Johanna Fateman

EO

Where do we begin?

JF

Maybe in the middle or towards the end, to explain how I wound up at Cultured? A little more than a year ago, I had these two major losses as an art critic. For seven years, I had been writing art reviews weekly for the Goings On About Town section of The New Yorker and when they drastically reduced the section and brought on a replacement for Peter Schjeldahl, I decided to move on. And then, two months or so after, there was the implosion at Artforum when the publishers parted with the sitting editor-in-chief over that infamous open letter, which thousands of us signed, in support of Palestinian liberation. I’d been a contributing editor there, and—with most of my peers—stopped contributing to the magazine in protest. Artforum is where I cut my teeth as a writer—working with truly exceptional editors, first on short reviews and ultimately on bigger pieces. I’m still very sad about that. I continued writing reviews regularly for 4Columns—one a month—but overall, there was a sudden, dramatic reduction in how much I was publishing. I was distressed about Gaza and about the repression of speech critical of Israel, so that political depression was coupled with the upheaval in my work life.

That fall, I started teaching seniors at NYU in the undergraduate visual art department. I was teaching the thesis symposium class. Being around young people and trying to teach them how to write about their work was helpful. It was a chance to reflect and return to first principles: What’s important about an artwork? How do you describe it? How do you frame and contextualize your object of study? It was freeing to think about writing more abstractly or generally, separate from the publishing world. At the same time, I was invited to write a long-form piece for Cookie Jar, a pamphlet series of the Warhol Foundation, edited by Shiv Kotecha and Pradeep Dalal. For that, I constructed a conceptual tour diary of Le Tigre’s real tour of the previous summer—which all feels so long ago now. Having that project helped me twist together the different strands of my life. It encouraged me to think of the art criticism that had been so prominent in my writing life for more than a decade as part of an overarching artistic practice that also encompasses the things I was doing as a teenager, and in art school, and in music. It’s funny that I’m back in the role of “art critic” at Cultured—just when I stopped thinking of myself that way, when I decided not to constrain myself with that category.

John Vincler, who I’d run into from time to time at galleries over the years, called me in the summer of 2024 and we talked about doing something new…

EO

How long were you with Artforum before the implosion?

JF

Well, I was a freelance contributor. I think I wrote my first piece in 2011. (I didn’t begin writing professionally, for magazines, until I was in my thirties.) During different periods, depending on what else I had going on, I wrote weekly Critics’ Picks and/or monthly print reviews, plus the occasional feature or column. I started writing for the Goings On section at The New Yorker in 2016—I’ll always remember that because Trump was elected for the first time just after I started. I remember thinking, How am I going to write about this stuff? It simultaneously felt like everything was meaningless (Why am I doing this?) and incredibly important (Okay, everything matters). Nothing matters, everything matters. I had this simplistic reaction.

I wanted to write about work that “meets the moment,” whatever that meant. But then, I think I was in a state of shock. I was seeing things in a too-literal way, whereas now I think that anything that keeps us human, that keeps us connected, is meeting the moment. That’s all that counts. There are so many ways of responding productively.

EO

What does it mean to respond productively? How do you engage with the things that you believe are meeting the moment?

JF

I don’t have the answer, of course, but if you look at the history of the 20th century—at art history in relationship to fascism, authoritarianism, and war—clearly there’s not just one way to make art in response to what’s happening. I think you have to trust yourself a little bit, trust your friends, trust the people you know to be brilliant. Nothing makes sense now, but the meaning of what we’re doing—conceptually, formally—might become more clear in fifty years. The way history works, the way we respond to trauma, all of this is very confusing. I know that’s a non-answer.

EO

It sounds like the point you’re trying to make is, “How can this one person position themselves to be frustrated when there are so many different ways of doing this?”

JF

Yes!

EO

In terms of your criticism generally, have you pitched pieces based on your own interests, or are you commissioned to write on particular topics.

