2Hal Foster

EO

One aspect of The Anti-Aesthetic that I found interesting is that it was published by Bay Press, which your friend Thatcher Bailey started.

HF

I grew up in Seattle with Thatcher. Charles Wright, who later became the director of the Dia Art Foundation, was also a great hometown friend. Thatcher was the publisher, Charlie became the instigator of events at Dia, and I was the writer, I suppose. The Anti-Aesthetic was the first major project of Bay Press; it appeared in 1983.

EO

Can you walk me through your landing in New York and how the book came to be? I noticed that Rosalind Krauss’s text was originally published in October and Fredric Jameson’s was based on a talk he did at the Whitney Museum.

HF

I came to New York in 1977 and immediately began to write for Artforum. I became an editor at Art in America in 1981. Already in those early years I was part of the art scene downtown. There was also the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, which is where October was based, and there were lots of discussions about architecture as well. I came to New York in part to study with Edward Said at Columbia; it was just at the moment of his Orientalism (1978); he was also one of the few academics teaching the Frankfurt School and new French theory. I became aware of these different conversations about poststructuralism and postmodernism in these different settings, but they weren’t connected. As a young critic, I wanted to participate in these conversations and to connect them somehow. That was the prompt of The Anti-Aesthetic.

EO

How old were you when you started at AiA?

HF

Twenty-five. I worked there with Craig Owens. We were involved with the “Pictures” artists, and we had a theoretical language that suited that work well, or so we thought. And we had a fight to take up: we wanted to change how art was made, seen, and discussed. But this was the 1980s; neoliberalism was on the march; the art market was transforming the art world. It became invasive. In the late 1980s I turned to the academy as a sanctuary, only to discover that I was a commodity there, too.

EO

How so?

HF

The late 1980s was a growth period in the academy, at least for critical theory. It became part of the curriculum, as did (a little later) contemporary art. There was a certain demand for people like me. And then our criticism was taken up rather quickly as history. The texts we published in Art in America and October were critical interventions, not historical accounts, but the two became confused.

EO

It’s like criticism as history.

HF

Our criticism was historically informed, but we didn't present it as history. But suddenly there was an appetite for courses in critical theory and contemporary art, and there was a premature assimilation of art and criticism as historical work, even canonical work. In time our point of view became less the insurgent one and more the dominant one. At least it did for that fringe of the book, museum, and academic worlds interested in what we were interested in.

EO

Can you talk more about how you turned to the academy and when?

HF

Academic prospects were grim in the late 1970s, and I wanted to write more than to teach. So I stepped away from the academy and worked as a critic and editor; then I returned to school at the Graduate Center in 1987 in Art History. I had known Rosalind Krauss for several years by then, and had already published in October, so it was natural to go to the Graduate Center, which had already attracted people like Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, and Benjamin Buchloh.

EO

I didn't know that October was initially based at the Institute for Architecture.

HF

Yes, that was its nominal home. The Institute was also where Oppositions, the architectural journal, was based, and there was an office for October there, too. I was already part of the debate about postmodernism in art, but the positions about postmodernism in architecture were very different.

EO

What were they?

HF

People like me saw postmodern architecture as more anti-modernist than postmodernist, in the sense that it reduced modern architecture to sheer abstraction and countered it with “a return to history.” It was basically a double-coded architecture, elitist in its use of historical symbols and populist in its use of pop signs. It offered up history as another commercial brand in a way that suited the Reagan years perfectly. So again, for people like me, that was a reactionary postmodernism, and we were interested in a resistant postmodernism. Those were the terms I put forward in the introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic. That was one fault line.

EO

What was left out of the book?

HF

Any intervention is punctual and any book is contingent. In 1982 I happened to hear Fredric Jameson give his first talk on postmodernism at the Whitney Museum, and that opened a whole other perspective on the subject. For Jameson, postmodernism was a way to periodize culture vis-à-vis capitalism. It wasn’t about this or that style, it was a way to think historical change.

The actual making of The Anti-Aesthetic was tentative, like a collage; I put this bit next to that bit and then added the next bit. Kenneth Frampton gave me his celebrated text on critical regionalism in architecture literally as a piece of collage; the manuscript was a matter of pasted strips of notes that we assembled into a numbered sequence. As for blind spots, well, there are many. There is an important text on postmodernism and feminism, but it was written by a man, Craig Owens. A gay man, but a man. Although the artists taken up in the book are mostly women, Rosalind Krauss was the only woman author. Said contributed to the book, but it wasn’t a text on postcolonial questions, so that was missing, too. Remember this was 1983. Postcolonial studies, queer theory, these were only emerging then.

EO

What was the theoretical disposition of postmodernism within architectural theory? Were they the same?

HF

There was a divide within architecture. On the one hand, there was the postmodernism of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Robert Stern, Charles Jencks, and many others, which, again, was mostly anti-modernist. On the other hand, there was the postmodernism of “deconstructivist” architecture, like Peter Eisenman’s, which drew on some of the same theoretical sources that we adapted, like Derrida.

