The anti-worker has to liberate himself from prevailing terminology, classifications and categorizations. In criticism (quiticism) only Jill Johnston and Gene Swenson have so far, been able to do it. In Journalism SCREW, NYRS., GOTHIC BLIMP WORKS, OTHER SCENES have done it.

–     Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” New York Review of Sex[1]

On June 1, 1969, The New York Review of Sex (NYRS)—a short lived, underground paper—published a long, rambling text by art criticGregory Battcock titled “The Last Estate: Filth and Degregation” (sic) (Fig. 1) “This is a new column which will run as long as my interest in it lasts, or the paper gets busted,” Battcock begins.

The reason I’m doing it is because of several things, mainly because I was getting a lot of pressure on account of writing for this paper. […] Things like East Village Other, Rat, New York Free Press aren’t really anti-establishment papers, because they subscribe to major demands that the establishment insists upon. One of these demands is “morality,” and along with it we find “truth,” “reputation,” “career,” etc. Before this column gets too fucked up, these are the points I will stick to:

1. New York Review of Sex

2. Morality and Herbert Marcuse

3. Jill Johnston, modern criticism, and miscellaneous notes.[2]

When the NYRS folded at the end of 1969, Battcock moved “The Last Estate” to the new post-Stonewall paper Gay, where he published the column through 1974. In 1975, Battcock began writing for a new underground paper, SoHo Weekly News, and in 1977 he published his own, staple-bound newsprint zine titled Trylon & Perisphere, which ceased publication in 1978 after just three issues. During the same years, Battcock regularly published art criticism in Arts Magazine, where he served as editor-in-chief from 1973 to 1975. He also wrote for the London-based magazine Art and Artists and the Milan-based Domus. He was a founding member of the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) in 1969. Julia Bryan-Wilson describes Battcock as “a perpetually confrontational voice in this time period” and characterizes his role within the AWC as being marked by a kind of slapdash pragmatism—a willingness to fudge the edges of theory to justify, for example, those “artists in the AWC” who “wanted their art to be political without having to compromise its nonrepresentational, esoteric form.”[3] Bryan-Wilson explains that

Minimalists did not have a thinker like Clement Greenberg to defend their art’s estrangement or autonomy from popular culture as a critical, even political task or to demonstrate that such autonomy rested on the question of radical form. The minimalists of the AWC did have Herbert Marcuse, however. Or, to be more precise, they had a set of critics who appropriated Marcuse’s theories to justify the relevance of minimal art. Gregory Battcock was at the center of this appropriation, although in practice it often meant creatively misinterpreting Marcuse himself.[4]

In addition, Battcock edited ten widely-read anthologies of modern art criticism for publisher E.P. Dutton and Co., including, most famously, his Minimal Art anthology of 1968 (Fig. 2).Art historian David Joselit recalls that “I, like many of my generation, learned the history of postwar art by reading Battcock’s collections in college.”[5] Battcock was murdered on December 26, 1980. He was found stabbed to death on a balcony in San Juan, Puerto Rico—which most of New York City found out about by way of a SoHo Weekly News cover story with lurid details about gay porn, dildos, and lube scattered about the apartment, all under the sensationalizing tabloid headline: “Blood of a Critic: Gregory Battcock’s Rise to Stardom and Fall from Grace.”[6]

Taking stock of this storied career, Joselit lauds Battcock’s “intellectual promiscuity”—his “consistent effort to broaden the circulation or distribution of information in and around art.”[7] According to Joselit, Battcock’s greatest achievement was the prescient role he played in heralding “a shift in values from objects (as reservoirs of artistic intention and semiotic complexity) to situations (characterized by ephemeral, and often flamboyant, open-ended communication). […] Art objects now perform similarly,” Joselit writes: “they are temporary halts or arrested conjunctions of information flows. Such is the real legacy of Conceptual art.” He concludes that “Battcock not only knew this—he acted on it.”[8]

On the other side of the scholarly spectrum, Anne M. Wagner describes Battcock as “a minor man of letters and art world weathervane”—furnishing a not-so-flattering caveat as she cites Battcock’s criticism.[9] According to Wagner, Battcock’s greatest achievements happened in spite, not because, of his best efforts. “He worked too quickly, without hindsight,” Wagner writes in an introduction to Battcock’s Minimal Art anthology, reissued in 1995. “[S]ome of the significance of Battcock’s anthologies lies precisely in the lack of great significance of at least some of their contents […] these volumes have as much the flavor of archives as they do anthologies.” And although Wagner describes the result as “singularly fortunate for the student of this period of American art,” this is due to Battcock’s distinct lack of editorial astuteness: “a Battcock (characteristically) scrambling to meet a publisher’s deadline,” as she describes him.[10]

It seems to me that Wagner’s dismissal and Joselit’s rehabilitation of Battcock are both overstated. Neither a heroic herald nor a mere “minor man of letters,” Battcock was instead a complicated figure who got some things right and other things deeply wrong, and who embarked on a fascinating, if fraught, project to reinvent art and criticism in pursuit of revolutionary change. Battcock’s vision for art and criticism was radically sex positive, affirmatively gay, ephemeral, and open-ended, but it was also racist, sexist, catty, and often totally frivolous.

