agitprop efforts through a heterogeneous
periodical surprisingly honest and reflexive about successes and failures; and from a
problematic vantage, Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion, a Republican Party-funded art
magazine, tries to produce a conservative cultural public. Portraying experiments in
political viability in an uneven and unsettled field, this thesis maps a definitive chapter in
the history of criticism.

1

INTRODUCTION

This thesis takes as its object of study the writing of artists and art critics in the
early 1980s that concerned itself with producing politically-engaged counterpublics. As
generatively proposed by literary critic Michael Warner, a public is a space of discourse
self-organized by discourse. A counterpublic is a public self-produced like, but
positioned in subordination to a mass public. Additionally, writing is (and all actions in
fact are) subject to material and symbolic conditions (a simple example: I invoke Warner
to imbue onto my paper a certain academic legitimacy).
1
Moreover, writing contains
publics both past (those addressed upon writing) and future (those who engage writing as
it circulates), a confused temporality providing primary access to the given historical
moment in which a text was written. As such, there is a past and a present explanation for
siting this analysis in the early 1980s. There is a key trajectory in the United States
artworld context from Clement Greenberg’s mid-century Modernist heights, when only a
few figures directed so much of the critical attention of the artworld, to a proliferation of
writers and forums for their writing in the latter part of the century. By the end of the first
half of the 1980s, what had been only a few decades prior a critical artworld built out of
art-market-oriented monthlies, general culture publications, or weekly columns in daily
newspapers had blossomed into a feisty, intra-artworld ecosystem. There were now art
historical reformists like Rosalind Krauss and Benjamin Buchloh at the journal October,
critical mavens like Craig Owens integrating emerging theoretical modes at a dynamic
Art in America, pamphleting leftist activists at Political Art Documentation/Distribution,

1
See Warner, Michael, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), and, per forms of

2
well-funded conservative revanchists like Hilton Kramer and his New Criterion, small-
run published punks like Kathy Acker, and foreign academic philosophers like Jean
Baudrillard occupying seemingly incongruent do-it-yourself ‘zines. Each platform
proposed a public, each one articulated different routes forward for art and politics.
What brought the political into crisis was a seismic recalibration of the American
political situation: a definitive rending of the left-of-center policy direction set in the 30s
by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. President Ronald Reagan’s agenda shifted the
national consensus toward neoliberalism—a policy logic that uniformly maximizes the
private sector’s role as arbiter of governmental (in)action—as foregone conclusion across
the political spectrum.
2
Historian Daniel Rodgers has characterized this moment as the
‘age of fracture’ when the notion of an American center was shattered by libertarian-
inflected thought on the right and a fluid, identity-driven politics on the left.
3
In his
recently released historicization of Republican knowledge production, Corey Robin
effectively articulated the permanence of this reordering:
Just as the Republican administrations of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon
demonstrated the resilience of the New Deal, so have the Democratic
administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama demonstrated the resilience of
Reaganism…[its] embrace of unregulated capitalism and imperial power.
4

That the political ground radically shifted in the 1980s is not a point of great debate.
Girding this political change was a culmination of a visual turn in mass-media political
address pioneered by Roger Ailes (late of the Fox News Channel) to support Richard

2
See Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2005).
3
See Rodgers, Daniel T., The Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
4
Robin, Corey, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin (New York:
Oxford Press USA, 2011), 246.

3
Nixon’s candidacy in 1968.
5
The rise of the 24-hour cable TV news cycle and its cudgel-
like mélange of graphics, video, and word improved the efficiency of Ailes’s glossy
production. A former actor, Reagan met the medium. He twinned to himself “Reagan:”
an image and not a person, immediately likeable, Teflon, resolutely popular when policies
were resolutely not.
6
In the artworld and in academia, running alongside this mass-media
shift were questions of representation (who gets to articulate what and how, and to what
end?) and with that a continued suspicion of the individualized aesthetic object (a shift
seen from Pop art onward). This thesis reads the renewed urgency to and experimentation
with criticism in the 1980s as related directly to the compromising of the image by
theoretical problematizations and political publicity onslaught.
The present-day reasoning for my focus involves the manner in which the 1980s
has been historicized. Thus far we’ve had 1980s as testimony—perhaps an agonized
testimony, but testimony nonetheless. In part this is because those who have had the
authority to comment were necessarily participants themselves. Illustrative of this
proximity is Artforum’s 2003 two-issue history of the 80s, a retrospective addressing the
major artworld actors that defined the moment. While Jack Bankowsky’s introductory
editorial produced a memorable characterization of the decade as an “open wound,” his
note actually began with a phone call to a “favorite—and famously ‘difficult’—
contributor,” who remarked upon prodding: "I remember nothing of the '80s. Not a

5
See Perlstein, Rick, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York:
Scribner, 2008).
6
See Warner, Michael, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Publics and Counterpublics (New
York: Zone Books, 2002): 159-186.

4
thing."
7
I remember established ownership and experience as essential to the historical
methodology to be taken. And that Bankowsky never revealed the identity of this
contributor further excluded the uninitiated. For the voices historicizing the decade so far,
this mode of reflection appears to be tied to, on one hand, pseudo-embarrassed attraction
to youthful indiscretion. This was the point made by art historian Alexander Alberro in
The 1980s: An Internet Conference when he remarked after days of ‘coming-of-age
stories’ that he was “struck by just how personal this topic is.”
8
On the other hand, Helen
Molesworth, in her expertly articulated exhibition, This Will Have Been: Art, Love &
Politics in the 1980s, elaborates Bankowsky’s contention offering that if “the 1980s is an
open wound, then surely AIDS is largely responsible for causing it.”
9
Like refugees from
any large-scale crisis, testimony becomes a singularly viable mode of expressing the
inexpressible. Still, Molesworth’s retrospective—while compellingly moving beyond
many recriminations such as the proposed inherent misogyny of neo-expressionist
painting—relied on her position as a participant-observer. To that end, methodologically,
by reading the criticism produced rather than integrating a comprehensive oral history,
this thesis aims to mine the primary record to draw new connections across the period.
10

7
Bankowsky, Jack, “Editor’s note,” Artforum, March 2003, 27.
8
Maurice Berger, ed., The 1980s: An Internet Conference (Baltimore: The Center for Art, Design and
Visual Culture/Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, 2006), 234.
9
Molesworth, Helen, “This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s” in This Will Have Been:
Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, ed. Helen Molesworth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 15.
10
In keeping, I appreciate Isabelle Graw’s reassessment of neo-expressionism with regard to October’s
polemical writing. See Graw, Isabelle, “Conceptual Expression: On Conceptual Gestures in Allegedly
Expressionistic Painting, Traces of Expression in Proto-Conceptual Work, and the Significance of Artistic
Procedures,” in Art After Conceptualism, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchman (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2006), 119-133.

5
The first chapter of this study begins with a schematic timeline of art criticism
from Greenberg’s high-Modernism to a multi-faceted Postmodernism. This shift could be
characterized as one from the heroic, pseudo-nationalistic, monolithic meta-narratives
that framed practices for the traditional encyclopedic museum to the atomized, ironized,
fragmentary histories that fed the subversive, subcultural work of young artists aligned
with the alternative spaces movement.
11
The chapter continues with a description of the
political conditions of the 1980s, particularly the problem of the image under
Reaganism’s iconicity—the publicity image “Reagan.” The second chapter maps a
multiplicity of writing projects in relation to the politics of the moment, taking as hubs in
a vast network four publications: the eminent October, a short-lived, theoretically-minded
publication wedge, the broadsheet Upfront produced by the activist group Political Art
Documentation/Distribution, and as complicating gesture, a Republican Party-funded art
magazine, the New Criterion. Tethered to those hubs is an array of other voices
occupying the field.
For all this activity, if one looked to the critical art writing anthologies like Art in
Theory: 1900-2000, most of the writing treated in this thesis would go unfound.
12
More
likely, one would find some of this writing in contemporaneous collections like Art After

11
In the broadest terms, Postmodernism as originally defined by Jean-François Lyotard is production that
eschews meta-narratives of ‘progress’ (contra Modernism) and self-reflexively addresses the failure points
of representation. See Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Though I will
discuss Greenberg exclusively to chart an operative construction of Modernist authority that will wind
through the rest of this paper, there is no one Modernism (or Postmodernism). These concepts were debates
across expansive fields of critique and thus any static framing (like mine) only exists to formulate a specific
and provisional argument. Per alternative spaces movement, see Julie Ault, ed., Alternative Art, New York,
1965-1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
12
See Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, ed., Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
(Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing, 2002).

6
Modernism: Rethinking Representation, but those are of the moment, unsettled, and
insufficiently contextualized.
13
Moreover, if one looked to the years primarily discussed
in this thesis, 1980-1984, one would find a narrative shaded by the later ‘Culture Wars,’
by government funding cuts and debates over censorship.
14
While those histories bleed
into this study, I do not aim to re-inscribe a siege narrative. Rather, the second chapter
narrates an explosion of discourse—while acknowledging that even more is out there—so
as to identify experiments in political viability under conditions of crisis. I’ve chosen to
focus so tightly, in part, because of the jarringly potent bursts of Republican expansion
upon Reagan’s election in 1980 and reelection in 1984.
15
To that end, the majority of the
production described is work from the political left meant to counter-act the power of that
expanding Republican agenda. Yet there is a remainder referred to by the figure of Hilton
Kramer. That is, the ‘Culture Wars’ is a narrative of the force of economic and political
power over a domain trading in the symbolic, but the symbolic still has its weight.
This paper takes its name from an exclamation in Kathy Acker’s Implosion by the
character ‘Marxist Feminist:’ “I might end up a Right-Winger.” Acker’s book is a

13
See Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1984).
14
Among these conflicts; The Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (The Meese Report) in
1986; the refusal of The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. to exhibit Robert Mapplethorpe’s
1989 exhibition The Perfect Moment as a result of political pressure; the attacks by Pat Robertson, Jesse
Helms, and Al D'Amato on Andres Serrano for his artwork Piss Christ in 1989; and the "NEA Four"
(Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes) whose projects were defunded by Congress due
to political content in 1990. See histories like Brenson, Michael, Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA,
Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America (New York: The New Press, 2001), or anthologies
like Richard Bolton, ed., Culture Wars: Documents from the Recent Controversies in the Arts (New York:
The New Press, 1992).
15
Moreover, there is perhaps a natural break around 1985/1986 with the rise of AIDS activism, and the
controversial removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza in New York City, a key non-
obscenity-related conflict in the ‘Culture Wars.’

7
bombastic retelling of the French Revolution in 1980s New York. The sentiment of
‘Marxist Feminist’ sums the stakes of a paralleled revolt under Reaganism while
oscillating between a complex amalgamation of dejection, complacency, and resilience,
and reflexive self-awareness paired to inevitable participation in manufactured mass
publics. Through reflecting messy positions and methods—some that led forward and
others that dead-ended—this thesis hopes to capture this operative anxiety, mapping the
field of difference in criticism of the early 1980s with the urgency with which it was
lived.

8
CHAPTER I: CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS

Art/Criticism—A schematic arc, 1939-1976

While the recounting of Modernism tends (perhaps exhaustingly so) towards
Clement Greenberg, the critic’s rhetoric provides a clear point of departure for any
elaboration of art criticism’s direction for the better part of a century. “There can be, I
believe, such a thing as a dominant art form,” Greenberg intones near the outset of his
1940 essay, “Towards a Newer Laocoön.”
16
In the I, the critic inserts himself, and in the
believe, he asserts his deeply felt and informed opinion. The clause is authority summed
and projected. The word dominant proposes a hierarchy with one form lording over
another. Art form is a key term entangling the aesthetic, an object (certainly for
Greenberg) ordained into a form beyond the utilitarian. “There can be, I believe, such a
thing as a dominant art form.” In the phrasing Greenberg explicates much of the role of
the disinterested critic—disinterestedness meaning the construction of critical authority
based on impartial distinction, connoisseurship and autonomy. The Laocoön referred to
in the title is the great Hellenistic sculpture Laocoön and his sons (25 BCE). Greenberg
invokes the work as the paragon of the sculptural and from there argues that mediums
have certain specificities—sculpture expresses space, and more importantly for his
moment, painting expresses flatness. If the pure painting is flat, then it is necessarily not
layered. If the pure painting is not layered, then it necessarily entangles its surface. If the
pure painting entangles its surface, then the purest painting takes as its subject the

16
Greenberg, Clement, “Towards a Newer Laocoön,” in Artists, Critics, Contexts: Readings In and Around
American Art Since 1945, ed. Paul. F. Fabozzi (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education), 11.

