Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen. Can These Antiques Ever Prove Dangerous Again?, 2012.

In honor of Labor Day, today we want to thank the publications that made our Summer Reading series a success. We were honored to host articles from Artforum, Art Papers, Art Practical, the Brooklyn Rail, East of Borneo, Frieze d/e, Hyperallergic, MN Artists, MN Original, MOMUS, Rhizome, SFMOMA’s Open Space, Temporary Art Review, and un Magazine. And we credit the labors of the artists and writers, without whom this series would not be possible: Juana Berrío, Timothy P.A. Cooper, Steven Cottingham, Jarrett Earnest, Matthew Fluharty, Orit Gat, Claudia La Rocco, Patricia Maloney, Pippa Milne, Ceci Moss, Mohamud Mumin, Matt Stromberg, Matt Sussman, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Catherine Wagley, Caroline Woolard, Ben Valentine, and RM Vaughan. We are truly proud to share this space with you! 

Phong Bui. Portrait of Peter Schjeldahl, n.d.; pencil on paper.

In the pantheon of art writers, Peter Schjeldahl holds a special place near the top as one of our greatest living critics. He entered the New York scene in the ’60s, a poet and college dropout escaping a Lutheran upbringing in Minnesota. Over the decades, his language has remained surprisingly fresh and unfailingly precise—the kind of effortless grace born of relentless practice, like a ballet dancer’s landing. Art critic for the New Yorker since 1998, he is alive to the nuanced movements of his own feelings, which he charts over the course of each review. This summer he met with the Rail’s Jarrett Earnest to discuss the interconnections between seeing, feeling, and writing.

Rail: From your writing it seems like the domain of art is for understanding our sensations of being in the shared world.

Schjeldahl: The arts are a great little laboratory, of absolutely free play of ideas and emotions which normal social space can’t cope with: You can play war and nobody dies, and play love and nobody has their heart broken. It’s also an education in physiology: the mechanisms and functioning and limits of consciousness.

Rail: When did that interest start?

Schjeldahl: In the ’60s, the drugs had a role. I dropped acid maybe five times. The first time was kind of great, the second was iffy, the other times were nightmares. That wasn’t a good enough excuse not to do it, because if you had a bad trip that was a character flaw—you had failed the drug. But it gave me a lot of information. It’s hard to describe, of course. It’s as if every bit of the mind is active and being seen, but by nobody—phenomena without a witness. Which may freak a person seriously out.

Read the full article here.

Carolee Schneemann. Correspondence Course (triptych), 1980/1983; self-shot silver prints mounted on silk-screened text; 30 x 20 in. Courtesy of the Artist and PPOW Gallery, New York. © Carolee Schneemann.

Jarrett Earnest: One thing that has been important for the deeper understanding of your work has been the publication of your letters and writing. When did you start writing, and how do you see it in relation to your visual art?

Carolee Schneemann: I wish I could grasp the writing. When I write, I cannot remember what I wrote. Writing is so difficult; it’s like a terrible kind of sculpture. But I was writing from the time I was a kid. I had Bruderhof neighbors who had a little printing press, and one year for Christmas, they printed a book of my poems—probably about cats, water, and birds. I was nine or ten. In school I was always writing; when I had a good teacher, they were respectful of it.

JE: The great thing about the publication of your letters is that it shows how important fiery missives are as part of your work: “This is not how you talk about my work. That is not what I was doing.” You are allowing people to have their own ideas; you are just insisting that they properly understand what’s actually going on. That means getting the words right.

CS: It is especially difficult the more these enclosing terminologies establish themselves as irrefutable. You can’t even talk about what you do unless you go through this nightmare of linguistic intervention. I’m doing a lot of writing now about these deformations of language—for instance, references to studio process as “practice.” I wrote an enraged letter once saying: “Dentists have to practice. Ballerinas practice. Visionary artists do not practice! We enable. We enact. We realize.” Also, we do not have ‘careers.’ What language-devils have evolved to substitute “unpacking” for “research”? I have a whole list of hateful language problems. I received a beautiful but bewildering essay this week from an English graduate student comparing Woolf’s The Waves and my Fuses (1965). It kept referring to the “film plate.” What? The sausage and eggs on a plate? It uses this expression over and over. I didn’t know what it was, so I wrote to her: “You are in the same coven—the moldering den of academics—destroying our ability to think straight with these deformed expressions!” I was very harsh, and she wrote back and said: “I’m only 22, and I’m at Oxford, and I don’t have anyone with imagination here, but I believe I’m a good thinker.” Bless her heart! She’s a very good thinker, and I can’t wait to meet her.