Overview

A reframing of the history of 1960s New York avant-garde art centered on the queer, genre-bending criticism of Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston. In the early 1960s, Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston began to imagine art criticism as something unruly and expansive, rejecting modernist appeals to purity and coherence that had overtaken the field. These critics were deeply enmeshed in New York's avant-garde art scene, and both were explicitly and unapologetically queer. First working independently of one another, then later in dialogue, Swenson and Johnston demanded criticism become life-sustaining, subverting protocols and distorting its form beyond recognition. They utilized criticism as a means of navigating queer existence and reclaimed terms like lesbian, homosexual, mad, and psychotic as their own. Jennifer Sichel follows the intertwined paths of Swenson and Johnston, providing a history of queer practices that were central to the development of avant-garde art but have been largely overlooked. Criticism Without Authority makes their work visible not just as criticism, but as its own form of art. As Sichel shows, Swenson's and Johnston's practices, bucking categories and disciplinary formations, resist historical streamlining and stand as a key for unlocking the queerness of postwar art history.

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9780226842820

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Reviews

“Situating these two critics together is a brilliant idea, and Sichel charts their various entanglements with laser-like precision as she offers a new orientation for how we should regard the avant-garde art scene of 1960s New York, one that is decisively queer and marked by failed gambits. Criticism Without Authority is sharp, rich, and packed with insight, reflection, and fantastic archival finds.” -- Jo Applin, author of ""Lee Lozano: Not Working"" ""An essential, vivid, and brisk account of two renegade art writers in postwar New York, Criticism Without Authority is as flush as its subjects with creative energy and the conviction that it’s important to sit with things, ideas, and histories we are not sure about. Beyond its importance to scholarship, this book is deeply moving."" -- Prudence Peiffer, author of ""The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever"" “Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston produced some of the most widely admired if eccentric art criticism in 1960s New York, in writing that was empirical, confessional, unembarrassed. Both were unabashedly ‘anti-workers’ of the art world. Finally, we have a study that brings them together with verve and spleen. Criticism without Authority is a lively, funny, provocative, and tonic book. Asking what is made possible by Swenson and Johnston’s queer praxes, Sichel follows the meandering leads of these two figures through her own methodological tracking. Doing the best kind of storytelling, Sichel’s account is grounded in thick description—the deep play of the cultural historian, allowing for both structure and phenomena to body forth.” -- Judith Rodenbeck, author of ""Radical Prototypes: Allan Kaprow and the Invention of Happenings""

Author Information

Jennifer Sichel is assistant professor of contemporary art and theory at the University of Louisville, Hite Institute of Art and Design. Her work has been published in Selva, Oxford Art Journal, and in catalogs for museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jewish Museum, and National Portrait Gallery.  

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