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Against Criticism: The Artist Interview in Avalanche

Magazine, 197076
Gwen Allen
Published online: 05 Aug 2014.

To cite this article: Gwen Allen (2005) Against Criticism: The Artist Interview in Avalanche Magazine, 197076, Art Journal,
64:3, 50-61, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2005.10792838
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2005.10792838

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C _ of AWllGnche 2,Winter 1971 ( c _ C>

AWllGnche.photoanPh of Bruce Nauman
by GIMfranco GorJonI)

SO FALL 200S

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It has been claimed that during the 1970s, "the 'Age of Criticism'... [gave] way
... to 'The Age of the Interview.''' I In magazines from Playboy and Rolling Stone

to AndyWarhol's famous Interview magazine itself, the celebrity interview fed

America's hunger for the spectacular revelation of private lives.Within the art
world, however, the artist interview manifested a different set of public concerns
in the pages of AYalanche, a magazine founded by Willoughby Sharp and Liza
Bear in 1968 to document performance- and conceptual-art practices.
Gwen Allen
AYalanche countered Interview's uptown glam with downtown grit.
Published thirteen times between 1970 and 1976, the magazine suggested how the quintessential publicity form of the interview might
instead function in the formation of a radical counterpublic, namely
the politicized alternative-arts community centered in SoHo in the
early 1970S.2 In this sense, the AYalanche interviews can be understood
as a form of anticriticism: that is, their meaning and their effect on
the reception of art took place in opposition to the dominant models
of criticism and publicity operating within the mainstream art world
at that moment. J
Of great concern to artists at the time was the way that formalist criticism
in the 1960s. such as that published by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried in
the mainstream art press, might be complicit in the commercialization and spectacularization of the art world. John Baldessari's 1968 photoemulsion on canvas,
THIS IS NOT TO BE LOOKED AT, alludes to the ethical quandaries riddling art
criticism at this moment. Baldessari's prohibition "not to look" gains a certain
antagonistic force in the context of the image it cites, the November 1966 cover
of Artforum magazine, showing a Frank Stella painting on the cover and containing Fried's famous article "Shape as Form." For in this article, the formalist critic
hails Stella's work as the pinnacle of modernist painting because of the way-to
parse his argument-that it announces its medium by making shape a function
of visual rather than tactile apprehension: in other words, because of the way it
privileges vision above the other senses. As Stella himself famously put it with
reference to such works, "What you see is what you see."! While Fried sought to
articulate a set of universal standards for assessing the quality of a work of art.
the self-pronounced objectivity of expert opinion was easily coopted as a vehicle
for market value.This dilemma was epitomized by the criticism's circulation in
art magazines such as Artforum, where it was financed by gallery advertisements
I. john Rodden. Performing the Uterory Interview:
and,
perhaps most insidiously, where the criticism itself-and the reproductions
How WritelS Craft Their Public 5e1\-es (Uncoln:
University of Nebraska Press. 200I). 5.
accompanying it-functioned as promotion, proving the adage "A reproduction
2. While this essay focuses mainly on SoHo-based
in an art magazine is worth two one-man shows," AYalcmche was, to be sure, not
artists interviewed in Avalanche. it should be
completely immune from such charges: the publicity generated by an Ava!cmche
noted that the magazine was international in
outlook and scope. as reflected in editorial and
interview contributed to an artist's ability to make a living. And as Sharp has
advertising content as well as readership.
asserted,
"If anything I was trying to encourage these artists to get into the mar3. The term anticriticism is used by Peter Uwe
Hohendahl to describe the critical reevaluation
ket. helping them market their work. I'm not against the market."! And yet I
of the institution of criticism in the 19605 by the
want to insist that we understand this claim not as a "selling out" but as part of
New Left. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl. The
Instiwtian of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University
an effort to forge a different model of publicity, an alternative paradigm for the
Press. 1982).
critical judgment of works of art.
4. Bruce Glaser. "Questions to Stella and judd."
in Minimal Art. ed. Gregory Bancock (New York:
The AYalanche interviews, conducted by Sharp and Bear.appeared in the
Dunon. 1968). 158.
magazine alongside artists' projects and abundant. grainy black-and-white pho5. Willoughby Sharp. in an interview with the
tographs. Among the artists interviewed during the publication's Six-year run
author. june 200 I.

