John Berger and David Levi Strauss, 2009. Photo: Yves Berger.

Amelia Rina: Can you talk about your relationship with teaching writing and your own education as a writer?

David Levi Strauss: The Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York is really modeled after the Poetics program at the New College of California, San Francisco, in the 1980s. It was built around the teachings of the poet Robert Duncan and the other poets that gathered around him, including Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Michael Palmer, and Duncan McNaughton. It was pointedly not a creative-writing program, but a program in poetics, the study of how things are made. The poets who taught there intended to give us an intellectual base that we could build on for the rest of our lives and to give us sources we could continue to draw on as we built our own network of sources. I think that’s probably even more important today. We now live in the Golden Age of Search, where a vast amount of material is accessible, so the need to develop ways to make distinctions among these disparate sources is crucial.

AR: Something that seems integral to the SVA department’s mission is that it isn’t in the business of “discourse production.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? And if it’s not in the business of discourse production, what is it in the business of?

DLS: I don’t know when the term discourse production was first used, but I think it was imported from cognitive neuroscience. To me, it always sounded like a needless bureaucratization of writing and thinking. Our approach is very different from this. We look at writing as a way of thinking—and a way to live, actually—and, at the same time, as a craft.

Read the full interview here.

John Berger and David Levi Strauss, 2009. Photo: Yves Berger.

Amelia Rina: Can you talk about your relationship with teaching writing and your own education as a writer?

David Levi Strauss: The Art Writing program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York is really modeled after the Poetics program at the New College of California, San Francisco, in the 1980s. It was built around the teachings of the poet Robert Duncan and the other poets that gathered around him, including Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, Michael Palmer, and Duncan McNaughton. It was pointedly not a creative-writing program, but a program in poetics, the study of how things are made. The poets who taught there intended to give us an intellectual base that we could build on for the rest of our lives and to give us sources we could continue to draw on as we built our own network of sources. I think that’s probably even more important today. We now live in the Golden Age of Search, where a vast amount of material is accessible, so the need to develop ways to make distinctions among these disparate sources is crucial.[1]

AR: Something that seems integral to the SVA department’s mission is that it isn’t in the business of “discourse production.” Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? And if it’s not in the business of discourse production, what is it in the business of?

DLS: I don’t know when the term discourse production was first used, but I think it was imported from cognitive neuroscience. To me, it always sounded like a needless bureaucratization of writing and thinking. Our approach is very different from this. We look at writing as a way of thinking—and a way to live, actually—and, at the same time, as a craft.

AR: Well, what I was thinking of is a distinction that Vilém Flusser makes in his text Post-History. He writes about the difference between discourse and dialogue. Flusser writes that discourse is like a pyramid scheme where information is disseminated from one point, but the information only goes in one direction. Dialogue, on the other hand, is more like a roundtable discussion with an exchange that allows for new information to be produced and added to the broader conversation.

DLS: Right, that sounds like writing to me. I mean, writing has always been a way of thinking for me. I never know what I think about something until I write it. And part of that process is the invention of the reader. The writing imagines the reader into existence. So it’s not that you have ideas and then you put them in writing to transmit them to a passive consumer (to “produce discourse”). That’s not the way it works. The process of writing is a way of knowing and making the world—especially writing about art.

The distinction between art writing and other kinds of writing is that we always have an object. I started out as a poet, and I also write fiction. But with critical writing, you have an object that you keep going back to, and it keeps the dialogue grounded. Having an object to return to is a real advantage.

Judgment was always the least interesting part of criticism for me. It’s necessary, and I do it, but it’s not what keeps me in it. What keeps me in it is actually engaging with works of art and trying to produce writing that can dance with them and not do violence to them. And that’s very difficult to do.

Every time I sit down to write something, I really have to make myself up again, so I change as a person with every piece that I write. When you’re writing, you’re making yourself up; you’re making a new person. And that can be painful.

AR: So what motivates you to continue subjecting yourself to such a painful process?

DLS: Writing is painful, but having written is ecstatic, and the ecstasy induces amnesia, so you’re willing to do it all over again. Like falling in love.

AR: Was the dedication to rewriting something that came from your own intuition? Or did you pick it up from your peers?

DLS: No, not from my peers—from my superiors, living and dead. I read dead people.

AR: Were you working with other people for edits?

DLS: Almost never. It was an interactive process affected by my reading of writers who I respected. Writing is a built thing: It has architecture; it has a shape. I was imitating the writers who I looked up to. John Berger was a tremendous one, but there were many others. I imitated Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Clarice Lispector, Simone Weil, Heiner Müller, Samuel Beckett…

AR: In a letter you wrote to Irving Sandler and published in the Brooklyn Rail, you wrote, “Criticism is not in crisis. Criticism is crisis.” Do you think our current crisis is critical enough? Have we lost the degree of criticality? Or has it been coddled or forced into submission by the market and media pressure?

DLS: No, I don’t think it’s critical enough. As you know, my writing has always been polemical. If you’re not going to question the status quo, what’s the point of writing criticism? There has always been a part of the art world that wants to diminish or eliminate the role of criticism, and unfortunately that part is currently running the show. But as I said in the letter in the Rail, I think art needs criticism. It needs something outside of itself to have a dialogue with. When that’s not there, we’re in trouble: We’re in a situation where things just get repeated every ten or twenty years, and the only measure of value is price. There’s no ongoing conversation about what we need, who we are, and what’s really changing. In that way, I think criticism is more needed now than ever before.

