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Peter Halley talks to Dan Cameron - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

DAN CAMERON: Before we talk about the '80s, we should talk about talking about the '80s.

PETER HALLEY: It's interesting, because the '8os were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-'80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism--which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown around 1980. Then you had the end of the '80s. After about '88, the economy was less good, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a more direct form of Conceptualism emerged, which defined itself in terms of a critical opposition.

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DC: So, in fact, in that ten-year stretch, we're talking about three distinct trends.

PH: Yes, it's interesting to speculate on which version of the decade is going to win. Of course I'm rooting for the more optimistic, glamorous version, namely, the mid-'80s.

DC: One thing that strikes me about the transition from the early to the mid-'80s is this public shaping of the artist as a personality. People like Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat were visible in a way that rock musicians and film stars were visible, but by the mid-'80s you saw the artists taking a different kind of relationship to the work. Artists were very glamorous in the beginning of the '80s, whereas the art itself got very glamorous in the mid-'80s.

PH: I'd like to think that a less artsy, more conceptual art that uses Pop materials is more glamorous. I might try to make the case that it's also more elegant if you think of elegance as doing more with less. It used strategies of representation and syntax that were more sophisticated.

DC: I want to ask about your role in the '80s. I think the idea of a painter as a thinker, writer, and theorist came as a real shock to viewers, who were used to painters being only semi-articulate about their aims.

PH: Well, I've never quite been able to figure out how my role as a writer fit in. Even today it concerns me that more artists haven't done more writing. Maybe an artist writing just doesn't make sense anymore. However, when I was a student in the mid-'70s, I was thinking about people like Smithson, Judd, and Robert Morris--all of whom wrote. Not long after I came to New York in 1980, I was introduced to Jeffrey Deitch, then a young guy who worked as an art adviser at Citibank. He had just published an article in Arts Magazine, and I wrote him a note saying, "I really liked your piece, but I disagreed with what you said about such and such." He sent me back a postcard saying, "Peter, that's great. You should do some writing." That gave me the idea, and during the next couple years, since it didn't seem likely that I'd be able to show my work at that time, I began to write. The only person at any of the art magazines who actually read unsolicited manuscripts was Richard Martin at Arts. When he got my first pie ce, on Robert Smithson, Colab, and New Wave music, he immediately published it. After that, he published everything I sent him. If that hadn't happened, I would not have become a published writer, I'm almost certain.

DC: I remember distinctly the very powerful impact that it had in the art world once you began writing about abstraction and geometry, and once your texts could be understood as somehow forming a manifesto for the paintings. People were excited by the notion that someone would use their texts as a wedge to state their ideas and validate the artwork itself.

PH: Well, I wasn't exactly aware of it that way. "The Crisis in Geometry" was published in '84, at a time when I hadn't really shown any work. A lot of the texts contain attacks on traditional liberal humanism, with a special emphasis on anything to do with spirituality. I still feel a bit self-conscious about it, because it also meant an attack on what was a truism in the New York art world: that abstract painting was uplifting, or that art could be spiritual. It was a broad attack on dearly held values, but I thought it was needed.

All the French authors I was reading then were, for me, fuel with which to build that fire. My introduction to that French critical writing also burst a lot of my assumptions, as somebody who had been schooled in liberal humanism.

DC: I'm very interested in your memories of the East Village and how the very rapid acceleration, rise, and disappearance of that scene mirrored the '80s more generally. It seemed as if the East Village started with neo-expressionism, peaked with neo-Conceptualism, and then just hit a wall.

PH: I really feel that art then was emphatically political. In 1985, I believed that Francesco Clemente, Schnabel, and Basquiat were, you know, right-wing tools. I felt that their art was a product of Reaganism and that they were trying to reverse everything exciting that had happened during the previous fifty years. And I'm sure they felt something similar about me and about the people I was associated with.

Peter Halley talks to Dan Cameron - '80s Then - Interview

ArtForum, March, 2003

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