REVIEW: ISABELLE GRAW‘S ‘ON THE BENEFITS OF FRIENDSHIP’
“I have now made you, the reader of these pages, an involuntary accomplice in my strategic considerations. And yet by subjecting the text to my stylistic and compositional ideals, I also attempt to place my secrets at a distance. ”
“Just a lonely boy… Would you be my enemy? ”
“Human After All ”
“o philoi, oudeis philos (“O my friends, there is no friend”) ”
Isabelle Graw? Do you know her? Have you read her?
I’ve read her. And yet I know her only insofar as you can know a writer through the verbal repetitions and idée fixes of their prose – verbal idiosyncrasies presently being exorcised via ChatGPT.
I know Isabelle Graw as the co-founding editor of Texte Zur Kunst (which I subscribe to) and her editorials and authored books published by Sternberg Press, whose editions on art criticism and painting I collect without hesitation. I know her through her critical discussions on institutional critique and conceptual painting, and the indivisible interrelationship between artwork and art market. I know her for her practise and advocacy of art criticism. Even though the artists whom Graw is in critical dialogue with, artist who hold a torch to the big, bad artworld in their work (e.g. Merlin Carpenter and Andrea Fraser et al), practise a form of a meta-criticism, being institutionalised and commodified by the very institution they critique, what Fraser laments as the “zombie argument”, something that “comes back and comes back and comes back…”
“To me, the idea of wearing other people’s clothes carries the danger of opening myself up to attack, of no longer being myself, of losing myself. ”
Knowing Isabelle Graw personally might mean feeling resentment towards her. She represents the ideal for an art critic. She is someone who founded an art magazine, and developed a networked community that continues to generate much-needed criticism on the arborescent nature of the artworld, a hierarchical root-branch ecology and economy structured around the relationship between artists and money (“money”, in Martin Amis’ words, being “against culture”). And all this, if that is not enough, against the backdrop of the public and private institutions that warehouse art and the art administration, from curators to collectors. The artworld (spelt one word) is a complicated and competitive lifeworld, full of zombies.
Jacques Derrida, with son.
In all the years I have read her, Graw’s prose has had a measure of distance and transparency in the texts she has written and the interviews she has conducted. I would even call her a young Derridean, in the same way Jacques Derrida, early in his philosophical career, upturned the foundations of contemporary philosophy by showing us that a deconstructive kernel already exists in the institutions of language, and thus the institutions of power. And yet it is not the critical moments of “analytical insight into the power relations and consensus-building processes of the art world” that strikes a nerve in Graw's writings, but the moments when she comes clean in respect to when her personal lifeworld vies with her artworld alliance. These moments are when I feel a human life living behind the text.
“Friendship was [Derrida’s] first criterion of choice. ”
The first time I read Graw getting personal about her lifeworld was in a Spike Magazine interview with Timo Feldhaus entitled “Isabelle Graw On Kids in the Artworld” (the interview title intimating the artworld and lifeworld are separate). In the interview she discusses her personal split in devotion to art after becoming a “so-called older mother” in 2006, explaining: “I had, after all, devoted myself passionately to writing or, more precisely, to theorising about artistic practices and I subordinated everything to this primacy. One consequence of this focus on work was that my social relationships were largely instrumental: I would scarcely have concerned myself with anyone who didn’t interest me in relation to my work.” It is this word “instrumental” apropos “friendship” that is the zombie that returns again and again in her latest book On The Benefits of Friendship.
Writing this review, I feel myself being pulled into the fantasy of the project, which is as much about the giving and receiving of criticism (self-inflicted or not), as it is about friendship in relation to enmity. Firstly, this is a pandemic book. It is composed of diaristic notes based on real experience and fantasy. Dated 20.7.2020 to 20.3.2021, one entry folds into another, close enough in terms of daily or every-other-day writing to be episodic without the spectacle — gossip is not on Graw’s confessional menu. The entries can be quite ruminating, rumination the sign of a depressive, something we were all experiencing during the pandemic. This rumination on instrumental friendships versus true friendships is the conflict that perpetuates what is a searching project, one without binary answers to what is a “dysfunctional family portrait of the contemporary art world” with Graw as its protagonist, documentarian and fantasist.
And yet this is one story by one individual, and for that reason, alone. It is a lonely project. This singular perspective is not relieved by the friends who either heighten the feelings of loneliness through their antagonism (“Peter”), or exacerbate the feelings of loneliness through their sympatico (“Solange”). There is no escape from the loneliness, as both true friend and useful friend inflate an ego that turns inward and outward by burdening herself with the fantasy of enmity, or unburdening herself with the reality of friendship. In some respects this project could have been named On the Benefits of Enmity.
