by Jon Lackman | 20 August 2010 | Books, Museums
In Artnet sculptor James Croak hypothesizes that Thomas McEvilley’s review of the 1982 MoMA exhibition ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth-Century Art “generally broadened the entire museological approach to both contemporary art and global culture,” making possible such shows as the recent MoMA blockbuster retrospective devoted to Marina Abramovic:
His irreverent review, published in Artforum and titled “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief” (variously a Hoagy Carmichael tune and a jump-rope rhyme), garnered an ad hominem response supposedly researched jointly by 35 MoMA staff members and signed by curator William Rubin, which was very poorly received. McEvilley’s text caused much soul-searching among art historians — one asked, “where were you when you read it?”
McEvilley has a new book out, on Abramovic and her collaborator Ulay, which Croak calls “an engaging read, with a narrative that is more like that of a novel than an academic treatise.”
The original review launched an exchange of responses between McEvilley, Rubin and Kirk Varnadoe, that are exhausting in their rhetorical flourishes. They were republished in their entirety in Beckley, Bill with David Schapiro eds. Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics (Allworth Press, 1998). I lost a whole afternoon while studying for orals reading them.