ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“Swenson’s and Johnston’s work is unstable, failing the categories of both ‘criticism’ and ‘art,’ and thus demanding a counterstrategy to contend with their unmanageability. This monograph, then, practices art history a little differently: it examines entangled archival remains sidelined by historical streamlining and leans into their uncertainty, nonlinearity, and antipurity. Without reservation, ‘the goal of this book is to tell an unfinished story,’ where—like for its subjects—things remain productively uncertain. . . . On the cover of Criticism Without Authority, the blue question mark Swenson held outside MoMA returns, filling the entire space and offering the book itself as a question to the discipline of art history—or, like Swenson did, putting the discipline into question. If Swenson’s and Johnston’s work can be recuperated from the margins to reread what seemed like an exhaustive history of 1960s Downtown New York art—and which Sichel convincingly demonstrated otherwise—what other possibilities and genealogies become available? What outmoded practices, overly queer artistic interventions, and failed objects can be recuperated as points of entry for new (art) histories? If we begin to value the incoherence of personal, political, and social life both as the core of artistic work and as the engine of historicizing processes, following Swenson’s and Johnston’s examples through Sichel allows us to ask questions—and imagine alternatives—that are uncomfortable, confusing, and profoundly vital.”

— Alice Centamore, CAA Reviews

“What could cultural criticism accomplish if the practice disentangled itself from its commonly held associations with expertise, judgment, and, above all, authority? Sichel’s Criticism Without Authority considers two historically rooted examples—both avowedly messy, imperfect, and contradictory—of what that very absence might look like. From apartments located just a few blocks apart in early-sixties New York, Sichel explores the intertwined lives of critics Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston, two figures who chronicled the early days of, respectively, Pop art and Judson dance.”

— Brooklyn Rail

“Through meticulously researched analysis of the archival remains of queer critics and practices in New York City in the 1960s, Sichel’s Criticism Without Authority makes a timely and generative intervention into the field . . . Sichel complicates the way queer historicities have been called upon to fill gaps or herald liberatory presents and progress, making a compelling case for criticism as a capacious and intersectional practice that indulges ‘wayward desires and indeterminacy’.”

— Art History

"Sichel’s way of situating the discussion around art criticism in relation to similar discussions around politics is crucial for any comparison of Johnston’s writings with practices today. What
political issues are at stake for art critics and art writers in the 2020s? Be these issues articulated in text or not, the conjuncture always shines through."

— Critique d'Art

“Sichel’s account traces ways to invent new worlds that looked toward transformation, possibility, and the future, if even a failed one.”

— Rain Taxi

“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"

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Other

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