Isabelle Graw & Merlin Carpenter (artblogcologne.com)
Graw uses the word “coquettish” to describe the self-reflective literary turn she is performing here or forever adopting in her future writings. Graw admits that the use of the pronoun “I” was once an anathema to her. She uses the word “coquettish” defensively to ward against the suggestion of such a lexical transformation. “Coquette” is defined as “a flirtatious woman”, one example reads, “her transformation from an ice maiden warrior into a winsome coquette.” This book is indeed flirtatious with regard to the filtering of information through fantasy and reality, and not knowing where you stand in relation to either, except for absurd narratives about a corpse image of Graw being circulated on social media; or the torrent of criticism Graw receives following the publication of a book entitled The Dark Years: Cologne 1988-1999 (which I searched for online hoping it existed, but doesn’t, in English anyway).
This fantasy versus reality pendulum is hard to focus on, and also hypnotic for that same reason, especially in instances when biography is introduced through the lens of parental separation and motherhood apropos the brutality and narcissism of the agents of the artworld. Graw discusses her father in terms of money and her mother in respect of love; and her life partner in relation to separate living conditions, Graw choosing to live alone in an apartment. Consensual loneliness permeates. She also shares how her now teenage daughter decided to offload one dark day that her mother is not the “significant person” in her life, rather her friends are. Graw is yet another parent to lose friends (reputation and respect) by becoming a parent, and then to discover her teenage daughter considers her neither a friend nor a significant person in her life. Graw is quick to psychoanalyse the ruptures in relationships that are memorialised or occur during the writing of the project in fantasy or reality. This almost becomes a predictable post-mortem of the psychological ruptures, and a predicament for the writing project as a whole, as the analysis becomes fisheye in its self-reflexive POV.
These biographical moments are punctuated by the ‘Isabelle Graw’ I have come to know and respect as a reader and fellow art critic, theoretical vignettes that bring critique to bear on her lifeworld vis-a-vis artworld, including insights into feminism, class, right-left wing politics in their liberal and libertarian manifestations (the latter being adopted disapprovingly by some of Graw’s ex-artist friends), and image.
Thomas Ruff, Portrait (Isabelle Graw), 1989
It is the question of image, Graw’s image as an attractive young women in Cologne, which, early in her career, was a magnet for unwanted sexual advances, even the locking and throwing away of a key in a hotel room by a pre #MeeToo predator, from whom she fortunately escaped.
Graw’s double image creates an uncanny presence in the book via two protagonists, Carla (as her gallerist self) and Madelaine, a Lynchian lookalike, who appears across the road in the same fake-fur jacket (from the Acne collection no less!?). It’s a weird moment that builds on its weirdness as the lookalikes become friends through the medium of mediated fashion, not art. Graw, or her fantasy double, writes: “To me, the idea of wearing other people’s clothes carries the danger of opening myself up to attack, of no longer being myself, of losing myself.” What Graw calls “mimetic rivalry” is something that is felt, not just in the ridiculous episode of the gallerist snatching a leather jacket that Graw had put on hold until she could afford to purchase it (class critique is alwalys relative), but throughout the book.
The selected image for the cover of the book continues this presence of doppelgangers. At first glance it reads as an Alex Katz painting, but it’s a Warhol. But not exactly Warhol Flowers, even though he supplied the original screen to the artist who copied it: Sturtevant.
Sturtevant, Warhol Flowers, 1970, Synthetic polymer silk screen on canvas, 56 × 56 × 2 cm. © Estate Sturtevant, Paris
If you didn’t know, Sturtevant was born four years before Warhol. She was an artist that brought mimesis to its limit through her carefully inexact repetitions of other artists’ work. In an interview with Bruce Hainley, Sturtevant responded to the idea of the “copy”:
'“But who is the here-and-now Warhol? All his greatness is being grabbed and tossed away by his being shoved into the rhetoric of copy. He was not making copies, and definitely not repetitions, but rather he was repeating a crucial difference. Although to repeat is the ‘same,’ the work of Warhol holds the contradiction that the powerful dynamics lie not in the interior but in a galvanised surface, and it is this surface that pushes the work. And there lies his radical brilliance.”
The “repetition” of Sturtevant on the cover, both Warhol and not Warhol, both Sturtevant and not Sturtevant, makes me think of Graw and the quote she selects to open the book following the dedication “To my friends”: “If you ask me who here speaks, which I, then it is my own and yet again not; from whom would only the own I ever speak.”—Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Like Sturtevant, who edited her name from Elaine Frances Sturtevant, Graw presents herself as a double negative, one who is forever inventing another self to cope with the zombie arguments and utility selves that populate the artworld. Truth is beside the point if utility.
I am not sure if Graw is drawing from a deep emotional well in terms of experience versus fantasy. There is a lot of conflict in this book, a lot of disenchantment with friendship as a whole, whether fantasy or not. And even though friendship is split (unequally) between a lament and hymn to instrumental and true friendship, the enemy is not in Graw’s critical vernacular. This is contra Derrida, for whom the enemy is a public antagonist, therefore a political protagonist, like the critic, like Graw in her less literary adventures. Or, if you read behind the lines, this is Graw’s most critical book on the artworld, because of the necessity to be veiled in fantasy.
