with Pat Steir, Robin Winters, and Walter Robinson
Moderated by Carlo McCormick

This panel conversation took place December 10, 2019, at Jeffrey Deitch, 18 Wooster Street, co-presented by Printed Matter and Primary Information on occasion of the facsimile reprint. The version presented here was transcribed and condensed in April, 2023.

Carlo McCormick
We have to be wary of nostalgia, for sure, but one thing that strikes me about Art-Rite that’s a little different than today is how strong and prominent it allows artists’ voices to be. Right now, there’s much more of a chattering class of all the art workers, a whole industry around it, and collectors have their say, and there’s all these different peoples’ say. I don’t know how often we bother to listen to artists. With Art-Rite, artists could speak directly. And so I thought maybe you could start with a little bit about the nature of the conversation going on back then, and the artist’s place within it.

Walter Robinson
We met in a seminar, art criticism, the three of us who started it — if that’s not exciting enough. We applied to the Whitney Independent Study Program [ISP] as critics. And the ISP, which is really exclusive and competitive now, back then I think we just ushered ourselves right in, to fit in between the art historians and the artists, because we said, “What, what’s up? No critics?” And that’s where we started. And I think, if you want to characterize my feeling about the 70s, which was 45 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. There was an institutional framework, which I’m reminded of, when I see Alanna Heiss here, who ran The Clocktower, and the Idea Warehouse on Greene Street, where I saw some fabulous performances. There was a sense of a neighborhoodliness that we were trying to cultivate because we didn’t come from a real theoretical point of view. We were just art lovers trying to cover the scene and make a place for ourselves.

Pat Steir
I met Edit and her then husband Peter Grass before Art-Rite. I met her at a dinner uptown, at a Hungarian restaurant among other friends of mine. She was a genius at connecting, because they were just off the boat and they were there in the middle of a group of New York artists. I knew Edit almost to the end, for a long time. And I always felt part of Art-Rite, although I wasn’t, but it was a magazine for people who didn’t belong — and I didn’t belong either, so it was great. I was invited to do a cover, I don’t know if I ever wrote anything or anything was ever written about me, I can’t remember. But I did a cover that I thought would be cheap to produce, with potato prints. And it turned out that it was very labor intensive. They kept wearing out potatoes…

Walter Robinson
It was actually fun and memorable, if a piece of work to do three different colors with potato prints on I think an edition of 2,000 copies.

Pat Steir
By hand!

Walter Robinson
You know, you didn’t really have anything to do anyway. [laughter]

Pat Steir
So, doing that, I didn’t think it was hard but it was a wonderful time. I felt part of it. Walter and Edit became part of Printed Matter and I was also a founder of Printed Matter. We all lasted together for a long time. We never had a big fight. Did we?

*Walter Robinson *
Oh we never fought at all!

Pat Steir
See? [laughter]

Walter Robinson
Can I say something first about Edit DeAk, who was sort of the reigning inspiration and much of the force behind the magazine. I really miss her and wish she were here now — she died two years ago. But I think back and so much of it would never have been possible without her fearlessness. You know, I was actually a very shy guy from the Midwest. What I could do was produce the magazine because I had a job working at the Jewish Week and the American Examiner, a weekly newspaper that I’d steal the type from… But Edit, I think, really was the one who did all the inspired things. She contacted the artists for the covers, and she had the nerve to go up to Leo Castelli and demand that he give her an ad.

Jeffrey Deitch
Walter, could you tell a little bit just about the Edit story of escaping in the trunk of a car?

Walter Robinson
Edit, she and her husband Peter Grass were from Hungary. And Edit was Catholic and Peter was Jewish, and as teenagers they found passion for each other. They decided to run away to Yugoslavia and then they convinced two separate drivers to put them in the trunk and drive across the border. This is the story that struck me the most, that they would split up and go into the trunks of strangers’ cars. But it worked out fine! A Jewish relief agency brought them to Baltimore, and they made their way to New York.