Battcock’s key conviction was that the new underground sex papers represent the best hope for a genuine antiestablishment Marcusian “anti-art.” These papers proliferated in the late sixties, with publishers capitalizing on increasing demand for queer sex classifieds and technological advancements in offset printing.[11] In 1969, Battcock began heralding the importance of offset printing in the underground press, convinced it would make possible whole new forms of art and criticism. In an essay on artist Les Levine’s short-lived offset paper Culture Hero: A Fanzine of Stars of the Superworld, he posits that

Levine, and to a lesser extent editors Sam Edwards (New York Review of Sex), Jeffery Shero (RAT), Jim Buckley (Screw), and Andy Warhol (Interview) exploited the unique and flexible graphic maneuvering that the offset press and the IBM typesetting machinery made possible. Thus a new genre was born, emphasizing fast, loose design and fast, loose editorial structure.[12]

According to Battcock, this new genre, with its openness to all sorts of perverse queer pleasures, engenders a new kind of criticism, which he calls “quiticism”—an ambiguous portmanteau combining “quit” and “criticism,” but also, I argue, “queer” and “criticism.” Battcock describes “quiticism” as a new form of artmaking that rejects conventions of authority, discipline, and judgement, and instead mobilizes language and embodied performance to imagine new queer generative ways of being in a world that isn’t working. At his most sincere and generous moments, he describes how fellow critics Gene Swenson and (especially) Jill Johnston managed “to do it”—which is to say, managed to quit all the normative conventions of criticism, and to produce instead extravagant queer forms that resist categorization and remain unacceptable to the establishment.[13]

However, at the same time, in Battcock’s own hands, “quiticism” becomes something altogether less sincere, and more troubling. In response to his own shifting sense of whether a genuine Marcusian “anti-art” is possible, Battcock doubles down on negativity,[14] embracing full-on a “slavish devotion to a neo-capitalistic pleasure principle, a remarkable commitment to consumerism, undisguised racism and chauvinism,” as he acknowledges bluntly (or perhaps sarcastically) in a 1972 “The Last Estate” column for Gay.[15] He levels his own critique in the guise of parodies and pretenses that offer much more in the way of nihilistic indulgence than rigorous criticism or sincere striving. And things didn’t end well, for Battcock personally, of course, but also for his version of “quiticism.” Tracing Battcock’s writings in and out of art magazines, and through a succession of underground papers as each was founded, floundered, and folded—from the muckraking, short-lived New York Free Press, to the polymorphous ’69-era New York Review of Sex (NYRS), to the post-Stonewall Gay, to his own satirical zine Trylon & Perisphere—provides an index of the trouble. And it is trouble worth countenancing, as an opening to linger on fleeting moments replete with the creative energy of imagining new queer worlds, but also as an occasion to face the disappointment of failure—to grapple with a queer utopian project that devolves into travesty and tragedy without much of a redemptive arc.

Marcuse and Anti-Art (in two parts)

In the summer 1969 issue of Arts Magazine, Battcock published an article in the “Critique” sectiontitled “Marcuse and Anti-Art,” presenting his version of Marcuse’s theories to the artworld, following on the heels of the publication of Marcuse’s popular book An Essay on Liberation.[16] It is one of Battcock’s most earnest pieces of writing. According to Battcock, Marcuse labels as “anti-art” those works that “have been created within the modern culture that best conform to the requirements for total revolutionary change”—but, as Battcock points out, Marcuse does not explain what anti-art actually is or give examples of work that might fit the criteria.[17] Battcock then suggests that the films of Andy Warhol might be the only example “of an aesthetic provocation that is legitimately entitled to the ‘anti-art’ label that comes from within the art field.” Warhol’s films “do not accommodate themselves to the commercial structure and procedures for cinema in general,” Battcock writes—they are “too boring, too ridiculous, just plain stupid […] too ‘outrageous’ and ‘indecent’ […] ‘put ons’ [that] require new artistic values that are not yet commonly understood.”[18] Other than Warhol’s films, Battcock explains that the real best hope for a genuine Marcusian anti-art will likely come from within the new, offset sex papers. “They differ from the traditional sex oriented tabloids in many ways,” he explains.