9
application of paint on a surface. The reasoning leads inexorably to the abstraction of the
New York School painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett
Newman.
17

This essentialist argument dovetailed with Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and
Kitsch.”
18
In that 1939 essay, Greenberg railed against kitschy ‘academic art’—the
figurative, neoclassical style that constituted the aesthetics of propagandistic Stalinist
realism—in diametric opposition to what he would a year later articulate as the paragon
of painting, the abstract. Abstraction was pure because the essential painting carried no
message beyond its aesthetic. Kitsch was taught, predetermined, and manipulative; real
art, to Greenberg, was messy and intuited. Taken to the essay’s logical extreme, one
could read the formulation as abstraction is freedom is the United States.
19
Essential to
Greenberg’s argument is a static set of criteria for art, criteria discernable only to those
who can discern. Moreover, in what can be labeled a Modernist rhetorical style,
Greenberg asserts a meta-narrative capable of defining a history of art, here of certain
medium specificities. Finally, writing in a Trotskyite—at that point, an anti-Stalinist
socialist—publication, Greenberg makes an indelible argument that the place for the
political in art is in its absence from the aesthetic object. To the critic, the freedom of the
artist to produce based solely on his desire is the apotheosis of the political.

17
Here, of course, critic Harold Rosenberg too looms large as his 1952 “American Action Painters” did as
much as, if not more than Greenberg to cement the reputation of the abstract expressionists. It is Greenberg,
however, that will primarily inform the arguments proposed by the publications to be addressed.
18
See Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed.
Francis Frascina (London: Routeledge, 2000), 48-59.
19
See Guilbaut, Serge, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom,
and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

10
His criticism strengthened by the concurrence of collectors like Peggy
Guggenheim, curators like founding director of the Museum of Modern Art Alfred H.
Barr, and followers like Hilton Kramer, Greenberg’s Modernist narrative of authority and
connoisseurship cemented into a bedrock art historical formulation.
20
The 1960s and
1970s, however, saw critics taking up new theoretical modes less amenable to vagaries of
taste and, as importantly, artists forcefully articulating their practices themselves. In the
former case, ushering in the 60s was a tide of influential structuralist critique by Roman
Jakobson, Jacques Lacan, and Roland Barthes and others arguing that universal
linguistics, psychoanalytic, and cultural structures scaffold being. The 1970s featured a
second wave of critical theorists expanding those ideas, mostly from Europe—e.g. Jean
Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Terry Eagleton—their work
institutionalized in the United States university context—e.g. influentially, Yale
Literature Department, the University of Chicago’s journal Critical Inquiry—and quickly
repurposed by domestic scholars—e.g. Frederic Jameson.
21
On the domestic front, also
essential was the emergence of a trenchant Feminist critique. Particularly influential in
artworld circles were the Redstockings, a radical feminist group founded in 1969. The
collective developed consciousness-raising as a central strategy, group discussions
equally addressing issues considered personal (such as domestic life) and political (such

20
See Clark, T.J., “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed.
Francis Frascina (London: Routeledge, 2000), 71-86; Clark, T.J., Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a
History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and Jones, Caroline, Eyesight Alone:
Clement Greenberg's Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2008).
21
See Cusset, François, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the
Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

11
as national concerns) to elevate interpersonal understanding. As defended by Carol
Hanisch, a co-founder of the group, this activity fostered a space “to learn how to better
draw conclusions from the experiences and feelings [spoken] about and how to draw all
kinds of connections.”
22
Though an under-acknowledged artworld current,
consciousness-raising has filtered in and out of politically-minded art since its invention.
In terms of artist-writers, their output was critical in the evaluative sense,
sometimes literary, other times heavily political, probably in certain ways always all
three.
23
Consider Robert Smithson’s “Entropy and the New Monuments,” putatively a
review of Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum, New York, an exhibition in which a
sculpture of the writer’s was included. The essay begins with a curious quote from a
marginal science fiction writer, a description of a character looking out onto a desert
horizon of monolithic forms. Conflating this sci-fi trope with the exhibition, Smithson
labels the spare, manufactured, minimalist work represented “new monuments [that]
seem to cause us to forget the future,” monuments against entropy and decay, monuments
against time.
24
Smithson’s writing is evaluative—he discusses Donald Judd, but not, for
instance, the more expressive work of Michael Todd. It’s transdisciplinary—rather than
sandboxing artistic production, he phrases it alongside popular literature, experimental
mathematics, and structuralist theory. It’s political—it’s 1966, Smithson’s writing

22
Hanisch, Carol, “The Personal is Political,” 1969, accessed February 18, 2012,
http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP.html.
23
For a retrospective, see Lucy R. Lippard, ed., Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from
1966 to 1972… (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
24
Smithson, Robert, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” Artforum, June 1966, 26.

12
obsesses over the notion of the future, the atomic, and the post-human.
25
And the writer
was not alone—Dan Graham, Adrian Piper, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and countless
others published, too. And whereas Greenberg had positioned himself as an art critic, yes,
but moreover, as a culture critic in generalized publications like The Nation and Partisan
Review, these artist-writers published in artworld-generated forums like Artforum, Art in
America, Arts, and Studio International, and small-run publications like Avalanche.
Two events in the 1970s provide especially illuminating background to the
direction of critical art writing in the early 1980s. The first occurs in 1971 as
Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Messers cancels artist Hans Haacke’s exhibition
on April 1, 29 days before its scheduled opening. Among other projects, Haacke was to
present a poll to be given to audiences that asked about their opinions on heated political
issues (a work previously presented at MoMA), and a pair of graphics tracing vast real
estate holdings by two partnerships. Messers’s explanation referred to Haacke’s work as
a “muckraking venture” rather than “the presentation of systems, whether physical,
biological, or social…with symbolic significances” that renders art “esthetically
susceptible [and a] fit subject matter for a museum.”
26
Befitting his work with the Art
Workers Coalition—a 1969-founded coalition of artists laboring to widen access to New
York City cultural institutions for the public and for artists—Haacke shamed the museum
by penning a press statement on the affair (paired to Messers’s letter) and later publishing

25
See Owens, Craig, “Earthwords,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott
Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), 40-51.
26
Open letter from Hans Haacke, sent to Hilton Kramer, dated April 3, 1971, M252.1, Box 2, Folder 4,
Hilton Kramer Papers, Bowdoin College Library.

13
this material for wider circulation. The moment was important not only for Haacke, who
continued to develop expository writing in his practice, but also, as the New York Times,
the Nation, Artforum, Studio International and other forums wrote about the kerfuffle, it
represented a noteworthy fusion of an individual practice to a political publicity.
27

A second major event occurred in 1975 when Rosalind Krauss and Annette
Michelson resigned from Artforum, a publication that the former described in her
departure letter as having “an aesthetic and intellectual position…personally and
professionally repugnant.”
28
Most simply (and more objectively), the magazine’s
editorial situation had broken down as a result of differences over the treatment of
methodologies like feminist and Marxist critique and practices in performance and
media.
29
While the parting with Artforum and the subsequent founding of the journal
October has accrued a mythology nearly as weighted as Greenbergian lore, the event
would profoundly alter the critical landscape. October was to be a journal predicated
upon “the renewal and strengthening of critical discourse through intensive
reconsideration of the methodological options…[and] a sustained awareness of the
economic and social bases of [artistic] practice.”
30
From that mission, it seems that
October launched in 1976 to aggregate in an institutional forum those aforementioned

27
For a theorization of publicity strategies in conceptual art, see Alberro, Alexander, Conceptual Art and
the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).
28
Letter from Rosalind Krauss to John Coplans forwarded to Hilton Kramer with proposal for October
attached, dated November 27, 1975, M252.1, Box 2, Folder 23, Hilton Kramer Papers, Bowdoin College
Library.
29
See Amy Newman, ed., Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962-1974 (New York: Soho Press, Inc., 2000).
30
“Statement of Purpose for: October,” undated, M252.1, Box 2, Folder 23, Hilton Kramer Papers,
Bowdoin College Library, n.p.

14
disparate trends in writing (critical theory from abroad, artist-driven discourse, activist
critique, and on). And considering the publication’s academic cloistering (many of its
writers being art historians), October was uncharacteristically responsive to the
contemporary art world, existing somewhere between journal and art magazine. As such
the publication would influence academia by engaging theoretical vocabularies—its
inaugural issue began not with an art historian or art critic, but with Michel Foucault—
but also involve itself in conversations regarding recent practice—exemplary being
Krauss’s “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” an early essay that addressed
Rooms, the inaugural exhibition at a site that exemplified the alternative spaces
movement, P.S. 1.
31
At the same time, the journal was reactive in its aggressive notion of
authority none too far from the Greenbergian prototype; for all the talk of methodological
options, the editors also discussed stemming “the growth of a new philistinism within the
intellectual community.”
32
The model of authority shared by both Greenberg and October
relies on a field of debate around fictive binary oppositions; for instance, whereas the
former contrasted kitsch to art, the latter would discuss the compromised against the
independent.
33
In the end, October would articulate a pluralistic project, all the while re-
substantiating a normative Modernist antagonism that would problematize even the most
dynamic of its positions.

31
Krauss, Rosalind, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part 1” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68-81
and Krauss, Rosalind, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, Part 2,” October 4 (Fall 1977): 58-
67.
32
“Statement of Purpose for: October,” n.p.
33
The construction of binary antagonisms is a tactic well contextualized by Bourdieu. See Bourdieu, Pierre,
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. (Harvard Press: Cambridge,
MA, 1984), 244-245.

15
Reagan’s iconicity and apocalypse left

Consider Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign poster, an image that at
once encapsulates a political publicity strategy, the marginalization of political dissent,
and the manner in which a mass public is produced. Squinting and asymmetrically
smiling, clad in a humble denim shirt, garlanded by cowboy hat, Reagan floats
superimposed over icons of the country (e.g. Lady Liberty, the Capitol and Chrysler
buildings), above a caption, America, and below that in smaller type a terrain identified
as Reagan Country. At the surface, Reagan’s publicity strategy is clear. Glossy,
costumed, and with the visual vernacular of a movie poster, the image sells Reagan
cinematically—it acknowledges his past as an actor in Westerns and repackages it as pure
political Americana. Effaced by this red-white-and-blue blanketing is, of course, anything
of policy substance. This was an iconography. Moreover, the articulation of an ‘America’
and within that ‘Reagan Country’ suggests a national space articulated by schism, an us-
and-them, a mainstream and a fringe, Reagan’s country and sleeper territory. Elaborating
Nixon’s silent majority, Reagan proposed an invisible minority.
In this way, the image clues in to what Michael Warner would later refer to as
“Reagan,” the mythical character beyond his policy, and his “mass public.” The former is
a publicity product that abstracts Reagan’s self into a synecdoche for ‘America.’ Paired to
that publicity is a complementary public; as Warner concludes, “a fundamental feature of
the contemporary public sphere is this double movement of identification and
alienation.”
34
Abetting Reagan’s continual production and division of publics was the

34
Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” 182.

16
introduction of the 24-hour news cycle. In 1980 CNN entered households across the
United States; suddenly news shifted from spurts projected by the 6 a.m. paper or the 6
p.m. telecast to a round-the-clock feed of provisional and affective drone. Writing for the
catalogue for 1984’s Disinformation at the Alternative Museum, New York, Noam
Chomsky characterized this shift and previewed the rhetoric of his forthcoming definitive
text: the mass communication media would from then on be corporate, driven by profit,
unwilling to present news outside the bounds of its financial interests, its sole goal to
manufacture the consent of its audience.
35
Similarly, though never fully developed, critic
Craig Owens built off Walter Benjamin’s description of the arcades of Paris, alluding to a
“phantasmagoria of the media”—false appearances as commodity entertainment, per this
discussion, “Reagan” presenting an image of a rational and bountiful America that
obscures irrationality and deprivation.
36
All public figures participate in this type of
publicity politics and every form of address forces an individual into a given public.
What separated Reagan and made his presidency all the more alarming was his particular
success.
Against such effective imaging, many attempted to subvert and pollute the
iconography. Robbie Conal’s guerilla postering campaign, most notoriously, depicted a
liver-spotted Reagan, aged and decrepit, captioned with the phrase Contra Diction, a
reference to the Iran-Contra affair. For their Silence=Death campaign, Gran Fury, a

35
See Chomsky, Noam, “Disinformation,” in Disinformation: The Manufacturing of Consent, ed. Geno
Rodriguez (New York: The Alternative Museum, 1984).
36
See Owens, Craig, “Phantasmagoria of the Media,” Art in America, May 1982, 98-100. These comments
were in regard to the videos of Dara Birnbaum. The line of thought was stymied perhaps by Owens’s
untimely death in 1990; if he had lived, the explosion of media in the next few decades surely would have
led to continued work on the subject.