Against Criticism:
The Artist Interview in
Avalanche Magazine,
1970-76

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6. Robert Smithson. "Discussions with Heizer.

Oppenheim. Smithson." in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings. ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley:
University of California. 1996). 249.
7. The Rumbles section did not exclusively focus
on local events and sometimes included national
or even international listings. However. it was
weighted toward local artists and events.
8. Sharp. in an interview with the author. June
2001.

were Robert Smithson, Vito Acconci, Ed Ruscha, Gordon Matta-Clark,Yvonne

Rainer, Jackie Winsor, Chris Burden, Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Nauman, and
William Wegman, a partial list, but one that suggests something of the progressive nature of the art that earned Awlanche's most avid editorial support: the
ephemeral and time-based practices associated with Conceptual art, including
performance, video, dance, and Site-specific and process art. These were the practices most seriously involved in dethroning the traditional categories of artistic
medium. And yet such dematerialization of art, as it was sometimes called, paradoxically resulted in a proliferation of media, largely text-and-photo-based,
which functioned as necessary sites of documentation, in essence allowing the
work to be seen by a broader audience than the handful of people actually present to witness a performance event or, in the case of Earth art, ambitious enough
to make the trek to the remote landscapes where these sculptures tended to reside.
Given this background, we can understand the publication of Awlanche within a
broader transformation in the reception of art during this period in which the
art magazine served as a necessary new physical support--or medium-for the
public circulation of the various dematerialized practices of 1960s art.
In the first issue of Awlanche, an interview with the Earth artists Smithson,
Dennis Oppenheim. and Michael Heizer takes up such issues directly. Here
Smithson articulates his concept of the nonsite as a form of documentationa map, geological sample, photograph, or textual account that stands in for the
site of the earthwork itself. Crucially, Smithson insists on a dialectical relationship
between site and nonsite, arguing that the nonsire, while it might appear to be
an arbitrary souvenir, is in fact "the center of the system, [while] the site itself is
the fringe or the edge/" Read in retrospect, this interview is fascinating not only
for its historiographical contributions but also for how it participates in the
representational problems Smithson describes-not only because it documents
Smithson's work and hence functions as a nonsite, but also because of the way it
structures communication about art. Just as the nonsite "centers" an otherwise
dispersed physical location. the magazine focuses and distills an otherwise diffuse social interaction.
The significance of Awlanche magazine, however-and by extension the artist
interviews it published-can be read not only in terms of the unusual formal
and representational strategies of Conceptual art, but also in terms of the politics
that so often motivated these strategies. This political dimension is given in the
materiality of the magazine itself: its inexpensive. ephemeral, and inherently
democratic format, as well as in the way it situates art within the social climate
of the SoHo alternative-art scene. References to this context are everywhere in
evidence in the pages of Awlanche, from the portrayal of alternative exhibition
spaces, such as 98 Greene Street Loft, to full-page antiwar ads. The social character of the neighborhood is also evident in the Rumbles section, serving as a kind
of community bulletin board to keep the inhabitants of SoHo posted on local
happenings," as well as in the artists' portraits appearing on the cover of each
issue: slightly grainy, brooding close-ups that in expression and demeanor suggest a collective portrait of the artist as disillusioned member of the counterculture. Awlonche's very title expressed an anti-Establishment sentiment: according to
Sharp, the magazine was meant, like an avalanche, to "break down the old structure.?" The artist interview can be seen, in light of such observations, as offering

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Cover of Avvlandle I, SummerfFall I,n

