The coldest profession

ArtForum, Feb, 1995 by Rhonda Lieberman

She-Devils the movie (1989) has been strangely underestimated as a seminal political text, not only about fattie empowerment but about the relation between art and life itself. As the fat, cheated-upon homemaker with no marketable skills, the Roseanne character harnesses a pulsating geyser of revolutionary affect and redirects it into breadwinning power, setting up a displaced-homemaker employment agency to commodify unpaid feminine laborers into market-savvy agents of revenge. Years later, in real life, the Stop the Insanity lady would work this script for real, overcoming fat and a nogoodnik husband to achieve thinness, capital, and now apotheosis as talk-show hostess. A total press magnet in '94, the Stop the Insanity lady mostly fascinates me by the uncanny way she acted out the She-Devils housewife revenge-fantasy in real life. While I can't say whether she actually saw the film, I have always believed you should be careful about what texts you consume - you may wind up living them.

It came as something of a surprise, nevertheless, to discover myself roped into the plot line of an early Woody Allen short story that gave me a frisson of foreboding years ago. Allen's "Whore of Mensa" features a nice Jewish doctoral candidate who supplements her stipend by turning tricks on the side: discussing lofty ideas with people who are intellectually frustrated. Since I daylight as a pedagogue, getting into heavy textual discussions with any schmendrick who can get into a seminar, my ethical high road has more than a slight odor of the world's oldest profession. I greet often clumsy advances responsively, indulge freakish trains of thought with the poker face of a hardened pro, shamelessly encourage the boring, and treat half-baked gibberish as if it were a cogent point, saving the client's face by making him seem sentient and desirable before the group. While some may claim what I do is sickeningly decadent - coddling the weak in the name of cultural populism - I see it as a day's work.

The distinction between prostitute and professor is finer than we suspect: both sell things most people expect for free, i.e., sex and encouragement. For the world to be enchanted, my friends, it must be libidinized in fantasy: I understand my school better when I think of it as a pimp with a large vocabulary. As a particularly fetishized version of pseudo-academic work, art writing itself has ossified into a kind of prosthetic genital - something not read but rather measured by the inch, standing up for the career potency or infirmity of the artist. A cover feature in Artforum, for example, is the textual equivalent of really expensive lingerie. So what's not to like? All I know is one day I'm looking for a nice pair of chunky-heeled boots in Chicago, the next I'm on a plane to Sweden, custom-ordered to service the voracious esthetic needs of a school full of intellectually starved Swedish art students two hours north of Stockholm by plane.

My acquaintance with Scandinavia consisting of a loose assemblage of brand names (Ikea, Absolut, Saab, Ingmar Bergman), I was grateful to find my host art school, Umea Universitat, a hotbed of Arctic glamour. My host was Stig Sjolund, the Bob Fosse-worshiping head of painting, whose soulful eyes and gentle manner provided an intriguing contrast to his black leather vest and whip. His affable sidekick was Dennis Dahlquist, a critic, gallerist, and international mover and shaker usually sporting designer togs hoarded on furtive shopping trips to NYC and Century 21. Even Swedish TV was fascinating: one game show presented a lineup of average-looking people, the task was to guess who had a tattoo. On another, a woman was challenged to eat a powdered donut without licking her lips; the whole studio audience watched, rapt, as she ate and, alas, licked.

Despite the relatively buzz-free art season in NYC this year, there's still the vague sensation elsewhere, like a NutraSweet aftertaste of hierarchy in our increasingly decentralized world, that no art gesture is complete without NYC attention. As you would expect, as the walking gaze of Artforum, I was bribed abroad with the usual extravagant offerings of flattery and free coffee. In an "anonymous" interview, "Masked Philosopher" Michel Foucault once discussed this absurd sense of the scarcity of cultural outlets, which sets everyone griping, "waiting in line" for "their turn," only to get replaced by the next "marginalized" voice the minute their turn is labeled, recognized, and therefore "over." Rather than a dearth of ideas and practices, Foucault saw a plethora of stuff; the task of the interesting person would be to "multiply the paths of comings and goings, which doesn't mean - as it is often feared - the homogenization and leveling by the low, but on the contrary, the differentiation and simultaneity of different networks" - the making of weird alliances that don't pass through "normal" institutionalized channels.

Now that the art market is down, esthetic libido can be released through a new, kindergentler, service-oriented kind of neo-early-'70s esthetic, with events and connections that are not about producing commodity objects - offering exciting new ways not to make money! In a recent project led by my host Stig (NOTE: any name mentioned in this text represents a bribe consisting of one (1) kilo of herring and a cute reindeer), students took over the running of a restaurant in Stockholm, bugged the restaurant's plants, and collected the gossip they recorded on tape - the artwork as gossip collection. Another student, Ingrid, installed a cafe for taxi drivers in a gallery, providing coffee and pastries, but none showed up. Another "real" event in Stockholm, a "noncompetitive" 24-hour environment called "New Reality Mix," included Rirkrit Tirivanija, the guy who is cooking his way across Europe's museums; a wheelchair-bound artist offering help; and a floor show featuring Stig. Leading four scantily clad art students (ranging in age from 20 to 45), the Head-of-Painting lip-synched to a number from Victor/Victoria in garters, pumps, and an ambiguous mini with fluffy pom-poms bobbing at crotch and butt. I almost forgave him for not warning me to pack for the school's Las Vegas night.