And like I said, we met in an art criticism seminar, and after I came down to visit them in Soho. Peter, who today is I think 72, he’s an artist now in the Catskills, and he’s got a church that he lives in. But Peter was very handy, and they had leased the top floor of 149 Wooster Street, 7000 square feet, split in half. So they had a 3500 square foot loft with a big studio in the back and living quarters in the front. I guess it wasn’t that unusual at the time but I was pretty impressed, and that’s where the magazine operated from during the 70s.

Audience Member
Walter, maybe you could clear something up for everybody about your career and personal life — We all thought you were having an affair with Edit DeAk for all those years.

Walter Robinson
Who me?! Well that’s the exciting part of the story. She was a beautiful, sexy girl

Audience Member
Long red hair and amber eyes.

Walter Robinson
She had an accent like Zsa Zsa Gabor, except she wasn’t goofy, she was serious. You know, we had varying degrees of closeness and separateness — I’ll tell you the whole stupid story later, I’ve told it before. There were originally three of us who founded the magazine. Two guys—me and my best friend—and Edit. And then after a little while there were just two of us running the magazine because…I don’t know. You can guess what happens. He quit the art world, went back to school, and now he’s an international banker — thanks to me!

Robin Winters
My journey to New York started with, first, Kathryn Bigelow, my friend in San Francisco. She came here to be in the Whitney program, and I’m like, “I want to do that.” And then Marcia Tucker came out and gave a talk in San Francisco. And I begged Marcia, it was like I sat at her foot, and I’m like, “please, I want to go to New York.” So Marcia wrote me a letter and called people at the Whitney program and got me in by the skin of my teeth. Then I hitchhiked to New York. And the first person I met in New York was Pat Steir, who I met because I went to her house to get a key to Marcia’s house—she was up in Chelsea at the time. And I’d stayed there for two weeks while they were on vacation. So I met you — barely — you stuck your hand out and gave me the key. Walter and I know each other from the Whitney program, to begin with. Carlo and I both go to the same church. We’re neighbors in the Catskills.

The first piece I had in Art-Rite was a letter to Nelson Rockefeller. I wrote him a letter. All my work in Art-Rite was anonymous — I think I had my name on one thing about artists’ books — but the rest of my contributions, and I had like five things in Art-Rite, at the time I did everything anonymously. I was more interested in the character than I was in my own name and personality.

So the first thing I had in Art-Rite was a letter to Nelson Rockefeller, who was an art supporter and a murderer. It was not too long after the Attica Prison Riot, I guess Attica happened in ‘71. So I wrote Nelson this letter, and I had a mask on, and kind of voodoo sticks in my hand, and I was suggesting to Nelson that he come play in my sandbox, and that all of his world power, domination ideas can be acted out with me in a sandbox, and maybe shown on community television. I never heard from him. But, thank God for Art-Rite.

Walter Robinson
That’s so funny because I remember you wanting him to hire you as a world-domineering artist. Robin, I have to say that, like, a lot of things happened in the 70s. And one thing that happened, I think, was a real strong performance art movement. That’s why we did a performance art issue. And Robin, I think, was one of the younger artists who had the most juice. He was the most inspiring, most original, and worked like a maniac.

Carlo McCormick
So Art-Rite has this kind of beautiful hybridity in that it’s kind of continuing some of the radicalism of the 60s and early 70s. We feel that in Robin’s letter. It was very much at that moment when punk was happening, or just, you know, about to happen in New York. If it ends in 1978, punk’s happening already. And one of the things I think about is that it did have this sort of DIY aspect, which we’ve ascribed to punk, but it comes before—it comes out of artist communities beforehand.

Pat, you mentioned how you and Walter were both part of the founding of Printed Matter, but you also did Heresies, which was to me a great magazine, and Semiotext(e) with Sylvere Lotringer. These things were really strong, as strong as Walter said performance art was back then. And Robin, you did your own weird galleries and still do your own weird gallery. So these things kind of continue. But maybe you can talk about how you had the nerve or the stupidity to create these incredible projects like Art-Rite or Heresies.