17
protest affiliate of ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), circulated images of a
grizzled Reagan with fiery eyes and the phrase AIDSGATE emblazoned upon him (the
identification referring to Watergate, mass-media short-hand for the break-in that led to
Nixon’s eventual resignation). Linking all of these efforts and much of the other
unforgettable protest iconography of the 1980s was the tacit acknowledgement of the
extent of Reagan’s iconicity machine and its power expansive to the point of necessary
explicit counteraction. Simultaneous to this explosion of subversive imagery—much of it
in the streets, engaging as broad an audience as possible—was a concerted effort to
bolster engaged publics through textual address. And moreover, text rather than image
proposed a different way forward against publicity.
While Reagan represented a symbolic crisis, more than optics, he augured a
material effect: the lop-sided reconstitution of the American economic and political
calculus. Entering office in the middle of what would become a double-dip recession,
Reagan would oversee an unemployment rate hitting 10.8% in 1982. In the midst of this
jobs crisis, the Republican administration engaged in a series of damaging budget cuts to
the ‘Great Society’ social welfare programs launched in the late 60s and reinforced in the
70s. In the United States, Reagan’s policy decisions—carefully designed by think tanks
such as the Heritage Foundation—ushered in the great neoliberal shift characterized by
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello as the ‘new spirit of capitalism.’ That is, as opposed to
the safety-net-oriented and state-sponsored second spirit of capitalism in the early-20
th

century, the new spirit would be entrepreneurial and individualized with the government

18
cutting regulation, taxes, and services.
37
In 1984 unemployment dipped to 7.2% and
Reagan coasted to reelection over Walter Mondale. His policy was variously unpopular,
but an “It’s Morning Again in America” publicity campaign—this time not focused on
the icon, but rather on “average Americans” getting up and going to work—proved
indomitable. Not that there was much opposition in the two-party system anyhow; after
the assassinations Kennedy (John F. and Robert), George McGovern’s collapse, Jimmy
Carter malaise, and Ted Kennedy’s unsuccessful 1980 primary challenge, Democratic
politicians, though intermittently imbued with Congressional power, read as resigned and
ineffectual and even complacent and counterrevolutionary.
The effect in an artworld increasingly tethered to an array of leftist and
counterculture positions: a pervasive pall of the apocalyptic.
38
Looking back, the tone
made itself evident in dystopically-minded exhibitions as divergently located as The End
of the World: Contemporary Visions of the Apocalypse, curated by Lynn Gumpert in
1983 for the then-minor New Museum of Contemporary Art and, steps away from the
Capitol, Dreams and Nightmares: Utopian Visions in Modern Art, curated by Valerie
Fletcher in 1985 at the preeminent Hirschhorn Museum. To frame her exhibition,
Fletcher referred to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a 1949 novel about one

37
Boltanski, Luc and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso,
2005).
38
Why this tethering? Perhaps because the artworld is tied to diverse, urban centers with social and
economic complexities making collective solutions seem more viable. Perhaps because the art market can
be an exploitative system, the logic of solidarity centralized on the left appeals to many artists. Perhaps
because as critical theory cemented in a primary position across art school syllabi, particularly in the late
1980s, the Marxist givens bracing such writing fused with the rules of the field. Perhaps because
Republican governments since Nixon have implicated artistic and countercultural production in the decline
of the nation.

19
man’s attempted subversion quashed by the futuristic totalitarian state in which he lived.
A frequent invocation at the moment, it’s one of those texts just vague enough for usage
across the political spectrum.
39
Regardless those vagaries, the left, embarking on what
would become more than a decade of political powerlessness, felt the book’s relevance.
The Cold War, still quite in flux and fought in proxy in places like Nicaragua, El
Salvador, and Chile, matched to Oceania’s perpetual war against Eurasia and Eastasia.
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—intervening across the world, breaking up unions at
home, rolling back their respective welfare states, all the while cinematic—seemed like
Big Brothers. As such, to maneuver the counterpublics positioned around Reaganism, one
must contend with both the reality of the political shift and the overall (and sometimes
distorted) sense of embattlement across the left.

39
For instance, Hilton Kramer would refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four’s big brother as the totalitarian leftism
of the artworld in “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984.”

20
CHAPTER II: WRITING COUNTERPUBLICS FOR THE EIGHTIES

October, Haacke, and the limits of Modernism

Against the backdrop of rapidly extending critical practices and publicity
iconography that problematized the image, and the dire political conditions of the Reagan
presidency, critical art writing politicized anew and its forms proliferated. While no
single study could capture the immense array of critical activities, this chapter presents
four emblematic positions that entangle legacies, futures, and each other. As a ground,
however, the journal October offers access to the field and its problems. In particular, the
case of the publication’s treatment of Hans Haacke’s practice is illustrative. Though since
its founding in 1976 October’s writers had engaged the political both in terms of broader
lived conditions and intellectual and intra-artworld inquiries, the 80s brought the
publication’s position (and with it its flaws) into greater relief.
1981’s spring issue, subtitled “Art World Follies,” began with an editor’s note
asserting that it was time to address a malign foolishness, “time to name it, to describe it,
and actively to become its adversary.”
40
As this fundamental edition continued, it became
clear exactly what was foolish and to what end those who engage in such foolishness
progress. Douglas Crimp’s “The End of Painting” lauded the work of conceptualist
Daniel Buren, arguing that though he literally paints, his material is the code of painting
as a valued art object. Thus Buren’s work represents the culmination of the medium’s
historical narrative.
41
Painting after Buren, Crimp seems to suggest, would be a

40
Krauss, Rosalind, Annette Michelson, and Douglas Crimp, “Art World Follies, 1981: A Special Issue,”
October 16 (Spring 1981): 4.
41
See Crimp, Douglas, “The End of Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 69-86.

21
barbarism, a retrograde effacement of a conceptual and political progression. The essay’s
twin came in the form of Benjamin Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of
Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting” (Figure 1). The
subject was neo-expressionism, painterly artmaking practiced by the likes of Anselm
Kiefer, Georg Baselitz, Julian Schnabel, and Leon Golub, loosely connected to the early
20
th
century German expressionism of Emile Nold, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Georg Grosz,
and others, and extremely popular on a booming art market. The essay was a polemical
reading of a pendulous art history oscillating between moments of post-object politicized
artistic practice and subsequent returns to figurative, expressionistic representation.
42

Most provocatively, Buchloh reads painting as necessarily attended by a notion of
autonomous subjectivity, and as such a stalking horse for misogyny and fascism:
With the demise of liberalism, its underside—authoritarianism—no longer feels
inhibited. And it thus comes to the fore in the guise of irrationality and the
ideology of individual expression. In reaction against social consciousness and
political awareness, proto-Fascist libertarianism prepares the way for the seizure
of state power.
43

In one issue, with little further discussion of neo-expressionism down the line, October
phrased painting as alternately dead and fascistic.
In 1984, “Art World Follies” would find a counterpart in another issue focused on
naming and identifying a malevolence afflicting the artworld, this time Reaganism and its
neoliberal spirit. Whereas the focus on Buren allowed the journal to critique painting,
Hans Haacke would center October 30 (Figure 2). In all, the issue contextualized the

42
See Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of
Representation in European Painting,” October 16 (Spring 1981): 39-68.
43
Buchloh, “Figures of Authority,” 66.

22
artist’s work to the point of celebration. Buchloh returned with the now essential “From
Faktura to Factography,” a history of soviet artists’ abandonment of the aesthetic
object—even in an already abstracted form—to produce a revolutionary public through
mass-media address.
44
Interestingly, betraying October’s position between artworld and
academia, the argument of this essay was presented contemporaneously in the catalogue
to a New Museum exhibition, Art & Ideology—Buchloh used the narrative there to
situate the work of artists Allan Sekula and Fred Lonidier, though Haacke was also
prominently mentioned while not even in the exhibition.
45
Crimp again contributed a
polemic, “The Art of the Exhibition,” variously denouncing the neo-expressionism-heavy
exhibitions documenta 7 and Zeitgeist, Reaganism’s economic conditions, and the
pseudo-Greenbergian and Republican Party-funded criticism of Hilton Kramer. Haacke is
favorably mentioned in that piece—primarily for a work attacked by Kramer, U.S.
Isolation Box, Grenada 1983, a facsimile of an enclosure created by the U.S. military to
temporarily imprison enemy combatants, made for Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention
in Central America, a protest exhibition against Reagan’s foreign policy.
46
By this point
Haacke’s writing had moved beyond the need to defend his name and into carefully
articulated essays pointing to systems of power and authority—October republished a
hand-full of these descriptions, including one for Isolation Box. Finally, there was a
conversation between Haacke and the collection of editors. On one hand, the interview

44
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., “From Faktura to Factography,” October 30 (Fall 1984): 83-119.
45
Buchloh, Benjamin H.D., “Since Realism there was... (On the current conditions of factographic art),” in
Art & Ideology (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 5-11.
46
For a brief history of Artists Call, see Ashton, Dore, Rudolf Baranik, Jose R. Dominguez, Daniel Flores,
Jon Hendricks, Catalina Parra, and Guandencio Thiago de Mello, “Artists Call: Freedom and the Freedom
for Art in Central America,” Arts, January 1984, 80-82.

23
allowed the artist to engage with the issues of the moment he had yet to turn into writing
or artworks—in particular he detailed the astounding circulation of funding from think
tanks to cultural forums supporting traditional art (aesthetically and politically), and
likewise the cuts to funding by the Republican-controlled National Endowment for the
Arts to projects critical of the domestic situation. On the other, Haacke’s work was forced
into a polarity with the “Art World Follies” scourge; in the conversation, Rosalind Krauss
gushing that what is “especially brilliant about [his] work [is] that [it] identified style as
one of the enemies…[identified it as] idealism, as a fundamentally nonhistorical way of
thinking.”
47

It is at this point that the limits of October’s critical potential becomes evident.
The journal gives Haacke and his research a prominent forum; the artist enters into
October’s canon, an increasingly valuable placement as the publication’s symbolic
capital would ultimately locate it in an elite position in the visual arts. Nonetheless,
concurrently, Haacke’s well-researched and thoughtfully and reflexively articulated
positions are enmeshed with a critical stance equally informed, but less self-critical. As
shown in “Art World Follies,” October explicitly takes issue with neo-expressionist
production apocalyptically phrased as fascistic. Throughout the interview, the editors try
to draw Haacke into a discussion of this or that artistic mode while the artist repeatedly
evades this characterization, at one point saying “if [he] had concentrated on the style of
current painting, the political content would have been left out.”
48
In keeping, his

47
Bois, Yve-Alain, Douglas Crimp, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation with Hans Haacke,” October 30
(Fall 1984): 47.
48
Bois, Crimp, and Krauss, “A Conversation with Hans Haacke,” 25.