EO

That makes me think of Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley’s “Deconstructivist Architecture” show at MoMA in 1988.

HF

Yes, that was an important counter to postmodern architecture à la Venturi and Scott Brown. But there were many positions in the debate about postmodernism. There was the divide in architecture. There was the divide in art, which, put simply, was the October position versus the anti-modernist position of Neo-Expressionism. And then there were other theoretical accounts, some of which we attempted to assimilate. In 1979 Jean-François Lyotard published The Postmodern Condition, which argued that the great narratives of modernity, such as the story of progress, the development of wealth, the spread of the Enlightenment, had broken up. That argument was related to ours; in fact, it was even more dramatic: Lyotard claimed that we faced the end not only of modernism but of modernity as such. But then other philosophers like Jürgen Habermas argued that we had to recommit to modernity as a project, that any other position was nihilistic. I included his voice in The Anti-Aesthetic as a counterpoint to the celebrations of “the end” in the book.

To my mind critical theory, not art or architecture, was the avant-garde of that time. In many ways critical theory of the 1970s and ’80s was the politics of the 1960s continued by other means. In part the political disappointments after 1968 were recouped as the theoretical activisms of the next decades, which were political after their own fashion.

EO

When you say critical theory is politics continued by other means, it makes me think of Stuart Hall.

HF

Yes, you could argue that Stuart Hall had a more direct connection to actual political activity than many other theorists through his participation first in the New Left and then in Birmingham Cultural Studies. Many critical models were developed to understand the different movements of the 1960s—the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-War movement, the Feminist movement. That was the case with Hall, but, like many of his British colleagues, he was more alert to questions of class than most of his North American counterparts.

EO

Say more about critical theory as the avant-garde of the time. It wasn't necessarily tied to the academy in the same way that it is today.

HF

In the late 1970s Rosalind Krauss wrote a short text called “The Paraliterary,” where she argued that theorists like Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan were the writers that young people read. Not only did they have radical ideas, but they also experimented with language, with subjectivity. This was enormously seductive. Remember this was a moment of political retreat. Thatcher was elected in 1978, Reagan in 1980, Helmut Kohl in 1982. Critical theory carved out a space of vanguard invention in the midst of a far greater counter-revolution.

EO

There was also the recession then.

HF

Yes, New York was bankrupt in the mid-1970s.

EO

And you arrived at that time.

HF

It had disastrous effects on the city, but it also made it cheap to live here. So, you could come here, hang out, meet other young people, and work only when necessary. My experience in New York then was much closer to that of artists and writers in the 1950s than to that of today. Most of my friends lived downtown, within a radius of ten blocks or so; we weren’t forced out into the reaches of the city.

EO

The fact that you occupied all of these different positions is very intriguing to me. What happened when architecture and art met with the market? When I interviewed Rem Koolhaas, we talked about how the residue of the movements in the 1960s didn’t really settle until the late 1980s, early ’90s, because of a cultural and social lag. And I feel like we’re only just now dealing with the effects of the policies of the 1990s now.

HF

The takeover of the art world by the art market was very intense. It affected things enormously, and quite quickly. Suddenly, some young artists had real commercial success. They were taken up by the media. Others weren’t. And this really tore up our milieu. It also changed the status of criticism. In some ways the curator and the collector displaced the critic as arbiter. That wasn’t yet the case when Craig Owens and I worked at Art in America. When the art market became too much to take, we shifted to the academic track.

EO

I'm curious for you to talk specifically about your time writing for Artforum, and then working at Art in America. Because my understanding of Art in America is that it’s been said that it was the writer’s art magazine, or the poet’s art magazine of its time.

HF

When I began to write for Artforum, it wasn’t a good moment for the magazine. There was a real lull in its discursive intensity after the great debates of the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. And that's about when I hit it. They were happy to let a kid like me have a go, and I was amped up on critical theory.

EO

Why not the New York Times or The New Yorker?

HF

They didn't have a clue about our interests. The major publications had a philistine relation to contemporary art, not to mention critical theory. The New York Times had reactionary critics like Hilton Kramer, and The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books had people like John Updike as their art critics. A fine writer maybe, but no art critic. And then there were all the poet critics, like John Ashbery, Peter Schjeldahl, and Carter Ratcliff. Also fine writers, but that was also the problem, their belle-lettrism. Otherwise, the literary world was rather distant from the art world and mostly dismissive of it. That has changed now. The writers I most admire, people like Ben Lerner and Rachel Kusher, are involved, even steeped, in contemporary art. But then the situation was very different, and that's why we were so critical. Most of the establishment publications, museums, and universities were either amateur or philistine when it came to contemporary practice and theory.

EO

I want to talk about Whitney’s ISP program.

HF

I began to present my work at the Whitney Program in 1984. I was a permanent faculty member from 1987 to 1991, and I have done a series of seminars there ever since. It quickly became a very important site for me.

