ANNE WAGNER RETIRES SPRING 2010
Tributes to Anne Wagner by her students
(see also "Being There: Anne Wagner in the Berkeley Years")
Robin Adèle Greeley, University of Connecticut
Many people outside the halls of UC Berkeley know and value
Anne's scholarship. Her innumerable books, essays, talks and
countless interventions have radically changed the face of art
history, of feminist scholarship, and of intellectual pursuits
altogether. Yet I want to honor Anne here for another aspect of
her work that a smaller number of us have been extraordinarily
privileged to experience: her mentorship. Since she got to
practice on me – her first graduate student — before she went
on to anybody else, I feel I have certain unique insights into that
mentorship process which I'd like to share here.
Anne has always been superbly attentive to guiding graduate
students through the challenges of earning a Ph.D.. Many of her
students no doubt suffered productively through experiences
similar to mine: how she used to roll her eyes when I would try,
unsuccessfully, to speak my way from one end of a sentence to
the other. Or how I have ever since retained a Pavlovian flinch
when I see split infinitives, because of how Anne used to harass
me over them. But I never minded because I knew it was all part
of her unceasing effort to teach me the rigorous practice of putting
words to images and its intimate links to a lived ethics of social
responsibility. It was part of her conviction that writing art history
matters, that there are critical insights into the human endeavor
that can only be reached through the study of aesthetics.
Working with Anne decisively honed my own research on the
fraught but productive entanglement of art and politics. She
helped me sharpen my ability to ask the right questions: how do
we understand the art-politics dynamic? How do we historicize
it? How might artworks open space for political debate in the
public sphere? How might aesthetics function as an allegory
for the political? Through Anne, I grasped the idea that politics
resides not solely in what is represented but also in the praxis
of representation itself. Any aesthetic address to the political,
she taught me, must mediate between the private, individual
aesthetic experience and the public, collective political sphere.
These lessons were central to my dissertation, particularly the
chapter on Picasso's Guernica, and to my current work on Latin
American art and politics. In all cases, the artworks reach the
political through the aesthetic, both as a point of resistance
to the relentless onslaught of modernity, and as a productive
mediation between aesthetic autonomy and collective action in
the political sphere.
Dialectically related to this, Anne insisted, was the need to
conceptualize my own writing as itself enacting that art-politics
relationship. Social art history, she taught me, must be based
in looking. It must always traverse the aesthetic object, and it
must always happen through a dialectical approach to putting
words to images. In this way, analyzing the procedures of visual
representation can, if done right, provide the critical knowledge
necessary to interrogate human experience.
All of this and more, I learned from Anne, and have been ever
grateful for it.
Richard Meyer, University of Southern California
Anne Wagner and T.J. Clark arrived at UC Berkeley in the
fall of 1988, as did I. I took the seminar they co-taught that
semester ("The Body in Art circa 1900") and was struck by their
intellectual fearlessness, their refusal to agree for the sake of
happy interpretive resolution, and the high standards to which
they held art history, each other, and us.
Shortly after that first semester, Anne published an essay in
Representations, then in its glory years as Berkeley's house organ
of new historicism. "Lee Krasner as L.K." was unlike anything I
had read before. Neither feminist reclamation nor apologia, it
focused on the ways in which Krasner's professional identity and
self-naming were shaped by the social fact of femaleness.
Although I have several favorite moments in the essay, there
is one to which I have returned repeatedly over the years.
Unfolding in two parts (both excerpted here), it consists of a
quote from an article in the August 1950 New Yorker followed
by Anne's gloss on it.
'We improved on a shining weekend on Eastern Long Island
by paying a call on Jackson Pollock… Pollock, a bald, rugged,
somewhat puzzled-looking man of thirty-eight, received us in
the kitchen, where he was breakfasting on a cigarette and cup of
coffee and drowsily watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner,
a slim, auburn-haired young woman who is also an artist as she
bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly.'
Enter Mrs. Jackson Pollock, as Lee Krasner was legally known
from 1945, obligingly bent over the stove, modernist anxieties
very much on the back burner, for the time it takes currant to jell.
The wifely role was one Krasner became familiar with during
the eleven years of her marriage though, despite the New Yorker,
her version of it was not all canning pots and apron springs.
After all, her particular corner of artistic bohemia was wellenough
versed in psychoanalytic discourse at least to pretend acertain irony and scorn where matrimony was concerned, if not
actually to avoid it completely. . .The problem, of course, is that
knowing that marriage is a shady business does not stifle the old,
possessive urge to have a beautiful wife. And ironizing about
your wifely role when journalists come to call (after all, why
choose that Saturday morning to make jelly instead of a picture)
does not stop the media from turning you into the little missus."
