The Brooklyn Rail

We always wrote in my house. My mother was a journalist for small trade magazines and my father still is a playwright. The towering figure in family lore was my grandfather, Benedict White, who had started out in the newspapers at age ten as an office boy, but had simultaneously written a column for children called “The Little Black Crow.” I guess this was in the 1910s, appearing in one of the innumerable dailies or weeklies that crowded the city. Ben White went on to write for the New York Daily News, and found his place in history breaking the story of Christine Jorgensen’s transition surgery in 1952. He also covered the infamous Woodward murder on Long Island in 1955. After watching All the President’s Men in high school, I briefly flirted with the idea of being a news journalist, but I was too excited by images to think about words, and I hadn’t read enough to be a writer (and still haven’t).

As I think is pretty typical in the life cycle of an artist, I found myself kicking around in my twenties, with not much to show for all my time in the studio. I was studio assisting for Ellen Phelan and Ronnie Landfield, and I had a magnificent space at the Fun Factory/Five Pointz, where all the money I made as an assistant went into having a studio. I did group shows wherever I could, had a couple of exhibitions at La MaMa—my father knew Ellen Stewart from back in the sixties, and she had taken a liking to me and kept showing my work in her gallery—but as is the case with most artists at that age, nothing much happened.

Here’s a slight but important digression: Charles Saatchi played a distant, conceptual role in my life. While I was plotting my escape from architecture school back in 2000, I was in St. Mark’s Bookshop, leafing through the catalog of the Sensation show (then in London) and noted the galleries that represented the artists who were included. It was the early days of websites and email, and the barrage of missives I sent to important galleries in London resulted in a couple of personal responses, and even a positive reply. I spent a couple of months in London apprenticing to the British painter Richard Patterson, and living off savings. After things began to pick up in my early thirties, I did an artist residency in Taipei. From Taipei though, you could look toward Beijing, and that was where everything was happening, art-wise. It was 2008, right before the Olympics; galleries were popping up everywhere, and the only person anyone could talk about was Ai Weiwei. I got myself into a residency in Beijing the year after Taipei. Charles Saatchi had started an art blog, and I wrote to the editor, to see if they wanted a Beijing correspondent, and they did. So I started interviewing Chinese artists and writing profiles. I did score an interview with Ai Weiwei. I had gone to architecture school, not art school, so I did feel self-conscious about this lacuna in my background.

In order to write my profiles of Chinese artists, I mostly fell back on things my mother had told me when she had quite brutally edited my writing, starting from third grade and lasting until mid-high school. Then, I also remembered the similarly austere precepts of Diana Goetsch, who taught journalism at Stuyvesant. In 2009 I started interviewing artists for Alanna Heiss’s Art International Radio—an online radio station that was a continuation of WPS1. This was an education for me: I interviewed mostly artist friends at the beginning, but then began chatting with established figures as well. The reality was that while my art wasn’t getting seen as much as I wanted, I could participate in conversations about art at a much higher level, and still be quite satisfied. None of us really knows exactly what art is—so we massage and poke this giant amorphous ball of human culture and shape it by collective action.

My family background in journalism has taught me to view it as a job, but there is a contradiction in that it is a job in service to the poetic notion of artistic practice. But the job part means you keep doing it week in and week out, and you don’t torture yourself too much over it—the copy needs to be filed; a dispatch from city hall and an art review aren’t different in that context. I did something like two hundred interviews for Alanna (they’re on Spotify now, go listen) and I’ve been writing for the Brooklyn Rail for about fourteen years. Along the way journalism started to bring in money for me, mostly for longer form articles and essays, as well as the monthly reviews, which I now feel are an indispensable ingredient of my practice. The art making and the art writing have supported me up to the point at which I find myself, and I am very happy at this intersection. Considering that he moved from children’s stories (written as a child) to gruesome murders on Long Island, I’m pretty sure my grandfather Ben understands how this all happened, as do I.