JF

For reviews, in the past, I mostly pitched the exhibitions I’d like to write about, but sometimes editors would suggest things. At Artforum, I had a lot of freedom to go in whatever direction I wanted, particularly with features. Even with the more monographic pieces (I wrote features about Nicole Eisenman and Niki de Saint Phalle, for example), which were specifically commissioned, beyond the general topic, I could do anything.

Other features there, like an essay I wrote about sexual assault and art at the height of the MeToo movement, or an earlier piece about Net art, social media, and feminism—those emerged from conversations I had with editors-in-chief David Velasco and Michelle Kuo, respectively. At The New Yorker, I pitched exhibitions to my editor Andrea K. Scott every week; at 4Columns, I don’t know, we talked about it; and now, at Cultured, it’s totally self-directed.

EO

Going back to your earliest writing, your zines with Miranda July, did you both have similar ambitions?

JF

I would say we were insanely ambitious, but not in an “art career” way. Art careers didn’t even exist to us, not exactly. Now when I talk to kids—18- or 19-year-olds in art programs—many will say that they want to show at Gagosian. That’s not the kind of thing that we wanted. We were situated in a punk scene, more specifically the “riot grrrl movement” or moment (that designation arrived retrospectively). I guess, though you could say we wanted to be famous, it was more like an underground fame—a different kind of attention or authority—that we were seeking. And we saw the form of the punk zine as fundamentally literary, rooted in a hybrid text-image style, and as a place for cultural criticism, polemics, and so on.

EO

What was California like at that moment in time?

JF

We grew up in Berkeley, which was still at that point kind of a radical enclave; it’s not so much anymore. I would say it was already on the wane, but the radical legacy of the ’60s—and the people active then—were still around, in the mix. Not just in relation to the university: activism and organizing in Berkeley and Oakland existed in the wake of the Black Panther Party. More broadly, our surroundings bore the traces of hippie counterculture. Berkeley was a profound foil to the Reagan era, which was when we were growing up. The country was in this severely reactionary Cold War, AIDS-hysteria, “family values” place, but Berkeley was the opposite of all that. And so, with that cultural backdrop, I had no realistic sense of this country as a young person. I still have very little sense of this country.

EO

Your dad, Richard J Fateman, was working within the field of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley at the time. Did his work influence you at all?

JF

No one has ever asked me that! I would say he influenced me in the way that any parent that you live with inevitably does, but I suppose maybe I do have a somewhat unique relationship to computing, artificial intelligence, the emergence of the internet—in that those conversations were happening around me as a child. And the art-world fascination with the Unabomber always perplexed me, since my father’s department at Berkeley was a target. I do think I practice a different strain of skepticism, and have a different attitude toward technology, than many of my friends because of my upbringing, but the influence of that on my writing and thinking is probably subtle and unconscious.

EO

What was Reed College like?

JF

Reed was great. But I went a year early, after my junior year of high school, and I was too young, in retrospect. I was interested in too many things to know what to do with myself academically. Ultimately, the biographical significance of Reed for me is that I was in the Pacific Northwest, going to punk shows, and that’s where I met a number of people who ended up being major figures in my life—particularly Kathleen Hanna, who became my collaborator in Le Tigre. It’s where I first encountered feminist and postmodernist theory too, though that may have happened wherever I wound up.

EO

What happened at Reed where you felt like you needed to leave, and what brought you to New York?

JF

Reed was a step in between high school and New York. I always wanted to go to New York. I could break it down into little events that made me want to leave Portland, but the truth is it was never going to be where I stayed. It was a great place to be in terms of the punk scene and underground culture, but I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to be in the art world—whatever that meant to me at the time. So, I applied to SVA.

EO

Only?

JF

Yeah. I didn’t know anything about art school. I applied to SVA because a friend of mine was. Looking back, that seems crazy. But, again, the idea for me was to get to New York, not to go to a particular school.