(cover C> Avvlandle, phoqnph of Robert
Smithson by Nancy Holt)

9. Sharp.in an interview with the author. June

2001.
10.Liza Bear. in Un Bear and Willoughby Sharp,
"The Early Historyof Avalanche. exh. brochure
(London: Chelsea Space. 2(05), 6.

an alternative mode of critical commentary, one that rejected the authority of the
critic and offered a more direct line of communication to the public.
This goal was central to the politicization of the art world more generally
during the late 1960s, evidenced by the emergence of numerous grassroots organizations, such as the Art Workers Coalition, established in 1969 to give artists
more control over the display and distribution of their work. Sharp and Bear
were deeply concerned with such issues of artists' rights, as evidenced by their
involvement in organizing artists and staging actions to protest institutional
injustices and insist on social responsibility within the art world. Their initial
aspirations for Avalanche magazine resonated powerfully with such objectives. as
voiced in the following recollection: "From the beginning I wanted to amplify
the artist not merely by putting their face on the cover, but to go into some
kind of dialogue with them and find out how the magazine could serve them.
Avalanche was an artists' magazine/'v This dialogue would take place literally in the
Avalanche interviews. In the words of Bear, whose candid interviewing style produced some of the most fascinating art-historical documents from the period,
the Avalanche interview was "no kissing cousin of the celebrity interview. but a
kind of investigative reporting that aimed to understand. rather than to expose.
in which the questioning voice was closely attuned to the artist's sensibility":"
The volatility of the interview form-its location between talking and writing, its status as both primary and secondary text-functions to destabilize the

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primacy and authority of the traditional critical text. By providing an occasion

for talking about art, the interview does not merely record but generates the discourse surrounding the work: it is a conversation that is being conducted precisely
in order to be transcribed and circulated in an art magazine, and this anticipation
of its future format inevitably shapes the conversation as it occurs, proleptically
determining its bounds and tenor and directing it outward, toward an imagined
audience of readers, a public outside of itself In this sense, the interview is less
about the immediacy of speech than its necessary mediation by text and context.
All theorizing aside, the Awlcmche interviews are fascinating art-historical documents: richly idiosyncratic, they convey something of the affective nuance and
informal quality of the original conversations they record, allowing us to imagine
that we are eavesdropping on history, flies on the wall of a SoHo loft when the
acronym was still novel. Often the interviews take place over a meal or over the
course of a long afternoon; sometimes they begin with the lighting of marijuana
or hash. They seem to be not only about the communication of information but
also the communion of intellect-as well as the enjoyment of company. II
Such details might seem peripheral---even inappropriate-to an art-historical
argument. And yet I want to argue that such things are crucial to the way the
Awlonche interviews participate in the representational concerns of their moment.
to the way they structure communication about art, and ultimately to their
striving, against criticism, to constitute the act of interpretation as a cooperative
endeavor. The SOCiability of the Awlonche interviews distinguishes them from
other kinds of art-historical documents. including other interviews. Compared
to the curt, contrived-sounding interviews appearing in other art magazines at
the time, which often read as a drill of preconceived questions, the AYOIonche
interviews capture the rhythms and cadences of natural speech, brimming with
pauses, non sequiturs. phatic expressions-those qualities that characterize
actual conversations. This is demonstrated by a 1972 interview with Ed Ruscha
titled"... a kind of a Huh?" referencing an exchange surrounding the meaning
and even the spelling of the expression "huh?" a word Ruscha used to describe
his first book of photographs, 26 Gasoline Stations:
ER: I realized that for the first time this book had an inexplicable thing I was
looking for, and that was a kind of a "Huh?"That's what I've always worked
around. All it is is a device to disarm somebody with my particular message.
A lot of artists use that.
WS: Give me some examples of "Uh.'