24
description of Isolation Box, for instance, consisted of a descriptive account of the
structure from the New York Times, a response to a politically-motivated attack on the
work from the Wall Street Journal, and only referred to artworld institutions in relation to
their participation in the Artists Call coalition (Figure 3). Yet Krauss’s interest in style in
tandem with Crimp’s polemic against Kramer and, again, neo-expressionism, reduced
Haacke’s depiction of the funding apparatus that gave that critic his forum, the New
Criterion, and the artist’s own contribution to a pointed protest action to the insular and
ineffectual. October’s unwillingness to disengage from the post-Greenbergian logic of
authority and foolishness through the prism of intra-artworld discourse hampered the
publication’s ability to meaningfully engage with political conditions or build some kind
of viable counterpublic. Polemical authority engenders only the same old arrangement of
acolytes and heretics.
This failure was evident even at the moment. Whereas Craig Owens began his
career with a series of influential theorization of Postmodernism in the pages of October,
by 1985 the critic had diagnosed the journal’s tethering to the rhetorical constructions of
authority as a regressive, vestigial legacy of Modernism.
49
Writing of Krauss, he argues
that her “initial break with Greenberg was motivated less by methodological differences
than by her disagreement with his (and [art critic] Michael Fried’s) assessment of the
value of minimalism.”
50
Pointing to the binary logic of “Art World Follies,” and Krauss’s
structuralist-informed critiques that nonetheless reduced a diversity of Postmodern

49
See Owens, Craig, “Analysis Logical and Ideological,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power,
and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 268-283.
50
Owens, Craig, “Analysis Logical and Ideological,” 269.

25
artwork to ‘grids’ and indexicality, Owens concludes that any questions of the
institutionally-determined nature of criticism could not be addressed at October as then-
constituted. To this end, we can read his editorial work at Art in America as purposefully
distinct, particularly vis-à-vis neo-expressionism. For instance, while Owens would
critique the commercialization of painting and even label documenta 7 “Bayreuth ’82,” a
not so subtle nod to Nazi-favorite Richard Wagner, he would then pair his writing with
someone like Donald Kuspit who read certain neo-expressionistic painting favorably.
51

(That said, even Kuspit addressed the style in typically apocalyptic terms as a tainted
dialectical sign, an anti-thesis potentially capable of revealing societal ills.)
So as not to elide the publication’s mutability, it’s worth noting that when the next
heavily politicized issue of October emerged, its 43
rd
subtitled “AIDS: Cultural
Analysis/Cultural Activism,” the journal focused on the politics of the moment so tightly
that it evaded much of the pitfalls that defined those problems previously discussed.
52

Nonetheless, October’s contradictions demonstrated the limits of Modernist authority
regardless of the address of revisionist, politicized, or theoretical practices.

51
See Owens, Craig, “Bayreuth ’82,” Art in America, September 1982, 132-139, 191, and Kuspit, Donald
B., “Acts of Aggression: German Painting Today,” Art in America, September 1982, 143-151.
52
Douglas Crimp, ed., October 43 (Winter 1987).

26
Figure 1

Excerpt from “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of
Representation in European Painting” in October 16, from JSTOR, accessed September
15, 2011, http://jstor.org.
OCTOBER
pleasure" in the narcissistic character disorder that results from this contempt.
Meyer Schapiro saw this symbiotic relationship between certain artists and their
patrons
in 1935: "The artist's frequently asserted antagonism to organized society
does not bring
him into conflict with his patrons, since they share his contempt for
the public and are indifferent to practical social life." 24
The aesthetic attraction of these eclectic painting practices originates in a
nostalgia for that moment in the past when the painting
modes to which they refer
had historical authenticity. But the specter of derivativeness hovers over every
contemporary attempt to resurrect figuration, representation, and traditional
modes of production. This is not so much because they actually derive from
particular precedents, but because their attempt to reestablish forlorn aesthetic
positions immediately situates them in historical secondariness. That is the price
of instant acclaim achieved by affirming
the status
quo
under the guise of
innovation. The primary function of such.cultural re-presentations is the confir-
mation of the hieratics of ideological domination.
24. Meyer Schapiro, quoted in Kozloff.
Gino Severini. The Two Clowns. 1922.
60

27
Figure 2

Cover of October 30, from JSTOR, accessed September 15, 2011, http://jstor.org.
Art
I Theory I
Criticism
I
Politics
OCTOBER
30
Hans Haacke
Walter
Grasskamp
Yve-Alain
Bois,
Douglas Crimp,
and
Rosalind Krauss
Douglas Crimp
Benjamin
H. D. Buchloh
Yve-Alain Bois
$6.00/Fall
1984
Broadness and
Diversity of
the
Ludwig Brigade
An
Unpublished Textfor
an
Unpainted
Picture
A Conversation with
Hans Haacke
The Art
of
Exhibition
From Faktura to
Factography
Francis Picabia.
From Dada to Petain
Published
by
the MIT Press
for
the Institute
for
Architecture and Urban Studies

28
Figure 3

Description of Hans Haacke’s U.S. Isolation Box, Grenada, 1983 in October 30, from
JSTOR, accessed September 15, 2011, http://jstor.org.
Hans Haacke. U.S. Isolation
Box, Grenada,
1983.
1984.
First shown in
conjunction
with Artists Call
Against
U.S. Intervention in Central America in the
public
mall
of
the Graduate School and
University
Center
of
the
City University of
New
York, January
1984.
David Shribman
reported
in the New York
Times,
November
17, 1983,
that the U.S.
troops
that had
invaded Grenada detained
prisoners
in boxlike
isolation chambers at the Point Salines
airport.
The wooden boxes measured
approximately eight
by eight feet,
had four small windows so
high
that
one could see neither in nor
out,
and had a number
of ventilation holes with a radius of half an inch.
Inside one box a
prisoner
had
written,
"It's hot in
here." The
prisoners
were forced to enter these
boxes
by crawling through
a hatch that extended
from the floor to about knee level.
Shortly
after the exhibition
opened,
the
administration of the Graduate School moved
the
sculpture
into a dark corner of the mall and
turned it in such a
way
that the
inscription
was
hardly
visible.
Only
after strenuous
protests
was
the work restored to its
original position.
An editorial in the Wall
StreetJournal, February
21,
1984,
attacked this work and a
gravelike
mound
of earth in
memory
of Maurice
Bishop,
the slain
prime
minister of
Grenada, by
the New York artist
Thomas Woodruff. The
Journal
found these two
works to be "in
proper company"
with "America's
greatest
collection of
obscenity
and
pornography"
a few blocks down 42nd Street. The writer of the
editorial also called the Isolation Box "the most
remarkable work of
imagination
in the show."
Artists Call
Against
U.S. Intervention in Central
America,
an ad hoc coalition of artists in the U.S.
and
Canada, staged
numerous
exhibitions,
performances,
and other events in over
twenty
cities from
January
to March 1984.
They
were
organized
in
protest against
U.S.
policy
in
Central America and in
solidarity
with the victims
of that
policy.
Claes
Oldenburg designed
the
poster.
In New
York,
more than 700 artists of all
ages
and
styles participated, among
them both
internationally
renowned and
totally
unknown
artists. Established commercial
galleries
such
as Leo
Castelli,
Paula
Cooper,
and Barbara
Gladstone,
as well as alternative
galleries,
made
their
spaces
available. Artists Call took out a
three-quarter-page
advertisement in the
Sunday
edition of the New York Times. Most art
journals
reported
the events
extensively.
Arts
Magazine
carried the
Oldenburg poster
on its cover.

29
Radical subjectivities at wedge

Forced gore of several years ago, our faux-fathers brought forts upon this
continent: a new nation, deceived, illibertied, and desiccated by the prostitution
that all men create inequal. And now we re-engage for a great civil war, testing
whether that nation—any nation, the whole nation notion—so deceived and so
desiccated, can long endure? These texts are meant as a great battlefield in that
war.
53

If October maintained an academic tone and Modernist hierarchical antagonism
under worsening political circumstances, with the above, Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn
Wilson dismissed altogether the charade of the hushed, subtle critique of mannered
polity. The statement introduced the pair’s 1987 compilation of essays and images taken
from the punk-inflected, critical theory ‘zine, Semiotext(e). Fleming and Lamborn Wilson
(the latter now known as Hakim Bey) were the founders of Autonomedia (at the time the
partner-publisher of Semiotext(e), the imprint) and interested in an anarchy completely
distinct from the historical left.
54
Though an extreme, the sentiment captures the dejection
felt under the seemingly unstoppable consolidation of domestic power within the
Republican Party, the flagging fortunes and efforts of the Democratic Party, the
continued dissolution of (and disillusionment with) international revolutionary activity,
and, tacitly, the emergence of AIDS and its contamination and stigmatization of
subjectivities struggled for. That last notion of subjectivity struggled for—subjectivity
here meaning consciousness and agency—is essential. Swirling around criticism were
older guard figures like Louis Althusser proposing that formations like school, church,

53
Jim Fleming and Peter Lamborn Wilson, eds., Semiotext(e) USA (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 0.
54
For a contemporaneous theorization see Bey, Hakim, T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone,
Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, accessed February 10, 2012,
http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html.

30
and family served only to perpetuate the state and capital.
55
The recently translated work
of Michel Foucault argued that épistemes—“shorthand for the ‘epistemological field’ of
assumptions, expectations, values and beliefs of a society at a particular historical
moment”—circumscribed perception, action, and practices of subjectification.
56
And
perhaps most bombastically, Jean Baudrillard proposed the end of the real in toto, that we
inhabit a hyper-real of symbols and codes without externality.
57
These figures and others
convincingly called into question individual agency.
In reclaiming that challenged agency, a 1980s artworld track pursued a radical
subjectivity. To be clear, by this term I mean subjectivity radical as in “characterized by
independence of or departure from what is usual or traditional,” but also “of or relating to
a root or to roots.”
58
That is, a simultaneous belief in the possibility of expanded
subjectification, the limits of said expansion’s political viability, and the potentiality of
relentless reflexivity leading to a collapse of an extant order and subsequent
emancipation. The theorization of contradictions short-circuiting a particular order
corresponds to Baudrillard’s writing about reversibility, “to defy the system with a gift to

55
See Althusser, Louis, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-188.
56
“Archaeology” in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, (London: Routledge,
2003), 147.
57
Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York:
Semiotext(e), 1983).
58
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "Radical," accessed January 17, 2012, http://oed.com. To a different end,
Lucy Lippard mined this definition of ‘radical’ to explain her approach to political protest; see Lippard,
Lucy R., “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed.
Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 340-358.

31
which it cannot respond save by its own collapse and death.”
59
Or as literary critic
Sylvère Lotringer put it, “a total revolution: a strategy geared to escalate the system and
push it to its breaking point”—theoretical mutually assured destruction for the Cold War
era.
60
This is the moment of the subcultural—counterpublics aware of their subjugation to
a totality laboring in the extremes to subvert that authority.
61
The journal wedge, a short-
lived (1982-1985) periodical edited by Brian Wallis and Phil Mariani, blended critical
texts and artist projects and worked in the above mode attempting to seed that radical
subjectivity.
Though wedge followed the validated contemporary artworld (i.e. addressing
artists found in the pages of October, etc.), it also discussed emerging practices and
theoretical models, and their fringe propositions. Wallis’s essay for the first issue,
“Governing Authority: Robert Longo’s Performance Empire,” implicitly laid out this
thrust (Figure 4). Longo’s 1981 artwork began with an introduction by actor Eric
Bogosian and a set of explicit instructions for viewing. What followed were three
performative tableaux. The first: two men erotically pantomiming wrestling, a projected
black-and-white 16mm film of a man frozen in arched convulsion with only the motion
of the grain and the light of the projector, and an elegant woman operatically singing. The
second: a saxophonist blasting, a ‘nattily’ dressed male and female tenderly dancing, and
a film of a ruined Greek statue. The third: a collection of well-dressed men and women

59
Baudrillard, Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Ian Hamilton Grant (London: Sage Publications,
1993), 37.
60
Lotringer, Sylvère, “Exterminating Angel,” in Forget Foucault (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 12.
61
Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979).

32
filling the atrium and setting into a slow, formal waltz, a suddenly sounding air raid siren,
and an abrupt end. Wallis writes about the work not looking for meaning, but rather
affect, and as such he sees Empire as a progression from intimacy and individuality to
spectacle and conformity. Through this reading the critic implicates the then-widely-
discussed issue of representation—a Foucauldian problem, the notion that the act of
making a person or discourse visible is a political and ideological maneuver, that there is
no neutral way to re-present. The solution Wallis articulates—one of superficial
ironization, of messing around extant language—locates the answer to the problem of
representation in Longo’s artworld-centric vernacular. Empire is an extreme artwork,
ordered at an uncomfortable degree. Longo works in heroic, almost fascistic scale; the
atrium of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, dramatic lighting, costuming, and motion, rigid
choreography, and Bogosian’s authoritarian directives (at one point in German no less!).
Through this mix of abstracted and emotive drama, the diffuse and the manipulative,
Wallis suggests that Longo acknowledges the inadequacy of normative artmaking, and
counteracts this reality through “the subversion and reuse of traditional forms, a
decentering to reveal the structure of representational systems.”
62
The absurdity of these
superficial forms imposes on the audience the responsibility to make meaning where
none exists. That Baudrillardian logic of overload, collapse, and emancipation stemming
from the pointed repackaging and redeployment of code by a given artist, will be a
dominant form addressed by wedge.