[1] Strauss coined the phrase “Golden Age of Search” in the introduction to his book Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow: Essays on the Present and Future of Photography (New York: Aperture, 2014), 9.

I’m a young curator and an arts writer with a museum job, but like everyone in the world, I can always use extra money. I’ve been approached before about “ghostwriting” for more established curators who get asked to write catalog essays for galleries and small exhibition projects. In general, I feel weird but not too weird about this—after all, I like the practice and the opportunity to think about an artist’s work that I might not otherwise consider or know of. Oftentimes, it’s not work I’ve seen, and my main point of contact with it is via the internet and whatever the gallery can send, which is in and of itself a problem. I guess my question is two-pronged. On the one hand it’s an ethical quandry: I’ve done a few of these now, and I appreciate the practice and the cash, but sometimes I feel odd about the whole masquerade (though not as odd as other people seem to; I guess that’s the money talking). On the other hand, it’s practical: as someone building a writing career, I would like to indicate these projects somehow on my CV, but of course if someone wanted to actually look, they wouldn’t find my name associated in the subsequent print publications, etc. What are your thoughts?

Pierre Huyghe. The Host and the Cloud, 2009-2010. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Let me run this down very simply: Your questions are, “Is this practice unethical?” and “Can I find a way to claim this on my CV?” My answers are a correspondingly straightforward yes and no, respectively. But let’s explore this matter, and its potential consequences, in more detail.

To be honest, I was shocked by your dilemma—fifteen years in the art world, and I’d never heard of such a thing! To me, a curator is someone who loves art and artists so much that he or she would not perpetrate a fraud in order to avoid writing about them. Wide-eyed and scandalized, I emailed quite a few friends and acquaintances to see if they shared my amazement; most respondents did. One of them, a curator who has had a long career with many institutional appointments, told me, “Your email makes me feel naïve, as I’ve never heard of such a practice. The honorarium for a catalog essay is so modest I can’t imagine how this could be lucrative for both the curator and the ghost, but that’s a different question. Taking inspiration from “The Ethicist” in the New York Times, I’d say your writer is a professional cheat and liar who is asking for your blessing to deceive the commissioner of the writing, and the public that reads the piece believing it to be the work of a noted writer, and to get paid for it, and to get credit for it. To use a word that has migrated from Yiddish to English, that’s chutzpah.” These are perhaps stronger words than I would have used, but the basic sentiment is the same: You can have the money, or you can have a clean conscience and a decent CV, but not both.

However, the very next person I asked—who also works at an institution—merely shrugged. In a private conversation, he told me, “I’ve done this. My boss isn’t a writer, so I write the catalog essays for our shows.” To my surprise, he seemed to be rather sang froid about this, but when I pressed him for more information, he also noted that it’s a regular part of his job; that his superior is a director and not a curator; and that he also regularly interviews the director and uses those notes for the essays. Although I was gratified to have found someone who was familiar with catalog-essay ghostwriting, your situations are dissimilar enough to make me feel that there’s no comparison.

Then I got lucky and found someone who had worked as a writer and curator, and who lived through a situation akin to yours. Here are her thoughts:

“However good the money, the benefits of getting paid to do this kind of writing will be short-lived in comparison to the longer-term regret this young curator/writer will feel. People who do this will never be able to attach their names to the work, or promote it as their own, especially on their CVs. That is the point of ghostwriting: The writer remains invisible and authorship is claimed by someone else. The contracting curators will not only be able to publish the work as theirs for an exhibition catalog, they will be able to use this text in any other capacity they choose: for a subsequent magazine article or guest lecture, all of which they will receive additional compensation for while the ghostwriter remains anonymous.

“It is highly unadvisable for this ghostwriter to include the work on a CV. The interviewing organization will quickly discover that s/he is not listed as the author and logically assume our ghostwriter to be a liar with a padded CV. Admitting that s/he was a ghostwriter will not amend the situation; it will only convey a willingness to participate in unethical practices. And there is no question: This practice is unethical. Not because of the restrictions it places on the writer, but more importantly because of the deception created for the artist. The artist and/or exhibiting venue has contracted with more-established curators based on their reputations, knowledge, and writing expertise, but they are not getting what they paid for. The artist will promote the text to represent their practice and hang their reputation in part on the curator’s. Any subsequent revelation of fraud will render it useless to the artist.

“I was the unwilling ghostwriter for multiple exhibition essays while working as a curatorial assistant at a museum. My research, which I was required to present as drafts, appeared unaltered, word for word, in the final published essays. Not only am I unable to claim authorship of these texts, they have subsequently appeared in books and other publications. I felt physically ill the day that I opened up a copy of Parkett with an article about an artist I had worked with during this time, only to realize that they were my words on the page, and someone else listed as author. It was a terrible feeling, and I don’t encourage its perpetuation.”

Ultimately, I’m guessing the money must be pretty damn good if you’ve been willing to sacrifice your honesty thus far (especially to yourself, because it’s obvious that this “writing experience” is not “practical” if you can’t claim it). You’ll have to decide which is more important: your bank balance, or your integrity and future as a writer. If you follow this advice and stop participating in these deceitful practices, you’ll definitely be poorer for a while, but perhaps you can contact the curators you’ve worked with in the past and ask them to recommend some publications that pay writers for essays and reviews. Maybe they’d even put in a good word for you. If you can get some paying gigs that will publish your name on the work and send you a check, you’ll be doing better for yourself in the long run. Good luck!