Rosalyn Deutsche

CS

What was your early life and education like?

RD

I grew up in a provincial working-class town in New Jersey, about forty-five minutes from New York City. My goal, throughout a good part of my childhood and my teenage years, was to move to the city. I wanted to live in an exciting place with museums and art movie theaters, meet interesting people, and be free of the constraints of my parochial environment. I went to Montclair State College in the 1960s. By the time I graduated in’68, protest culture was in full swing. I was rebellious and somewhat mixed up, so I wasn’t the best student, although I fondly remember my literature classes and a single art history class. I was always a voracious reader, and that continued during college. In my senior year, I spent a lot of time on New York’s Lower East Side, which was becoming a center of hippie life. I had a boyfriend there. After graduating, I finally realized my dream and moved to the city where I’ve lived ever since. After a couple of years in NY, influenced by people at my day job at Plenum Publishing Co., I became involved in organizing demonstrations against the American War in Vietnam, and soon after in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). I still consider feminism and war resistance to be inseparable.

Before I was an art historian, then, I was a feminist and antiwar activist, and that fact has largely determined my intellectual and political trajectory. Feminism was a break in my life, and I’ve never broken with the break. I’m paraphrasing the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of  “the event” as something that utterly changes the person caught up in it. I became a subject of feminism. However, the kind of feminism I’ve been in solidarity with has undergone transformations, following an unpredictable path, which is characteristic of the event. At first, as part of the WLM, I campaigned for reproductive rights and equality for women, although I didn’t seek equality in the existing social world—I  wanted to change that world, make it less warlike. In this, I was affected by Virginia Woolf’s great anti-war book Three Guineas and by Simone de Beauvoir, particularly her autobiographical writings. I pursued a new form of kinship in which friends merit the same degree of commitment as blood relations and husbands. The dehumanizing effects of privileging family members above all others, what Beauvoir called the prescribed “hierarchy of the human heart,” troubled me.

CS

What led up to pursuing a doctorate in Art History at the Graduate Center? Was it because Linda Nochlin was there and you were already interested in poststructuralist feminism? Was she on your radar?

RD

By the late ’70s, when the protest and countercultures were on the wane, I realized I had to do something different. Encouraged by friends and after taking a year of master’s courses at Hunter College, I applied to and entered the PhD program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into, but for a long time I had loved art, which I then thought of as a refuge from or antidote to barbarism. At CUNY, I quickly learned, especially after reading Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, that art is fully implicated in barbarism. Benjamin’s statement that “there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” has always stayed with me. Nonetheless, art is a resource of resilience for me.

Linda wasn’t at the Graduate Center when I entered, and I don’t think I knew much about her at the time. I may have already read her landmark 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” I wouldn’t characterize her as a poststructuralist feminist, although she was definitely interested in poststructuralist and psychoanalytic feminist theories. Linda was very open but at first a bit insecure about her grasp of the new theory. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was published during the so-called second wave of feminism. It not only excavates historical discrimination against women in art education–sexism–but, more importantly, interrogates the naturalizing concepts of “genius” and “greatness” that have long circulated in art discourse. That interrogation was certainly in the poststructuralist spirit of challenging absolute, extra-social sources of meaning.

At Hunter, I took courses with Eunice Lipton, a friend of Linda’s, and with Rosalind Krauss. Both were critical art historians, though in different ways. At first, when I moved to  CUNY, I felt like something of an outsider because feminism wasn’t yet on the intellectual or political agenda there. When Linda joined the faculty, poststructuralism/postmodernism began to be articulated with feminism. By 1983, Craig Owens, a CUNY student, influenced largely by Barbara Kruger and other postmodern feminist artists, was deep into the feminist politics of vision and wrote “The Discourse of Others,” which theorized the relationship between feminisms and critical postmodernism in the visual arts. Initially, Craig delivered a version of the essay in an Art History seminar at the Graduate Center.

CS

In Douglas Crimp’s oral history interview with the Smithsonian Archives, he characterizes his grouping with Krauss, and also mentions that you were a bit of an outsider. What was your relationship to Krauss and the group then?