Their appeal is mainly to the “new sensibility” that views sexual matters as outside the sphere of morality and guilt. They do not accept the established definition of “obscenity” and their editors publicly subscribe to Marcuse’s dictum that “Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.” […] Perversion and subversion, once taboo subjects for serious, practical speculation are now legitimate areas for moral investigation. […] The newspapers referred to above are “anti-art” because they (or perhaps their principles) cannot be accommodated with the existent criteria for serious journalism. Indeed, they actively disrupt those criteria. Yet they are serious newspapers.[19]  

Overall, “Marcuse and Anti-Art” conveys Battcock’s romantic faith in the “awesome responsibility” Marcuse gives to artists—“the responsibility to structure the new sensibility”—and his hope that artists can rise to the occasion, thereby becoming “a relevant factor determining the direction of the revolution and the very environment of real freedom.”[20] And Battcock sees the new pornzines—with their flexible design, loose editorial structure, antiestablishment ethos, and non-moralizing embrace of perverse queer sex—as the most promising site where such artistic experimentation can happen.

Battcock maintains this hope even after he quickly decides that, actually, “Marcuse is a total reactionary”—as his puts it in an interview with John Perrault for Culture Hero (Fig. 3), just a few months after “Marcuse and Anti-Art” came out. “It turned out I was completely wrong in my article,” Battcock tells Perrault. “I took Marcuse’s theories and I led them to their inevitable conclusions. […] He knows nothing. He’s just an… He has old-fashioned conservative taste. He likes paintings of flowers and things.”[21] Unperturbed by this revelation, Battcock simply proceeds to argue that Marcuse himself is wrong about the on-the-ground implications of his own theory. As a corrective to his first article, in November 1969 Battcock published a second Arts Magazine critique titled “Marcuse and Anti-Art II.” In a surprisingly blunt change of heart, Battcock concludes,

Marcuse’s theories concerning the function of art in a pre-revolutionary society are considerably different than one might have expected […] once they are understood, [they] must be challenged. They are certainly at odds with the artistic theories of the radical artists and critics of our time. In a third article I will attempt to defend Anti-Art, and try to demonstrate that it is a radical form and as such is required by our repressive social environment. I will compare some of Marcuse’s theories with those radical artists and make predictions concerning the development of art in a repressive pre-revolutionary society.[22]

Battcock thus takes up the mantle of challenging Marcuse’s conclusions. But at the same time, he remains dedicated to Marcuse’s earlier notion that in order to become liberated from repressive, compulsive capitalist consumption, society must embrace Eros—or, non-(re)productive pleasure and play. As Marcuse explains in a 1966 “Political Preface” to his earlier 1955 book Eros and Civilization: “‘Polymorphous sexuality’ was the term which I used to indicate that the new direction of progress would depend completely on the opportunity to activate repressed or arrested organic, biological needs: to make the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor. […] Today the fight for life, the fight for Eros, is the political fight.”^[23]

In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse famously advances a utopian vision for a regressive yet forward-looking polymorphous sexuality, as his own Freudian-Marxist solution to “a ‘political’ problem: the liberation of man from inhuman existential conditions.”^[24] “The play impulse is the vehicle of this liberation,” Marcuse writes. “The impulse does not aim at playing ‘with’ something; rather it is the play of life itself, beyond want and external compulsion—the manifestation of an existence without fear and anxiety, and thus the manifestation of freedom itself.”[25] In this transformation of work into non-(re)productive play, Marcuse envisions the emergence of a “genuinely humane civilization”—in which society manages to “undo the channeling of sexuality into monogamic reproduction and the taboo on perversions.”^[26] Marcuse explains,

The organism in its entirety becomes the substratum of sexuality, while at the same time the instinct’s objective is no longer absorbed by a specialized function—namely, that of bringing “one’s own genitals into contact with those of someone of the opposite sex.” Thus enlarged, the field and objective of the instinct becomes the life of the organism itself. This process almost naturally, by its inner logic, suggests the conceptual transformation of sexuality into Eros.^[27]

In a May 1967 article for Arts Magazine, titled “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” Marcuse argues that art is key to this transformation of sexuality into a polymorphously perverse, pleasure-seeking Eros. According to Marcuse, art can resist the “the totalitarian character of our ‘affluent society’” by becoming “consciously and methodically destructive, disorderly, negative, nonsense anti-art”—or, by completely negating the “established system” to bring about a new system “of needs and satisfactions in which the aggressive, repressive, and exploitative instincts are subjugated to the sensuous assuasive energy of the life instincts.”[28] It is a treatise full of romantic language about art’s power to liberate civilization from the totalitarian, “one-dimensional” character of the established capitalist system.[29] Light on prescriptions or specifics, it offers more in the way of aspirational paradigms and optimistic platitudes. According to Marcuse, art can “guide the construction of the new society” and herald “the emergence of new modes and goals of technical progress itself.”[30] Who wouldn’t want that?