EO

Who was there when you were? Was anyone who’s doing anything now there?

JF

Oh, yes, there were lots of working artists there. I had amazing, generous teachers. So, though SVA is not necessarily a great school by some measures, I have no complaints. Mary Heilmann was one of my teachers, and I became a studio assistant for her. Jutta Koether, John Miller, Marilyn Minter, and Jack Whitten were all my teachers. And, through Mary, I assisted another artist named Billy Sullivan, a figurative painter. I learned a lot from those jobs, and I just got to be around a lot of people, to observe them. Through Billy, working at his Bowery studio, I got to meet people like Nan Goldin, Sharon Niesp, and Gary Indiana; I came into contact with a whole Downtown world of people that was incredibly glamorous to me. All that was a dream come true. I felt like, Okay, this is why I came to New York—to know these people, even if they don’t know me, or even know my name. [Laughs.] Also through Mary, or maybe through Jutta, I worked for Pat Hearn—not at the gallery, but at her apartment, when she was already sick. I was in contact with her gallery staff constantly, though, and that’s how I got to know Daniel Reich, and how I was sort of in the orbit of Pat’s partner Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts, too. And a friend of mine—someone I knew through riot grrrl/zine networks, actually—worked for Gavin Brown, who was also in Soho then. This is a long way of saying that I consider this stuff to be my true art education, much more than the classes I took. But SVA was the way in for me.

EO

That was of that moment for American Fine Arts, right? And ART CLUB2000.

JF

Yes. The ART CLUB2000 people went to Cooper and were a couple of years ahead of me. Looking back, we were all really young, just kids, and there’s no real age difference, but I thought of them as older. And I would say we were less in the same social scene as much as we were in the same labor pool. Patterson Beckwith and I wound up on some bizarre studio/gallery-assistant assignments together. We would do these little jobs, for Mary or Pat or an AFA artist for a day or two. It’s kind of a blur.

EO

The Bernadette Corporation, were they also in the mix with you?

JF

Yes, I mean, you’ve definitely identified the milieu and the moment. I didn’t know Bernadette, but I came to know Jim Fletcher a little when I worked at Thread Waxing Space after I graduated.

EO

What was your impression when you met all of these people?

JF

Coming from Berkeley, I suppose it was inspiring to be around people who had ways of being radical, rigorous, transgressive, that looked very different from what I had seen so far. I didn’t have a picture of intellectual life outside of academic contexts or punk. I was 20 when I moved here, in 1994. I turned 21 in New York. I think it’s a great time to move to New York—developmentally, it’s the perfect age because you can take care of yourself a little bit, but you’re still a sponge.

EO

You’re like half sponge, half person. You have a certain cognitive awareness, but then you’re still blind in your circumstance and own potential, or something.

JF

Yes, I was trying to explain this to someone, about that time. I could not Google people—that wasn’t a thing. You couldn’t meet someone at a party and read their Wikipedia page or find their Instagram account later. So, you and your friends had to form your own CIA: listen to everything, pick up on the cues, piece it together, know who to ask, compile information, cross-reference it. Who’s who, what’s their art about? Where do they show? Who do they date?

EO

What happened next—after working for Mary Heilmann and Billy Sullivan?

JF

Le Tigre happened next. I graduated from school and Kathleen moved to New York and we started writing songs. And then, at the same time, I started working at Thread Waxing Space—my first full-time job out of art school. Lia Gangitano, who is now the founder and director of Participant Inc, was the curator at TWS previously; I was the curatorial assistant there. I stuffed envelopes, answered the phone. And I was really encouraged there, to be an artist, musician, writer, whatever. I made a soundtrack for Cecilia Dougherty’s film Gone, after getting to know her through work. Eileen Myles curated a reading series called Scout at TWS, and I met so many writers through that programming. I met a lot of people who are still in my life. I worked there at the same time as Hunter Reynolds, an artist I became very close to. He died recently. The artist Sheila Pepe I met there, and I just wrote a catalogue essay for her recently. When Lia found out I could write, or when she taught me to write, I started writing press statements and helped with research and essays.