RD

I was involved in the group in the sense that I was interested in what Rosalind was teaching and took all of her classes. She was going to be on my dissertation committee. However, she had left for Columbia by the time I defended–many of us from that group took a very long time to complete our dissertations as we were busy publishing and teaching. I was friends with Douglas, not as close with Craig, but definitely admired and supported his work. I attended countless concerts and ballets with Douglas and a few with Craig, who was immersed in classical music, as was I. 

For me, the CUNY years were both intellectually exciting and emotionally painful. Intellectually, I was interested in what Rosalind and the October group had to offer, but some in that group had a contemptuous attitude–a snobbism–towards the other students and professors in the program, which greatly disturbed me, although I shared the group’s criticism of traditional art history. I did, however, publish some of my earliest articles in October and was on the journal’s advisory board for about ten years.

CS

What has your involvement with October been like since? You and Krauss are both faculty at Columbia.

RD

By the time I started teaching at Barnard/Columbia, Douglas had had a turbulent break with October over his desire to promote queer studies. Craig had broken with Krauss earlier. I left the board about a year after Douglas’s forced resignation from the journal, but I continue to publish there. I respect the journal’s longstanding rigor and the work of the earlier editors. It’s an important venue for critical thought. It’s also a different journal now, drawing on Black studies, for example. Art historians like Mignon Nixon, David Joselit, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Huey Copeland, who are deeply engaged with feminism and anti-racism, all of whom arrived after Douglas’s departure, are among the editors. [It should be noted that one of the earlier editors, Joan Copjec, was always passionately committed to psychoanalytic feminism.]

CS

What about before the Graduate Center? Can you talk more about the art you were interacting with in those early years, before the veil of autonomous art fell for you?

RD

I’ve gone to museums all my life. As a child, my parents took me. They were cultured people and had a worshipful attitude towards high art, as did I. When I was very little I  ran away from a painting by Otto Dix that scared me at the Museum of Modern Art. It depicted a doctor with a big mirror around his forehead. Pavel Tchelitchew’s Hide and Seek, showing children entangled in a tree, also greatly frightened me. I was pretty unsophisticated until graduate school, where I gained a critical perspective.

As I said, the CUNY Art History department was very exciting intellectually. A  radical rethinking of the discipline was taking place there under the guidance of Rosalind, who brought photography theory, critical theory, and structuralism and post-structuralism to bear on art history and criticism. I read Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan. CUNY during this period represents a storied moment in the field. Unusual students were formulating the meaning of critical postmodernism in the visual arts–Douglas, who became an intimate friend, Craig, and a bit later, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster. Later still, we were joined by Ann Reynolds, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Maud Lavin, and others. Our main target was the idealist aesthetic ideas that had long dominated the discipline, embodied at the time in Clement Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s modernist doctrine that a true work of art must be self-governing and stand apart from everyday material life, compensating for the miseries of the social world. I studied the work of artists of the historical avant-garde, such as Marcel Duchamp, John Heartfield, the dissident Surrealists, and the Soviet avant-garde. Early on, Douglas’s exhibition and essay “Pictures” sparked my interest in the Pictures Generation artists, who were engaged in the postmodern critique of representation–Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Sherrie Levine, James Welling, and so on. Early art historical theories of postmodernism were not feminist, though their ideas about subjectivity in representation were useful for feminism.

CS

Did you take part in reading groups? If so, how did they impact you? What were you reading and discussing?

RD

Alongside my studies at CUNY, as postmodern feminist theories were being vigorously developed in France, Britain, and the U.S., particularly in film studies, I was in several women’s study groups, in which a great deal of my education took place. It was joyful, democratic learning. First, I read Capital, Volume I, with Eunice and, I think, Abigail Solomon-Godeau. I don’t remember if Linda was in that group. Later, with Abigail, Linda, and others, I read Freud, Lacan, and contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theorists. Feminist psychoanalytic ideas about the politics of vision and images, and the specifically feminist critique of representation in the work of both scholars and artists, had an enduring impact on my thinking.

It’s really impossible to construct a clear chronology of all the different strands of intellectual life taking place while I was in graduate school because things overlapped, happening all at once. However, Craig did criticize himself and other early postmodern visual theorists for ignoring feminist theory.

