Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe interviewed by David Shapiro, for Bomb Magazine #21, 1987
One of the best interviews Iâve ever read. Here are some extracts:
"I donât give a fiddlerâs fuck how such people grade Marxists, and should gladly, were push come to shove, which at the level of cultural production it has not, identify myself with even the grossest Stalinism in opposition to any doctrinaire anti-Marxism. If they want to talk about vulgarity why donât they say a few words about vulgar Conservatism? Vulgar neo-Conservatism is a pleonism. Any doctrine which seeks to convert tomato ketchup into a green vegetable by Presidential fiat, in order to deprive the children of the poor of a decent school lunch in the name of fiscal responsibility, is nothing but a vulgarization of the western political tradition as such."
"Warhol is beloved by the right and the left for exactly the same reason: he performed a ritual purging which seemed to deprive the art work of its complexity, freeing both those in power and those fascinated by it to talk about what really interests them, namely power in the land of commerce. In Capitalist society the conversion of any object into a purely commercial enterprise is always mistaken for a demystification of some sort. Warholâs accomplishment was to demean the art object, which is to say, thought itself and of any sort, so thoroughly that both William Buckley and Benjamin Buchloh could experience the cultural object as one entirely explicable within the terms of their own codes. That is of course a part of Warholâs triumph. The point is that all such triumphs are the triumphs of establishmentarianism and take place at the expense of complexity and any real desire to reorient thought. Warholâs achievement was I think that he managed to dress confirmation up as transgression."
On art and language and Duchampian academicism:
"The Duchamp academy has imposed an authority of the word unto everything in such a way as to make language very difficult to use in conjunction with the visual. The authority in question is indeed that of the slogan and it is indeed imposed. I donât know what I think about Joseph Kosuth. I think heâs a guy who signs things, a Pop Duchampian. What I think about feminist slogans is what I think about slogans in general, they possess the clarity of the epigram, which is to say they distort even as they clarify, and in general I think slogans tend to stop thought rather than promote it. âThe Personal is Political,â a slogan of the now less recent past which was not I think invented by feminists but was certainly adopted by a large part of the feminist movement, has to go down as one of the great invitations to regression into liberalism, or alternatively to the worst sort of Maoist-Ayatollaism, that Anglo-American culture has produced in my lifetime."
"[Haim]Â Steinbach, by the way, seems to me to be one person who has managed to use the idea of the readymade without being mired in Duchampian academicism in so doing."
On the shortfalls of ironical view points in 20th century art:
"As to neo-Dada, Iâm not quite sure where the Dada is in neo-Dada. Neo-Dada so often seems to do little but declare itself as an object which celebrates the possession of knowledge through cleverness. Such an object, as far as I can see, could never really be ironical, because it has to present itself as something credible while it is the very idea of credibility which itâs supposed to call into question. I think itâs there that you and I might disagree about Johns. I donât see the workâs deployment of irony as sufficiently self-critical, by which I mean it begins with Duchamp but fails to call Duchampâs ideas into serious question. Itâs confirmational art, and what it confirms are the beliefs necessary to a certain criticality, with regard to which it is in no sense ironical as far as I can see. In general irony would seem to be very difficult in the 20th century. How could one construct an ironical distance in an epoch where the preposterous consistently exceeds itself as it has in ours? When the foci of world history flicker from Queen Victoria, to Hitler, to Ronny Reagan, there is really little possibility for irony to be much more than presumptive and as such capable of little more than ornamentation. I think this is why irony plays such a small part in the great art of our century. Thereâs very little irony in Joyce or Pynchon, or Matisse or Ryman, in fact itâs effectively excluded."
"As to American anti-intellectualism, I think I should just want to draw our attention to the extent that this is at the present an anti-intellectualism of intellectuals. This is not the thuggishness of the book burner, itâs the thuggishness of those who want books to be confirmations of themselves, a deformation which has produced the contemporary habit of stridently championing what is in fact already in power, but doing so of course through a rhetoric which pretends that it isnât."
On interpretation and (re)appropriation:
David Shapiro:Â Recently, Buadrillard complained of being misused by some of the young painters. You agree that he has been misappropriated?
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe:Â Why shouldnât he be? Everybody else is. It kind of reminds me of a riposte of Foucaultâs to those who attacked his use of Nietszcheâs writing: âDonât tell me what Nietszche said, listen to what Iâm making him say.â Iâve already commented on the down side of people making things mean what they choose to make them mean but there is the other side to the question too. If Peter Halley gets the idea of hyperreal color out of Baudrillard, in some sense, good luck to him.
David Shapiro: [âŚ] Can painting today be subversive? Can poetry? There is a Paul Klee painting Ad Marginem. Are we so much in the margins, socially, psychically, as not to count at all?
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe: The point might be, whoâs doing the counting? Whoâs standing where God used to stand? History? In the form of whom? The editor of the Modern Language Association Quarterly? Of Artforum? Iâm reluctant to grant the authority required by the concept of the marginal. For those who need to eliminate Painting and Poetry, and as far as I can see, Prose, Sculpture, Cinema as a literary form, and also argument itself, from cultural life all these things belong at the margins. All the easier to just do a bit of cropping and have done with them altogether. More seriously, I think cultural forms might be most subversive when most irrelevant. What could be more threatening to the megalomania of power than that which couldnât be fitted in, the irrelevant? One should struggle to be irrelevant, which is to say to be irresponsible where the power apparatus is concerned.