However, by 1968, Marcuse was already pretty blunt in his public statements about the distinct unlikelihood of this happening. In a New York Times interview published October 27, 1968, in response to the question, “Do you believe in the possibility of revolution in the United States?” Marcuse replies: “Absolutely not. Not at all”[31]—demonstrating uninterest in, or indifference to, the burgeoning queer perversity and gay liberation very much on display in the underground press. As theorist Kevin Floyd explains: “Marcuse is ultimately more interested in utopian, speculative figures of perversion than he is in real perverts.”[32] Floyd argues that within just “a decade of Eros and Civilization’s publication […] Marcuse abandoned what was, finally, a more or less exclusively figural, speculative, impractical emphasis on the liberatory potential of the sexual reification of the body.”[33] Such abandonment plays out in Marcuse’s artworld texts too, as he soon publicly reneges on the vague optimism of his 1967 essay, around the same time An Essay on Liberation hit bookshelves in 1969. In a remarkably swift about-face, in a lecture at the Guggenheim Museum titled “Art as Form of Reality” delivered on April 22, 1969, Marcuse proclaims to the museum audience (including Battcock) that anti-art is actually “self-defeating” because “in this universe, the work of art, as well as anti-art, becomes exchange value, commodity.”[34]  According to Marcuse, the best art can do is provide “utility for the soul or the mind which does not enter the normal behavior of men and does not really change it—except for just that short period of elevation, the cultured holiday.”[35]

“However, what if Marcuse is wrong, and the rebellious forms are not absorbed by the market and defanged by it?”[36] Battcock asks, pointedly, in “Marcuse and Anti-Art II.” Working within this “somewhat claustrophobic dilemma,”[37] as he calls it, Battcock proceeds uneasily in contradictory directions. On the one hand, he puts forth a utopian queer vision in which “anti-art” and “anti-criticism” prefigure freedom from capitalist exploitation by engendering new genres of artistic practice that excite the body and resist categorization and commodification. This queer utopian vision accords with David Joselit’s sense that, more than anyone, Battcock understood the “real legacy” of conceptual art as a shift from authored, commodifiable artworks to open-ended situations characterized by exchanges of information.[38] And significantly, rather than exchanges marked by a bland “aesthetic of administration” (to invoke Benjamin H.D. Buchloh’s phrase),[39] Battcock heralds the possibility of art engendering promiscuous, turned-on communication that activates the whole body in pursuit of assuasive pleasure.

On the other hand, Battcock adopts an “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” kind of attitude at odds with this anti-capitalist, queer utopian vision. Rather than worry overmuch about Marcuse’s abandonment, beginning around August 1969 Battcock goes his own way—assembling and advancing a pseudo-Marcusian “anti-” practice focused on trivial, gossipy, erotic, fuck-off-I’m-having-fun sorts of things: food, fine wine, luxurious travel (often on ocean liners), and lots of edgy sex. Embracing Marcuse’s goal of making “the human body an instrument of pleasure rather than labor,” Battcock really does it. But the result is not anti-capitalist or antiestablishment, and certainly it isn’t utopian. Rather, Battcock reproduces some of the worst racist, classist, sexist colonial logics of a capitalist system—especially as he frequently brags in his columns about escapades with young, Puerto-Rican men (teens?), whom he frequently refers to in print as his “houseboys.” As in, for example, from a column in Gay dated May 10, 1970: “My houseboy needed $10.00 which I didn’t have so I explained how he could go out to Third Avenue and hustle—which he did.”[40] Or, perhaps even worse, a year and a half earlier, in a column published January 30, 1969 in the Free Press, Battcock explains why he didn’t join the newly-formed Artworkers’ Coalition delegation to deliver the group’s initial “13 Demands” to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). He was vacationing in Martinique instead. “One nice thing about the French Antilles is that there is no art,” he proclaims. And digging in even deeper, he continues, “I wasn’t getting enough sun and wonder if some of the black of the inhabitants might rub off but I don’t think I will have the chance to get close enough to find out. They’re very puritanical and that’s very boring.”[41] The AWC’s petition to MoMA turned out to be a key watershed moment in the history of art and activism that inaugurated “a polemical redefinition of artistic labor vital to minimalism, process art, feminist art criticism, and conceptualism,” as Bryan-Wilson has demonstrated.[42]

Battcock’s decision to proclaim in print, in casually racist terms, that he went cruising in Martinique rather than petitioning at MoMA doesn’t feel much like a utopian project or a viable political strategy. But Battcock’s contradictory visions—for a genuine “anti-art” of freedom and for a sarcastic, chauvinistic “slavish devotion to a neo-capitalistic pleasure principle”—coexist in the same fraught project. The tension between these visions becomes most palpable and poignant in Battcock’s writings during the summer of 1969, right after he moved his column to the New York Review of Sex and renamed it “The Last Estate.” For a brief period when everything was up in the air—just before Battcock would conclude that Marcuse is a “total reactionary,” and just as New York City was welling up with the liberation energy that would erupt at Stonewall on June 28^th—a vision for genuine, anti-capitalist queer liberation seemed, somehow, possible. Until, perhaps, it didn’t.