CS

You said you weren’t clear if you were aware of Nochlin’s essay in 1971. Do you remember how her work was received at CUNY or the downtown art world?

RD

At the time, before I went to graduate school, I was reading lots of women writers and seeing work by women artists, but as I said, I don’t remember when I first read Linda’s essay, the opening salvo of feminist art history. Once I became friends with her, Linda told me that certain social art historians initially denigrated it and made remarks like “what a loss for art history. Linda Nochlin is so brilliant, and now she’s writing this?” The essay remains one of the most important texts in our field. I taught it up to and including my last course on postmodern feminism in 2023.

CS

Yes, where we centered postmodernist critiques of representation. 

RD

In graduate school, my feminism became postmodern. It’s important to remember that there are multiple definitions of postmodernism, just as there are multiple feminisms. My postmodernism was aligned with feminism and with the diverse intellectual tendencies that are often placed under the rubric of poststructuralism. Poststructuralists questioned the Eurocentric idea that a fundamental order of meaning exists in itself, in things themselves, as what Derrida calls “presence.” By contrast, they interrogated the construction of meaning and subjectivity in language, which is to say, the social field. Their critique was integral to the challenge leveled by anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkers to the epistemological grandiosity of Western culture and its equally grandiose conception of the human subject. Poststructuralism transformed my feminism into what it is today: a critique of a certain way of being human that is encapsulated in the term “Man,” a being oriented toward mastery in the sense of conquest and dominion. This orientation or drive has been variously called “pathological masculinity,” “phallic masculinity,” or “toxic masculinity.” I mostly use the term  “masculinism” to emphasize that it stands for a position with which women as well as men can identify, though historically men have usually occupied it. My feminism, then, is an ethics, one that calls for a psychoanalytic approach to the human subject because, among other reasons, the core concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious mind—radically undermines delusions of mastery, including mastery of the self.

CS

This led you to question art history as a discipline. 

RD

Very much.

CS

You quote Trinh T. Minh-ha on how rethinking art history should not mean introducing topics like “otherness” to just create a “mere stir within the same frame.” In this line of thinking, I’m curious what your thoughts are on the move of an art history towards visual studies? Especially in this time of war.

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Visual Culture studies founder, recently published the book, To See in the Dark, about Palestine and witnessing genocidal war via video and images on Instagram and TikTok. In our feminism class, you lectured on how vision can be a form of control in art and film. Have you been thinking about vision and scopophilia during this time, in which we experience war and devastation via social media and mass shared images?

RD

Taking your last question first—yes, I think about vision and scopophilia in relation to mass media representations of war, and I write about this topic in my book Hiroshima After Iraq: Three Studies in Art and War, which deals with three artistic counter-representations of the bombing of Hiroshima.

And yes, there’s a crisis in the discipline of art history—a salutary one—sparked by Black studies, feminism, queer theory, and Indigenous studies, which collectively have uncovered the white supremacist, patriarchal, and colonialist foundations of our field. Is art history still possible? I’m echoing Trinh T. Minh-ha, who some years ago raised the same question about anthropology. This kind of crisis should be welcomed rather than evaded. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger says that real movement in a discipline can be measured by its ability to undergo a crisis in its basic concepts and procedures—and thereby put its research on new, contingent foundations. During such a crisis, the relationship between disciplinary inquiry and the things it interrogates “comes to a point where it begins to totter.” That’s happening in our field.

When Minh-ha refers to “a mere stir within the same frame,” she’s saying that crises in disciplines shouldn’t end in self-congratulation about adding women and people of color (a mere stir) to the existing canon (the same frame). Rather, the crisis can open us to new ways of knowing—perhaps learning is a better word—and being in the world. I recently re-read Derrida’s The University Without Conditions, which calls for a new Humanities “capable of taking on the tasks of deconstruction, beginning with the deconstruction of their own history and their own axioms.” It is precisely this new Humanities that is being censored in American universities today.

CS

Is this crisis a natural part of a discipline’s evolution?