[...J
ER: I think that would be spelled H-U-H with a question mark ...
WS: Or H-U-H-U-H-U-H.
WR: Well, then that would be like a "yes," that would be like uh-huh,
I I. By emphasizing the social and somewhat casual nature of the Avalanche interviews I do not
mean to imply that they were lacking in seriousness or deliberateness. or that they were off the
cuff. On the contrary. Bear and Sharp took their
roles as interviewers seriously and prepared thoroughly for these interviews.

WS: Uh-ha, right.

WS: Mmmmm. Right.
ER: I just use that word to describe a feeling that a lot of artists are attempting to bring out, and some are doing it very well.' 2

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,.,. from AwtIcmche 7, WInterlSprtnJ 1971

(pap C A...IcrndIe, photoaraphs of Ed
Ruscha by Carol " - ' - u )

12. Willoughby Sharp," ... a kind of a Huh1' An

Interview with Edward Ruscha," Avalanche 7,
(Winter/Spring 1973): 30-32.
13. H. P. Grice, -Logic and Conversation (1975):
in The Philosophy of Language, ed. A. P. Martinich
(Oxford and New Yorlc Oxford Univel'5ity Press.
2001), 175.

The "huh?" seems to capture for Ruscha the difficulties in inhabiting language: "huh" is a kind of phonetic lapse, signaling the experience of inaudibility
-or even aporia. And yet the "huh?" in this instance signifies not so much a
deficiency in communication but its inevitability: the fact that even when we
can't quite find the right word, we manage to convey meaning through sounds
and gestures and expressions. Such communication is fundamentally different
from the conventions of written language.
Indeed, deviation from conventional usage is something that, according to
linguistic theorists, characterizes the social practice of conversation to begin
with. As the linguist H. P. Grice argued in his 196] lecture "Logic and Conversation," when speaking to one another, we often flout the rules of conventional
language, using irony, understatement, hyperbole, amblguirj; obscurity, and prolixity to imply things that are outside its scope. Such tendencies, he concluded,
make the meaning of conversations both context-bound and indeterminate. The
meaning of conversations, Grice claimed, "is not carried by what is said but
only by the saying of what is said, or by 'putting it that way,''''! Grice's notion
of "putting it that way" is not limited to the utterance itself, but can also involve
facial expressions and body language, as in the following excerpt from an
Avalanche interview with Vito Acconci, this time conducted by Bear:
LB: Can we try to get at your obsession with movement?
VA: One point that this interest in movement can be traced back to ...
55 artjounW

e - of Avalanche 6, Fall

1972 ( c _ C
Avalanche, photoaraph ofYito Acconcl by

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VanSclMy)

LB: It's not an interest. interest is too cold and academic.

VA: Okay, obsession.
LB: It's hard for you to say that, isn't it?
VA: Very hard.
LB: You come on so much as an obsessed kind of person, and yet you always talk
about "my interests" in very neutral terms. It's alright, that won't go in.
VA: That can go in, I like it ...

[ ... ]
LB:You'reclenching your teeth.
VA: Maybe the words'll get out through them anyway. 14

14. Uza Bear. "Interview with Vito Acconci:

Avalanche 6 (Fall 1972): 75.

Here the clenching of teeth inflects the meaning of Acconci's statement, signifying a certain reticence or discomfort about the terms in which his work is being
cast-a reticence that the artist, paradoxically, wants represented in the final transcript of the interview.
Consider another excerpt from an interview conducted by Bear and Sharp with
Chris Burden about the artist's infamous 1971 performance Shoot, in which he
arranged to be shot in the arm by a friend.

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Pace from "The Church of HumlIn Eneru:

Chris BurdM. an I"WI oMtrt," AW'lIIandte I,
SummerlFall 1973, with photosnPh of
Chris Burden's 1971 Shoot <Pale 0
ANIcmche, photoaraph ..,-Ided by Chris
Burden)

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17

WS:You didn 't think it was dangerous?

