title: “Mixed Media” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-10” author: “Ricky Palmer”
At issue was how the 33 works–all but one of which are collages–that comprised Malcolm’s first solo exhibition, on display through Nov. 16, should be hung. Should two rectangular pieces, for example, be placed side by side? Should the dark work be hung below the lighter colored one? The conflict was closely fought, but after an hour, the exhibition had been arranged to mutual satisfaction, and peace was declared.
Malcolm’s outburst may have reflected a natural case of preshow jitters, but along with other hints it suggested the tensions that can arise when those who are known for one pursuit attempt another, quite different, activity in public.
Were Janet Malcolm hailed tomorrow as the new Picasso, this would not fully erase her reputation as a journalist and the notoriety of the sentence that begins her book “The Journalist and the Murderer. “Every journalist,” she wrote, “who is not too stupid or not too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible.” Her prose is characterized by sedulously researched, deceptively simple patterns that give way to intuitive and controversial leaps. Malcolm, now 69, is also known for the lengthy, bitter and unsuccessful defamation action that ex-director of the Freud Archives Jeffrey Masson brought against herself and “The New Yorker.” In person, the writer is shy, wry and witty, but mostly shy; her last book, “Reading Chekhov” devotes many pages to praising the Russian master’s self-effacement.
When comparing Malcolm’s books and collages (which are priced from $2,000 to $3,500), it is at once lazy and entirely accurate to note that the two have similarities. Both are poised. Both evince a tendency to miniaturism–the great majority of the collages measure no larger than nine by seven inches and though Malcolm writes at length journalistically, her books tend not to exceed 200 pages. Finally, in both the intimate coexists with the formal. While negotiating the enigmas of language and meaning, Malcolm will pause to admit to readers–as she did in “The Crime of Sheila McGough”–that she dislikes the woman whose essential innocence she is protesting. Her collages, too, employ what might be called confidences, personal materials such as wartime letters typed to her parents on onionskin paper and medical documents that belonged to her father.
Such congruencies make any variation from the norm more striking. The largest work in the exhibition–“America 1950”– is a cross between Gerhard Richter and a high-school yearbook. A parade of photos, mostly jowls and lapels, presents the top business leaders in the U.S. of that year, and is interrupted by a small curtain of yellowish parchment. Behind it lies the lineup’s sole woman, Dorothy Shaver, the head of the Lord & Taylor department store. This highlighting seems anathema to Malcolm the writer, who when she makes notes in the margins of books will do so only in pencil. Yet the wax paper also obscures Shaver’s features. So the underlining is also a concealing, an annotation performed in pencil and pen that suggests the desire to have things both ways.
That Malcolm’s artistic and written work shares certain values is probably natural, but what seems most curious is that–despite her obvious writing ability–she has chosen a visual medium. When I spoke with her earlier this year, she told me she had no desire to attempt fiction. She had not, she said, been able to progress beyond a few college-era exercises in veiled autobiography. I took this to be a triumph of standards and ambition. If she couldn’t write like Chekhov, she wouldn’t bother.
Yet surely fiction and art are of a par. Sipping her English breakfast tea last week at a Starbucks near the gallery, Malcolm insisted that her exhibition was “consistent with the answer to the previous question [on fiction]. If I were painting you’d have reason to wonder … Collage is like a form of nonfiction in art.”
In another interview, Malcolm described how the artist David Salle had persuaded her that her collages could be considered as art. Yet when I mentioned this, Malcolm said hastily, “He didn’t persuade me, he ducked the question. He said, ‘If you call it art, it’s art,’ the Duchampian dictum.”
Correct, but this too ducked the question. I quoted the relevant lines (in which she says that Salle convinced her), and asked: are you making art?
“This is hard!” said Janet Malcolm, using her second exclamation mark of the day.
Such interrogations must be familiar, for Malcolm has made them herself. In the piece she wrote on Salle for The New Yorker, she noted, “I have never found anything any artist said about his work interesting.” At the gallery, Malcolm sometimes proved her theory. We talked about how one work in the triptych called “Homage to Malevich” includes sewing needles. I asked why she had chosen to use them.
“I just had some,” she said.
Then I remarked that another piece “Extra Buttons” also contains sewing needles.
“I guess I got the idea from that,” she said.
Malcolm began titling her work with the enthusiasm of a child being forced to eat boiled cabbage. A favorite of hers, as she paced up and down dispensing names, was “Untitled.” At one point she turned to me, shrugging. I made a suggestion, half of which was accepted. (Wonder ye thus, at the subtle beauty of work No. 21, titled “Color Index”!)
“I’m new at this,” Malcolm explained later, referring to her reluctance to call what she has done “art.” She continued, “I’m learning. With writing, I know what I’m doing. I guess I’m just timid about this.”
Malcolm’s writing may illuminate aspects of the collages, but the collages do the same to the writing; sometimes they indicate shadows. My sense, judging from what I’ve read of hers and looking at the show, is that her visual works are more European than her writing; certainly the source materials are. Her sensibility seems more obviously modern, as opposed to contemporary. Malcolm has said before that in making the collages she wanted to document her century.
Putting aside that documentation is low on a list of things the 20th century lacks, this statement is startling because it implies that Malcolm now feels she inhabits an alien time. For a writer or an artist, such a view must be constraining, and invigorating. Yet the 20th century presides, both in print (Malcolm’s last piece for The New Yorker investigated Gertrude Stein’s protection by the Vichy regime) and personally. As we paced around, naming the works, Malcolm said of one, “I did that in 1902.”
“Two thousand and two?” offered Lori Bookstein, helpfully.
“Yeah, 2002,” corrected Malcolm.
Any journalist who interviews Malcolm courts peculiar hazards. Her books (and collages) address serious topics–history, Europe, journalism’s immorality, biography’s triviality–seriously, which tends to induce people like me to make encouraging, poker-faced noises. This High Church atmosphere can obscure what on reflection is one of Malcolm’s chief virtues, her playfulness. She likes jokes. Her journalism and books crackle with zingers. Humor is apparent in a the collage “Das Ich und Das Es” (“The Ego and The Id”), which features, affixed to the cover of the Freud pamphlet of the same name, an image of two female legs. When you get down to it, the ego and the id do resolve to a nice pair of pins. At the gallery, she was also being funny. Malcolm (whose work owes an obvious and acknowledged debt to master collagist Kurt Schwitters) spoke of how she felt at a loss signing the collages; indeed occasionally she didn’t even add her name to them.
“You don’t need to be Janet Malcolm,” someone suggested.
“Yes,” she said, extending her hand theatrically, “I could be … Kurt Schwitters.”
Art is important, and so is levity, which may be interpreted as a lightness of touch. It should be received with a lightness of interpretation. In “Reading Chekhov” Malcolm wrote, “Chekhov’s allusions to religion are inconclusive. They mark important moments, but they are written in pencil. As always, and unlike Tolstoy, Chekhov leaves the question of what it all means unanswered. He raises it, but then–as if remembering that he is a man of science and a rationalist–seems to shrug and walk out of the room.”
At the end of our interview, I returned to the one question that Malcolm had failed to answer. “Are you making art or not?” I said.
“I’m trying,” she replied.