RD

It’s not natural or an evolution, but rather the result of new modes of inquiry that break with the discipline’s structural frame in order to approach new objects. Of course, there’s another crisis in the discipline now, caused by the second Trump administration’s attack on universities and the humanities, as well as on art institutions. Let’s not confuse these two crises. I’ve been attending a lot of panels and meetings about the current challenge to art and art institutions, and I find myself caught in the same dilemma as many others: wanting to defend the university and art, which we’ve been so intent on disrupting. 

CS

Speaking of the institution, the Whitney Independent Study Program is going through a crisis. You have also taught there when Ron Clark was director. Can you speak to your relationship with the ISP and thoughts on recent events?

RD

I’ve been on the faculty of the Whitney Independent Study Program for about thirty years, giving seminars and serving as a tutor for quite a number of critical studies fellows. The great thing about Ron’s stewardship of the program was that he provided a space for new kinds of theories, even when he didn’t necessarily agree with them—psychoanalysis, rights discourse, queer theory, et cetera. My experience was that Ron’s Marxism became increasingly traditional. When I gave seminars focused, say, on human rights, he would argue against me. I would say my piece, and he would say his. 

I was very pleased when Gregg Bordowitz took over as director. He would have done wonderful things at the ISP had he been given the time and support. Gregg’s dismissal is profoundly disturbing, as is the conversation that has erupted around the ISP, which is based largely on unsubstantiated rumors. These include the associate director’s public accusation that Gregg harassed her and female participants in the program. Andrea Fraser wrote a long, meticulous defense of Bordowitz, saying precisely what I think: Gregg is the least likely person to harass women—or anyone. He’s worked extensively in groups, organized demonstrations, launched the thriving low-residency program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and undertaken nonviolent resistance training. Such an accusation is completely out of keeping with Gregg’s ethical character. I don’t know what will happen to the ISP now that it’s been paused for a year. I suspect that the critical studies segment will be discontinued, which may be what the Whitney Museum wants. But I don’t know. I don’t want to claim to know. It’s sad, because now more than ever we need spaces for critical thinking. These will arise elsewhere. There are people—especially ISP alumni—who are trying to reinvigorate the program, perhaps in a different format or place.

CS

Yes. The enduring question is what it would look like for institutions to still have monetary support from a board of trustees, but also have the board relinquish control. Following the Whitney’s move to the Meatpacking District and now the ISP’s change, what else—culturally—have you seen shift in the Chelsea region? You’ve lived in Chelsea for a long time.

RD

The Whitney’s move, coupled with the construction of the High Line and Hudson Yards, was the linchpin of gentrification and redevelopment in the area, which has become much wealthier, to say the least. I’ve lived in Chelsea for years. It’s rapidly changing as more poor people are pushed out—and out of the city altogether—the continuation of a process that’s been happening since the 1960s.

CS

In 1984, ’86 and ’88, you wrote articles about spatial politics for October. Your book, Evictions, is about the displacement of unhoused people and what actually constitutes the “public” population in designated public spaces. You raise the question of who is allowed to participate in that definition. How did you navigate this as a New Yorker, particularly since you have lived in Chelsea for so long, and these issues persist at an increasing rate? Right now, the city is in the middle of a mayoral race…

RD

I haven’t written about urban spatial politics since 2001. What I observe now as a New Yorker is, as I said, the culmination of a process to reserve Manhattan for the elite, as Mayor Lindsay put it in the 1960s. My students can’t afford apartments, even in the boroughs. The mayoral contest–the popularity of Zohran is a hopeful sign–is partly over this. Who is the city for? What is a city? In the 1980s, I argued, following the French Marxist geographer Henri Lefebvre, that a city is not a framework created by urban development for users. It is, rather, a social form created by users. Lefebvre thought that modern urban planning had killed the city–a space of spontaneity and heterogeneity–which, he added, is haunted by the ghost of the city. To draw a Freudian analogy, repression never fully succeeds. “Power suffers,” writes Lefebvre.  I don’t claim to speak as an expert anymore because after my writings on cities, I expanded my notion of spatial politics.

CS

What are these expanded notions? 

RD

By 1989, certain Marxist geographers whom I had relied upon for my work on art and urban spatial politics published books that were critical of postmodernism and that relegated feminism and other social movements to a subordinate position in politics, even dangers to left-wing politics.

CS

Is this Frederic Jameson?