62
Wallis, Brian, “Governing Authority: Robert Longo’s Performance Empire,” wedge 1 (1982): 65.

33
Evidencing this focus was issue 3/4/5, a cherry red folder featuring 14 chap-books
created by artist-writers such as Matthew Geller, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Gary Indiana,
and Kathy Acker among others. The editor’s characterization of the artist-writer at this
moment is particularly revealing. The interest in producing texts as part of practice was a
key legacy of the 60s and 70s—think back to Smithson’s “Entropy and the New
Monuments.” According to Wallis and Mariani, and in keeping with the tenor of the era,
the work of artist-writers took on new meaning for the 1980s:
This special issue of wedge is devoted to the investigation of the viability of a
politically engaged form of writing… Under such conditions the evolution of
new, critical forms of writing which expand from within existing structures are
not only predictable but imperative.

Above that note ran a quote from William S. Burroughs’s The Job: “Image and word are
the instruments of control used by the press.”
63
Wallis and Mariani refer to both the
iconicity crisis—in the viability of writing in the face of Reaganite advancements—and
the need to rework and reverse extant forms. The texts enclosed engaged the political
through the personal in manners direct and obscure, quoting from popular culture and
critical theory equally, engaging the artworld through various subtleties and swaggers.
Some of the chapbooks read breezily, such as Sarah Charlesworth’s A Lover’s Tale,
perhaps a reference to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, but readable as a
diagrammatic portrait of masculine/feminine constitution in popular culture. Making up
the book are a series of contrasting images, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula ogles and points and a
woman in a Venus de Milo-esque early photograph averts her eyes; women are chained to

63
Mariani, Phil and Brian Wallis, “Editorial,” wedge 3/4/5 (1983): verso.

34
logs and wheels and men and apes defend and fight them; a knight stands, a lady kneels.
64

Co-editor Mariani’s …the difference between appearance and reality., traces Chomsky’s
notion of manufacture consent, matching excerpts from public speeches by Reagan,
Alexander Haig, Jesse Helms, and other Republican leaders to images from 1950s
television.
65
Both texts are heavy handed, but nonetheless attempt to layer codings
political, cultural, and aesthetical towards a new discourse.
The apotheosis of the exercise, however, was Kathy Acker’s blood-splattered
contribution Implosion (Figure 5).
66
Written in play format, the book ports to the 1980s
New York punk scene Maximilien Robespierre’s killing of Georges Danton during the
French Revolution, the onset of the Reign of Terror. To this end, the title of the work
seems evident: Acker narrates contradictory spurts of revolution, the manner in which
individual agency (political, aesthetical, spiritual)—Danton and Robespierre both claim
the mantle of heroism—collapses in upon itself when enacted in the collective:
Robespierre: Who needs friends? I do everything I do only in accordance
with myself: I act. I am the hero. […]
Danton: I’d rather die than murder. I’d rather be fucked than fuck.
Lacroix: You’re right: It’s better to die than to die.
67

Layered upon this, as per Acker’s broader writing practice, is the semi-autobiographical
(or more precisely, the self-aware representation of the autobiographical). Occasionally
‘Kathy’ emerges as in one scene where she engages in a violent, if pleasurable sexual

64
Charlesworth, Sarah, A Lover’s Tale (New York: Wedge Press, Inc., 1983).
65
Mariani, Phil, …the difference between appearance and reality (New York: Wedge Press, Inc., 1983).
66
Here a direct reference to Baudrillard as he uses implosion to describe the origin of the hyperreal—the
collapse of the symbolic into the real.
67
Acker, Kathy, Implosion (New York: Wedge Press, Inc., 1983).

35
encounter with ‘Father,’ a sadistic feminist. In a later scene, Acker portrays her ‘version
of art criticism,’ with a comical moment at Artforum starring a ‘Situationalist With Italian
Accent’ and ‘His Girlfriend.’ This exchange, for one, addresses Acker’s tumultuous
relationship with a publication for which she occasionally wrote.
68
Says the Situationalist:
“I just saw an American film. The title of the film is ‘Bladder Run.’…the filmmaker
proves to us the audience that robots are as human as we are.”
69
Crudely renaming Blade
Runner—a 1982 sci-fi film about humanoid robots and the repercussions for society in
dealing with simulacra—Acker shoots holes through an elite contemporaneous
theoretical mode, while toying with its techniques herself. To similar effect, just a few
lines later, says the character ‘Marxist Feminist,’ “I might end up a Right-Winger.” Is this
a joke? An anxiety? A prophesy? Perhaps it’s just the specter of the mass-public—Acker
acknowledging the inevitable drawing up into social organizations not of her own intent
and ironizing that eventual participation to continually evade its categorizations.
Visually girding the narrative is Mark Magill’s design. Two motifs define the text.
First eyeglasses with lens alternately reflecting the words on the opposite page, blacked
out, or bloodied. Allowing for other interpretations, the images could refer to the act of
reading the text itself (the reflection) and the subsequent antipathy (blacked out) or
resonance (bloodied); or perhaps to the glasses of Burroughs, a major influence on Acker,
the reflection haphazardly tearing the words much like that older writer’s cut-up
methodology. The second motif is a matchbook at first depicted with a single match burnt

68
See Acker, Kathy, Interview, BOMB Interviews, ed. Betty Sussler (San Francisco: City Light Books,
1992), 85.
69
Acker, Implosion, 7.

36
among many untouched and then throughout the text riven and torn so that matches flow
through the margins. Here Magill illustrates a principle for the moment: one detonates but
remains fixed, so the only solution is further self-destruction. These images and their
associated text are evidence of a characteristic mix: unable agency, estranged
participation. Implosion embodies the core ethos of radical subjectivity: it’s better to die
than to die. The book is a perpetually circling firing squad.
This reflexive evasiveness defined wedge. Even its look, feel, and form radically
shifted from one issue to the next. The first looked like an October knock-off; grey with
black and red serifed fonts, a bourgeois academic publication. As described, 3/4/5
abandoned unified form. Numbers 7/8 in Winter/Spring 1985 (again one issue, the last
issue, in fact), designed by Louise Lawler and Magill, culminated design theatrics and
addressed the counterpublic intuited by wedge from its earliest moments (Figure 6). “The
Imperialism of Representation, The Representation of Imperialism,” featured excerpts
from Gayatari Spivak and Edward Said among others, artist projects by Barbara Kruger
and Allan McCollum, and dossiers detailing American interventionism abroad. This was
a discourse of postcolonialism, a theoretical line of inquiry beginning with the idea that
the ‘West’ brought itself into being through an opposition to a primitive ‘East’ refused a
voice of its own. From there postcolonial methodologies developed strategies of critique
to evade the gaze, to decenter representation, and to empower the subaltern.
70
It’s a logic
that would engender queer theory, elaborations the likes of which, in the address of
publics and texts, this thesis takes as a base. That said, whereas it is useful to discuss

70
See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, ed., The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London:
Routledge, 1995).

37
wedge vis-à-vis the critical models circulating at its moment, to reduce the publication to
terminology that could (and would) be subsumed by the art market (among other
economies) is to ignore that what the publication actually mined was evasion and
potential. Lawler and Magill’s design embodies this ultimate aim. Issue 7/8 is a rust-
colored edition with Buren-esque stripes, the contrast disorienting to the eye; it is op-art
coloration and line-work dizzyingly relaying shifting borders, it’s both an invitation and
rejection, asking you to pick it up but disallowing an encompassing gaze. wedge
proposed alternatives not to centralize itself in a new cultural order (to arrest our
attention, to have us obsess over its brilliance), but to evidence critical actions that
propose to its counterpublic the viability of its own proliferation.

38
Figure 4

Documentation of and script for Robert Longo’s Empire in wedge 1, Summer 1982, from
the collection of Santiago Vernetti.

39
Figure 5

Cover of Kathy Acker’s Implosion, designed by Mark Magill, 1983, from the collection
of Santiago Vernetti.

40
Figure 6

Cover of wedge 7/8, Winter/Spring 1985, designed by Louise Lawler and Mark Magill,
from the collection of Santiago Vernetti.

41
Political Art Documentation/Distribution’s Upfront and an activist majority

Walking near then-still-gritty Union Square in Summer 1982, that recessionary
peak, you would have encountered in the windows of the New Museum of Contemporary
Art a startling diptych (Figure 7). On one side: a mural featuring falling missiles, roving
tanks, and flying planes, all with price tags, and overlaid with the exhortation ‘DON’T
BUY THIS’ in English and Spanish. On the other: a sculptural tableau of two bodies
presiding over an overflowing table of fruit, and images of typewriters and painting
supplies, asking the viewer again in English and Spanish to ‘CHOOSE LIFE!.’ The
display was a strikingly legible image of the pervasive apocalyptic tone; the installation
offered its viewer stark options between death or life, nationalized militarization or
domestic peace, absence or participation. More, it was an anonymized argument capable
of appealing to a broad public, a rejection of imaged, heroic individuality and iconicity.
As opposed to the over-coded gloss of Robert Longo’s Empire and the unending ironies
of Acker’s Implosion, here was a statement more intuitive. A small bit of text by the
window’s edge identified its creator: the Public Works Committee of Political Art
Documentation/Distribution.
Founded on the evening of February 24, 1980 at the behest of critic and curator
Lucy Lippard, PAD/D constituted itself initially as a hub, an archive for disparate
aesthetic documents of activism. “A major part of PAD’s program is to hear from you
and to make sure that when one of us hears from somebody we all hear from somebody.
There’s a lot of energy out there, some of it being dissipated in unsupported isolation,”

42
read Lippard and Jerry Kearn’s introductory call for submissions.
71
Soon after launching,
however, the group quickly evolved into an agitprop collective—replete with a Public
Works Committee—responsive to the issues affecting its members and its Lower East
Side community in New York City. Uniting the documentation and distribution central to
its name was Upfront (originally 1
st
Issue)—an aggregating newsletter, a critical
mouthpiece, a running historical marker, and, with its sister calendar Red Letter Days, a
protest agenda, all written in a manner distinct from even the more expansive critical art
writing on the pages of wedge and certainly October. Refusing to re-inscribe an artworld
order, the inaugural essay by Lippard and Kearns plainly articulated that PAD/D’s “main
goal [was] to provide artists with an organized relationship to society,” that the group
could not “serve as a means of advancement within the art world structure of museums
and galleries,” that they would “have to develop new forms of distribution economy as
well as art.”
72
While taking lessons learned, PAD/D would attempt to extricate itself from
an artworld discourse and market system.
In recollection, Gregory Sholette characterized the historical horizon from which
the group sprouted as “the cultural organizations of the 1920s and 1930s organized by
labor unions, socialists, and the Communist Party USA.”
73
Like Haacke a primary
member in the Art Workers Coalition herself, Lippard was well-versed in such pseudo-
secessionist projects. Even in her most embedded participation, hers was an artworld

71
Lippard, Lucy R. and Jerry Kearns, “PAD: Waking Up in NYC,” 1
st
Issue, February 1981, verso,
accessed September 10, 2011, http://www.darkmatterarchives.net.
72
Lippard and Kearns, “PAD: Waking Up in NYC,” verso.
73
Sholette, Gregory, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London, UK: Pluto
Press, 2011), 25.