The anticipation and anxiety over the enemy is the hidden entity most present in this book, or what Derrida might better describe as ‘prescient’, meaning friendship, like democracy, is always preceded by the preposition towards. That is why this is an insular project or projection, one inward rather than outward looking, and thus not political. While reading I longed for the “capital-T Truth” as David Foster Wallace put it. Even though the capital-T Truth is the thing we will never have. From time to time Graw reminds the reader, especially in the closing pages with references to other auto-fiction writers, that this is not the intent or ambition of this project. Gossip is out! Graw’s utilisation of the literary device of a diaristic auto-fiction imbued with real experience is a way to express what is not expressible, even among true friends, while retaining consideration for the other and self-protection for the self, to remain capital “I” Insulated.
Elaine Sturtevant, Duchamp Man Ray Portrait, 1966, photography, 21 x 20 cm
Once again, this is a project of its time, its trauma, its trepidations vis-a-vis the pandemic. And yet there are small truths regarding left-right wing tribalism and polarisation, channelled through Graw’s PC aversive libertarian friends, through which there feels like there’s no longer any room or common ground for a dialogue between the extremes of entrenched left and right. What we are left with are friendships on the line, about to break or already broken. And it is this split in politics and the self as an image projected inward and outward, online and offline, that is the real lament that has no future prospect of a hymn.
Or can we look at this splitting of self in the private and public sphere as something necessary to exist alongside the other. The self, in the end, is not known to ourselves. The self is made and conditioned in the presence of others. The self responds to stimuli outside itself. The self is permeable, allowing stimuli to pass through and react with its reactive nature and core. Without the other, the self dries up, becomes barren and repetitive, reliving the memories of old exterior stimuli that dissipate and perish with every invocation, every rumination, to end in madness. It has been said before, but it needs saying again, we are social beings. We are stimulated by others, for good or ill.
The thing is, if you come upon Graw’s On the Benefits of Friendship without any experience of reading her academic and critical writings on the artworld, this book by itself will lack the split and tension it had for me as an admirer of her writing thus far. Here, I am split as a reader. I worry that she is yet another art critic who has succumbed to the seduction of the literary, foregoing what has gone before for something that is less fugitive and more pronounced in its singular ambition to be an autonomous artwork, not dependent on the image-for-words reciprocity of being a cultural critic. Graw’s invocation of Roland Barthes who, in later life, was to abandon academic writing for a more literary approach, is telling. We all need allies, past or present, to give us permission and precedent for change.
The artworld is not a give and take ecology, it is a take and take economy. Once you have used up your use-value, you are not needed. And of course there are exceptions to self-interest in the artworld, which Graw is at pains to highlight and list throughout this book, albeit with the use of only one hand to count. In January 2022 I wrote a response to Dan Fox’s essay “April to July 2020” in the essay collection Art Writing in Crisis. The durational essay title is interesting, as the dates chime uncannily with Graw’s pandemic project, which started a month later in August 2020 after Fox’s reflections on his time in the artworld ended. I wrote:
“Dan Fox’s essay in Art Writing In Crisis is the best of a bad bunch. It’s truly great. It runs through decades of artworld malcontent with a soupçon of reward. It’s great because he’s telling our story. He definitely stayed too long. Ground it out. Took the hits. The artist egos. The power brokers. Meta-institutional critiques. Curator messianism. Problem is Dan Fox mistook and misplaced desire for need. Like us all.”
Like Dan Fox’s essay, Graw’s On the Benefits of Friendship is a pandemic project, but also a philosophical one. Like Derrida, who theorised crablike between friendship and the enemy in The Politics of Friendship, Graw leaves the question of friendship – in the context of the artworld – wide open in terms of theory, but closed off IRL. I cannot add much to Graw’s discussion as a fellow cultural critic. That said, the “backing up” of the critic in instances when the critic puts their opinions on the line did strike an emotional chord. In my experience it is not artists who have criticised my words in public, but other… let’s call them in the context of the Irish art scene, academics and art writers. Derrida opines that the political enemy only exists publicly not privately. Artists have mostly come to my defence privately. As the late Dave Hickey wrote, critics have to disagree or they become irrelevant, whereas curators have to create consensus to be relevant.
In a conversation between Graw and the New York Times senior art critic Roberta Smith at the American Academy Berlin in 2014, Smith spoke of how veins harden over time in respect to art appreciation. What Isabelle Graw further shows us in On the Benefits of Friendship, is the heart softens under the repetitive and recycling nature of the artworld, where ideas and production for production sake become reified zombies, who come back and come back and come back…
P.S. Thank you for the words, Isabelle — continued safe passage through the artworld.
—James Merrigan
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