RD

Jameson accused feminists and other new social movements of destroying the coherent political project, which, according to him, must be based on the foundation of economic class. Jameson wasn’t a geographer, but the Marxist geographer David Harvey reinforced Jameson’s assault on feminism. Both writers completely ignored the critiques of totalizing politics that had been leveled for years by poststructuralist feminists and radical democratic theorists. I wrote critiques of Harvey and Jameson in which I argued that their recourse to an absolute foundation of the space of the political was itself a form of spatial politics—an authoritarian one. I called that construction masculinist in the sense of being driven to ideals of wholeness, unity, and mastery. (I recount this history in the introduction to my book Not-Forgetting.)

With regard to concepts of publicness, in the first section of my book, Evictions, I introduce the idea of the public sphere into the then prevailing discourse about art and public space. I argue that a truly democratic public space is a space of democratic political discourse in which people criticize the social order and/or the state. The right to critical speech is the founding democratic right. Therefore, the art that was being widely touted as democratic—art that aims to beautify redeveloped spaces or provide lunch tables and other functional equipment—was, in fact, legitimating exclusionary, authoritarian uses of space. I countered conservative notions of democracy with ideas about radical democracy, such as those of Claude Lefort, Derrida, Chantal Mouffe, Ernest Laclau, and Jacques Rancière.

CS

War resistance spans your whole life and career. As you’ve said, it’s inseparable from your feminism. From protesting war in Vietnam to the genocide of Palestinans, exhaustion is all around yet war resistance endures. I’m curious if spirituality has helped you fight back exhaustion?

RD

An interesting question, one I’ve been asked in somewhat different ways before. I’ve even been accused of optimism! Sometimes I do feel exhausted and I’m not incredibly optimistic about the direction the world, and certainly our country, is taking. But I didn’t have unrealistic expectations about social change to begin with. When I was demonstrating in the early 1970s, I did expect to change things, and we did in some significant ways. Since then, there’s been a concerted and vicious backlash against the social and cultural gains of “the sixties.” What has helped me? My personal life has been and is very rich. My friends, family, and intellectual life are sustaining. Reading texts by thoughtful people, seeing interesting movies or television—sometimes I watch escapist programs, too—keeps me sane. So does being with people who think clearly, carefully, humanely, knowing that sanity and goodness exist along with the prevailing cruelty, perpetual war, and indifference to the claims of the oppressed.

I’ve recently begun reading liberation, prophetic, constructive, and process theology–the work of Abraham Heschel and Catherine Keller, for example. It’s been inspiring to acquaint myself with theological discourse about the possibility of social regeneration that arises in conjunction with catastrophe–apocalypse. I agree with both secular and theological thinkers that something new can come into the world but that that possibility depends on human action. Such action is  where actual hope lies. By definition, doubt is intrinsic to hope. I don’t believe in hope in the form of wishful thinking or turning away from catastrophe. I’ve written about this in my essay about Martha Rosler in Not Forgetting. I’m capable of despondency, but I’ve found that, though getting older can be a drag, I’m happier. I’ve gained a lot of experience and knowledge. I’ve opened myself to new ways of thinking. There was a time when if I had talked about theology or even spirituality—I’m a longtime meditator and am influenced by Buddhist philosophy—people on the left would have attacked or ridiculed me. They still might, but I don’t care.

CS

You’ve written about Crimp and his relationship with Buddhism, especially in his last days, and how he found peace in the practice. Did he influence this direction in spirituality? Was there a unifying spiritual perspective in grad school, or did this come later in your friendship? 

RD

The spiritual perspective was pretty much verboten in graduate school. Douglas was one of the people to whom I could never say the word “spiritual.” I wouldn’t have even said it myself. I was occupied with challenging the debasement of concepts of “spirituality” and  “spirit” in much art discourse. Douglas’ transformation in the last few months of his life, when he was dying, was remarkable to witness. I’ve written about it in several eulogies. Influenced by Gregg, Morgan Bassichis, and me, he started to meditate and read Buddhist texts about death. It was a great solace to him. Morgan meditated with him nearly every day. They read the Hebrew Bible together. I meditated with him the day he died. It was all part of a general softening in Douglas as he faced death. I forget exactly how he put it, but he began to let go of certain things that had hardened in his heart. He read poetry, which he had always rejected.