43
defined by the ‘escape attempts’ of conceptualism, the dematerialization of the art object
not as an aesthetic program against Modernist orthodoxy, but intimately of feminist and
Marxist critique. The ‘art historical’ narrative PAD/D suggests is one defined by AWC,
the Ad-Hoc Women Artists Committee and the like as much as Sol LeWit, Lawrence
Weiner and Douglas Huebler.
74
A key difference between PAD/D and the ‘escape
attempts’ moment perhaps exists in the title of the project itself; art worker and artist are
subbed out for art in general, a move away then from a figure to a set of operations. “Our
goal is to provide artists with an organized relationship to society.” In that formulation,
collectivized artistic production supersedes the definitive character anchoring a market
artworld, the isolated artist, the bearer of individuated labor and value (a proto-neoliberal
figure). As such, PAD/D projects endeavored to address community-wide issues, rather
than artworld discourse—this was not a project to create a parallel artworld, but a non-
artworld. Their archive of protest images welcomed all contributions—an open call for
submissions ran at the end of each issue of Upfront. The group hosted Second Sundays
public dialogues at the Franklin Furnace that addressed resolutely sociopolitical issues:
abortion, civil liberties, informal art (e.g. graffiti), ecological issues, and minority
concerns. Public protest shifted away from targets like MoMA—as had been the priority
of the AWC—and toward colorful, performative mixed media gestures engaging those
general topics addressed at Second Sunday and expressively articulated so as to ensnare
as broad an audience as possible. Not just a localized artworld exercise, the aim was to
build an audience so large as to perhaps influence policy directions in the United States.

74
See Lippard, Lucy R., “Escape Attempts,” in Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from
1966 to 1972… (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), vii-xxii.

44
Thus that opening image of the window project; politically pointed, inoffensively
general, and attempting to reopen, in a moment of recessionary budget cutting, the
question of continual militarization. PAD/D’s was an effort to produce a meaningful
activist majority.
While Upfront featured dynamic imagery (usually of a caricature, photo-montage,
or street-art-inflected variety), it was its rhetorical eclecticism and honesty that in
retrospect seems its most valuable tool in producing an extensive activist counterpublic.
As Lippard and Kearns explain in that first issue, those strategies were meant to both
individualize and collectivize (as opposed to the artworld’s focus on the former):
We are convinced that it is possible to overcome the conflict between ‘my own
work’ and outreach, between collective work and ‘getting back to my
studio.’…So far, the most visible models for understanding the personal/political
fusion have been provided by feminists [doing] important work to dispel the
negative separation.
75

PAD/D’s strategies directly connected to the second wave feminism that began in the late
1960s. Clearly mining consciousness-raising, Upfront addressed a diversity of subjects
(U.S. interventionism, gentrification, labor issues) while reflexively acknowledging the
unresolvable. PAD/D was not alone in finding continued utility in this strategy. As just
one lateral project, Heresies, a dynamic feminist publication that from 1977 to 1992
addressed art (and not just the visual arts, but literature and poetry and music) and an
array of political subjects on scales personal (sex, labor, race, etc.) and communitarian
(ecology, war, violence against women, etc.), even sharing writers with Upfront.
76

75
Lippard and Kearns, “PAD: Waking Up in NYC,” verso.
76
For a digital archive of issues, see The Heresies Archive, accessed October 20, 2011,
http://heresiesfilmproject.org/archive/.

45
In stark contrast to October’s treatment of the artist, Upfront 5 would situate Hans
Haacke through a round-table called “Who’s teaching what to whom and why?” with the
effect of underscoring his didactic representations of socio-political systems rather than
placing them in an aesthetic container.
77
Haacke against neo-expressionism amounts to an
artworld polarity, but against Tim Rollins’s long-term community-based work in the
Bronx with students excised from mainstream symbolic hierarchies, the comparison
interconnects spheres of knowledge production along a potentially consistent ideological
spectrum. Consciousness-raising requires contributions from both those at the
Guggenheim and those not. 1984’s issue 9 would touch the artworld’s third rail. A
conversation with Sue Coe, an illustrator known for her politically-incisive images of
Reagan, asked explicitly about whether or not working for the New York Times—which
Coe did, even with the paper occasionally censoring of her drawings—amounted to
‘selling out.’ Her response to a question of personal economics (that verboten topic in
artworld discourse) was nuanced and substantive as she described the economic calculus
of participating in the commercial market.
78

It was actually an early issue, however, number 3 in December 1981, that outlined
what would be a defining tension for PAD/D (Figure 8). Repeated on the front page four
times, “Against ‘Inner Exile,’” and below that the commitment: “As artists we affirm our
rights to practices which are openly opposed to the prevailing culture, rather than ‘inner

77
“Excerpts from a Panel on Art, Ideology and Education, PADD Second Sunday Forum, Nov. 14, at
Franklin Furnace,” Upfront, February 1983, 7-13, accessed September 10, 2011,
http://www.darkmatterarchives.net.
78
See Garber, Stuart, “From Soweto to Loisaida: The Art of Sue Coe and Anton van Dalen,” Upfront, Fall
1984, 7-12, accessed September 10, 2011, http://www.darkmatterarchives.net.

46
exile.’”
79
In this affirmation, activists and artists Vanalyne Green and Margia Kramer
acknowledge that enforced schism stemming from that Greenbergian ideal; the artist
extricating herself from political content to produce the ultimate political statement of her
freedom. The commodity artworld still insists, the writers maintain, on this split. What is
most interesting about this issue, however, is how Green later complicates this point in a
humorously self-aware acknowledgement of the distance of even the politically-engaged
artist and the world in which she lives. Of her time at the socialist New American
Movement conference she reports:
Although the presentation of PAD’s archive material was successful, I felt less
prepared for the informal discussions generated from the other workshops.
Reading and re-reading my copies of Social Text, Praxis, and Telos were not
helpful in communicating to people unfamiliar with an academic discourse about
art and popular culture. Apparently other people at the workshops experienced
this gap also. At the largest cultural workshop, where painter Ralph Fasanella and
folksinger Kristin Lens spoke, interactions that resembled non-sequiturs would
occur: e.g. Lens would quote a passage from Marxism and Art, only to be
followed by a response from the audience of, ‘Fuck Art, let’s dance…’
80

Perhaps, there is a fundamental incommensurability between even the most leftist
symbolic theorizations of political action and the ability to produce a coalitional activist
majority. Here there is certainly a tension between the vocabulary of the activist field in
which Green participates (self-reflexive, academic critique presumably tied to concepts
of governmentality) and the vocabulary of other activist fields (the physicalized and
emotionalized call to fuck art and dance).

79
Green, Vanalyne and Margia Kramer, “Against ‘Inner Exile,’” Upfront, December/January 1981, 1,
accessed September 10, 2011, http://www.darkmatterarchives.net.
80
Green, Vanalyne, “Report: The NAM Conference in Milwaukee,” Upfront, December/January 1981, 9-
10, accessed September 10, 2011, http://www.darkmatterarchives.net.

47
While the group dissolved in 1988, PAD/D modeled the production of an activist
public of the broadest base, a reflexive and emotive collectivity contra the individualized,
fragmented neoliberal subject. Of course, it’s difficult to measure the success of an
organization with those ambitious aims. From their archive now in the MoMA library,
the group clearly amassed a great deal of protest material from the 1980s, an indication of
the breadth of their counterpublic. And from contemporaneous Upfronts, it is clear that
their publication brought news of international protest actions and exhibitions into the
city and broadcast PAD/D strategies out. At the same time, the acquisition by MoMA of
said archive betrays an eventual lack of independent viability. Still again, however, the
notion of institutional perpetuity could be seen as a shibboleth of capitalism—on that
score, PAD/D’s eventual dissolution was one its strengths. Finally, that essential,
repeatedly addressed imbalance between artworld-integrated artist and his or her desired
activism that leads to actionable politics would endure. This tension would persist in the
writing of artist Gregg Bordowitz agonizing over the distance between his work with
Postmodern theory at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program and his
activism with ACT-UP.
81
This tension would persist in Sholette’s agonistically-
articulated notion of dark matter: the “makeshift, amateur, informal, unofficial,
autonomous, activist, non-institutional, self-organized practices” that are “invisible
primarily to those who lay claim to the management and interpretation of culture,” the

81
See Bordowitz, Gregg, The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986-2003 (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2003). In particular Douglas Crimp’s forward, and Bordowitz’s “Operative Assumptions” and “My
Postmodernism” (the latter republished from the Artforum 80s issue).

48
laboring of the ignored increasing the value and authority of those ignoring.
82
And this
tension persists today in the reception of W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater
Economy), a group returning to the collective bargaining strategies practiced by the Art
Workers Coalition, and critiqued as defining-down the scope of political participation of
artist-activists.
83
To imagine reworking the relation of artists of the artworld to the
broader world was, perhaps obviously, an impossibility for one group. But in enacting,
and more importantly in openly reflecting on that impossibility, PAD/D illuminated
viable if continually problematic paths forward.

82
Sholette, Dark Matter, 1.
83
See the recent back-and-forth between Abigail Satinsky of InCUBATE, a Chicago-based collective
addressing alternative arts funding, Randall Szott, artist and curator, and A.L. Steiner of W.A.G.E. At issue,
in the end, was the intellectual and political honesty of the notion of an ‘Art Worker’ contra a non-artworld
informal art enthusiast. See Satinsky, Abigail, “Protest Culture: Wisconsin and WAGE,” Bad At Sports,
March 20, 2011, accessed September 10, 2011, http://badatsports.com/2011/protest-culture-wisconsin-and-
wage/; and Randall Szott, “Art Worker – WAGE – Artistic Labor,” Lebenskünstler, March 21, 2011,
accessed September 10, 2011, http://randallszott.org/2011/03/21/art-worker-wage-artistic-labor/.

49
Figure 7

Installation view, PAD/D Public Works Committee, New Museum of Contemporary Art
window project, Summer 1982, New Museum Digital Archive, accessed January 20,
2012, http://archive.newmuseum.org/.

50
Figure 8

Cover of Upfront, December/January 1981, from Gregory Sholette’s Dark Matter
Archives, accessed September 10, 2011, http://darkmatterarchives.net.

51
Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion and the persistence of the symbolic

While October, wedge, and Upfront perhaps succeeded in some primarily
symbolic economies (like the critical artworld and academia), their subordinated position
in dominant material economies (like the art market, financial markets, government
funding) meant that their contemporaneous necessity was to convert symbolic capital into
a more viable form. Hilton Kramer represents a different problem. Whereas he began his
career fully within the Greenberg-dominated world of art criticism (with editorial
positions at Arts and eventually the New York Times) his move in 1982 to the New
Criterion reoriented his position. To explain, a step back.
While Reagan’s efficient publicity apparatus carried him into office, he had a
supporting cast of intellectual producers to thank as well. On the Republican Party right
the reading of Richard Nixon’s collapse and resignation in 1973 was that his presidency
was felled by an unopposed activist movement supported by academia and the press and
their attendant funding and distribution mechanisms. In response, Nixon’s former
Secretary of the Treasury William E. Simon diagnosed that “‘the thing that [could] save
the Republican Party...[was] a counterintelligentsia,’ created by funneling funds to
writers, journalists, and social scientists whose ideas had been frozen out of general
circulation by the ‘dominant socialist-statist-collectivist orthodoxy’ prevailing in the
universities and the media.”
84
Simon’s Olin Foundation (along with the Heritage
Foundation, the American Scaife Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation,
among others) would allow the Party to have it both ways—a future Republican president

84
Rodgers, The Age of Fracture, 8.

52
could maintain the outsider status and anti-intellectual position necessary to coalesce a
traditionally populist base (for Reagan: the cowboy hatted publicity image) with the
active support of an ‘erudite’ messaging machine.
The aim was to build a variety of partisan Republican counterpublics across
academia and the media. We can see this as a clear success today vis-à-vis the muddying
of global warming consensus, for instance, or the rise of purely partisan academic
institutions like Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That kind of success would
not come to Kramer. Funded by the Olin and Scaife foundations, the New Criterion
culminated the critic’s shift from concerned advocate for Greenberg’s image of a
Modernist triumph to what would be labeled towards the end of the decade, a “culture
warrior.” While at the New York Times, the critic’s assessments tended positively toward
work that underscored a general art historical thrust from antiquity and European art
toward the abstract expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning, Rothko and Newman.
85

Even so, Kramer weighed in fairly generously on the Art Workers Coalition’s protest
actions at MoMA, siding with the institution, yet maintaining that the AWC was “the
only professional art group in the country [addressing] itself to the fundamental social
and political problems [that afflict] the visual arts as a profession and as a cultural
enterprise.”
86
His rhetoric would radicalize, however, in the mid-1970s in response to
artist-writer Allan Sekula’s critical revisiting of the legacy of Edward Steichen and art
historian Carol Duncan’s critique of the depoliticization of Revolution-era French art, or

85
See Kramer, Hilton, “30 Years of the New York School,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, October
12, 1969, accessed August 12, 2011, nytimes.com.
86
Kramer, Hilton, “About MOMA, The AWC and Political Causes,” New York Times, February 8, 1970,
accessed October 12, 2011, http://nytimes.com.