Back then, there were certain pockets of the art world—I don’t think it’s necessarily this way anymore—where it was understood that your job sucks. You’re in the waiting room. The older generation hires you, mentors you a little bit or keeps an eye on you, because they know you’ll leave and do something interesting—that’s the reason they gave you the job, right? I don’t know. Perhaps I just really lucked out with the people I met. But what I mean is that there was a sense of fostering young people a little bit more—it was like, Okay, you do have to label slides and run errands, pay your dues, but when you get a show we’re going to be there. I felt very supported by my teachers, by my coworkers, and by the artists I came in contact with. And I was so obnoxious, really, so I’m extra appreciative of the grace they extended.

When I quit that job, it was because Le Tigre was going on our first tour. Or maybe I took time off for that and I quit a little later.

EO

How did the band form, and what did you want it to do?

JF

The band was, at first, Kathleen, Sadie Benning, and me. (Sadie lived in Chicago, not New York, so it was a difficult collaboration and Sadie left soon after our first tour.) I knew Kathleen from Portland, I met her at a Bikini Kill show, and Sadie I met in Portland—I think—at a film screening. Sadie was showing early pixel-vision work and traveling with the Toronto queercore band Fifth Column. Kathleen and I met JD Samson, who joined Le Tigre in 1999, when K8 Hardy dropped by Thread Waxing Space with her—they were seeing shows in Soho. I think they were both still in school. We shared a vision for making art under the umbrella of “being a band.” I didn’t have any plan, and I don’t know what I thought would happen. I was just laser focused on “being an artist.” Strangely, we were sort of successful, and we signed to a major label eventually.

EO

What did it feel like when you were experiencing that kind of success?

JF

Very exhausting physically and often alienating. There was a lot of touring. Things changed as we grew and, in turn, the band wasn’t as interesting to me—to any of us, maybe. We became more like a normal band, it was more like a job, and our ideas didn’t necessarily work for a broader audience or bigger spaces. That’s what I think in retrospect. I’m not sure what I thought at the time. But it was truly an adventure. I saw the world; I learned technical, production stuff; I learned about the music industry; I learned how to write a pop song; I learned how to work with recording artists. We wrote a song with Christina Aguilera. I got a publishing deal. I feel really grateful for all those experiences. It was really bizarre to be in that world, but, again, I’m very grateful. My rule at the time was to just say yes to things. I figured I had nothing better to do. (Now I’m more discerning. I say no to more things. I think until you’re 40, you’re figuring out what you want to do or who you are—it takes time and it’s better to err on the side of yes rather than no.)

The only person I really cared about meeting who was famous was Missy Elliott. She did a remix of a Le Tigre song. That was the only moment where I thought, I actually did something cool. [Laughs.] I met her at her manager’s office with JD, and she gave me a bunch of clothes from her fashion line. She picked a song off our last album and did a remix. (It was never released.) Towards the end of the whole Le Tigre thing we were doing these increasingly crazy—or surreal—things, but it wasn’t connected to anything I ultimately wanted to do with my life. I learned from the band that I don’t need to be on stage under a spotlight. I’m not necessarily a performer. I think I can do it—and I will do it in service of something—but it’s not what drives me. Although, of course, it completely shaped me as a young person; Le Tigre informs everything I have done since. I’m very aware of that.

EO

What years did you do Le Tigre?

JF

1998 to 2005, roughly.

EO

What happened when the band dissolved?

JF

I bought a hair salon in the West Village.

EO

Why?