CS

How do your spiritual practices intersect with your Jewish identity?

RD

My family was Jewish, and we observed certain cultural traditions, holidays, and food, but my parents were atheists. When I was about eight years old I invented my own “Deutschist-Jewish” religion, in which I imagined I had a personal relationship with god and wrote letters to him about my problems.

What does being Jewish mean to me? I didn’t seriously reflect on that question until after October 7th, 2023 and the resulting intensification of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians, which is horrific and goes against what is valuable in Judaic ethical tradition. As you know, a lot of people who support Israel say that in order to be Jewish, one has to be a Zionist. I think that’s anti-Semitic and strongly disagree. I’ve never been a Zionist, though I understand some Jewish people’s longing for a safe homeland. Zionism in Palestine hasn’t led to one. My work has long been influenced by philosophers who draw on Judaic philosophy–for example, Emanuel Levinas and Benjamin. More recently, I started reading Rabbi Abraham Heschel, a prophetic theologian. I’ve become interested in the prophetic ethos or imagination in different religions. The prophet, according to Heschel, interferes in unjust collectivities on behalf of the claims of the oppressed. To be religious is to be a political activist.

In retrospect, it seems that I’ve been influenced by the Hebrew messianic hope for a just world, which Benjamin secularized in Theses on the Philosophy of History and the earlier Toward a Critique of Violence. Of course, Levinas and Heschel were Zionists, but who knows what they would think today?

CS

At the People’s Graduation in May 2024, students and faculty stood in protest against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and the actions of the Barnard and Columbia administrations. When the interfaith ceremony ended, professors, including you and Elizabeth Hutchinson, stood outside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and bid farewell to students. It was a bittersweet moment that marked the united political fight and end of the academic year. Though the ceremony symbolized students leaving the university, it also underscored that one doesn’t retire from a community.

I’ve asked you before about the distinctions between community and institutions. Over the years, you taught many iconic courses at Barnard, including Institutional Critique. Can you speak to this dynamic as institutional critique is increasingly professionalized?

RD

Yes, the People’s Graduation was wonderfully restorative, reminding me that faculty, staff, and students are the college and university, not the administrations or boards of trustees.

Institutional critique? Keep in mind that an institution is a social system. Not just a building or even an organization’s personnel, but a system and an apparatus. Take the art institution. Peter Bürger describes it as the mode of production and distribution of art, as well as the ideas about art that prevail at a given historical moment. Defined in that way, we can’t leave the art institution—or art as institution—behind. As Andrea Fraser has written, we’re part of it and it’s part of us. I don’t think institutional critique is hopelessly compromised, although artists have  to continually use new tactics and exercise what Louise Lawler calls “finesse.” Can institutional critique negate the institution from within, perform an exodus from it? I write about this question in my essay “Louise Lawler’s Play Technique,” which is influenced by Paolo Virno’s theory of institutions. Virno argues that institutions are necessary because humans are destructive animals. However, institutions themselves pose a danger of becoming authoritarian  unless they can conceive of their own negation.

CS

You’ve had a long and inspiring teaching career—beginning before Barnard with positions at places like Cooper Union and Queens College. This past academic year marked your final one in the classroom. I feel lucky to have caught you at the tail end of your time at Barnard and Columbia.

RD

My first teaching job, in 1983 or ‘84, was at Queens College. I was a graduate student. I taught the Art History Department’s first feminist art history class, a seminar, which they wouldn’t let me call “Feminism and Art” but, rather, “Women in Art.” Still, it was feminist. There were eight students. They were fantastic, ardent, and really wanted to learn about feminism. I invited Barbara Kruger, who was not so well-known at the time. They adored her work. I showed a lot of work by the postmodern “Pictures” artists. Then I taught other courses at Queens, 19th and 20th-century art. I loved it. I loved the students. Many were quite provincial. Some had never even gone into Manhattan. I remember a student who practically couldn’t speak English and definitely couldn’t write it but was enthralled by 19th-century art. That was thrilling. I remember the intense interest that showed on his face. 