The Last Estate

After proclaiming in his first “The Last Estate” column of June 1, 1969 (see Fig. 1) that he would stick to three main points (“1. New York Review of Sex; 2. Morality and Herbert Marcuse; 3. Jill Johnston, modern criticism, and miscellaneous notes”), Battcock stays with the program for two more columns (Fig. 4, Fig. 5). Then things did indeed get “too fucked up” and the NYRS did soon go bust—both as he had predicted.[43]

Battcock identifies Johnston as the foremost exponent of “anti-art” and of “anti-criticism” or “quiticism”—without any clear demarcation between them, which is the point. When it comes to “anti-” practices, genres get conflated. At the end of his first “The Last Estate” column, Battcock explains,

What someone has to do is get out of all these identifications and categories but only Jill Johnston so far as I know, has really been able to do it. Its [sic] very hard. Nobody wants you to do it. […] Jill can do it because she’s smart and has learned to stop listening to what people say. Her work, which I think is criticism, doesn’t fit into any existent definition of criticism and that’s what makes it the best criticism around today.[44]

“Jill isn’t nearly as fucked up as some people who read her column think she is,” Battcock asserts in his second “The Last Estate” column, published June 15^th.

Today’s critic isn’t nearly so sure of himself. Subjectivity is tolerated. In art criticism, like in everything else, the formal procedures are questioned and, usually found wanting. So what is today’s critic doing? Criticism, be it artistic, literary, music or dance is nothing like it used to be. Who are the new critics? What does this new view mean? How is it related to art, and politics, and culture? The whole thing is really a mess. It’s extremely difficult to figger [sic] out. Well something is happening and nobody is interested in finding out what it is I’m afraid. Everybody says they want to know but all they really want is to tell you how wrong you are.

For various reasons, the new criticism is, today best represented by Jill Johnston in her column “Dance Journal” which runs in the VOICE. […] She comes to criticism from an extremely thorough background. She has been through the critical mill and comes out on top. Them that are fucked up are, as usual, them assistant professors again who can’t stand any authoritative assault against their precious conventions—conventions that simply mark them as the “kept intellectuals” they are.[45]

For his third “The Last Estate” column, Battcock writes an extended analysis of his participation on a panel discussion titled “The Disintegration of a Critic: An Analysis of Jill Johnston,” which took place at New York University’s Loeb Student Center on May 21, 1969.[46] “This then is what anti-criticism is,” Battcock proclaims near the end of the column.

Today, the new artist must produce “anti-art”—that is art works that are so opposed to the values and terminology of the mainstream of Western artistic tradition that they cannot be accommondated [sic] within the existing institutions; the prevailing values and criteria don’t apply. In order to be awarded the “anti-art” label, these works must require different receptive faculties on the part of the observer; receptive faculties that for the most part haven’t been developed yet. Obviously there is a problem. How can one even recognize anti-art when you see it. Well, usually you can’t. As a matter of fact, it might well be the first criterion—at any rate a criterion for this time and place for art—that it not be recognizable, identifiable, that we not know it when we see it. That is, not know it’s ART when we see it.

[…] An “anti-art” must develop as it must accompany and more than that, it must create an over-all environment of true freedom. This is terribly important. It will meet with tremendous opposition—everybody thinks Jill Johnston is a quack, everybody respectable that is. […] The new obstructionists delaying the advent of revolution will come from a class that, up until now, supported art, artistic freedom and has encouraged artistic license. However since “anti-art”, (like “anti-journalism” and “anti-criticism”) neither depends upon nor even cares about any of such traditional freedoms permitted within the capitalist class system.[47]

---

Within these first three “The Last Estate” columns from the summer of 1969, Battcock extolls possibilities for “quiticism” in the new underground offset sex papers. The idea here is that in a fleeting period while they are still “new”—before they get busted, fold, or become acceptable and predictable—the sex papers furnish fragile, provisional spaces for artistic critiques that address “new obstructionists” in ways that are not immediately recuperable by the establishment. They furnish platforms for “anti-” practices that cannot quite be internalized by capitalism—at least, not instantly—because the practices do not cohere well enough or make enough sense; or because they are too embarrassing, raunchy, confessional; or because they are too perverted; or because they are “too boring, too ridiculous, just plain stupid” (as Battcock writes of Warhol’s films); or too hopeful; or any combination of these things. But how to sustain this “anti-” creative energy? For Battcock, the key question becomes how it’s possible to work within the “somewhat claustrophobic dilemma,” as he would later call it, in which the “rebellious forms” are almost instantly “absorbed by the market and defanged by it.”[48] And on this account, he turns to Johnston for inspiration and for resources.