Pat Steir
Well, we had nothing to lose. And so that made us able to do anything. And I had the first 10 years of my adult life I worked as an art director for Harper & Row Publishers. So although I was older than Walter and Edit, I was the same generation artistically, because I quit my job, got a teaching job, started to work at all those fledgling magazines I didn’t ever work at Art-Rite, but I worked at Heresies and Semiotext(e), and was a founder of Printed Matter.

And founding Printed Matter, I had the idea crossing a street in Genoa — I asked Sol LeWitt if he could finance a publishing company for me. And he said, yes we have to publish mass produced artists’ books. And I said, “Okay, I think of that as a job I could have if art failed me.” So I wrote to Edit, I sent her a postcard, and I said “We’re starting this business, get a Board together.” And she did, she got a Board together, and that became the founding Board of Printed Matter. And she just sent postcards to everybody, and then Sol went around talking to people on the Board, and he made everyone feel like they started Printed Matter with him. And that was a good thing, because everybody felt totally involved like they were a partner in its founding. Meanwhile, it wasn’t a job — it was a lot of work, we published 10 books in the first two years, I think. And then we hired Ingrid Sischy who helped us go not-for-profit.

I think we were the first bookstore with a not-for-profit designation. I don’t know about now, but it was a new thing then. And she wrote an essay comparing it to a performance space — performance spaces are often not-for-profit.

For Art-Rite, I don’t know if I was ever more a part of it than doing the one cover. Honestly, I don’t remember if I wrote anything or if they wrote anything about me, but I always felt a part of it, because it was so freewheeling. It was bouncing around, it wasn’t part of any programmed kind of thought. Conceptually, it wasn’t minimal, it wasn’t performance, it was everything and anything. And so, I felt part of it. I was part of so many magazines, and a book company, but I always felt like an outsider, and Art-Rite was sort of the outsiders’ forum, I thought.

Walter Robinson
There was a lot of stuff going on, and we were trying to clear a little space for ourselves. You know, there were the existing art magazines like Artforum, Art in America, and not only Heresies and Art-Rite, but like, The Fox and a whole bunch of magazines — people trying to make space for themselves. And I think one of the real values in Art-Rite is all the people we got involved — not so much our editorial brilliance — but the fact that we got a whole lot of people involved.

Even though after 40 years it seems all fairly incoherent, and sometimes I wish we put the artist’s name in the first paragraph! I’m pretty sure that we forgot to credit Ed Ruscha when he did our cover, you know — it’s by Ed Ruscha! I know we misspelled Alan Kaprow’s name on the essay he wrote for us. And one of my favorite pieces was a letter from Linda Nochlin, where she straightened us out on the “E-bergs” versus the “U-burgs”. [Claus] Oldenburg being U-burg, [Clement] Greenberg being E-berg — we had gotten it mixed up. So I think the point of all this is there’s maybe some kind of virtue in doing things before you know how to do them. I don’t know, that’s part of what Pat was talking about, about not really knowing any barriers, you know, the energy and fearlessness of the 20-somethings — that see today, everywhere. It can’t be underestimated.

Robin Winters
I was gonna say that when I first got to New York, Pat was a great inspiration to me. Partly because she was doing magazines, and I had a book that you did the cover drawing for, and your paintings at that time were full of all kinds of crazy imagery. And you know, we were in the face of minimalism at that moment, so you liberated the painting world in the sense of like, you painted whatever you wanted. And that gave a lot of us permission to feel that way as well. And so also, I want to mention Jeffrey Deitch because when I first got to know Jeffrey, he was an art worker at John Weber Gallery, as I remember. And Jeffrey came to my performance on the Bowery, which, I had a poster that said: “To Gandy Dancers and Roustabouts: Look for the Man in the Yellow Hat”. And I just hung out with bums all day long every day for two months. But Jeffrey came and actually sat with me on the Bowery, which hardly anybody did, you know, so I can say he was an intrepid art appreciator from the get-go. And I have a film with Jeffrey, and many other people — Gordon Matta-Clark and Joan Jonas and Hannah Wilke — all wearing rubber top hats that I made. And it’s a 16mm film where I ask the audience to play a part, and then I play a part. I mean, I keep coming back to all the people I know, because it’s how I’ve survived here for so long. It’s just the tribal support that I’ve gotten from many of you.