CB: I knew it was dangerous but I figured it would work out perfectly, the bullet
would just nick the side of my arm . It didn't work out that way, but it wasn't a
bad wound.
WS: So it doesn't matter much to you whether it's a nick or it goes through
your arm.
CB: No. It's the idea of being shot to be hit.
WS: Mmmmm. Why is that interesting ?
CB: Well, it's something to experience. How can you know what it feels liIte to
be shot if you don't get shot? It seems interesting enough to be worth doing it.
WS: Most people don't want to be shot .
CB: Yeah, but everybody watches it on TV every day.

[... J
LB: Do you thinlt your work is a criticism of vicarious experience, in a sense?
CB: A criticism of vicarious experience?
l.B: Because you were also saying earlier that most people's Itnowledge of
some extreme conditions is only second hand through the media.

57

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Awrlcmche ... SprInl 1971 ( c _ C>

Awrlcmche.phoeop.ph of Lawrence WeIner
by Doua Connor)

Avala

ce

CB:Yes, I think that's true.

LB: So much so that they can't even respond to ...
CB:To the real thing.... My pieces have a lot to do with what I believe is
going to happen ...
The model of communication represented here is a distinctly temporal and
collaborative one: it depends on the fact that a conversation between two people
always exceeds the sum of its parts, that it takes place according to the logic of
interactivity and reciprocity rather than objectivity. In these interviews, Sharp
and Bear come across less as critics than as interlocutors: curious, Insightful. but
not particularly anxious to forward a thesis. The interviews in Avalanche meander.
like real conversations, they are guided by the whims and moods of the people
involved. Sometimes they are awkward. or sometimes they ramble, circling
around a point without ever seeming to get to it. Or sometimes they lead
straight into dead ends, as in the following amusing exchange between Sharp
and the Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner:
WS: What does the photographic image of this work [A Square Removal (rom a
Rug in Usc] mean to you?
15. Willoughby Sharp and Un Bear. Chris

LW: Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Burden: The Church of Human Energy.

Avalanche 8 (Summer/Fall 1973): 54. 60.

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C _ of AWllGnche5, Summer 1972 (~

C AWllGnche,photopaph of Yvonne RaIner
by Glanfranc:o Gorpnl)

Avalanche

[...J
WS: What experiences led you to want to deal with language as an art
problem?
LW: None of your business.

[...J
WS: The general concerns of your work have often been referred to as conceptual. How do you relate to that category?
LW: To be terribly frank, I don't understand it at all. 16
Other times the interviews are personal and moving, as in the following
exchange between Sharp and Yvonne Rainer.
YR: My first intense feeling of being alive was in performance and that's really
what committed me to ...
WS: Could you describe that?

16. Willoughby Sharp. "Lawrence Weiner at

Amsterdam: Avalanche 4 (Spring 1972): 67. 72.

YR: Mmmmmm. It was my first dance. I did Three Sotit Spoons, a solo to Trois
Gymnopidits, in an evening Jimmy Waring had organized in July' 61 at the Living
Theater when it was at 6th Avenueand 14th Street. As the date drew close, I really
had the distinct sensation of butterflies in my stomach. I stood waiting for the

Sf art journal

curtain to go up-no, it didn't go up, it paned, and I had the sense of uh ... it
was like an epiphany of beauty and power that I have rarely experienced since.
I mean, I knew I had them-the audience, 17

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Something about the immediacy of Rainer's revelation-the sense that her