More than anyone else, according to Battcock, Johnston manages to keep working within the dilemma, and to make it more capacious. Their friend and fellow critic Gene Swenson manages “to do it” too, albeit less consistently—and Swenson died tragically in August 1969, while he was still in the throes of figuring things out. When it comes to Johnston, though, Battcock lauds how she’s able to sustain her practice in an unresolved state. Her work “doesn’t fit into any existent definition of criticism and that’s what makes it the best criticism around today”[49]—something she manages to do for years, publishing every single week, constantly innovating along the way. And Battcock takes notes. At the end of 1969, when he moves “The Last Estate” from the NYRS to Gay, he establishes a new formula that takes its cues from Johnston’s “Dance Journal” column in the Village Voice. He adopts hallmarks of Johnston’s style: clever word play, repetition, first-person address, stream-of-consciousness writing, use of fragments, found phrases, twisted grammars, and colloquialisms. Like Johnston, Battcock furnishes an ongoing chronicle of his daily encounters—where he goes, how he gets there, who he meets, who he fucks, and what he eats—full of gossipy tidbits about himself and the artists in his circle. He peppers his columns with tributes to Johnston, such as: “What I’m trying to say, before I am accused, once again, by readers who, silly geese everyone of them imagine I’m imitating the great Jill Johnston, is that no matter where you are, there is some fool around who’ll remind you of home.”[50]

However, Battcock also departs from Johnston in fundamental ways. In response to the “somewhat claustrophobic dilemma” in which art can feel impossible, Johnston trawls her inner life, embracing darkness and failures, in search of resources to keep working. “It’s always a dilemma,”[51] Johnston writes in March 1971—and she stays with the trouble. By contrast, Battcock writes from an altogether less sincere, more guarded place. Rather than searching his inner life for resources to keep working, Battcock trawls the world in search of trivial things, as he explains in an Arts Magazine article published November, 1970, titled “A la Recherche du Temps Trivial” (his third and final follow up to “Marcuse and Anti-Art II”). Battcock proclaims: “Art is high, sex low, etc. Why should it be? […] What is the lowest common denominator? Have we really hit rock bottom? Let us rediscover trivia, the banal and the obvious.”[52]

By the start of 1970, Battcock adopts an almost entirely cynical stance toward the Marcusian artistic critique of capitalism—aiming for rock bottom, so it seems. He also adopts a contemptuous, lazy stance toward organized political activism. “We shouldn’t make compromises anymore I don’t think,” Battcock writes in a “The Last Estate” column published August 16, 1969—written in the aftermath of Stonewall, in the midst of a “truly open season on homosexuals,” as Battcock puts it, with “cops harassing homosexuals as usual.”[53] Battcock loosely advocates a kind of hands-off approach: let the whole thing go to shit so people will show their true colors, and then everyone else might get jolted out of complacency. “Rather no freedom, since half freedom is stupid,” Battcock explains, without a high degree of rigor. “With half freedom we can’t move forward, instead we are stuck with the kept intellectuals constantly bewailing censorship, and trying to decide what is the difference between freedom and license, or some shit.”[54] So rather than engage with that “shit,” Battcock just does his own thing. In a “The Last Estate” column published in Gay on May 24, 1971, Battcock explains:

In case the reader wonders, I see MY contribution to society as being something of a “guru in search of the trivial.” Largely due to my viewpoint concerning leisure time and how to kill it in the most efficient profitable way possible—as long as “profit” has nothing to do with the capitalistic “profit motive” and nothing to do with production of objects and possession of things but rather, in the Marxist view, profit in the experiences that exist without object, or in sensual experience of objects that cease to exist upon consumption (food, sex, wine).[55]

Battcock’s embrace of the trivial is, of course, problematic—there’s no way around that. Consuming food, sex, and wine is obviously not a particularly viable anticaptialist strategy. Indeed, Battcock pushes the most problematic parts of his practice up to the surface—at times, it seems, as a middle finger (of sorts) aimed at the “kept intellectuals” and “traditional liberal class,” with their status-quo-maintaining, incessant handwringing. In a sense, Battcock was ahead of the curve in quickly realizing that a Marcusian artistic critique of capitalism fails in key ways. His responses to that apparent failure are varied and contradictory. In works like his first three “The Last Estate” columns from the summer of 1969, Battcock expresses faith that “anti-art” can still pave the way for liberation. In other places, including in many of his “The Last Estate” columns from the ’70s, Battcock responds with a hardened cynicism.