53
with regard to histories of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, that portrayed as corrupt the pursuit of
communists within social and political life.
87
In response to what he saw as an artworld
“climate of ideas hostile to both the freedom and the prosperity which our society has
created,” Kramer proposed the New Criterion.
88

The editorial line at this new publication would rephrase “Avant-Garde and
Kitsch” for the 1980s; whereas Greenberg had Stalinist kitsch, Kramer had Postmodern
Camp.
89
In discussing that latter term, the critic explicitly referred to Susan Sontag’s
theorization of Camp, an evasive minority strategy of empowerment electing pop and
fringe production into a higher critical sphere.
90
Kramer’s inaugural essay “Postmodern:
art and culture in the 1980s” lambastes Sontag’s form as a “mock ridicule [offering]

to
the cognoscenti [a] ‘forbidden’ pleasure in objects that are corny, exaggerated, ‘stupid,’
or otherwise acknowledged to have failed by the respectable standards of the day.”
91
The
essay’s discussion and his titling, however, forced onto this terminology from 1966 the
issues of the day. Kramer saw in Camp the entire field of Postmodernism: low pop

87
See Kramer, Hilton, “The Blacklist and The Cold War,” New York Times, October 3, 1976, accessed
August 10, 2011, http://nytimes.com, and Kramer, Hilton, “Art View: Muddled Marxism Replaces
Criticism at Artforum,” New York Times, December 21, 1975, accessed August 10, 2011,
http://nytimes.com.
88
“A Proposal for a Monthly Cultural Review” by Hilton Kramer, September 1981, M252.1, Box 8, Folder
13, Hilton Kramer Papers, Bowdoin College Library.
89
In a complementary motion, as Kramer adapted Greenberg towards pseudo-partisan ends, art historian
Serge Guilbaut likewise revised Greenberg’s legacy, painting him a crypto-conservative
counterrevolutionary actively depoliticizing artistic practices at mid-century. In the introduction to that
history, Guilbaut invokes Kramer as a similarly oppressive figure. See Guilbaut, Serge, How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur
Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
90
See Sontag, Susan, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador,
2001), 275-292.
91
See Kramer, Hilton, “Postmodern: art and culture in the 1980s,” in The Revenge of the Philistines: Art
and Culture, 1972-1984 (New York: Free Press, 1985), 6.

54
culture mined for art, but only because its codes could be understood in the context of a
specific, validated intellectual lineage and repurposed through an exclusive political
antagonism. (Here shades of Baudrillard’s reversibility.) Like Greenberg’s binary
phrasing of kitsch, Kramer’s address of the Postmodern insinuated that what was at stake
in the discourse’s attendant shift was culture writ-large, that autonomous sphere which
defines the free world. Truthfully, much of the writing in the New Criterion can be
reduced to the logic of this initial essay—the magazine and its public would be
oppositional, this was a project of perpetual critique, not of alternative production.
While the critic politicized contemporaneously to artists and writers around the
artworld, the material structures of power in which he enmeshed himself by pursuing and
accepting funding from the Republican Party intellectual apparatus excised his writing
from the validated artworld. Kramer had aimed to produce a general culture publication
like Partisan Review and probably thought the artworld would tag along with him. As
such, the New Criterion, rather than nostalgically reaching back to those more accessible,
socio-politically expedient Great Western Civilization triumphs of antiquity and the
Renaissance, maintained a focus on topics relevant to the day. Thus the inaugural essay
on Postmodernism. Even more, his introductory note to the first issue specifically
discussed Lucy Lippard, “the saddest of many such cases” of critics who “fell victim to
the radical whirlwind.”
92
Later essays would address the proliferating means of
knowledge production on the left; for instance, Irving Howe’s political histories and
Althusser’s ideological state apparatus. That said, one could characterize this discussion

92
Kramer, Hilton, “A Note on the New Criterion: September 1982,” in The New Criterion Reader: The first
five years, ed. Hilton Kramer (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1988), iv.

55
of alternative practices and theoretical or methodological modes as dealing with rather
than reckoning with, explaining away rather than acknowledging. Use, from the get-go,
was out of the question.
While Kramer imagined himself disinterested—writing exclusively for an
artworld conversation ultimately based on aesthetic criteria, resolutely distinct from
political power—his connections proved this untrue. No matter if “Criticism Endowed:
reflection on a debacle,” a 1983 essay denouncing the peer-panel granting process at the
National Endowment for the Arts, directly led chairman Francis Hodsoll to rescind grants
to a variety of groups (PAD/D included), Kramer at the least provided intellectual cover
for such moves.
93
When he would address Haacke’s Isolation Box as resurrecting an
“American cultural life [of the 1930s that] was dominated by the hypocritical ‘social
consciousness’ of the Stalinist ethos,” again regardless of what was actually a
complicated position on the terminology, the essay was potentially dangerous redbaiting
considering the ongoing Cold War (Figure 9).
94
Ironically as Kramer and his New
Criterion advocated for an artworld distinct from politics, his position brought into relief
just how tethered the two are. Kramer’s relationship with the Republican Party made his
position anathema to Artforum, October, the Village Voice, the New Republic, and most
other forums that addressed contemporary art.
95
While in the late 1980s, Kramer would

93
See Kramer, Hilton, “Criticism Endowed: reflections on a debacle,” New Criterion, November 1983, 1-5.
94
Kramer, Hilton, “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984,” New Criterion, April 1984, 72. See
also, for discussion of Stalinism, Kramer, Hilton, “A Conversation with Robert Gorham Davis,” New
Criterion, October 1984, 1-6.
95
Among other articles, see Lawson, Tom, "Hilton Kramer: An Appreciation," Artforum, November 1984,
102-105; Goldstein, Richard, “The Conservative Brain Trust Wants You! The War for America’s Mind,”

56
be a public voice during the ‘Culture Wars’—most notably with his homophobic polemic
against Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment—any authority valued in the field of
art had evaporated. And by that point the more smug and aggressive Roger Kimball had
become the detestable voice of the New Criterion. Perhaps it was only the reputation of
the New York Times that gave Kramer’s voice weight anyhow.
Today you’ll only find the New Criterion anthologies through The Free Press—
publisher of books like The Bell Curve—or Ivan R. Dee—publisher of “serious
nonfiction for general readers, with emphasis in history, politics, biography, literature,
philosophy, theater, and baseball.”
96
And in 1983 where you would have seen ads for an
exhibition of Michael Heizer’s work, today you’d only see those promoting the
libertarian Cato Institute. And whereas Kramer sought to engage the artworld, his
successor Kimball, perhaps realizing the discursive gulf, shifted the publication to full on
antagonism. So, if you walk through your local university art library, there’s a chance
you’ll still find a subtly-designed magazine, one that looks as reputable as all the rest,
called the New Criterion—but it probably won’t mean much to any discourse to which
you’re a party.
Ending with Kramer is meant to not only tie back to the pervasive encroach of the
Reagan presidency on all fronts, but to offer some problems his position entails. In
particular, Kramer represents the unrelenting lure of symbolic capital even when
economic or political capital is already attained. This persistence can be seen both in his

Village Voice, June 8, 1982; and Wieseltier, Leon, “The neoconservative criterion for culture: Matthew
Arnold & The Cold War,” The New Republic, December 27, 1982, 23-29.
96
“Ivan R. Dee,” https://rowman.com/IvanRDee, accessed January 31, 2012.

57
difficulty transcending artworld discourse to embrace the intellectual sphere built
explicitly for his position, and more in the whole premise of the New Criterion. One can
argue that the magazine served a purpose at its onset—to provide critical cover for cuts to
the NEA—but its resilience to this moment, still attacking October and revisionist art
history for an assuredly small audience, is a curious development.
97

97
See Panero, James, “Criticism after art,” New Criterion, December 2005, 16-20.

58
Figure 9

Cover of the New Criterion, April 1984, from the collection of the Architecture & Fine
Arts Library at the University of Southern California.

59
CONCLUSION: REMAINDERS

Aside from its ability to amuse, irritate, and cause a sore head in the reader, does
Kramer’s criticism have any merit? The answer is, not much—certainly not much
of a lasting kind. Oh, he will make it into the history books no doubt, in the
footnotes, much like those Parisian critics of the last century whose intemperate
misunderstandings instruct us as we read our histories of Impressionism. But there
will certainly be no reason to look to Kramer’s writing for any useful insight into
the art produced in America since he started publishing art criticism in the mid
‘50s, for he has none to offer.
98

We’re now at the moment foretold by Tom Lawson when Hilton Kramer’s
criticism slips into the footnotes of history as a marker of opposition in the longer
narratives of October, PAD/D, wedge and their descendants. Without nonsensically
advocating the introduction of the New Criterion into art school lesson plans, is there any
use for what I termed in the introduction a remainder? Again and again this paper has
referred to hubs and arrays to acknowledge the depth of debate in the field of art criticism
in the early 1980s. Kramer’s position is part of a network and his resolute difference,
rather than making him a footnote, makes his production all the more important to the
historicization of the moment. Lawson is right that Kramer’s writing would not shed
much light on the practices Haacke or Buren or other producers increasingly valued by
the contemporary artworld, but he wrongly minimizes the value of those Parisians who
doubted the Impressionists. In the 1980s, the stakes were too high to read Kramer in any
other way than related to money and power; can we add to that today some generative
characterization of the fringe alternative the critic proposed?
99
Yes, and that history can

98
Lawson, Tom, "Hilton Kramer: An Appreciation," Artforum, November 1984, 90.
99
There is an expanding body of literature trying to make sense of the alternative logic of the U.S. right of
which Rodger’s Age of Fracture and Robin’s The Reactionary Mind are but two recent examples.

60
tell much about both the culture sphere and the intellectual world we’re left with today.
Still, this form of meaning-making is difficult, and it’s easier to dispose of remainders
than to integrate their positions into a larger map.
To assimilate such problematic voices into a history of art criticism is a
homological problem in the Bourdieusian sense.
100
That is, taking as principle the
existence of structural differences (economic differences, for instance, that prevent an
individual or group from accessing certain educational environments that imbue on their
pupils the ability to participate in a given field), how can one compare divergent lines of
thought? The New Criterion, October, wedge, and Upfront each look like critical art
writing, but actually abide starkly different rules of order. The way to bridge such gulfs is
deep contextualization that evidences the panoply of conditions that inform a given field.
When those circumstances have been laid out a homology can be diagramed, reactions to
shared and unique contexts can be tracked and compared across individuated discursive
spaces. One could then characterized the nature of each intellectual ‘investment’ that an
individual forum required to participate and from there build an understanding of the
necessary shifts that occurred to produce dominance in a given field. In charting a history
of art criticism, in explicating the conditions under Reaganism, and in accounting for the
positions of the four publications addressed, this paper has tried to make clear the context
of the early 1980s to clarify the way the field of art criticism networked itself. Kramer’s
fundamentally dissimilar position unlocks a great deal of insight about how exactly this
arrangement occurred.

100
See Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993).

61
The transition in art criticism wrought by the work of Baudrillard, Foucault,
Derrida, and their ilk, as well as feminist and postcolonial practices is obviously key, but
not only in a sense that this thought would engender a great deal of future artistic
production. More interesting is the way that the increasing importance of those
politically-tethered ideas advanced a passage from one form of intelligence to another, a
movement underway perhaps since Minimalism.
101
There was the art criticism of the past
tethered to the complex and vague combination of access, privilege, taste, and
moderation packaged into a skill known as connoisseurship, and a future engaged with
the world around it, critical of what it saw as culturally- and institutionally-determined
knowledge rather than anything empirically verifiable. This is the point made by Brian
Wallis in his 1984 introduction to Art After Modernism when he writes that the “central
purpose of art and art criticism since the early 1960s has been the dismantling of the
monolythic myth of modernism…[a] gradual shift or mutation [not leading] to another
style, but to a fully transformed conception of art founded on alternate critical
premises.”
102
As demonstrated in this paper, that this shift happened does not mean that it
happened smoothly, legibly, or coherently.
By including Buchloh’s “Figures of Authority” and only using Kramer as a once-
quoted foil in the introduction, Wallis’s collection positions the two in opposition.
However, as narrated, the New Criterion and October both built positions on pseudo-
Greenbergian models—the former directly adapting Greenberg’s theorization of the

101
See the debate over the theatricality of Minimalist art, in Meyer, James, Minimalism: Art and Polemics
in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
102
Wallis, Brian, “What’s Wrong With This Picture? An Introduction,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking
Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), xiii.

