Salad days: David Frankel talks with Ingrid Sischy, Amy Baker Sandback, and Anthony Korner - about art periodical "Artforum International" - Interview

AK: I remember staying up late, cutting and pasting.

DF: The magazine lost money for much of the '80s, Isn't that right, Tony?

AK: It wasn't profitable until the later '80s, but the losses were never huge. We did try to run it as a business--

ABS: It was important to be real, to pay our own way. We worked hard at making the magazine viable at all levels. If we were occasionally "nonprofit," it wasn't by choice but because of the high costs of big ambitions.

AK: And in time it succeeded; the issues got progressively heftier through the '8os. Then the magazine went through a bad period in the early '90s, when the recession hit, just before Jack Bankowsky took over as editor.

DF: As a community the magazine was high stress. Everyone was stretched to the limit, working punishing hours, and it did seem risky--

AK: It was risky. Our glossy exterior was misleading.

DF: Yes, and in that sense the magazine had a kind of authority that people reacted against.

IS: And also supported intensely. The strong feelings were a function of people reading the magazine and being excited by it-

ABS: Or made angry by it. At least they were paying attention and reacting. Of course, we didn't need to ask anyone's permission-- to answer to some corporate hierarchy. All things were possible because the magazine was independent. We were responsible only to ourselves, and we took that very seriously.

AK: It was the improvisational nature of it that was stressful. There was often a sense of a balance being created at the last minute or, in the case of Tom McEvilley's article on "Primitivism" [November 1984], at the last second.

IS: Tom couldn't write until he'd seen the show ["'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern," Museum of Modern Art], which had only lust opened to enormous acclaim a couple nights before our deadline. Along came little Artforum, saying, "Wait a minute, this needs unraveling." Tom's article caused enough of a ruckus that both lithe show's curators] Bill Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe wanted to reply. We printed their letters because this debate mattered enormously, but we also answered them in the same issue. The debate went on for several months and had deep consequences. That was our high-stress system at its best: trusting a writer, letting him go, and helping put into the world an important debate that really broke down walls and changed perspectives.

AK: It was the first time I'd heard a discussion that presented "the other" not as antagonistic and difficult but as an equal.

IS: To go to another view of the so-called other: When we published a group of Mapplethorpe pictures in 1987, we had to have discussions about which ones we could print. Then I remember walking around an art fair only a few years later and noticing that so many galleries had homoerotic art dealing with the male body. It had become a trend.

DF: Amy and Tony, did you feel vulnerable publishing that material?

ABS: We were presenting strong imagery that crossed lines. There were dissenters, and there were times when I wasn't altogether comfortable, but that tension was part of the punch of the work at the time. That punch may have been absorbed since, but back then it was a concern that the men on press would shut us down. I remember a particularly long impromptu "discussion" with hesitant printers about what the artwork was about, and why an image they objected to was not pornographic-and therefore fit to be printed at a union shop and mailed via the US Postal Service.