Anne's response to the New Yorker is pretty much pitch perfect—
the parenthetical aside about making "jelly instead of a picture,"
that last, devastating turn of phrase about the media and "the
little missus." The author of "Lee Krasner as L.K." attends to the
artist's world as well as to her work, to the possibilities afforded
and limits imposed by the categories of artist, woman, and wife at
mid-century. Guided by this example, I could see that accounts
of an individual artist (whether in words or pictures, in her own
voice or that of the New Yorker) were neither bedrock truth nor
dismissible fiction. They were motivated representations with
which the scholar had to reckon. I could see that art history
might be no less a matter of kitchen stoves and currant jellies
than of studio easels and abstract paintings.
In January 2007, Anne delivered a keynote address at "The
Feminist Future," the first major conference on feminist theory
and practice organized by the Museum of Modern Art. At the
reception following the conference, I took a photograph of
Anne caressing one of the Guerilla Girls with Tim, beaming
in the middle distance, nicely triangulated between them.
How does Anne touch the Guerrilla Girl? What does her touch
convey? Affection, respect, comradeship, inspiration. I love
this photograph because it reminds me of how Anne Middleton
Wagner has embodied these same qualities in her practice as a
teacher, scholar, and mentor. And how she will continue to do
so long into the feminist future.
Julia Bryan-Wilson, University of California at Irvine
At some point in my graduate career, I gave a presentation for
a seminar taught by Anne Wagner that included a slide that I
identified as Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII (originally made in
1966). This work, a low stack of industrially fabricated bricks
placed directly on the floor, was a small part of my larger
argument about artistic labor within minimalism. The slide was
on the screen for perhaps ten seconds, maybe even less, and
buried under an avalanche of other images in the middle of the
presentation. Nonetheless, it was this image that Anne returned
to in her very first words to me when the talk was over: "For
one thing," she said with a smile, " as you very well know, that
was NOT Equivalent VIII." And of course, as with all matters
minimalist, she was right.
What I had on the screen was a different iteration of Andre's
Equivalent series. And though the two sculptures are made of an
equivalent number of bricks, the version I had on the screen was
arranged with a row of five bricks along its width, rather than six
(as is the case with Equivalent VIII), thus shortening the overall
form in what is a subtle but crucially distinct configuration. I was,
yes, a little embarrassed, but also in complete awe of the precision
of Anne's art historical lens — as she has consistently showed in
her scholarship and teaching, her vision is preternaturally keen.
I was in awe, to be more specific, of Anne's marvelous ability to
see so closely and so accurately. In retrospect, it was among the
most significant pedagogical moments of my graduate career, for
in that moment I grasped that the material distinctions between
five versus six bricks matter. Such details are significant—they
are momentous— and this precision regarding objects is one of
the most important lessons she imparts.
It is not an exaggeration to say that I learned everything I
know about minimalism from Anne—I had never seen Robert
Morris's L-beams before I met her—which is no small thing
given that minimalism has come to be vital to my research,
and, perhaps somewhat more surprisingly, vital to my affective
life. Her convictions about the politics of bodily effects and
sculptural procedures have marked my research indelibly.
As she demonstrates in all her work, her own encounters
with objects are importantly corporeal – her deeply nuanced
understandings of artists as diverse as Louise Bourgeois, Agnes
Martin, and Charles Ray are an extension of her circling around
works, getting as close as security will let her to the canvas, or,
in one anecdote that is forever imprinted in my mind, crawling
under a table made by Katharina Fritsch to examine exactly how
it was put together. (Hearing about Anne doing this has become
a mythic moment in my mind, as it is the very embodiment of
commitment and creative art historical exploration.)
In her writing, as well as her teaching, she grasps the ethical
dimension of minimalist viewing, one that, until her interventions
in the field, had not been fully illuminated. For Anne, to be in
the presence of a thing is to not know it, but to be uncertain,
to want to pursue fresh angles of sight, to question, to restlessly
speculate. She models the act of open, fully aware looking, and
in her thick descriptions, you can see her taking in the work
in all its dimensions and complexities. This type of gazing has
other ramifications—what would it mean to stand in front of
something, or someone, and be interested in every part of them,
including their hidden undersides, their multiplicities, their
irregular surfaces? It would look, I think, something like love.
When I arrived at Berkeley in 1997, it would have seemed
preposterous and even a bit offensive to suggest that I would
eventually love a work like Carl Andre's Equivalent VIII. Not only
because I had no real tools yet to visually apprehend it, but also
because in those years, I had a fairly unrefined feminist outrage
with regards to Andre, given the fact that he may or may not
have been responsible for the death of his wife, the Cuban-born
artist Ana Mendieta. In my youthful version of moral justice, I
believed that the only way to properly pay homage to Mendieta
was to participate in a complete discursive blackout and boycott
Andre's work—in my reckoning, his work should not be taught,
spoken about, or written of. My feminism at that time was not
exactly well-developed, looking something like that of a 22 year
old riot grrrl who had just been making her own rageful zines in
Portland, Oregon, which is exactly what I was in 1997.
So when, in Loren Partridge's proseminar, we read Anne's
Three Artists (Three Women), it was a revelation. Here was an
account of the reception of women's lives and women's art that
deftly considered the suppleness and strangeness of gendered
biographical circumstance. It was a book I very much needed
at that time, for it exemplified how a feminist scholar could
theorize the complex weaving together of personal and political.
Anne's book radically changed my views – for it showed me
how to think through contradictions and ambivalences within
and among artistic practices, to take them in and absorb them
without revulsion. In her chapter on Eva Hesse, she also provided
a map for how to approach subjects like mortality, suicide, and
illness, not by refusing to look or by turning one's head away,
but, just the opposite, by pushing up closer to see their surfaces.
Now, when faced with Andre's work, I see much more than the
swirling rumors that had previously clouded my look—I am
curious about its physical properties, and profoundly moved by
its lowness. The charged forms of minimalism continue to shape
my own emotional landscape, in no small measure because of
Anne's vibrantly alive approach to the study of sculpture.
I focus this short tribute on Anne as a teacher, a mentor, an
art historian, and a feminist, but of course she has also been a
tremendous influence on me as person. I will not go into detail
about my genuine and lasting gratitude for how she convinced
me to stop smoking, or how she once paid for my parking at
SFMoMA when I was flat broke. (When I tried to pay her back,
she replied, with typical humor, "Consider it a grant. And don't
forget to put it on your C.V.") But I owe my greatest debt to Anne
for the fact that I can now glimpse a slide of an Andre piece and
know that it is or is not Equivalent VIII. She departs from Berkeley
to take a new post as a research curator at the Tate, which, in
a nicely poetic turn, happens to own Equivalent VIII. What a
fantastic and fitting public stage for her astonishing intellect, her
impressive acumen, and her generous gaze. We will miss her in
California, but I have no doubt that she will continue, as she did
for me, to open people's eyes.
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BIO
Born in Connecticut in 1949, Anne Wagner was educated at Smith College, Yale University (BA cum laude 1971), Brown University (MA 1974) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1980). Before coming to Berkeley in 1988, she taught in the Department of Art History, Vassar College and in History, Theory and Criticism, MIT. Her books include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (Yale University Press, 1986), Der Tanz: Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989), Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (University of California, 1996) and most recently Mother Stone: The Vitality of Modern British Sculpture (Yale University Press, 2005).
Among her recent published essays are “de Kooning, Drawing and the Double, or Ambiguity Made Clear,” Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, with Princeton University Press, 2002); “Kara Walker: “The Black-White Relation,” Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress (Cambridge: MIT, 2003; and “Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Body of Sculpture,” Grey Room 14, Fall 2004. Soon to appear are studies of the implications of Eva Hesse’s titles, the spatial politics of Dan Flavin’s installations, and the ambiguities of Bruce Nauman’s attitudes towards sculpture. In the last few years, she has also contributed essays and reviews to The Threepenny Review and Artforum. These forays relate directly to her ambitions for her next book, which will collect a selection of her recent essays, both published and unpublished, in a volume conceived as an alternative, even a corrective, to the interpretive obscurantism and historical obtuseness of much recent criticism. The working title of this volume, Meaning what? On art since Jasper Johns, begins to suggest its aims and range. Wagner also has a strong interest in early video, and a primer introducing the origins, purposes and aesthetics of this influential medium is in the planning stages.
In describing her research interests, Wagner emphasizes their close relation to her teaching fields: “I am struck by how many of my recent projects have their origins in the classroom. Not only graduate and undergraduate seminars, but even large lecture courses, have sparked ideas and lines of enquiry that have eventually made their way into print. For me, teaching is vitalized by this close exchange, and one aim of my pedagogy is to involve students in the pleasures and excitement of practical criticism and original research.” In keeping with these aims, her courses incorporate current exhibitions and local collections wherever possible.
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(The Guerrilla Girls are, famously, the conscience of the art world
insofar as they work anonymously (beneath those gorilla masks) to
reveal sexism, racism, and other forms of inequity within the sphere of
contemporary art and museum exhibition.) [Photo: Richard Meyer]
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