62
avant-garde to disparage discourses of Postmodernism, the latter integrating the older
critic’s structures of authority into activism and theory. Also essential to the shift was the
participation of marginal figures in the field like wedge and PAD/D that embraced critical
theory through cycling these ideas into radical subjectivity and practical protest. That
said, to different ends both the New Criterion and PAD/D needed to deal with critical
theory—one effacing to maintain extant aesthetic and conceptual criteria, the other to
broaden its base. Unlike wedge or October working in fields not requiring the conversion
of symbolic power into actionable political power, neither PAD/D or the New Criterion
could take theory more-or-less wholesale. The New Criterion could be seen as a final
threshold in the shift alluded to by Wallis in the moment. That Kramer could not embrace
the vocabularies of critical theory meant that he (and others like him) could no longer
participate in the field of art criticism with any major measure of validation (i.e. inclusion
across art school syllabi).
Also at stake at this moment was the problem of the institution. These
publications produced counterpublics, by definition self-organized groupings existing
apart from a mainstream center. In other words, these publications positioned themselves
in ways that implicitly and explicitly critiqued extant institutions and conditions. Of
course, the methodology known as institutional critique—that move from picture to
frame, from the act of representation to the address of the structures determining that
representation—emerged in the 1980s as a central leg of politically-engaged artistic

63
practice.
103
This was also the moment of the alternative space, provisional and flexible
environments, non-collecting and often non-profit, a space for practice rather than
museological positioning. It’s essential to see this concern in art criticism, as well. That
is, Greenberg was more than a critic and his Modernism was more than an idea. His work
projected onto the field a set of standards that determined activity under its auspices; to
participate in the discourse of Modernism even in critique was to position oneself around
these borders. (Thus this paper’s address of Greenberg’s writing some 70 years after his
definitive efforts.) If the discourse of Postmodernism was to provide an alternative, as
suggested by Wallis, it required new structures. Clearly, October would not suffice.
PAD/D and wedge, however, positioned themselves around the institutions of art in
marginal and (temporarily) unyielding formations. Radical subjectivity kept wedge’s
voice in motion. PAD/D’s community organizing built new economic and distribution
models. When these positions were no longer tenable (whether subsumed by the broader
culture or no longer economically or politically viable) new forms were carved out by the
participants.
104
To realize a Postmodern criticism, the Greenbergian center would need to
be dismantled. In its place would stand a purposefully disordered network, agile and
responsive.

103
See John C. Welchman, ed., Institutional Critique and After (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2006) and Alexander
Alberro and Blake Stimson, ed., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2009).
104
This persistence perhaps explains Kramer’s obsession with Lucy Lippard, one of the artworld figures
repeatedly mentioned across his writing. Sometimes, those most against an individual understand best the
implications of his or her practice. That is, Kramer understood the potential in Lippard’s continually
evolving practice to influence the direction of the politicized artworld.

64
Each of these forums also dealt with the political conditions under Reaganism and
its iconicity. With the early 1980s domestic political context in mind, Buchloh’s (and in
general October’s) apocalyptic warnings of the figurative image seem a measure less
hyperbolic. This was a moment when a lot of political authority was wrapped up in the
saccharine imaging on one man, Ronald Reagan. Likewise, wedge’s tending to the coded,
the cloaked, the bombastic, and the subcultural opposed the clean, legible, and plainly
emotive graphics of the cable TV-inflected visual turn in the political sphere. To project a
raw and ironized marginal self when so much power was tied to the broadcast of consent
and the imaging away of dissent was to spit in the face of such categorizations. (Today,
under the conditions of an omnipresent Internet, this is an increasingly important lesson.)
PAD/D, in contrast, waded into the publicity culture. If Reaganism was going to be
imaged, the left needed countervailing projections. And nothing too insular either as this
project required a coalition. It’s worth noting that essays in the New Criterion ran without
illustration. Even (and considering its Greenbergian roots maybe expectedly) this
magazine turned from the image during its benefactors’ expansion of publicity culture.
Ideas were for words in print; the ‘elite’ audience imagined by the New Criterion had no
need for the pictures that swayed the masses.
105

Finally, entangling both the critique of the institutional center and the conditions
of Reaganism (whether viewed as apocalyptic crisis or necessary revanchism) was the
manner in which each forum proposed models of renewed democratic space in relation to

105
Irving Kristol, founder of the similarly Republican Party-funded Public Interest, made this sentiment a
point of principle. See Goldstein, Richard, “The Conservative Brain Trust Wants You! The War for
America’s Mind,” Village Voice, vol. XXVII, no. 23, June 8, 1982.

65
monolithic political authority. October maintained a traditionalist, elitist republican
approach, one where authority is apportioned and from there dictates articulated. wedge
tied to an anarchistic logic tending toward the individualized and the unmonitored to
empower its public to group in autonomous organization. PAD/D integrated the personal
into the political, but did so in a way that the ultimate production of power would be in a
mass capable of affecting lived, political conditions in an extant democratic society.
Overall, the model proposed across the left—one based in the need to engage an
individualized subject regarding class, race, gender, and so on, a process identified
contemporaneously as differential articulation, later historicized as identity politics—
could not immediately compete against the sheer volume of publicity, capital, and
perhaps the inevitable historical swing that brought about decades of conservative
Republican dominance.
106
Still, the left’s efforts represented essential formulations of
democratic space that continued to be elaborated in the cultural and political spheres.
107

The New Criterion was of a partisan think tank project and an attendant oppositional and
combative method of knowledge production. Kramer was a face with a measure of
symbolic legitimacy (an iconicity produced by a medium perhaps not unlike Reagan’s)
behind which groups like the Heritage Foundation proposed policy that comprehensively
altered the position of the domestic arts situation. As of yet, the partisan think tank
continues to define much of the political condition of the United States, but considering

106
Per differential articulation, see Laclau, Ernesto, “’Socialism,’ the ‘People,’ ‘Democracy’: The
Transformation of Hegemonic Logic,” Social Text 7 (Spring/Summer 1983): 115-119.
107
Per elaborations of democracy, I am thinking of Bruno Latour’s technocratic dingpolitik, Chantal
Mouffe’s fractious agonism, the unsigned autonomous efforts of Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, and
the horizontalidad pioneered in Argentina after the country’s 2001 financial crisis.

66
the significant recent conversations about ‘epistemic closure’—the notion that divergent
spheres of thought individuate facts per political leanings—and the horizontally-
structured Occupy Movement, new horizons may appear.
At a time of drastic transition (statism to neoliberalism, old media to new,
Modernism to Postmodernism), an array of counterpublics attempted to influence those
shifts. I have charted just four. October attempted to renovate what worked before to poor
effect, maintaining essentially that new politics (Postmodernism, leftist activism) could
mix with old capital (Modernist authority). It’s a legacy of ineffectuality that continually
proves problematic—consider most recently the journal’s five-years belated response to
the Iraq War, an issue centered on a leading questionnaire written by the editors from a
position of ‘knowing’ authority, and arguing that the current generation’s tethering to
technology squelches public protest.
108
It was a typically dampening position. The
periodical wedge highlighted fringe propositions from within the artworld vernacular.
Yes, its styling and theoretical modes imbued with subcultural seductiveness would be
subsumed by the art market and the mainstream again and again. Nonetheless, the
magazine modeled an evasive strategy that allowed it to reconstitute itself against specific
exigencies. PAD/D too was fated to dissolve eventually as the nature of political urgency
is its subsequent fading. It is Upfront (and the archive housed at MoMA), then, that
proves most valuable. The broadsheet’s relentless, self-reflexive reckoning insists on a
continued relevance not through institutionalized perpetuity, but rather through a set of
discursive techniques filtering onwards. The New Criterion was a limit, a forum

108
See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Rachel Churner, eds., October 123 (Winter 2008).

67
increasingly without audience, kept on life support to provide cover for extra-artworld
interests. It continues on, but to little end. Whether today dissolved, irrelevant, or at the
center, the interaction in the early 1980s between these forums (and others referred to and
unnamed) represents a crucial chapter in the history of art criticism.
Returning to Lawson’s disparaging of Kramer over two decades ago, his slight
reads more like an unintentional compliment. After all, what is a counterpublic if not the
purposeful or forced choice to participate from the margins? PAD/D and wedge are no
doubt footnotes too compared to the centralized October. Kramer wanted the institutional
center, but his role would have meaning otherwise in a considered Postmodern history. In
the end, it’s those remainders littering the footnotes that give history its real texture
anyway.

68
POSTSCRIPT

Overall, the aim of this thesis was to present the field of art criticism so
corresponding, but divergent gestures (towards retaining or producing power, towards
realizing the democratic, etc.) could be leveled to be addressed across parallel
vocabularies. What I realized in writing, however, was how raw the history remains; to
elaborate Bankowsky, an open wound unstitched. To that end, what this thesis most
obviously evidences is the continued need to expand and elaborate a history of criticism
in relation to the artworld. The primary reasons for this are one, to-be-published text
begins with a public, one frozen-in-time and therefore telling of contemporaneous
problems, and two, the sheer flexibility of circulation means that many of these
propositions socialize widely.
Much of the New Criterion is now online—there are still questions to be posed
and to be answered, but it is accessible. However, one loses the advertising, a cipher for
shifting publics, particularly telling in this magazine’s case. October is, of course, piled
online and in libraries, and well-cited; such is the benefit of bolstering art historical
methods. Gregory Sholette has done well by PAD/D by creating a website on which
Upfront lives freely and by working to provide historical insight. That said, as a
participant-observer with his own biases on the ultimate dissolution of the group, more
work is required. A small-run effort, wedge can be difficult to find (so difficult, in fact,
that I was unable to access issue #2 in time for this paper’s deadline); the non-profit
Printed Matter—incidentally, in the basement of which PAD/D was founded—carries
dead-stock, but purchasing is a barrier to entry, and the publication is not widely

69
collected by libraries. Moreover, as this thesis is retrospective my writing about wedge
could not address its multiplicity of theoretical, aesthetical, and literary techniques and
affiliations. A holistic treatment is required.
Add to all of the above the production of Semiotext(e) (less the well-historicized
Foreign Agents series that brought us Baudrillard, more Native Agents feminist-inflected
literature), Autonomedia’s publications, Heresies, and much more, and we would have a
history offering vital access to the decade. There is much more work to be done.

70
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis reframes the history of the politicized artworld of the 1980s by centering on the writing of artists and critics and the way this writing produced oppositional publics. As traditional image-making seemed compromised by theoretical problematizations of representation and the peaking of Ronald Reagan’s overwhelming publicity strategies in the elections years of 1980 and 1984, criticism and publication projects took on new relevance. This thesis addresses four efforts emblematic in their distinctive positionalities. The preeminent journal October attempts to integrate politicized theory and activism into its art historical discourse

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kaplan, Zachary N. (author)

Core Title I might end up a right-winger: writing counterpublics for the eighties

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Public Art Studies

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 04/10/2012

Defense Date 04/10/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1980s,art criticism,art writing,Benjamin Buchloh,Clement Greenberg,Craig Owens,Hilton Kramer,Kathy Acker,Lucy Lippard,New Criterion,New York artworld,OAI-PMH Harvest,October,Political Art Documentation Distribution,Reaganism,This Will Have Been,wedge

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anastas, Rhea (committee chair), Brenson, Michael (committee member), Wedell, Noura (committee member)

Creator Email znkaplan@gmail.com,znkaplan@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-24627

Unique identifier UC11287939

Identifier usctheses-c3-24627 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KaplanZach-588.pdf

Dmrecord 24627

Document Type Thesis

Rights Kaplan, Zachary N.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA