Yve-Alain Bois

VM

The dismal state of art history as discipline in France when you were a student is one of the main running themes in An Oblique Autobiography, as an impetus for the entire course of your professional development and the specific path that it took. So how do you feel about the state of art history and art criticism now, both in France and in the US?

Y-AB

When I was younger, in France, and I would be asked what my profession was, I would never say I was an art historian—because art history in France was so reactionary and so stale. So, I would say, “No, no, no, not art history! I'm an art critic.” But now in America, art critics have basically disappeared, or rather most of them have become, you know, professional clappers. If you write a negative review of an artist’s show, you are just crucified. So that's done less and less. You basically are condemned to recite the press release of a gallery. So, I wouldn't say I'm an art critic now, I would rather say I'm an art historian.

It depends on the context, but at the end of the day the goal is to be a critical art historian or a historical critic—to be both and to have a sense of defending certain things according to certain of your own beliefs. And, of mining history to make your discourse coherent and/or to find some critical coherence in history. There’s a difference of intent, perhaps, between history and criticism, but in my own work—and I think this goes for many of the people I admire—there was always an attempt to combine the two: of not doing history without the critical function and not doing any criticism without a historical base.

I don't know the situation in France that well, but I think things have changed. I mean, there were always pockets of people who were very interesting but they were very, very marginal. For example, when I was attending the seminars of [Hubert] Damisch, he was considered to be absolutely taboo by the establishment art history at the time. Art history then was completely governed by one centralized institution, there was a whole pyramid governing not only the universities, but the museums as well. At the top of the pyramid a single court of a few old men had the authority to decide on all appointments in art history anywhere in the entire system of French academia, and in the museum system as well. It was just completely clique-y, and—except in the field of medieval art, which was a little niche of its own and developed slightly different structures, even though in that case it was more historians proper than the art historians that started to move things around a little bit. It was purely empirical, fundamentally anti-theoretical. It was, in fact, more than just empirical, it was actively against any idea: “Don't have any ideas! They are dangerous! Just catalog, count stones, and that's it.” All that was recommended to grad students was to work on the Grand Siècle, on the seventeenth century French. It was really awful.

To give you an example, with regard to twentieth century art, when I was a student, there was exactly one person in all the Paris universities who was allowed to direct PhDs in that field, and he himself was an Africanist, Jean Laude, a wonderful man. He was so disgusted by the situation that he took upon himself to teach half his courses on modern art and the other half on African art, which was his official brief. The two professors who were occupying chairs of modern art were fundamentally anti-modern: I mean, they both considered Cézanne the beginning of the apocalypse. So that's what it was, and it has definitely changed. There are lots of people doing interesting work right now, I think, both in the more traditional subfields, such as the Italian Renaissance, and in modernist studies. I’m reading new things now that are really interesting, things are happening, that's for sure…

VM

I want to ask you more about Damisch later, but for now can you name a few of the most exciting to you?

Y-AB

I have several friends that are doing very good work. Jérémie Koering, for example, recently published a book on edible art from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to our time (Les iconophages. Une histoire de l'ingestion des images [The iconophages. A history of image ingestion]), and I believe it is going to be published by Zone Books in English. There are really good things also being done on the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The nineteenth century is a bit tired at the moment, but the larger point is that there are new directions, and new people, and things are moving out there.

VM

Do you think there’s been a movement in the direction diametrically opposite to the dumb draconian empiricism that you have witnessed in France in the ’60s? Perhaps it’s specific to the Anglo-American sphere, but it seems sometimes that the theoretical part has become completely divorced from any materiality or, for example, questions of conservation. I remember your great review in Artforum of the grand MoMA expansion in 2005, and the attention that you paid to the re-installation of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk within Yoshio Taniguchi’s updated building, the way they put it under an overhanging gangway, allowing, not to say inviting, the public to look at it from above, which is exactly the opposite of Newman’s whole conception for the artwork as an inversion. So, do you ever feel that the art historical discourse basically became the negative of its own earlier failings, in a sense? All brain, no body…

Y-AB

I definitely learned a lot from conservators. But, you know, there’s also been a change in conservation itself. I think that my friend Carol Mancusi-Ungaro was very important for that change, which is that there used to be a complete separation of fields, like artists or curators wouldn't even speak to conservators, and the conservators wouldn't speak to art historians—with the result that conservators sometimes were paying too much attention to something that had no importance whatsoever historically. And art historians were making mistakes because they did not to even think of doublechecking with a conservator. So, now I think conservators have decided that it's a good idea to have some kind of notion of historical development, and art historians, of the material development. This said, it’s an incredibly important part but there are many other things that are happening in art history at the moment that I just don't even feel competent to talk about. I just look at it from afar, and I say, fine, it's interesting...

VM

But you don't feel motivated to delve further…

YAB

I feel like I'm a dinosaur. A disappearing species. People like me are a disappearing species.

VM

That's just being rude to yourself. But so, have you had any encounters like that, with issues of conservation, with the materiality of the work, where it fundamentally changed the way you had to think about it and approach it?

Y-AB

Well, you know, you repeat things that you think because you were taught them. And then at some point, some people say, “No, that's not the case.” I remember very well that the first time I met my friend Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, we had a fight. It was at a small colloquium that Kirk Varnedoe had organized on Pollock, as he was working on his retrospective of the artist, it was a kind of little informal gathering of, I dunno, fifty people or something like that. And during the discussion I was speaking about Pollock not using the brush and not touching the canvas, just letting the drip take its course, that whole thing, and Carol intervened and she said, “That's not true! He sometimes used a brush. And he sometimes touched the canvas,” I was so taken aback, I couldn’t believe it, crying out something like, “What do you mean it's not all drip?” And she showed me, directly in front of one the classical drip paintings at MoMA. So, all my mantra about Pollock never touching the canvas, and not thinking of the brush as a prolongation of his hand, and having the agency solely left to gravity and the paint’s viscosity or liquidity, I had to curb all that back a bit.

VM

But it was both! I mean, the fact that he did sometimes use the brush as a regular painter does not necessarily invalidate the significance of the horizontal drip. Because that's a pretty important point in the Formless: A User’s Guide [the catalog accompanying the eponymous exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, which proposed to re-read many of modernism’s banner works with the aid of Georges Bataille’s concept of l’informe, or formlessness].

Y-AB

Yeah, of course. So, all of the ideas of Pollock that I had at the time of L'Informe show, many I think coming from Bob Morris and in any case from authors who had paid attention, unlike [Clement] Greenberg, to Pollock’s process, I still think are important and that they remain in great part valid—but in many ways Pollock was also, you know, a traditional painter.

VM

Right. Well, speaking of the L’informe exhibition—and speaking of the Oblique Autobiography’s main running thread of elective affinities—the catalog for the show was a catalyst for my decision to become an art historian…

Y-AB

Well, I was looking at some of the texts in November’s volume on L’informe, particularly the roundtable about our show and its catalogue, and some of the takes on it were not exactly very kind… I was surprised you would want to talk to me at all!

VM

Well, I was not part of that particular conversation, and if I were, I would probably have to be a lone dissenter… but here is your chance to respond to all and any of those less than friendly takes.

Y-AB

Well, I was amazed by the general aggressiveness of the round table participants—while at the same time the categories we proposed and through which we structured the show (horizontality, base materialism, pulse, and entropy) are never discussed as a set. The tone is often that of rage, and I guess I should take it as a badge of honor that something that's a quarter-of-a-century old still elicits such an irate response. Maybe rage is the preferred discursive mode nowadays, or the default one? To the point that even our own discourse is read as one of anger: at some point Aria Dean, who is the least hostile towards Rosalind and I throughout the roundtable, quips that we “get mad at Georges Didi-Huberman” (whose reading of Bataille she prefers). I don't remember feeling any of that: we were, and still are, fundamentally opposed to his position on and his interpretation of Bataille—as was and is Denis Hollier, from whom we borrowed a lot—and we tried to explain why. What is interesting to me is that Aria Dean's point of departure is actually not very far from ours—I'm thinking of something she says in the roundtable: that what she loves "about Bataille is that he was really thinking very structurally." And in her very interesting essay, "Black Bataille," published in the same issue of November, she admits that our decision not to include Manzoni's Artist's Shit in the show "makes a lot of sense for the time" and even that "a year or two ago, [she] might have done the same," which to me indicates that she understood that, in our mind, the sheer referentiality of the work would have taken over and masked the much deeper structural operation that we wanted to emphasize (and enact, with regard to canonical modern art) as Bataille's concept of base materialism.

VM

Can you tell me a little bit more about the experience of making that book and the show?

Y-AB

Well, that show was a long, long time ago…

VM

Do you think everything's been said that needs to be said about it? Time to put it to bed?

Y-AB

Well, no, I’m not sure anything should ever be “put to bed.” It was a very interesting experience to collaborate with Rosalind, she's someone who is very strongly opinionated, and it was very interesting for me that we had almost no disagreements. We knew fairly early on what we wanted to put in. And we each agreed that we could put one thing that the other one didn't like.

VM

Tell me, please!

Y-AB

Oh, no, no, I can't say it. But, you know, that was interesting, and strange, and almost eerie, the way we made the plan of the entire show in basically one afternoon and then just brought it to life.

VM

Do you know that the book is out of print now?

Y-AB

Oh, it's been out of print forever, both in French and in English.

VM

I think it's such a shame.

Y-AB

And in terms of the American publication, it has been pirated on the web pretty widely by now…

VM

Yeah, for sure. But the physical thing is not out there.

Y-AB

Yeah, that’s true. I don't actually know in what format the French version will be reprinted because there are all these problems of copyright for images and all these kinds of things. So, I don't think it will be a facsimile of the original object…but anyways, something will be out there.

VM

Well, that's fantastic because I personally think it must be taught in all grad courses on art history, if only as a masterclass in how to think with art, and through art, toward a demonstration of its own operative anthology. But speaking of reading modernism against the grain, one of the other things that I know that you fairly deplore and that has been more and more prevalent recently is, for example, looking at Mondrian through the prism of spiritualism, and mysticism and his involvement with the likes of Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner, and the rest of it. There was, in fact, yet another exhibition fairly recently at Villa Mondrian on the subject, and that's also become a trend generally with a different way of recasting modernism altogether…

Y-AB

Well, the Mondrian/Theosophy bromide is something that started long ago, in the 1960s, as a reaction against what was admittedly a fairly stupid formalist take on his work. As I wrote in my long essay on Mondrian (“The Iconoclast") for the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and MoMA in 1994-5, it's absolutely true that Mondrian had been involved with Theosophy. It was crucial at one particular moment of his life, it helped him channel what he was suddenly discovering about modern art. He discovered Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Fauvism all at once, around 1908. At the time his own work was basically akin to that of an 1830s Barbizon painter, and he now has to deal with Monet, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, and even Matisse. It was a lot to absorb, and Theosophy was useful to him, providing a syncretist compendium of various idealist philosophies. Thanks to it he was able to accept that painting could go beyond its mimetic function, that colors did not have to be realistic, etc. Through Theosophy, he concocted for himself a theory that was not very far from Gauguin's Symbolist and Maurice Denis's Neoplatonist theories. But then, this was only for a short while: as soon as he discovered Cubism this whole edifice began to fall apart, and he gradually abandoned Theosophy as his theoretical crutch. The only aspect of Theosophy that he kept all his life is the emphasis on evolution--everything else disappears from his writings. In fact, he only mentions Theosophy two or three times in all his vast writing corpus, each time it's somewhat critically, the last mention, in 1923, being categorical. I devoted a long footnote to this issue in my National Gallery of Art text, so I don't want to repeat myself here.

What I disapprove of is the very ahistorical practice of referring to texts that Mondrian wrote in his youth, and that he himself criticized, and applying those to his mature Neoplastic abstract art. I find it intellectually dishonest. The same thing happened with a text about "the female and the male elements" in art (supposedly matching the horizontal/vertical opposition, which was a total cliché in Symbolist theories of art—I think that Ferdinand Hodler wrote about this too). His notes for the text date from around 1914, when he was reading a lot of another loony spiritualist (not Blavatsky this time but Schoenmaekers), and by the time he published it in 1917, he was already taking his distance from all this. The centrality of the horizontal/vertical opposition remains of course crucial to him, but the gendering disappears from his writing almost as soon as he had proposed it. I just resent the fact that these early texts and their banal ideas are quoted to interpret Mondrian's abstract works, long after he had explicitly and repeatedly disapproved of any kind of Symbolism. And of course, this compulsion to transform Mondrian into a Theosophist, or Kandinsky, or Malevich, all this, it's always a means of transforming abstraction into something that it was not, of going back to the previous chapter, secure because it is well-known. For this kind of history writing, nothing ever changes. At best I see this as laziness: rather than trying to understand what Mondrian transforms, you fold his abstraction back to what was before…

VM

Is it indeed laziness, or does it have more to do with the general trend of this recent interest in all things mysticism, Occultism, egregores, you know, all those things, and people’s desire to bring the art they find compelling under that umbrella as well? A popular way to think about this new fascination is to place it within the larger context of the noosphere’s narrative collapse, and that in turn also loops back toward the impulse to decomposition—one of the driving narratives through most of your writing, as well as modernism by and large. Is that a serviceable way to look at it?

Y-AB

I don't know much, if anything at all, about the trend to which you are referring. Maybe the recent fascination for Hilma af Klint is in that category? I don't perceive this in relation to Mondrian or that part of history, at least. I think that the whole idea of presenting abstraction as a part of a mystical current goes back to [Maurice] Tuchman, and his exhibition in the ’80s at LACMA about spiritualism in art, which was itself indebted to Sixten Ringbom’s famous 1970 book, The Sounding Cosmos. So, this is all pretty old—it’s something that was already happening forty, fifty years ago in terms of discourse, I don't think that's something that is just happening now. It might be recurrent, but it's not something that is emergent. And I think it has more to do with the old Symbolist tradition, the simplistic “let's transform everything into symbols,” and that's as simple as that.

I’m not saying that the Symbolist or even occultist tradition did not produce any interesting work—and indeed the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim was amazing—but this has nothing to do with the neoplasticism of Mondrian who never stopped, from 1917 on, to rail against “symbols” and their use in art, including his own past art during what he called himself, if I remember well, his “transitional” period. As I said it’s just laziness, you know, not even trying to understand Mondrian’s abstract work on its own term, and instead associating it exclusively with a well-known tradition that interested him for only a millisecond, just because it is well-trodden and much easier to grasp.

VM

This “failing to try to understand the artwork on its own terms,” would probably have a lot to do with a common misconception that formalist reading is easy, or more simplistic—whereas in fact, it's quite the opposite. And that's definitely a label—or is it a curse?—that is often being leveled at you…

Y-AB

Yeah, yeah, I gladly take the blame!

VM

And yet formalist analysis is one of the most complex and sophisticated ways of doing cultural history or criticism, is it not? And it’s just as much an issue of confusion between what formalism means to begin with, because when you talk about formalism, you talk about, you know, the tradition of Schklovsky and Jakobson…

Y-AB

And Tynyanov, probably most accurately—to make a very tiny distinction that would be completely lost on most American readers, Russian Formalism being so little known in this country. In fact, there are at least two trends of formalism, one which was dominant here for a long time, whose main representative was Greenberg, and which I call “morphological formalism,” and the other, initiated by Russian Formalism and pursued by French Structuralism, which I call “structural formalism.” I wrote a position paper about this long along (it was published in the Art Bulletin in 1996). It’s somewhat strange that we should be still discussing things like that today.

VM

Do you wish that were a type of analysis you could see more of, for the sake of the discipline’s complexity?

Y-AB

Well, I think that when I read art historical texts that really appeal to me, more often than not there's a very strong attention that’s being paid to the object itself, to the form of the objects that are being discussed. I do believe there are today still a lot of young, or not so young, art historians who discuss things formally in ways that I find very interesting. I'm just thinking suddenly of a book that I think is great, by Trevor Stark, called Total Expansion of the Letter: Avant-Garde Art and Language after Mallarmé. I mean, there's a very, very strong component of formal analysis of the all the works that he's discussing in there. And there are many other examples. In the book section of the “best of 2022” issue of Artforum, for example, I proposed David Kim’s Groundwork: A History of the Renaissance Picture, which concerns for the most part a crucial yet usually ignored element of Renaissance painting: the background. In a chapter I found particularly exciting, Kim shows how the gray monochrome background in the portraits of Giovanni Battista Moroni, an artist I knew nothing about, subtly inflects their meaning. I could also have picked Paul Galvez’s Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (I refrained from this just because he is my spouse), in which a close reading of the works—down to the microlevel of the stroke and use of the palette knife—is essential in exposing Courbet’s search for the “co-substanciality” of painterly matter and represented matter (rock, foam, etc.), and what interpretation of the world this kind of materialism induces. So, I don't think that “formalism” is dead, despite the negative reputation it has had in this country for a while. I should add that I do not particularly want for every art historian to be a formalist. To paraphrase Lenin, I would say that a dumb formalist is much worse than a smart iconologist! There are some scholars who don't want to address formal issue at all because they have other concerts, and it's also fine, I don't want everyone to do the same thing anyway, so, you know…to each their own.

VM

Don't you think the formal element is integral to the proper analysis of an art work as a whole?

Y-AB

I personally would think so. My own formation is very straightforward in this way, I come from a Structuralist education in which basically, very early on, you were taught to mark the difference between meaning or content, and referent. Those are two very different things, there's a huge gap between the two, and in order to look at this gap between the two, which is probably what interests me most from a historical point of view, there's no other way than going through, than performing an analysis of the signifier. It’s certainly one of the reasons I was first drawn to abstract art, which is auto-referential for the most part, and why I am always irritated by all these iconographic (mainly Symbolist) interpretations of it. So, formal analysis—I don’t want to be saying that it's the only way to do art history, that's just the only way I can do it myself. That's all.

VM

Fair enough. Let’s switch gears then: one of the people I was especially curious to hear you speak about, who’s not a figure in the Oblique Autobiography is Annette Michelson. I wanted to talk to you about her, and also your relationship to film more broadly, that being Michelson’s perhaps most signature subject...

Y-AB

Well, this book is expressly a collection of essays that were previously published. I loved Annette, I had always had a very good relationship with her. We used to be, in fact, often partners in crime in the October editorial meetings, we would agree on certain things that all the other editors would vehemently disagree on. And she was also very funny! So, I could have included the text that I wrote about her recently (in a special issue of October dedicated to her shortly after her death) but it concerns the weekly reviews she was writing for the Herald Tribune while she was living in Paris during the late 1950s and early ’60s, texts that I discovered very late and that had nothing to do with my intellectual formation. In fact, I did not read her work before I came to teach in America in the eighties, except for two essays, one that she had written for the catalogue of a Bob Morris show at the Corcoran Gallery, which I had bought when I was in America as an exchange student for a year at age seventeen or so, and was probably too young to fully grasp, and the other, which I stumbled upon because it was translated into French in a special issue of the Revue d’esthétique about cinema, her famous 1972 Artforum article on Vertov and Eisenstein, “‘The Man With a Movie Camera:’ From Magician to Epistemologist.” But, you know, because she was working mainly on film, and I was not, this wasn’t something that shaped me professionally.

Now, as to my own relationship with film, that is something that relates directly to my student years. I was very much interested in cinema, and Paris at the time was like a paradise for filmgoers. I mean, you could go three, four times a day to a film theater, and for students it was heavily subsidized by the government—it cost nothing, like one franc, two francs maybe, which is basically 20 cents in today’s money. And we had an incredible, constant access to films from all around the world, it was impossible not to find a great film to see at the last minute. You didn't have to study schedules in advance and mark your calendar for this or that rare screening of a non-commercial film, like the way it is now. And theaters would compete in doing “festivals:” you could see all the films by Fritz Lang that week, all those of Douglas Kirk the next, or Ozu’s, or Satyajit Ray’s. So, I saw tons of films, and I was very well educated in cinema until I came to America, where the way you consume film is just fundamentally so different. There's no place in America that is, or ever was, the equivalent of Paris in relation to the cinema experience—even though in Paris it has gone down the hill in recent years too, with the growing domination of Hollywood blockbusters, but it’s still amazing by comparison…

So, back then, I used to see a ton of films, and I was an avid reader of the Cahiers du Cinéma until when Cahiers du Cinéma became Maoist and then it became unreadable. I even followed a seminar given at the Sorbonne by Jean-Louis Comolli (who was then the chief editor), and also one by Raymond Bellour, and we’d look at films on an editing table.

VM

One of my favorite movies of all time is Jacques Tati’s Playtime. And I don’t know if I dreamed or hallucinated this—because I couldn’t find it anywhere online when I was preparing for this conversation—but I could have sworn that I once read, or maybe heard you speak, about this film as being exemplary of the logic of decomposition, the modernist urge toward decomposition, as well as decentering of the subject, which is a theme of a lot of your writing elsewhere…

Y-AB

Oh yes! Though I’d say non-composition rather than decomposition. Tati’s Playtime has the most extraordinary last 45 minutes, where basically nothing happens. Nothing happens narratively but millions of things happen all over the screen, everywhere, so that you cannot possibly see everything that is happening at the same time. You have to watch it closely several times to even perceive all of these micro-events—and I did—hundreds of times, just to discover all the little details, new ones at each viewing. I don’t know if it was in filmed in CinemaScope but I think so… In any case, it's a very wide screen, and you have all these things taking place everywhere. And if you miss anyone of these details, it’s fine, it’s not a major part of the plot—if one can even speak of a plot in that movie. This technique of fullscreen saturation with a camera moving just a bit, but not that much, and never zooming in or focusing on one character, I thought it was extraordinary, something like the equivalent of Pollock’s all-over. I mean, it just wasn’t done in the commercial type of cinema—as for underground cinema, you can imagine easily Warhol doing something like that. Not so surprisingly Playtime is a film for which Tati basically bankrupted himself. But it's one of my favorite films as well. If I meet someone and they tell me they can’t watch this film, that’s how I know we can never be friends. [Laughs.]

VM

Are there more examples within film that tie up to this larger impulse toward non-composition at the time? Erasure of the narrative center?

Y-AB

I don’t think I know enough about film to think of a good example off the cuff. I'm sure there are things which are not dissimilar in Antonioni, for example. There are some passages in some of Satyajit Ray’s films, which are a bit like that too, where you have this kind of multiplied, saturated field.

VM

Like in the Music Room?

Y-AB

Yeah, the Music Room, which is also one of my top ten favorite films. But that one is more focused on the characters and the inevitably sad story, even as the light and the space are becoming so distorted by the slow movement of the camera that you get lost.

VM

Well, now I’m dying to know, what are the other eight? Of your favorite films…

YAB

Oh, well, let’s see… Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore, [Pier Paolo] Pasolini’s Hawks and Sparrows, [Andrei] Tarkovsky’s Andrei Roublev, Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, [Yasujirō]Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together, Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante.

VM

You begin the Oblique Autobiography by citing what has been omitted from the book, the people and the things that you may similarly [to the ones that were included] consider among your elected affinities, but that just did not make it into the final draft, and one of them is Michael Fried. I wondered if you could tell me about your relationship.

Y-AB

Well, as I said, the book is made exclusively of texts that were already published. I didn't want to write something new for it, except for short intros prefacing each essay, and I didn’t have anything pre-published on Fried, so…

VM

The one on Derrida was never published!

Y-AB

Oh, you mean the letter to the New York Times [in response to the paper’s obituary of Derrida]? Well, it should have been published… but anyway, the book consists exclusively of old texts, because I didn't want to really write an autobiography from scratch—I actually dislike the genre. And so, in the introduction to the book, I felt a need to specify the rule (only previously published texts) and what went with it, which is that there would be whole aspects of my scholarly existence that would not be dealt with at all, even though they are as important to me as the ones that are in here, just because I don’t have any pre-existing text to reflect on those. And one of those important things is the fact that I came to work at Johns Hopkins and that Michael [Fried] was the person who invited me to come teach for a year. And even though he certainly knew that I was not 100 percent agreeing with him, he probably didn't know the extent to which I disagreed with him when he invited me. I made sure that he did, though, when he asked me to stay, and offered me a tenure-track position. For example, I gave him a long essay to read that I had just written on Richard Serra, which contains a long critique of “Art and Objecthood.”

But we had a very interesting relationship. We even taught a seminar together, which was really quite lively because of our multiple disagreements; it even had what I’d call a comedic aspect. The students were confused at first, they didn't know what to do! Because one day Michael would say, “for next week we'll read the most important essay in twenieth century art criticism by Greenberg,” on, say, collage. And I would say, “well, this essay is great, there are wonderful things in it, but it so happens that I find it fundamentally wrong!” The discussions were vibrant—I remember particularly those on Fredric Jameson’s first major essay on “postmodernism” and on [Manfredo] Tafuri.

Michael was also very generous towards me; he edited the first text that I wrote in English, which was an essay on Barnett Newman for the exhibition of an exhibition at the Pace gallery in New York. And when I left for Harvard, he was unhappy—I think he considered me a deserter, because he was the one who had invited me to America, and there I was, leaving after eight years—but at the same time he would say, “I understand you can't refuse this offer.”

I remember that not long before I left, he made a Venn diagram of two intersecting circles, and he tried to list all the artists that we agreed on in the middle, and then two long, long lists of the ones where we disagreed to each side—that was his means to say that there was enough common ground for us to have a meaningful conversation.

VM

Is there anything about the Oblique Autobiography that you hoped I would ask you about that I haven’t?

Y-AB

No. The only thing that I should have mentioned in the introduction and didn’t, because I didn't even think that it was something special until I noticed that it has escaped most people who read the book and commented about it so far, is that the texts are reprinted in the reverse order of their original publication. That is, the first text of the book is the last published, and the last text of the book is the earliest published. To me, this feels completely natural, you know, you go backwards, you just climb back into your past. It never occurred to me that it could feel counterintuitive. It was my intuition, so it wasn't counterintuitive to me. So, the order of the table of contents may look random, but it’s not. That is, this very strict order does generate disorder as you never get the facts to which those various texts allude in a chronological order.

VM

I didn't realize that either but that makes perfect sense. One of the protagonists of the book who makes an appearance throughout the chapters and gets a lot of credit for shaping who you are today is Hubert Damisch, and what puzzles me about Damisch is his lack of recognition and popularity in the Anglo-American art history sphere. Can you tell me about your personal relationship a little bit?

Y-AB

Well, it started when I was a student, and he became a friend. In the book there is a long essay/memoir about his seminar, which I attended for several years. I came to it completely unprepared. I'd never heard of him and at that time, I was completely disgusted by art history. It was [Roland] Barthes who told me to go and check it out. So I went, only because Barthes strongly recommended it, but since Damisch was mentioned to me as an art historian my expectations were very low. And then, right from the first session I attended, I was completely mesmerized by his immense appetite. He was a voracious reader, and in all kinds of direction, in every kind of field. Before art history he had studied anthropology and philosophy, but he was also interested in psychology, linguistics, history, and whatever you could think of, even math. He was absolutely insatiable. It was really quite extraordinary to have someone that open, that curious, as a role model, even though I would never have the courage to be like that, to try to master all these fields at once. [Meyer] Shapiro was like that, too, but that’s quite rare. Of course, there is some kind of hubris to this, too, imagining that you can go into all these fields, that you can know all these things, and do all these things. This kind of unbelievable openness was based on a great self-confidence, to be sure, but he was very generous about sharing his findings, about whatever theoretical issue he was munching on at any given moment time. I mean, in France at the time, and I’m speaking of the mid-1970s, he was the only person reading Rosalind Krauss and October, discussing them in class. In fact, he was the one who first spoke to me about Rosalind. I had actually read one or two of her things before, but I thought she was just someone who’d written a few pieces in Artforum, I hadn’t connected her to anything larger than that...