JF

Good question. I had $30,000, I think, when Le Tigre cashed in our chips at the end. I thought I should buy an apartment, but that’s not enough money. [Laughs.] That’s not enough for a down payment, even then. And a stylist friend of mine was like, I want to move to North Carolina. I want to sell my hair salon. And so I gave her all my money. I bought Seagull with another friend, Shaun, and then we also paid her every month for a while. It wasn’t the building or anything—we just bought the business, a below-market lease on a storefront space on West 10th Street. But I actually made a living there—that’s how I supported myself mostly for around ten years. I owned it and worked at the front desk in the early years. And then I started writing about art.

EO

Now we’re in 2006, when you bought Seagull. What world were you in?

JF

Neither the art world nor the music world (or I was in both). I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. Maybe in a way it was a mistake not getting a job in my “profession,” picking up where I left off when Le Tigre started, but I couldn’t see myself at a gallery. And I learned so much from the salon. Now I know how to run a business. Now I know how to manage people. Now I know how to make sure everyone gets paid. That was good, I don’t regret it. But after maybe four years, I would say, it was a little boring. I was restless.

EO

When did Artforum happen? What was it like getting that call and transitioning into writing in that way?

JF

I wouldn’t call it getting a call. First, I was asked to write a book review for Bookforum.

EO

David [O’Neill] reached out to you?

JF

Yes, he’s an old friend of mine, and his partner Lisa Darms is an even older friend, from the Pacific Northwest. I met her in Olympia. Dave knew I wrote zines, that I was a writer in some sense, if not a magazine writer. And there was this book about riot grrrl coming out. I was one of the few people in that scene who wasn’t mentioned in the book. So he asked me to review it. I think I just did a good job. And then people kept asking me to write. I’ve been very charmed in that way—it’s never something I’ve had to fight for. I’ve never really had to try to get my work in front of someone. People have invited me to contribute.

EO

What was the book called?

JF

Girls to the Front by Sarah Marcus. I wrote other things for Bookforum after that, too. Dave was a huge part of helping me write cultural criticism in this new way. It was Lauren O’Neill-Butler who asked me to write Critics’ Picks (online reviews) for Artforum, I think because of that first book review. Then, after a while, I was writing three a month plus one print review. Then I got a Warhol Grant—the Art Writers Grant. And I think that’s when Michelle Kuo asked me to write a feature.

EO

You wrote the essay about sexual violence, “Fully Loaded,” for Artforum. Then what happened with The New Yorker?

JF

So that’s jumping ahead a bit. That essay was in David Velasco’s first issue of Artforum as editor-in-chief. I was already writing for The New Yorker, but probably only for a year or so. The editor of the Goings On art section at the time, Andrea K. Scott, was a client at my hair salon. Actually, this is something I should mention—so many artists, writers, people in publishing, people in fashion came to the salon. I just knew a lot of people—random people and art-world and publishing-world people as clients. Of course, Andrea also read my writing. (She wasn’t just like, Oh, this random woman who owns a hair salon—I’m going to ask her to write for The New Yorker.) But I think Seagull was a big part of how I stayed connected to people.

EO

Absolutely.

JF

I don’t know why Andrea asked me. Maybe because she saw I was writing short reviews once a week for Artforum so she figured I could do it. And I soon learned that being able to file on time, and doing it every single week, is most of the job. That’s the hardest part, never stopping.

EO

How did that inform your evolution as a writer and a creative person?

JF

Well, writing three reviews a week is tough, even (or especially) if they are so short. You have to learn how to write in a new way, but after a while you’re at a level you didn’t know was possible—writing fast, writing these extremely compact things. And reviewing art for a general audience, rather than an Artforum reader, was a big change. I’d write about something at the New-York Historical Society and something at 52 Walker the same week. It wasn’t all “cool art” that art-world people would care about—in fact, it mostly wasn’t. And seeing exhibitions from that perspective, thinking about which shows would be interesting to somebody who lives in New York and just wants to spend a Saturday walking around Chelsea or the Lower East Side, changed my relationship to criticism. I began to see it more as a service, both to readers and to the people doing interesting things in the city. I liked writing about the museum shows with mainstream appeal and to see those reviews appear adjacent to the more marginal or eccentric things happening. And I think the significance, at least to me, of what I was doing emerged from the larger practice and the constellations of reviews together rather than the internal argument of any single 150-word piece.

