ARTFORUM

"They all came, some wore sentiments / Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness / Of the hour." Mostly, it was standard issue: black, of course, but also a stiff dose of the drab favored by the academic rank and file. Still, for a literary Festschrift, the costumes of the subculture were well represented. DENNIS COOPER, the novelist, poet, and critic who joins Artforum's masthead this month as contributing editor, was the honoree at two evenings last spring--a roundtable followed by a night of readings from his work--sponsored by New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections, celebrating an exhibition of Cooper's papers and the publication of his fifth novel, Period. Designed to cement the stature of the writer in question, such official demonstrations of literary worth, even when the subject is a credentialed "outlaw," tempt a measure of back-of-the-class tittering--from panel perennials no less than from the gallery. The T-shirt in question, appropriately accessorized with haircut (and skateboard)--exactly the sort of disaffected stray on whom Cooper's obsessive narratives dote--slipped out of the auditorium just as Michael Warner, professor of English at Rutgers University (and a basic-blacker), clinched his paper's thesis.

For a writer who exists at a certain remove from the official salon, from the culture, say, of the New Yorker, such occasions count. Indeed, Warner's notion of Cooper's courage, his sense of the author's willingness to risk the not literary, cuts to the heart of the Cooper conundrum: It is precisely his dedication to the not literary, his commitment to the condition Avital Ronell, another panelist, called the "whatever" (in the Valley-speak sense of the word), that makes his achievement literary, that links it to a broader "stupefaction," to the state or symptom of which it is a poetic verity. Ironically, it is Cooper's attention to the "whatever," to the depths of duh, that enables a formalism of at times breathtaking exactitude.

Perhaps John Ashbery--whose words I lifted for my opener--is on my mind simply because his Norton Lectures and Your Name Here, a new collection of poems, have just been published (he discusses both in an interview in the concurrent issue of Bookforum). Still, there is a comparison to be made between the cycle of Ashbery commentary, the rhythm of defensive over- and undervaluing of what the poet amusedly calls his "stop-making-sense" approach, and the weariness that Cooper must feel when his formal achievement is neglected on the grounds of subject matter considered either too "specialized" or too dumb to be worthy of serious literature. As it happens, I came to the work of both writers at about the same time; Ashbery was already the unimpeachable genius among us; Cooper still a dangerous enthusiasm. The older poet's mandarin culture--the "high" you could never live up to--remains for me a polar foil to Cooper's equally unattainable "low," however much each feint ultimately dissolves in its poetic reimagining . Another coincidence: Both have written about art. In this respect, the current issue is a prod to think again about our stock-in-trade, not only because Cooper joins our masthead but because a new history of Artforum's early glory years is considered in these pages. Yve-Alain Bois's review, despite its abundant wisdom lightly worn, is haunted by too fixed a dichotomy: The belletristic versus the high theoretical. If our reviewer waxes nostalgic for the latter (Ashbery, of course, long practiced the former, even figuring in the Art News mix of the "moody prose" period for which early Artforum, Bois argues, supplied the necessary antidote), Cooper's relationship to art--his straddling of popular culture and vanguard practice--reminds us that at times the juice is altogether elsewhere. His attunement to the colloquial, to the culture on which generations of post-Pop artists have by now long fed, grants him early warning, allowing him to bypass the high-toned gatekeepers whose vetting of the new is the next, ne cessary step in the digestion process. It is telling, then, not only that, in his first issue as contributing editor, Cooper should address two separate subjects in two separate pieces (Lars von Trier's latest movie and Mike Kelley's latest installation), but that news of the latter should come of a conversation that dates back to pre-famous LA days: The pair have known each other--and each other's work--longer then we have known either artist.

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