Carlo McCormick
That’s great. It’s interesting at that time because the art world was pretty shut down, and there were these new voices coming up. I’ve taken so much inspiration from you three, but what you might share in common, which is not a lot visually, is that to me you have this conceptual basis for your work. Like you’re talking about Sol LeWitt and what a great figure he was, but all of you somehow brought a kind of seduction to what was visually compelling at that time, and which was maybe a little lacking in the art world in the 70s.

Pat Steir
Well, we were outsiders, I keep saying that, but because it was minimalism, conceptualism — we were the outsiders, and that gave tremendous amounts of freedom. Heresies had one point of view, Semiotext(e) had one point of view, but Art-Rite had all the points of view. There was no limit. I think that Edit and Walter allowed themselves to think anything, to play with any kind of thought, and so it wasn’t just criticism and philosophy — it could be that, but it could also be a thousand other things, and was. And that’s what my joy in it was. I have to say that I think art and literature, and magazines, reflect society as it is when they’re being made. All the things that we were doing, put together, reflect that time. No one thing does, but they all do. And I think it’s a different time now — I’m old, so I don’t know exactly, but it seems like a different time to me.

Carlo McCormick
It strikes me as an incredibly irreverent magazine considering the gravitas of some of the ideas and certainly the figures in it. Did you mean to be such kind of… jerks that way? It was great.

Walter Robinson
I think there was a lot of nonsense in the magazine — that’s what actually bothers me when I look at it now. I was like, going through the Art-Rite facsimile in preparation for this today, and I couldn’t believe how emotional I was getting with these old, old memories. But I remember what I thought as a 23 year old when we started the magazine — I thought that, you know, all the smart kinds of art have already been done and had reached a kind of peak. You had conceptual art, you had minimal art, you had pop art — everything had been done, and I had this feeling that you had to do something new, you know, you had to do something original, but everything had already been done. All the spaces on the wall were taken. Of course, a couple of decades later postmodernism would come along and change our mind, but what I saw happening in the 70s—and it’s reflected in the magazine’s theme issues — is this kind of horizontal spreading.

You know, I remember hearing Phil Glass playing on West Broadway, and we had a performance issue, and there was a video issue — everybody was making videos. And the artists’ book issue. If you can believe it, in the 70s it felt like all of a sudden everybody was making artists’ books because they wanted to make something that was democratic, because the political impulses of the 60s had been anti-commodity. And so it felt like we were spreading out sideways, you know, rather than heading towards the mountain.

And at the same time, alternative spaces were a big thing in the 70s. The government — the feds — and the state would give us money. That’s where some of our funding came from. So people like Alanna, and the New Museum, and Artists Space, and The Kitchen, were all getting money from the government. And somehow that helped.

I always thought it was kind of a secret conspiracy that these progressive art bureaucrats would…we were supposed to match the grants, one-to-one with other fundraising, which of course we couldn’t do, but they would let us match the grants with our in-kind services — our own work. So actually, the government was just sort of giving us the money to do what we wanted. It all went away at the end of the 70s and 80s as part of the culture wars.

Robin Winters
So, Art-Rite was definitely like a gateway drug in the sense that there were more women in Art-Rite than any of the other art magazines, there was more of a queer presence. I would say there’s not very many people of color — Adrian Piper, but I don’t know who else. And I’m gonna give you some shit now: Chris Burden — he did a terrible piece in Art-Rite. He did a very racist work. I love you dearly, but come on, you can find it. It’s in there. But I mean I’m only bringing that up because really, it was this edge of consciousness that’s way more developed now. And yet the problems still completely exist in terms of the proportions of representation in the art world.