I went on to teach at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, MIT, Harvard, and Princeton. For many years, I didn’t want a permanent job. I didn’t feel comfortable in academia, although I loved teaching. In 2000, however, Benjamin Buchloh invited me to teach at Barnard as a sabbatical replacement for Keith Moxey. After that, Keith convinced me to stay. I've been there for 25 years and just retired this past semester. Teaching became increasingly important to me. Writing was more important at the beginning. My parents were teachers. I remember someone observed my teaching at Queens and wrote that I was genetically a teacher—a great, encouraging comment.

CS

You said your family and friends have sustained you. I am curious how family life and raising children may have influenced your pedagogy. My peers and I formed tight bonds in the classes you led, especially in the senior thesis seminar, where you emphasized peer-to-peer advising. In that class, we saw you in a maternal or familial light. I’ve also felt this in your mentorship beyond the classroom.  

RD

I love introducing young people to new things. I especially love hearing them interpret artworks, which we do a lot in my classes. I’ve become aware that in a certain sense, I don’t actually know what I’m teaching. I know my subject matter more or less, but I don’t know how students are receiving what I say. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it. I’m bringing something into the world, but don’t know what it will be. That idea appeals to me. People often see me as maternal, and I’ve always wanted to be kind to my students. I respect them. They’re grown-ups or close to being grown-ups.  I had one threatening encounter with a rabidly anti-feminist undergraduate early on, but as a whole I feel fortunate to have students. Critical theory, feminist ideas, and art have helped me so much in life, and I want to give them to younger people.

CS

What was the decision like to marry and have children during a time when your radical feminism was forming and you were pursuing a doctorate? 

RD

I wouldn’t call myself a radical feminist because in the 1970s, radical feminists were separatists, and I’ve never rejected men. I was against marriage as a social institution and probably still am. It's been an oppressive institution, and, as I said earlier, I've always fought against the constraints of conventional family life. Beauvoir, in her autobiographies, recalls that she, Sartre and their circle experimented with relationships. One year, for example, they had a rule that they weren't allowed to interrupt each other if they happened to see each other  in cafes, in conversations, things like that. I always loved that idea of thinking so carefully about relationships.

I was also influenced by an unmarried aunt. She was like a second mother to me, and yet was not awarded the same recognition and gratitude as my biological mother. Even as a child, I found this tremendously unfair and tried to include her in everything. In college, I read a story or novel–I don’t remember which one–by Beauvoir, whose protagonist was the mother of a grown son. The mother and her husband, the son’s father, were French communists, but the son becomes a Gaullist nationalist, and she stops speaking to him. I thought, “Oh my God, wow, a mother can have strong principles that override the family relationship!” The father continues to see the son and by the end the mother speculates that she'll no doubt re-establish her relationship with him. The mother’s intense disillusionment with the son’s opportunism affected me powerfully. And, as I said, I was already fascinated by nontraditional relationships and forms of kinship, which were part of early feminism but are not talked about very much anymore. Of course, I also felt that marriage was unfair to my gay friends who, at that time, couldn't marry.

We live with contradictions. Feelings don’t necessarily harmonize with political convictions (stream Jane Weinstock’s film Three Birthdays, which deals with this contradiction). Douglas was vehemently opposed to gay marriage, but got married late in life. My marriage has been wonderful and also a struggle. I got married because, at a very young age, my partner, Bob, had a heart attack, and I realized I could have been kept out of the ICU. There were practical considerations in terms of insurance and children, but being married also fulfilled something for me emotionally. My criticism of marriage may have made my marriage better in that my husband and I have pursued independent lives. I wanted to be as devoted to friends as to family, even as I love and am deeply committed to many members of my family.

CS

Has there been a big break or change in your teaching throughout the decades that stands out to you? Has anything come to its expiration?  

RD

I’ve grown intellectually. I was pretty young when I started teaching, not that far beyond the students’ age. Now, I’m farther away. I explicate difficult subject matter because I don’t want anybody to be completely lost. When I was a child, I was often confused by my father, who could be irrational. I couldn’t make sense of him. I don’t want to do that to anybody and may even go overboard in trying to clarify things, though I also involve the students in discussing and figuring out texts and analyzing art. I ask a lot of questions about their thoughts. Of course, a certain amount of confusion is okay because it can mean a student is letting go of received ideas. I’ve loosened up and am more secure than I was earlier, which makes it easier for me to be open. It’s a relief to say “I don’t know,” and it’s good for students to be aware that teachers don’t know everything, and that they don’t have to either, that we’re all learning rather than knowing.