EO

When did Ron Clark start there?

HF

Ron was one of the founders; he directed the Program for over 50 years. Early on he set an agenda that was quite rigorous—and very attractive because it was so rigorous. It was guided by his commitment to the Marxism of Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and other Gramscians concerned to see artistic practice as counter-hegemonic. For young artists, critics, and curators the Program was like a crash course in Marxist analysis and cultural resistance. Soon that agenda was complemented by different forms of feminist, postcolonial, and queer critiques. Early on the Program was also a home for interdisciplinary artists like Yvonne Rainer, who brought dance and film into the mix.

The Program has three parts: a group of artists, a smaller group of critics, and an even smaller group of curators. And it allowed for a very lively conversation among these three practices. Each week there was one reading seminar and then one seminar with a visitor—usually an artist, but sometimes a critic, a curator, or a filmmaker. It exposed young people to these different ways of thinking and working. It was also like a laboratory. There were little studios where artists could work; the curators did a show each year, and the critics wrote papers that were presented at a symposium at the end. It provided a space for young people to form a discursive community almost instantly. That, too, was a very important effect.

EO

Its sense of community seems felt at every level to this day.

HF

At every level, but at times those levels collided. Enemies were made there, too, but that’s part of any intense group of ambitious practitioners.

EO

Are the curators in a section together? Or are you with everyone at once?

HF

Most everyone did the seminars together. One putative effect of the Whitney Program—and this is what many people hold against it—is that sometimes the theory paralyzed the artists, or they only illustrated it. I get the force of that charge. That form of didacticism has never interested me much. I think art is theoretical in its own ways, not as illustration.

EO

It reminds me of the performative. Thinking about the program, art and language through this lens of performance—I’m not interested in the didactic generally, but we lack specificity of context. Because all these people are taking classes together it changes things.

HF

Performance is a good example of how an artistic activity, the practice of performance, and a theoretical activity, the idea of the performative, can come together and enrich each other. But when the art simply illustrates the theory, or vice versa, nothing much is done to either term.

EO

Does that have anything to do with how performance is perpetually ephemeral, and art is tied to these physical objects? There’s this variable, which is the market, and performance can’t be co-opted in the same way.

HF

Oh, I think it can. Look at Marina Abramovic. Relational aesthetics couldn’t avoid it either. The problem might go back to the “Pictures” artists, in fact. Douglas Crimp argued early on that “pictures” were really stilled performances—Cindy Sherman would be the obvious example. Artists like Robert Longo took performance and made images out of it, ones that could be sold.

EO

What is the role of the historian now?

HF

Traditionally there was a divide between art history and art criticism. Not for me. My historical projects are often motivated by contemporary commitments. And I hope my critical work is always informed by historical knowledge. There's a difference in deployment, but in each case there must also be a theoretical engagement, at least for me. The real point of theoretical work is to think the work of art, to disclose what it has invented conceptually, and to do in a way that it can’t do itself. That's the charisma of art criticism and art history at its best. As a young person, I found it in Leo Steinberg, and then again in Rosalind Krauss, and since then in many others as well. That’s what I’ve always taken to be my project—to think the work in a way that it can't do itself. And that means bringing in cognate ideas and complementary practices as well.

EO

Where is the space to do the work that one wants to do?

HF

That’s a good question. The art world is flooded with money and saturated with media. To be “successful” as an artist or even as a critic today, it seems you have to be a personality. You must have a branded presence on Instagram and other social media. And all that has very little to do with what I’ve done or wanted to do. In terms of that world I feel quite obsolete.

But the art world is also so vast that different micro-sites still pop up. New little spaces, new little institutions, often forged out of sheer will and mad hope. And that keeps me interested. You can find them and inhabit them either opportunistically or collaboratively. It’s still important to try for “a good entrance.”

EO

What’s “a good entrance”?

HF

It’s an idea of George Kubler’s from The Shape of Time (1962). Take Jasper Johns: he made a good entrance. He figured out what needed to be and appear at a particular moment and his work was strong in its intervention. Same thing with Richard Serra, and many others as well.

I don't know if I made a good entrance, but I had the good luck to fall into a milieu that accepted me and informed me. You can’t anticipate these situations, much less fake them; they are made collectively. And also, I think, in resistance. I mean, apart from the mirage of recognition and riches, why become an artist or a critic if you’re not discontent with the world as it is, with what’s given to us as ways to think, to feel, to live? So you begin to look for others who feel as you do. It's just an intuition you have, but the conditions have to be right. And it's not the same each time out; in fact it’s never the same. Those openings . . .

EO

Present themselves.

HF

Yes. You make them, collectively, semi-anonymously, but they're also there to be made. And that's why it's really important to have little sites like the Whitney Program or Artists Space, or The Kitchen, or Light Industry, or Triple Canopy, or November (I could go on). They come and go, but they’re crucial.

EO

Like portals.