Carlo McCormick
While Walter looks for that piece, it just makes me think of something. One of the things I like that appears often in the magazine and is really kind of felt — cause this is before the internet and text messaging and stuff — you really felt the social conversation of it. You asked a lot of different people one question. You’d ask famous collectors if collectors were patrons, and you’d hear people try to parse the difference. There was one where you asked all these women artists if there was a feminine aesthetic, and — except for Hannah Wilke, who always did like to talk about vaginas a lot — most of them were like “fuck you, no!” And I thought that was really great. And it reminded me of the way Basquiat would never strip his awareness of what it meant to be a Black man in a totally white art world. He would be like “why does everyone call me a Black artist, why can’t they just call me an artist?” And I thought of that with basically all the responses from these now famous women artists being like “stop calling me a woman artist, I’m just an artist.” And I wonder how that plays out with the way identity politics has evolved now.

Pat Steir
Well I was just included in a book, and the title was “Great Women Artists” and they crossed out the word “women.” So, still it’s there. And they interviewed some of the artists for a film and I was one of them, and I tried to explain that you’re not a woman artist, you’re not a man artist, you’re not a queer artist, you’re an artist. And that’s what I believe. If you spend your whole life making art, that’s what you are.

Robin Winters
Some things have changed, but not enough.

Judy Rifka (in the audience)
I have a question. Could artists who have participated in Art-Rite that are here raise your hand? I’d love to see a representation of who is here, how many people are here who actually did a magazine or did a cover or did articles.

Walter Robinson
Our very first cover artist is here, Les Levine. He found a smile and picked it up…

Robin Winters
And Judy Rifka — I’ve got so many of your drawings from the last issue of Art-Rite that you did the entire Art-Rite. Full of drawings. It’s a beautiful piece.

Judy Rifka
It was two years of my life!

Carlo McCormick
It’s probably really trite, but we are talking, as Walter pointed out, about 45 years ago, so we’re also talking just the three of you, and many in the audience, about the stubbornness and persistence for survival because the world keeps changing and careers go up and down. You’ve all had highs and lows in your career and managed to survive and prosper and continue, and that’s true for many people in the room because the art world is kind of a shiftable landscape. I don’t know if there’s any wisdom you can teach anyone here who’s younger about how you stay in for the long game and be relevant 45 years later?

Robin Winters
I’ve been hiding the whole time.

Pat Steir
And I’ve been hiding in public. And that’s the way to do it, just be present and do what you want. And hope for the best. I never thought of it as a career, so that was helpful and still is. I don’t think of it as my career. It’s what I do every day because I’m a fool and I go to the studio and I work, and I wouldn’t know what else to do.

Jeffrey Deitch
Walter, tell us about what went on in the Art-Rite world, because I remember seeing for the first time a Jack Smith film screening. The loft was an extension of the magazine.

Walter Robinson
Well I wish I remembered better. You know how office work is, it’s just like an endless grind. One of the things I remember is of course working with Edit, trying to translate her abstruse Hungarian prose into something we thought was readable — now that’s a fun memory.

And the thing with Jack Smith was really kind of amazing, you know. It’s one example of many. Jack Smith was this incredible avant garde filmmaker who had done Flaming Creatures more than a decade earlier. It had caused a riot and he was arrested by the police. But by the mid-70s, I don’t know if he was forgotten, but he was neglected. And Edit went and got him and became his sponsor. I remember we visited him in his Lower East Side apartment, it was like a little tenement apartment that he decorated totally in his trademark kitschy style and they would come over and huddle in the front and, you know, he’d refer to me as the creature of the back.

And so they had a little room at the front where they would huddle and talk and eventually Edit promoted him to do film screenings, and you know, Jack was very eccentric and idiosyncratic — “I just wanna show my own films!” So, she’d arranged these events where he’d project his own films and then maybe he’d have a whole lot of trouble with the projector, and maybe he’d drink a little too much and throw up in the trash can.

But one of the more exciting things I think that happened at the loft on Wooster St was when this German artist Christof Kohlhofer came over — we had gone to Europe I think in 1975 or ‘76 with the idea of doing a European issue. If you look at Art-Rite, the missing number 16 is the European issue we never did. But when we went to Europe we ran into Christof at a gallery and asked if we could stay with him, and we stayed with him for a couple nights. Then six months later he came over and stayed with us for six months.