memory has been elicited by the conversation, by Sharp's being there to hear
what she has to say---strikes me as key to the particular way the Avalanche interviews condition the relationship between art and its public.
In the Avalanche interviews, artists speak to be heard-not only by the individual conducting the interview, but by a broader public constituted by the readers of Avalanche magazine. And yet this speech is not based on the rational and
universal model of discourse that has guided liberal, bourgeois notions of the
public sphere and from which modernist criticism gained its most vivid justifications. The ideal public sphere through which art criticism historically imagined
its ethical function is one that art of the 1960s and 1970S seriously challenged,
replacing its universal and abstract subject with the specificity of raced, gendered, classed. and resolutely embodied subjects.
The Awlanche interviews participate in this project through their opposition
to the conventions of art criticism. Against the principles of instant legibility, the
interviews demonstrate the richness of language in use. As such, they implicitly
foster a model of the public sphere that is itself formed by and in the act of
expression. As Nancy Fraser has argued, "Participation [in the public sphere] is
not simply a matter of being able to state proposinonal contents that are neutral
with respect to form of expression. Rather, participation means being able to
speak in one's own voice. and thereby Simultaneously to construct and express
one's cultural identity through idiom and style."'8 In arguing that such things
matter, Fraser suggests the importance of form and context as well as content in
the formation and functioning of the public sphere. To repeat an earlier quotation from H. P. Grice, public communication depends on "putting it that way," '9
With regard to the reception of art, the Avalanche interviews demand that we
return to the sociohistorical milieu as well as the specific urban setting in which
they were recorded-the alternative-arts community in SoHo in the early 1970s.
For here art was not sequestered in pristine, whitewashed gallery walls, but dispersed, almost like a natural resource, throughout the neighborhood, pervading
social interactions in lofts and alternative spaces-places such as 112 Greene
Street, Food restaurant, or the offices of Awlanche magazine itself, at 93 Grand
Street. Here art was often produced and viewed in informal gatherings, and it
depended on the conversations that took place during these gatherings, as Laurie
Anderson expresses in the following recollection of this period:
17. Uza Bear and Willoughby Sharp. "The
Performer as a Persona: An Interview with
Yvonne Rainer." Avalanche 5 (Summer 1972):
57-58.
18. Nancy Fraser. "Rethinking the Public Sphere:
A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy," in Habermos and the Public
Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge. MA: MIT

The thing that I loved best about that time was how much people were
involved in each other's work. All of us did a lot of talking and a lot of writing.... The talking was really a working method and a way of identifying
with each other.... The talking is not only a way to figure out what you're
doing, it's the work itself. In fact I felt really frustrated with Gordon [MattaClark] 's shows and the exhibitions of other friends. Because without the talk,
the background, the thing was left really blank. The life was out of it. It could
be considered sculpture-not that anything's necessarily wrong with sculpture. But it wasn't everything. 20

Press, 1992). 125.

19. Grice, 175.

20. Laurie Anderson, "Interview with Joan

Simon." in Gotdon Matta-Oorl<: A Retrospective. ed.
Mary JaneJacobs (Chicago: Museum of
Contemporary Art. 1985). 18.

6.

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Anderson's frustration with gallery exhibitions, which isolated the work,

severing it from the vitality of this social context, points to a model of the work
of art that exceeds a formal definition of medium as a tallying of materials and
procedures and instead locates the significance of art in its social experience and
effects.The talking, she states, is "the work itself"
In conclusion, Avalanche magazine speaks to the social and political context
in which the representational and formal concerns of Conceptual art gained their
imperative: this context was an alternative art movement that sought to critique
the exclusionary policies and elitist institutions of the mainstream art world as
well as the political and economic systems of the world at large. In their rejection of the dominant models of art criticism and their enactment of a kind of
anticriticism, the Avalanche interviews reject the model of public discourse such
criticism upholds. Indeed, the role of these interviews is not to achieve a consensus on the aesthetic value of art but to enable a dialogue about its meaning.
In this sense, the Avalanche interviews enact a kind of reception that echoes the
process-oriented models of artistic production so central to radical art of this
period: they insist that the meaning of the work of art, no less than the act of
interpretation, is never finished, that it is unstable and ongoing.
Gwen Allen is visiting assistant professor of art history at the Maine College of Art. Her doctoral dissertation, completed at Stanford University in 2004. was about art magazines in the 19605 and early 19705.

, I

art [ournal