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Salad days: David Frankel talks with Ingrid Sischy, Amy Baker Sandback, and Anthony Korner - about art periodical "Artforum International" - Interview
ArtForum, April, 2003 by David Frankel
DAVID FRAN KEL: Ingrid, you came to Art forum through Amy, as I recall-
INGRID SISCHY: Absolutely.
DF: This was before I got there. Tony and Amy had acquired the magazine, and Amy recommended that you two talk.
AMY BAKER SANDBACK: Ingrid and I had a shared history at Printed Matter, the artist's-book project, which is still going strong. Ingrid had been the director and I the president, and somehow she seemed a perfect choice. Ingrid had never edited a magazine. Tony had never published one.
DF: And you had never produced one.
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ABS: Right, we were an ideal team. We didn't know any of the things we should have, so we were fearless. I think the artist's-book background was positive in that we didn't see the magazine in a conventional sense, as simply text illustrated with pictures. ANTHONY KORNER: I remember discussing with you and Ingrid what the dream magazine might be: accessible, international, and with a spectrum of specific topics. It was very exciting.
DF: Coming from Printed Matter, lngrid, did you feel that the ideas embedded in artist's books in the '70s--ideas of multiply reproduced, easily available, inexpensive art--influenced what you were doing?
IS: Actually, at the point we're talking about I was at the Museum of Modern Art in the Department of Photography. John Szarkowski, the director of the department, had invited me to be that year's NEA curatorial fellow. But, yes, the paradigm of artist's books was an immediate route for the first issue we did together at Artforum [February 1980]. But there wasn't some plodding uber-plan. People perhaps take the first issue oversymbolically; after you've been in magazines for a while, you realize that the horror is there's always another issue... [Laughter.] In this case we had ten days to do the whole thing. The old regime was not happy about us, so we were pretty much on our own.
DF: So the writers weren't writing--
IS: The writers probably would have been writing, but we didn't know the writers, or have time to get to know them. So the route through artist's books was partly practical, but also it was intellectually the right gate to open. It was the fastest way to say, "A page can be as important a space as a canvas or as a wall in a museum or gallery." We had witnessed the late '6os and '70S, when so many of the breakthroughs had come out of searches for alternatives to galleries, and we believed that a magazine not only could describe what was going on but could be a vehicle for new art.
The artists responded so positively to the idea of creating special projects, even though we could give them barely any time-
ABS: There was only one outright rejection, which was remarkable, since many of the positive responses were to cold calls made to very busy artists.
IS: Basically we said, "Well, who do we want?" And then, "Of them, who do you know?" Or "Who do I know?" Or "None of us knows so-and-so; who'll make that call?" And then we got on the phone and did it.
AK: It was a reach--and the reach was international. That was a message from the start.
ABS: We all felt the art world had changed, and it was important to reflect a new focus: American artists showing in Europe, European artists showing in America, Japanese artists--everyone seemed to be traveling to or from some event. The art community had become the art world.
DF: One thing that interests me about your alternative-space, artist's-books kickoff point is that I've found younger people today may view the '80s not in terms of those politics but as a commercial period, when the gallery system recovered after a period of disfavor in the '60s and '70s.
IS: But the '8os were many things: They were a moment of development for feminism, of photography escaping its ghetto, of figurative painting and sculpture vitally expressing all sorts of identities. I also see two '80s: before and after AIDS. As for commerce, one reason new galleries were starting was that new art was starting. In publishing on the return of painting, which had been almost taboo, we were bringing down fences that had been put up. Artforum was no longer a place where only one kind of art was acceptable as avant-garde. We wanted to recognize that things had opened. That's why we started columns, for the first time in the magazine's history--columns on design, television, advertising, film, architecture, things that had so clearly been part of the look of modern life but had never been points of focus in an art magazine. We weren't championing only one group of artists or writers; we never made an investment in one side. What we were championing was debate, the idea of different kinds of art an d of different kinds of critical writing. Artforum wasn't a kind of comfortable academia; it was a place for people with something to say.
DF: Yet it often struck me how monolithic it looked from the outside. People assumed we had an enormous staff, teams of researchers, strings of global correspondents... But inside it felt like a very fragile boat.