EO

Were you reading other critics? Peter Schjeldahl, Roberta Smith, Jerry Saltz?

JF

I read Peter. But, in general, if you are writing reviews, I don’t think it’s helpful to read a lot of reviews. You have to stay rooted in your own approach, voice, idiosyncrasies. You don’t want to take cues from other critics in a weak moment, when you are feeling stuck or insecure. Reading fiction, memoir, fantasy—that’s a richer well to draw from in terms of language and style.

EO

So, how did you first connect with Amy Scholder, who edited the Andrea Dworkin anthology with you?

JF

Amy’s a really good friend now, but I’m trying to remember how we first met. I think it was maybe in 2009 or 2010. Around that time, I donated all my zines and correspondence to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library at NYU. My close friend Lisa Darms was an archivist there and she initiated that project. She edited a book for Feminist Press based on the collection. I wrote one of the introductory essays, and I think that’s how Amy officially came into my life—she was the Feminist Press editorial director then.

EO

So you’d met Amy, your archive was at NYU, and The Riot Grrrl Collection (2013) had come out. How did things with Andrea Dworkin and Semiotext(e) start to take shape?

JF

Well, my Dworkin journey started when I wrote a longish essay about her for an anthology called ICON (2014), for Feminist Press that Amy invited me to contribute to. This really happened at more or less the same time as The Riot Grrrl Collection, so I was deep in that material and feeling very in touch with my teenage follies. And I wanted to choose a feminist thinker who was iconic for the wrong reasons, because she’s reviled, not celebrated, by my third-wave, riot grrrl generation. I chose Dworkin because she was notorious for her antipornography stance. Also because I did read her as a teenager and was very moved by her stridency and style.

From that experience, of (re)reading Dworkin’s books and writing that essay, I ended up getting in touch with her widower, John Stoltenberg. He was into the idea of me working with her archive. Again, one of those weird things that I just sort of said yes to. And I wanted to do it with Amy. We were on the same wavelength; I think she saw the potential for a reconsideration of this ultra-contentious thinker at that moment. So that’s how Last Days at Hot Slit (2019) came about.

EO

We need to quickly talk about Semiotext(e).

JF

I think that it was the perfect context for Dworkin—the perfect way to recontextualize her. The project was so wrong in terms of the thinkers they are deeply associated with at Semiotext(e) that it was exactly right. I wanted Dworkin to be considered within a very different radical literary tradition, and I wanted her work to have space to breathe, away from an outdated terf-y radical-feminist kind of dogma. And Amy, who had by then left Feminist Press, knew Hedi and Chris. (I guess, by then, I also knew Chris.) So it worked out. We were surprised by how much attention the book got, and I’m really happy about the way that it shifted the conversation a little

EO

Now that you’re in this new position, at Cultured, how are you engaging in the general form of criticism?

JF

I’m still finding my footing—figuring out what I can do with the platform and how I can push things as a writer. Founding the Critics’ Table, as our vertical at Cultured is called, is also, for me, about working with other people, it’s about being an editor, which is new for me. I think there is something good just in that, in doing something new at this point in my life. It’s a somewhat desperate time, let’s face it. And I know people aren’t going to read what we publish in Cultured as much as they’ll read Harper’s or the Times. But I don’t want to spend this time, during my country’s descent into fascism, watching my peers say, Yeah, things got really woke in the 2020s and the art world sucked. I don’t know what the counternarrative is exactly, but I know we develop that by working, by not stopping. So, I can’t give up. Art is important. And I care about it not because I think it can achieve some specific social or political goal, or because I think it can replace organizing, but because I’ve seen its meaning—its capacity to make meaning—in my own life.