Damisch said in one of his texts, and this is something that he repeated a lot, that he felt he was not an inventor of concepts, but that he was a trafficker, a passeur—that his main function was to transform disciplines simply by transporting concepts from one to the other. He felt that this activity was his most worthy contribution.

VM

Are there any artists that he changed your mind on?

Y-AB

No. We didn't have the same taste or range of interests, exactly. I mean, he wrote very interesting texts on artists that I liked a lot. His text on Mondrian from 1959 has remained for a long, long time, for me, one of the best written on that artist, and still today I find it very impressive. Also, his essay on Pollock, dating from the same period—I don’t know of any text written in French that is as brilliant, except that by my friend Jean Clay, which I mention in the long essay I wrote about him, which is reprinted in my book. But at the same time, sometimes, Hubert he would defend some artist whose work I personally found trivial…

VM

Like whom?

YAB

Oh, Valerio Adami, for one! He was an artist who had seduced many of the French intellectuals. Derrida, Lyotard, they all wrote about him. And I thought his work was basically decorative kitsch…

VM

Are there any artists who you changed your mind on radically because of learning something about them or having a conversation with somebody else, reading something or seeing something in person?

Y-AB

Well, there are artists for whom I had a lot of respect but whose later work really disappointed me. And so, you start asking yourself, maybe it was not that great before, or maybe you were wrong about it from the beginning, or maybe you were exaggerating the significance early on.

VM

Can you name any names?

Y-AB

Well, I could say just one name: Daniel Buren! The work he has done for the last thirty years seems ridiculous to me. It's completely contrary to everything that he said and done before. To be one of the “founders” of institutional critique, and to end up making little shawls for Hermès and gazebos in the garden of the Palais de l’Elysée , come on. So, you begin to wonder if all his grand standing and very brilliant essays that he wrote in the late 1960s and early ’70s, if all that was not complete bullshit… I mean, you just begin to question everything. But in general, no, in general I'm a faithful person.

VM

Can I ask you a little bit about Ed Ruscha and your relationship to his work? Because you've a written fair amount on his practice, yours is one of the essays in the catalogue raisonné, and all, but probably not as much as some of the people you are most associated with. I think that's a fair assessment...

Y-AB

Well, I probably would have never written about Ruscha without the insistence of Robert Pincus-Witten, who commissioned a text for the catalogue of a show he was organizing at Gagosian. He just called me one day—I knew who he was but I had never met him. At that time, I had never written anything about Pop, never written anything about Conceptual Art. I was interested in Ruscha, I kind of felt, even though I dislike Surrealist painting, that his was a kind of Surrealism I could understand. But I did not feel competent to write about his work and told so to Pincus-Witten, saying: “I don't have the tools, I don't have the necessary baggage. I'm like a little baby in front of that thing, I can't possibly write about it”. And he said: “Come and see the works and you'll be surprised.” So I went to New York, and at the gallery, they had assembled about four or five of his “liquid word” canvases, which I thought were very, very funny, and for whatever reason I immediately began to imagine things I could write about them.

So, I quickly wrote that first piece—more quickly and easily than any other text of that length I’ve written on any artist. I am still proud of that text, and I wish things would always be so effortless! Unfortunately, Ed didn’t like the essay at all, he didn’t tell this to me until much later… in any case, I got more and more interested in his work, and maybe he heard about this from common friends because ten years later he asked me himself to write the preface of the first volume of his catalogue raisonné. And that second text, apparently, he did like. Another decade passed and then he asked me for a third catalogue preface: on average I wrote a text on his work every ten years, even though he did not like the first, I think he felt it was too “formalist.”

For my own part, I just really did not know a lot about his work and its enormous range when Pincus-Witten approached me. But what I did know relatively well, and had always admired, was the books. I mean, I always felt they were fantastic books, and it is through them, in a way, that I was able to access the rest of his work, particularly the early “word paintings.” The common denominator, the key, was Ruscha’s sense of humor, which is so impressive. There is nothing more difficult than making a funny work of art. It's just the most difficult thing. It's hard to imagine Mondrian being funny—comic paintings are rare. And Ruscha has my respect for it. In fact, humor is a difficult genre in all media, even in film, except maybe for slapstick. I think it is much more difficult than tragedy.

VM

Who else is good at making funny art or humorous art?

Y-AB

Lichtenstein! I wrote a whole essay on that (also for Gagosian, actually). It is about this series of paintings that he titled Perfect/Imperfect. And because this series is so funny—it's a kind of spoof on Frank Stella’s shaped canvases—I wrote a funny text conceived as a parody of an art history lecture. So, Lichtenstein is funny. Miro, of course, but that seems banal to say. Oh, I should also add Richard Artschwager. What makes me think of it is that I also wrote a piece—again for Gagosian!—on his particularly hilarious series of gigantic toy pianos.

VM

Do you find Duchamp funny?

Y-AB

Duchamp, yeah… but there is also something that I found very cold in Duchamp’s humor. Irony can be very castrating. And I find that sometimes happens in Duchamp.

VM

He's kind of a smartass. What is your relationship to Duchamp generally?

Y-AB

The great grandson of Duchamp just gave me, a few months ago, the copy of a letter I wrote to him when I was fifteen…

VM

That's beautiful. Is it a good letter? Are you proud of yourself?

Y-AB

It's not as embarrassing as it could have been.

VM

That's the best one can hope for. How do you know Duchamp’s grandson?

Y-AB

I was in contact with him about something else entirely, actually, because he is also part of the Matisse family. His mother was the granddaughter of Henri Matisse, the daughter of Pierre Matisse and Teeny Duchamp, who was the latter’s wife before marrying Duchamp. So, the families are related, and that’s why I was in contact with him. But Duchamp, he was someone I admired very much when I was a teenager, and then I just got tired of the Duchamp cult. But you cannot write the history of modern art without Duchamp; he is someone that you just have to reckon with.

VM

I’ll finish by asking what you are working on right now, and what’s on the horizon.

Y-AB

Well, I am currently living and working in Florence and working on a number of different projects, (besides of course continuing my long-haul catalogue raisonné of Ellsworth Kelly, something that will keep me busy for quite a few more years, I’m afraid). Of all the different projects I have in progress, only two are really related in one way or the other to Italy. One is a show of Matisse’s Station of the Cross, which is something that has not been written about much. This was the last, the third mural in his Venice chapel. And it's very, very un-Matisse-like, so people don't know what to do with it. For this mural, realized at the end of his life, Matisse made a lot of drawings and quite a few of them are sketches after altarpieces and frescoes from the Italian Renaissance, things he had seen years earlier when he traveled to Florence and Padova, but also from reproductions he looked for in books. I’m trying to determine what he was interested in, and for what reason.

And then there is another project, it's another exhibition, which, if it happens, would be held simultaneously in three different museums: The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Pompidou, and that’s a show on the history of impasto. Impasto starts in Venice with late Titian—not at all Florence—and then it goes to Holland with Rembrandt and then, you know, all over, with many moments when it is totally banned by the various academies of art. And so, the show would be the history of impasto from the beginnings to today, from Titian to Gerhard Richter.

VM

Is Richter the last great artist? Or the last great painter?

Y-AB

Well, the last person who thinks about painting as an art of possibility, yes. I remember all these fantastic interviews where Benjamin Buchloh was always trying to tell him or even to make him say that painting was over and Richter would go, “No, no no...!” There was an endless back-and-forth in their dialogue.

VM

That's true. So, there's no one painting right now that you find remotely interesting?

Y-AB

No, no, there are plenty of artists that I find very interesting, that's for sure. But I would not say that there are many artists who, like Richter does, believe that painting is something that needs to be saved. I don't think they consider their work as this mission to save painting, which I think is something that Richter indeed does. And so, he is very much one of the last people to speak and think about things like impasto.

VM

Isn't the reason for that the fact that the discourse around different media has itself changed? We don't really seem to talk about the death of painting anymore, certainly not in the way people did in the, say, 1960s through the ’80s. Nowadays, everybody's painting, and everybody wants to be a painter. All the kids in MFA programs now want be painters, and it feels like a very unproblematic, very easy attitude for them to have. There’s a long discussion we could have just about that…

Y-AB

Yeah. Well, that's because they don't understand that painting can only live if it wants to die.

VM

Does it want to die?

Y-AB

Yeah! Every modernist painter had to have a myth of the death of painting. Otherwise, what's the point? Now, it seems to me that it's the market that is fully behind this “return to painting” that you are talking about, but I have the impression that all those metaphysical and teleological ideas about the necessary horizon of the death of painting have completely disappeared.