Peter Selz (29 page)

Landauer points to Selz's passion for “underdog artists” such as Peter Voulkos and Nathan Oliveira as among his most attractive qualities. Their world is his world, the place where he chooses to live. But she also suggests another aspect to this attachment, seeing in the license that is often granted to creative individuals—“Well, what do you expect? He's an artist!”—justification for libertine and otherwise self-absorbed behavior. She remembers a meeting at the University of California Arts Club at which she expressed concern about Marcel Duchamp's “kinky, predatory sexual behavior.” Selz responded, “Who cares? It's all about the art.”
¹⁶

From the standpoint of an ongoing publishing collaboration, Kristine Stiles, a professor at Duke University and formerly Selz's doctoral student at Berkeley, occupies a unique position. Stiles met Peter in 1973 and entered graduate school the following year. She credits him for her switch from Etruscology to contemporary art studies. Why did she change? Stiles offers the following partial answer. She describes Selz the teacher as having “wonderful descriptive powers,” although, she laments, “Unfortunately, he could not explain to me when I asked him what it meant to have his ‘great eye' for art—and how one could
achieve such vision. Also, [academically] non-ideologically driven, albeit politically left. Open to new ideas but resistant to those that differed from his own (Pop Art). Taught material that no one else in the U.S. was teaching at that time—particularly art and technology coming from his deep involvement in Kinetic Art.”
¹⁷
Stiles found Selz, as a writer, to be critical, but without a contemporary theoretical foundation. That is not to say that he was uninformed. Rather, he remained invested in existentialism and the philosophical thinking of the 1940s to 1960s. Above all, and against the academic trend, Selz resisted Stiles's interest in critical theory—semiotics, structuralism, and poststructuralism—chiding her for using the related jargon. “We argued about this.” Now she allows that in this judgment of her youthful dependence on these theories and their languages he probably was partially correct.
¹⁸

Stiles offered one anecdote from her experience as a research assistant that speaks to both his strengths and his shortcomings. While working with him on his book
Art in Our Times
(Abrams, 1981), she lobbied for the inclusion of feminist artist Carolee Schneemann. His final response was “Okay, but
you
do it.”
¹⁹
Most likely, Selz could not have written the entry on Schneemann at the time; in his acknowledgments he mentions Stiles's contribution to the more recent sections of the book.
²⁰
As time went on, Selz retroactively came to fancy himself a feminist. Rather than asserting a political position, what he may really have been saying was that he liked women—but he still had no real understanding of women's issues of the time.
²¹
However, Kristine Stiles, who was there, now insists that Peter was “always supportive of the women's movement.”
²²
The two discussed feminism, especially with regard to
Art in Our Times
. In her view, for some people Peter's personal interest in women unfortunately clouds the concurrent social and intellectual support his female students received.
²³

Moira Roth, a committed feminist and prominent women's rights advocate, had Peter as her doctoral advisor, and although she could easily have taken issue with Peter's perceived flaws, in a recent conversation what she mainly recalled was Peter's friendship and support. It is surprising that this dedicated feminist made no mention of the criticisms of Peter's treatment of women, both personally and professionally,
that had been leveled at him during many of his years at the university. But his genuine concerns and advocacy for marginalized individuals and groups, especially artists, evidently has corrected some of that history. Moira's 1974 dissertation was on Marcel Duchamp, and Peter was supportive of her oral history method, an unorthodox approach in academia at the time. She was impressed with his firsthand knowledge of European art, as reflected in his famous
New Images of Man
exhibition at MoMA. In addition, “Peter had a passion for art, more so than other art historians. It was so impressive how much he looked at, touched, works of art. He was putting order into disorderly contemporary art. And he was comfortable with artists, and they with him.”
²⁴

Selz's interest in “marginalized” and nonmainstream artists and expressions influenced Roth, or at least pointed the direction for her own engaged art history. She has nothing but accolades for his award-winning
Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond
(2006). “Wonderful,” enthused Roth. “Nobody else would have done it!” With a twenty-page section devoted to “The Women's Experience,” beginning with the feminist movement, Selz
had
come a long way. Whatever his blind spots in connection with earlier feminist art, he made up for them in this book. He also cast himself as an enlightened supporter of women artists in his 1999 Abrams monograph and much earlier (1973) UAM exhibition devoted to sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud. He proudly proclaims that the Berkeley show was among the “first solo shows in this country on a woman artist of color.”
²⁵

That may well be the case, but it would not satisfy the objections to Selz's earlier exhibition program made by artist Eleanor Dickinson and her colleagues in the West East Bag (WEB, predecessor to the College Art Association of America [CAA] Women's Caucus for Art [WCA], founded in 1972). A respected Bay Area painter, teacher, and activist, Dickinson played a prominent role in the movement to remedy underrepresentation of women artists in art museums and books. Especially in the early 1970s, with the rise of feminism in general, gender inequality in the art world radicalized her and many other California women artists—prominent among them Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro, Arlene Raven, Sheila de Bretteville, Rachel Rosenthal, Suzanne Lacey, Eleanor Antin, Lynn
Hershman, and Moira Roth.
²⁶
The two most influential consciousness-raising figures on the national scene were critic Lucy Lippard and art historian Linda Nochlin. The latter's famous 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” inspired women—Dickinson among them—to challenge this perception and fight for greater recognition.