Trylon & Perisphere

Battcock’s cynicism reaches an endpoint around 1977, with the publication of the first issue of his own newsprint art magazine Trylon & Perisphere (Fig. 6).[56] Battcock published only two more issues before the magazine folded, for reasons that are unclear. An advertising memo for the magazine proclaims:

Q.  What in the world is Trylon & Perisphere?

A.  A humpy arts magazine—outrageous, provocative and a scream.

Q.  What is it about?

A.  Nothing. It’s about pretense. And posing. And the art world.

Q.  How can you get it?

A.  By subscription. Only $14.00 for ten issues. It’s the only art magazine anybody reads.[57]

An editorial on the first page of the first issue declares that the magazine is: “Dedicated to the world of tomorrow that will never be. Trylon is a celebration of the cynical, the profane and the droll” (Fig. 7).[58] The description is accurate. In a letter dated May 15, 1977, Battcock specifies, “All pieces must be funny. They must succeed is [sic] DEMOLISHING their subject, i.e. don’t write about something unless you hate it.”[59] The first issue of Trylon & Perisphere includes, among other things: a frivolous report on gallerist Judith von Baron; an account of the tchotchkes and concessions people bought at the SOHO Artists Day festival; a report on the art historians who showed up to the Cézanne opening at MoMA and their goody-bags; and a rating of art galleries according to “décor, friendliness of staff, spaciousness, lighting, attire of personnel, quality of clientele, and last, but not least, quality of the artworks exhibited.”[60]

The cover of the first issue of Trylon & Perisphere features a photo by Jack Mitchell of Neftali Medina—who, as Joselit notes in a disquieting and strange aside, was Battcock’s “companion at the time, who would later be a suspect in the critic’s unsolved and gruesome 1980 murder in San Juan, Puerto Rico.”[61] Just as unsettlingly, in his analysis of Battcock’s archive, artist Joseph Grigely notes in passing: “Each cover [of Trylon & Perisphere] featured a Puerto Rican male, all close friends—‘houseboys,’ as they were called—who lived with Battcock.”[62] Medina wears a tight white jockstrap, a cut-off Puerto Rican pride ringer t-shirt, and a hard-hat. As Battcock specifies in the letter of May 15^th: “All cover photos will be done by Jack Mitchell, the celebrated photographer of celebrities. All cover subjects will be black and Puerto Rican males.”[63] Each of these “black and Puerto Rican males” contributes an account of domestic work accompanied by gritty, sexy photos, tucked in alongside all the art-world satire and in-crowd jokes. In the first issue, Medina writes about cooking, and in the next two issues Tony (his last name is not given) writes about car maintenance, and José Ramos writes about housekeeping.

All pretense without substance, Trylon & Perisphere is exploitative and racist without offering much in return.[64] It indulges the trivial pleasures of art world gossip, parties, food, travel, and sex. By design, Trylon & Perisphere is not critical, sincere, or subversive. Within the context of this “humpy arts magazine,” Mitchell’s photographs could function almost as textbook examples of “the ‘brown’ body commodified by dominant gay male culture,” as theorist Hiram Pérez diagnoses the situation.[65] “Once available to cosmopolitan consumption, the brown body generates desire,” Pérez writes. “It provides cosmopolitan gay male subjects with objects of desire and with the superabundant raw material from which to compose the story of that desire. […] He gets to have his brown body and eat it, too.” [66]Indeed, Mitchell’s photographs in the context of Trylon & Perisphere provide pretty much that, without apology.

Trylon & Perisphere’s dedication “to the world of tomorrow that will never be” announces less a world-building project than an abdication of any such project. I think it’s fair to say that Trylon & Perisphere gives up: not just on the artworld—which, as Battcock notes elsewhere, “in each and all of its many parts, industries, investment agencies, educational, museum, aesthetic institutions is corrupt”[67]—but also on art. As a magazine that is “outrageous, provocative and a scream,” all about “nothing,” “pretense,” and “posing,” Trylon & Perisphere represents one possible end point of “quiticism”: a result in which the space left behind by discrete works of art, judgment, and analysis gets filled with trivia, frivolity, pleasure, racism, sexism, and edgy indulgence. It represents a failure—and not the artful kind of failure that “allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development” and “provides the opportunity to use negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life,” as Jack Halberstam elucidates in the book The Queer Art of Failure.[68] It’s just failure, an end point with nowhere else to go.

Moments of productive, queer failure do exist in Battcock’s oeuvre—when “alternative ways of knowing and being” that are not “mired in nihilistic critical dead ends” come into provisional focus.^[69] They tend, I think, to occur when he is in the throes of figuring it out, and of juggling competing imperatives: when Battcock confronts the realization that existing concepts and vocabularies for art are impoverished, incapable of capturing even just his own queer ways of experiencing things aesthetically outside codified genres. Such moments also tend to cluster around Battcock’s attention to Swenson and especially Johnston. In these moments, sincere language about morality punctuates Battcock’s vocabulary. For example, in a 1970 interview with David Bourdon for the fifth (and final) issue of Levine’s Culture Hero, Burdon asks Battcock, “Who is your favorite art critic?” Battcock replies: “The late Gene Swenson. Through him, I learned all I know about politics and ethics […] [I asked] Gene Swenson to write guest columns for the New York Free Press. Nobody else would publish him and I thought what he had to say was very important.”[70] And eulogizing Swenson after his tragic death in 1969, Battcock laments, “Swenson’s large and passionately held reformist views give his own single-handed attempts to accomplish them a degree of pathos. […] When Swenson died, many of us felt as though we had lost our conscience.”[71]

