Martha Schwendener
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WE ARE ALL ARTISTS, SUPPOSEDLY. -
Formalist art critics used to say that the life of an artist was irrelevant to an understanding of his or her work,” Calvin Tomkins writes in the preface to Lives of the Artists, a collection of New Yorker profiles published over the past ten or so years. “In my experience, the lives of contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation.” For critics of a certain generation—me, for instance—educated by art historians more inclined to mapping Lacan’s L Schema than outlining an artist’s formative years, Tomkins’s statement is like a grenade. -
You could quibble with a few things in Marcia Tucker’s posthumously published memoir, A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World. For instance, it takes a bit long to get to the art-world part; one travels first through Tucker’s early life, growing up in Brooklyn and New Jersey with a beautiful, critical mother and a withdrawn, workaholic father. Given the thin boundary between fiction and fact, we’ll never really know whether a twenty-four-year-old Tucker actually called up all of her “so-called friends” and told them “the relationship wasn’t working out,” or whether she indeed told -
Dan Graham’s migratory approach to media was on full view in his recent traveling retrospective, where you could see many an “artwork,” published in a commercial magazine, that later became an “essay,” reproduced in a museum publication or critical anthology. Same thing with Rock/Music Writings: A number of the texts here (there are thirteen in all) didn’t originate on the page or are better known in other forms.