And Christof was a colleague and a fan of Sigmar Polke, and his work had to do a lot with Polke’s. He took a million slides — he’s still around, he’s an amazing artist — and he’d go out into the New York night in the 70s and get these photographs of the city burning down and the firemen fighting the fires and the water freezing in winter. And with all these slides we had these slideshows at the loft, and played music. I’m not sure if it inspired Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency or if it was just a part of the same impulse, but that was definitely one of the kinds of events that would happen. We’d have these parties.

Oh, I also want to credit Edit for, you know — you could buy Super 8 cameras for not very much money and you could get two and a half or three minute rolls of film and send them off to be developed. And Edit shot incessantly sort of random Super 8 film of us goofing off in the loft, you know, girls taking off their clothes, guys skating around. And before she died she worked with Patrick Fox to put together a sort of montage of all these films and had them acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, which digitalized it, and now there’s 81 minutes of this home movie at the Modern in the very sub basement. They have a big show of home movies down in the film department, so you can go there and watch 81 minutes of all of us goofing around in the loft, and it’s like, to me, it’s like a lesson in how to be a bohemian. You don’t really have to do very much. Smoke a cigarette, dance around, take your shirt off. Anyway.

Audience Member
I have a question about place, and this neighborhood that we’re in…Soho. When I first became aware of it in the early 70s, it was kind of thought of as an “artist ghetto”, and was really occupied by middle class, educated younger people who were living in substandard housing, who were building their own living spaces, who had lack of cafes and restaurants. How do you feel that that contributed to say, the DIY nature of Art-Rite and how you built a sense of community where there was none before? This was the truck and warehouse district, and Fanelli’s was really the only bar, and I think that there’s something interesting about how Art-Rite was really a journal of this community.

Walter Robinson
Well, you know, none of it would have happened if it hadn’t been for us. [laughter] …

I think the Soho-ization — Soho had already been an artist community by the time I got there in 1973. In fact, there were artists living there in the ‘50s.

Carlo McCormick
You get some nice vestiges of Fluxus throughout Art-Rite. It’s like Dick Higgins or Al Hansen. In Art-Rite you actually still have some of those voices in there, and I think that’s part of the hybrid mix I like so much.

Walter Robinson
We were actually beneficiaries of all the work that people did to make it into an artist district. There was all this local government politics that was sort of ancient history. There used to be a panel — you were supposed to be certified an artist to live in a loft. By the time we got there, I don’t know, people just nodded at you. I lived in a couple lofts and never had to be certified. But that’s a whole other weird history.

One thing interesting about Soho, I think Anna Chave, the art historian and critic, is the one who wrote an essay that made me realize this, is that it was the existence of these big industrial lofts that sort of made it possible for artists like Richard Serra to do did big prop pieces. And all that kind of large-scale minimalism actually comes out of the structural reality of a place like Soho.

Audience Member
What about the title? Does R-I-T-E, at that time in the 70s, is it coming out of some interest in rites, rituals, the primitive sort of thing that Lucy Lippard wrote about in “Overlay”? Or is it a pun on “R-I-G-H-T”, a pun on “W-R-I-T-E”, or what?

Walter Robinson
I never thought of any of that before. It’s definitely down market, so it’s like Shop Rite, it’s like a dollar store. I don’t think we were very much into rituals. I don’t know.

Alanna Heiss (in the audience)
I’d like to share an old memory of Edit. She came by to get me — Edit had a car. She liked to drive in New York, she couldn’t drive but she liked to. She drove in the middle of the street, she drove any way she wanted to, she didn’t care. And she picked me up in that really big car she had — I think it was a convertible — and we went uptown. She said, “Alanna I’m gonna take you uptown and show you something.” She took me up to Harlem and we went to a nightclub together. And there were all these wonderful people there, there was great music. We sat and we drank, drank, drank. There were beautiful showgirls. And she turned to me and said, “Have you ever considered that we are really in the wrong business.” And she said, “People are really having fun all over New York. Let’s make sure we always have fun.” So, that’s the girl with the long red hair and the amber eyes that was such an influence on Art-Rite, and gave us all such a wonderful gift of happiness and joy and wickedness and adventure….