CS

What stands out about your pedagogy is the emphasis on the precision of a term’s use. One would think it’s a given in academia. In teaching and conversation, you always ensure that everyone’s in agreement on the definition of a term—not necessarily the truth value. It’s taught me to listen closely, pause more often, and not shy away from asking for someone’s definition.

RD

It’s important to take responsibility for the way we use terms. Not just technical ones, but ordinary words. What do we actually mean when we say or write something? Language produces meaning.

CS

War is a main topic in your writing, and you often cite Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas on the culture of war. What do you have to say to, or perhaps warn, the current generation of art historians and critics during this new—but not unprecedented—phase of U.S. complicity and participation in genocide and multiple wars abroad? What is the antithesis to warlike art criticism?

RD

I used the phrase “warlike art criticism” in the introduction to my book Hiroshima After Iraq, which is about three contemporary anti-war videos, by Silvia Kolbowski, Leslie Thornton, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. I took the phrase from Maurice Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. Blanchot says that political impatience, the urgent desire to move directly towards social change, makes criticism warlike. He defines war as the struggle for mastery and domination, which is what I’ve called masculinism. Blanchot writes about literary criticism and literature, especially poetry, which, he says, proceeds precisely by indirection. It thus makes politically impatient critics unhappy.

I applied Blanchot’s ideas to art criticism, prompted by a questionnaire distributed by October in 2008,  during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. The authors of the questionnaire asserted that the current generation of academics and artists, by contrast with those during the American War in Vietnam, were not taking positions of public opposition to the Iraq War. Their role, said the October authors, had been reduced to amnesia and anesthesia. I viewed this questionnaire as an instance of what Walter Benjamin calls left melancholy: an attachment to past political struggles that forecloses possibilities of political change in the present. I suggested that the questionnaire’s impatience with contemporary art’s anti-war activity was itself warlike in that it returned to masculinist conceptions of the political. I found it rather odd for a journal like October to limit anti-war art to aesthetic production with explicitly anti-war content–such as agit-prop. I argued that art without direct antiwar content but that troubles masculinist subjectivity can also be considered anti-war, an argument that I think accords with Blanchot.

To answer your last question, then: Based on the psychoanalytic feminist premise that dominant visual images construct a masculinist subject for whom vision is a form of control and domination, an alternative lies in the work of feminist artists and critics who seek to disturb the masculinist look, to undo the fantasy of mastery.

CS

You’ve said you’re retiring from teaching, but not from your work as a writer, historian, and theorist. Can you speak to that distinction? 

RD

I don’t know what I’ll be doing in retirement, though I suspect I’ll continue writing and will volunteer to work for causes that are under attack in this reactionary time. I have ambivalent and sometimes tumultuous feelings. There’s loss and there’s freedom. I love the freedom, but I’ve also loved teaching and my students and colleagues.

I used to feel incredibly fortunate walking around campus, but, as you know, there’s been an authoritarian turn on the part of the Barnard and Columbia administrations over the last two years, and that has complicated my feelings about retiring. In some ways, it’s made it more difficult. I feel bad about leaving colleagues and students in a tough situation. Students are arrested, suspended, and/or expelled for exercising their democratic right to critical speech. Professors are investigated. The administrations have institutionalized the Palestine exception to free speech, equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism through their adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. The transformation of these schools into carceral institutions—obsessed with discipline and punishment—is deeply dispiriting. In other ways, the change has made it easier to retire, more liberating. It’s a relief to get away from the stress. I joined the American Association of University Professors, which is leading the fight to protect students, faculty, and staff  and defend academic freedom. I’ve been impressed by my energetic, articulate, and courageous colleagues. It helps me to take part in protests and vigils, which I’ll continue doing in retirement.

I’m also looking forward to living a less pressured life. Freedom brings anxiety, of course, but I’m not retiring from thinking. My intellectual life will continue to sustain me.