Eleanor was particularly angered by what she describes as Peter's poor record in this regard at the University Art Museum. In 1973, she participated in a WCA/WEB picket that led to a meeting with Selz in his office; he was “shocked” at the grievances and agreed to “mend his ways.”
²⁷
But, as Dickinson reports, although there was in fact 50 percent representation the following year—a great improvement—all the artists shown were “pretty young women.” In her view, the letter of the agreement was observed, but not the underlying spirit. For his part, Peter points out that when Eleanor and her fellow feminist protesters appeared at his office, the Barbara Chase-Riboud exhibition was on view at the museum. His comment: “Either they didn't see it, or they didn't care.”
²⁸
Moreover, Selz furthers his claim to supporting women artists with an account from his first year at Berkeley. He was invited to attend art practice faculty meetings, and in discussing names for a new painting faculty appointment, Peter suggested a woman. His colleagues responded, “Peter, you're new here. You don't know that we don't seek women artists.” Peter asked why, and the response was “Margaret Peterson O'Hagan.” The teacher of Sam Francis and Jay DeFeo, O'Hagan was dismissed when she refused to sign the loyalty oath. O'Hagan was on faculty from 1928 to 1950.
²⁹
The implication was that the loyalty oath of 1949 imposed by the university regents had served as a convenient means to get rid of unwanted faculty. Margaret O'Hagan was adamant in her refusal to sign, and uncompromising in her reasons. It may be that such a strong female personality had not been a comfortable fit for her male colleagues. In any case, no woman had been on faculty in the art practice department from her departure up to the time of Peter's suggestion.

In 2003, Dickinson was honored by the College Art Association of America, specifically by the Women's Caucus for Art. No doubt contributing to her Lifetime Achievement Award was the famous interview she conducted at the CAA annual convention in 1979 with H. W. Janson,
author of the art history text that through many editions has served as the basis for most undergraduate instruction in art.
History of Art
, with presumed authority, declared what art was important and which artists had “changed the history of art”—Janson's criterion for inclusion in his book. At the time, not a single woman artist appeared in the book. Janson did not hesitate to inform Dickinson that there was, so far, no woman— not one—who met his standard. He even seemed amused when she asked if he was aware that the Coalition of Women's Art Organizations was launching a national boycott of his book. He laughed as he replied: “No, but this is a free country and they are certainly at liberty to do so.”
³⁰

Selz was far less dismissive of Eleanor's objections. And it is worth considering how similar he and she were, not necessarily as colleagues, but as kindred spirits. Dickinson understood the conflict between his professional life and bohemian inclinations. An example of Peter's personal independence is his posing nude for Eleanor's 1987
Crucifixion
series, a group of large-scale works for which several friends agreed to disrobe. The unveiling of his portrait was the occasion for a performance in Eleanor's Belcher Street studio in San Francisco. An exotic dancer seductively removed her seven veils, floated each in the air, and, one by one, let them settle on Peter and Carole Selz as they sat on a low couch, watching. At the conclusion of the dance, Peter's nude crucifixion portrait was revealed to “oohs” and “aahs” from the delighted audience. Peter and Carole were as pleased and amused as was the audience.
³¹

Before he became one of the models, Peter had written a review of an exhibition of the
Crucifixion
series at San Francisco's Hatley Martin Gallery for
Art in America:
“The Crucifixion series from which this show was drawn is based on the religious premise that all men (and women) carry their own crosses through life. The individuals who served as Dickinson's models for these large (6-to-10-foot-high) pastels on black velvet are people whose emotional concerns and spiritual life are known to the artist, and indeed, in rendering the bodies of her sitters who came to her studio ‘to make their statements,' Dickinson seems to have captured their feelings and thoughts as well.”
³²

Peter's closest friends and colleagues resemble him in their views of life and art. They tend to be independent outsiders, sometimes fiercely
so. And to a person, they are politically aware and engaged, on the left side somewhere between liberal and radical. Yet as Kristine Stiles and others have pointed out, Selz was never polemical in his teaching. “Maverick” may not be the most appropriate term for Peter himself, but his favorite collegial friends, including Agnes Denes, Dore Ashton, Wayne Andersen, and former student Rupert Garcia, could very well be so described. Carole Selz dismisses the term in connection with her husband, pointing out that he cares too much what people think of him.
³³
In short, he wants it both ways, to be a friendly and much admired insider-outsider hybrid.

Agnes Denes, whom Peter met in New York in 1975 while writing a piece on her work for
Art in America
, is a strong and steadfastly independent artist who expanded his thinking about contemporary art. He considers her one of the truly innovative artists working today. They quickly became close friends. He was, in her memory, attracted to the conceptual core of her art. In fact, they seem to agree that her work was Peter's true introduction to conceptualism, a phenomenon to which he was not naturally attracted. “Peter was probably introduced through my work to an art that he then became interested in. As he says, the ‘conceptual' part of it. I am a conceptualist—and I started very early, in the late 1960s, when only men were doing conceptual art. Keeping anybody else out. I was doing my own work and I was very much on my own. Still am.”
³⁴

The qualities that distinguished Denes's art from that of her conceptualist peers are exactly those that enabled Peter to engage with it, thereby establishing his own relationship to what was becoming the main thrust of twentieth-century practice. This is made clear in an insightful—and somewhat surprising, given Selz's usual enthusiasms—essay of 1992: “Although Denes had little contact with the largely male group of conceptualists, she shared similar concerns with the conceptual artists of her generation. But her probes often went more deeply into essential human concerns. And unlike most of the conceptualists, Denes never renounced the object. On the contrary, her art is endowed with an intensely visual character of broad dimensions and perfection of execution, which is always specific to the particular work in question.”
³⁵

Selz found himself in his philosophical comfort zone with Denes,
and in the same essay he further praised her objectives in staying away from the Clement Greenberg formalist rulebook: “Agnes Denes was one of the artists who broke these odious constraints, and she did so in a most unique manner by incorporating the investigation of science and the development of philosophy into art of universal dimensions. Her attitude toward philosophy was different in kind, although no less profound, from the philosophical paintings by artists such as Rothko, Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman.”
³⁶