JAMES MEYER
ON THE FACE OF IT, "THE CRYSTAL LAND," THE EARLIEST OF Robert Smithson's magazine texts, is a charming travelogue: a recollection of a visit to an abandoned quarry in New Jersey. That Donald Judd is among the "guests" along for the tour seems an incidental detail, until it becomes apparent that Judd's work has become fodder for the author's capacious imagination. The flat, descriptive prose is strikingly suggestive of Judd's "placid but dismal" style, and Judd's pink Plexiglas box is compared to a "giant crystal from another planet." Nor does Judd himself escape appropriation. The Judd of Smithson's account is a fellow geologist and would-be earth artist. The formidable author of "Specific Objects" has become a narcissistic reflection of Smithson's interests. In the Smithson tour, the Pied Piper of Entropy always leads the way.
The first of Smithson's famous travel narratives, "The Crystal Land" reveals much about the artist's investment in Judd (who later complained in Artforum that "Smithson is not my spokesman"). Yet unlike so many of Smithson's texts, which found their way to influential if small-circulation art magazines, "The Crystal Land" appeared in a most surprising venue. Smithson's essay was published in the May 1966 issue of Harper's Bazaar, in the "Scene and Not Herd" column, wedged between ads for Kotex tampons and Prince Matchabelli eye makeup.
In this sense the Smithson text was no anomaly. In the July 1966 Harper's Bazaar, articles on Pop and the artist Chryssa vied for attention with Annette Michelson's "Surrealism or the 'White-Haired Revolver,'" whose description of surrealism as a recurring attitude and set of formal strategies, rather than a movement that had come and gone, has proved prophetic. A portfolio of artists' portraits by Diane Arbus that captured the vitality of the local scene filled more pages. The Oldenburgs, Claes and Pat, are pictured clowning around in the faux-leopard Bedroom. Lee Bontecou is reserved, Roy Lichtenstein, serene. Frank Stella sports a shit-eating grin. The successful painter, cigar in hand, is revealed to be nearly toothless; under Arbus's dangerous lens, his smile becomes vampyric, grotesque.
A subsequent spread shot by Francesco Scavullo depicts male artists accompanied by their wives or female friends modeling the latest fashions. A dapper Ellsworth Kelly posed with "Miss Judith Heidler of the Sidney Janis Gallery," the latter attired in a stiffly geometric dress whose crisp contours evoked the artist's reliefs. Judd crouches awkwardly beneath his wife. The two artists are presented as the master couturiers of a new aesthetic of ostentatious simplicity--a "minimal look." A few pages later, an article by Smithson titled "The X Factor in Art," which included quotations by the likes of Robert Morris, Ad Reinhardt, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, lent an intellectual pedigree to the "miminal" Zeitgeist. During the 1966 season, it seemed, "austerity" was the final word in chic. The aesthetic of monochromy and reduction marked by such exhibitions as that spring's Jewish Museum "Primary Structures" show and the Guggenheim's "Systemic Painting" in September found immediate affirmation in the pages of Bazaar, which touted the structured suits of Courreges and Jantzen's "Hard-Edge" knits to its readers. That autumn, reports of Truman Capote's notorious Black and White Ball broadcast the new look to a mediatized public.
The presence in Bazaar of writings by Smithson and Michelson, and phoriotwearraphs of Kelly and Judd, was no accident but the handiwork of Dale McConathy, the magazine's remarkable literary editor from 1966 to 1969. A native of MacAlester, Oklahoma, McConathy exemplified a type of media figure that exists to this day. He was one of those countless college graduates who descend on Manhattan every year like migrating birds, eager to work for a magazine that, furtively perused at the drugstore back in Oshkosh, promised a glamorous future. In the 1959 film The Best of Everything, that dusty fable of the New York publishing world, the ambitious Girl Friday played by Hope Lange rises from the steno pool to supplant the aging, embittered editor played by an aging, embittered Joan Crawford. I imagine that McConathy, during his salad days, was no less enterprising than Lange's chipper 'Cliffie. Joining the masthead of Bazaar as an editorial assistant in 1965, he replaced his boss, the magazine's longtime literary editor Alice Morris, in little more than a year.
McConathy was ambitious but not narrow. After a stint at Betty Parsons Gallery, he moved into editorial positions at Bazaar, Vogue, and Time, became founding director of the sculpture garden Artpark, and headed the arts management program at NYU before his death in 1988. The author of a book on cultural policy and essays on Gorky and Smithson, he also turned out such tomes as Best of Friends: The Dog and Art and Hollywood Costume: Glamour! Glitter! Romance! (with Diana Vreeland), and an expose on Lady Bird Johnson titled "WifePower" ("Lyndon kept leading me further...; somehow I had the courage to follow him").
McConathy's catholic taste extended to the social sphere. A friend of Kelly and Reinhardt, he was equally at home with Fifth Avenue matrons and fashion mavens. "His eclectic and talented circle of friends is the chief ornament of his Spanish Harlem brownstone-the sagging shelves of books and art-crammed halls reflecting his wide-ranging interests," as the April 1967 contributors page of Bazaar described him. This little glimpse of the editor-most likely written by McConathy himself--is a Holly Golightly fantasy of Bohemia on the Hudson (or East River), a New York of low rents and madcap friends, of smoke-filled cocktail parties and late-night conversations: a New York that was yesterday, to use Gregg Bordowitz's felicitous phrase. In truth, McConathy was a Sunday Bohemian. During the week, he left East Harlem far behind.
He emerges from the subway, a deli coffee and doughnut in hand. He rushes though skyscraper corridors at a fast clip. He turns on to Madison Avenue, home to ad agencies and media conglomerates-the nerve center of the "spectacle"--and enters a tower. It's time to go to work.
There was a magazine to turn out. But in the days before focus groups and micromarket research, a young editor could take liberties. Ensconced in his offices at Hearst, McConathy inserted texts of the most recondite character in what was, after all, a fashion magazine. The middlebrow offerings of Mailer and Updike favored at gentleman's journals, or the polite New Yorker fiction published by his predecessor, would not do. Only the most difficult, the most opaque, sufficed: poetry by Francis Ponge, Paul Bowles, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and John Ashbery; prose by Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Musil, Raymond Roussel, and Samuel Beckett; projects by emerging artists like Smithson, Dan Graham, and Sol LeWitt. In McConathy's conception, bohemia and commerce were not discrete, but intertwined spheres. High art and fashion could exist on the same page. They were each components of the same zeitgeist, and he was equally interested in both.
Certainly, the dialectic of fashion and high art is a constitutive fact of modernism itself, as Thomas Crow and T.J. Clark, among others, have suggested. It was a connection that McConathy instinctively understood and embraced. Baudelaire's The Painter of Modern Life is a locus classicus of this idea, and it is hardly surprising that McConathy published an excerpt from this text, "In Praise of the Cosmetic," in the November 1967 Bazaar. If Naomi Wolf has argued that beauty is a myth foisted on the guileless consumer, the author of Les fleurs du mal counters that the cosmetic, as pure artifice, is more authentic and more alluring than an unadorned face. ("Carefully survey and analyze everything that is natural ... and you will find nothing that is not horrible," the poet advises.) Baudelaire's encomium to makeup and luxury forges an unlikely alliance between an art of pure form and a culture of consumption at modernism's outset. Only a representation unhinged from the burden of denotation, the poet argues, is able to capture the fleeting sensations of the bourgeois city--the pleasurable sighting of a raised hemline, or whether "hat-brims have grown wider and chignons have been lowered." For Baudelaire, the rapid line and flowing ink washes of a Constantin Guys sketch are far more evocative of such transformations than a phoriotwearraph of the same scene; similarly, his poetry evokes the sensual experience of Paris through allusive means. Is it any wonder that McConathy, a disciple of the great poet, also favored an art of opacity, an art of the signifier, even as he sang the praises of couture?