In a 1971 preface to Johnston’s anthology Marmalade Me, Battcock explains: “It is to Johnston’s credit that her work is several things all at once. It is poetry. It is criticism. It is history. It is self-revelation.”[72] And in an unpublished 1973 text, he proclaims: “For many, Johnston’s writings are difficult because they are frequently painful and cutting, full of sharp provocations toward easy values and commonplace motivations. Johnston consistently demands a higher, stricter and, indeed, extravagant morality that many people cannot easily afford.”[73]

Whether Battcock met the demands of Swenson’s “conscience” or of Johnston’s “extravagant morality” remains an open question—sometimes, probably, he did; many times, it seems, he did not. However, it is also true that he did not accept “easy values and commonplace motivations.” Rejecting every redefinition of artistic labor that characterized radical artistic practice of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Battcock forged his own messy, at times questionable ways to keep working.

• [1] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” New York Review of Sex, July 1, 1969, 16.
• [2] Ibid., 17.
• [3] Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 150.
• [4] Ibid., 62.
• [5] David Joselit, “Transformer: Gregory Battcock,” Artforum International, vol.51, no. 1 (September 2012), 507.
• [6] David Weinberg, “Blood of a Critic: Gregory Battcock’s Rise to Stardom and Fall from Grace,” Soho News, vol. 9, no. 1 (October 7–13, 1981), 12–16.
• [7] Joselit, “Transformer: Gregory Battcock,” 507.
• [8] Ibid., 511.
• [9] Anne M. Wagner, A House Divided: American Art Since 1955 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), 29.
• [10] Anne M. Wagner, “Reading Minimal Art” in Gregory Battcock, ed. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 5–8.
• [11] The proliferation of underground sex papers was widely reported upon in the alternative press in 1969. For two key reports, see: Claudia Dreifus, “The Sex Newspapers: High Profit in Porn,” New York Scenes, July 1969, 19–27, 62; and John Burks, “The Underground Press: A Special Report,” Rolling Stone, October 4, 1969, 11–33.
• [12] Gregory Battcock, “‘Culture Hero’: Truth and its Place in Journalism” in Les Levine: Language ÷ Emotion + Syntax = Message, catalogue published to accompany a Les Levine retrospective exhibition at The Vancouver Art Gallery, March 13–April 14, 1974. Emphasis in the original.
• [13] In my forthcoming book Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025), I argue for the significance of Swenson and Johnston’s “quiticism,” or queer practices, as art. I trace how—through performances, protests, and on pages of underground newspapers—Swenson and Johnston reimagine sexuality, intimacy, and selfhood, and posit ways of being ambiguous and unmanageable in response to a world that tended to demand clarity and punish difference.
• [14] I am grateful to Allan Doyle for his brilliant insights in thinking through the queer stakes of “doubling down on negativity,” as part of our ongoing collaboration. See: Allan Doyle and Jennifer Sichel, “Mourning (and) Queer Theory: Pedagogy in a State of Emergency” (paper presented at the College Art Association 112^th Annual Conference, Chicago, February 14, 2024), https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/20887.
• [15] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” Gay, January 24, 1972. Clipping from Gregory Battcock papers, 1952-circa 1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [16] See: Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Note that An Essay on Liberation includes many of the ideas Marcuse first presented in an artworld context in his 1967 essay “Art in the One-Dimensional Society.” In fact, Marcuse begins An Essay on Liberation by acknowledging its belatedness—noting that it is based on “lectures delivered in recent years” and “was written before the events of May and June 1968 in France.”
• [17] Gregory Battcock, “Marcuse and Anti-Art,” Arts Magazine, vol. 43, no. 8 (summer 1969), 17–19.
• [18] Ibid., 18.
• [19] Ibid.
• [20] Ibid., 19.
• 21 Gregory Battcock and John Perrault, “Interview with G. Babcock [sic.],” Culture Hero, vol. 1, no. 2 (1969), 11.
• [22] Gregory Battcock, “Marcuse and Anti-Art II,” Arts Magazine, vol. 44, no. 2 (November 1969), 20–22.
• [23] Herbert Marcuse, “Political Preface, 1966,” Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966, originally published 1955), xxv. Emphasis in the original.
• [24] Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 187.
• [25] Ibid.
• [26] Ibid., 199.
• [27] Ibid., 205. The quote is from Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1949), 25.
• [28] Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” Arts Magazine 41 (May 1967): 26-31.
• [29] For a different account focused on how nostalgia for Marcusian “Eros” motivates the artworld’s “contemporary queer dream” for communion and commonality, see: Jonathan D. Katz, “Naked Politics: The Art of Eros 1955–1975,” in Queer Difficulty in Art and Poetry: Rethinking the Sexed Body in Verse and Visual Culture, eds. Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2017), 74–86.
• [30] Marcuse, “Art in the One-Dimensional Society,” 29.
• [31] Jean-Louis Ferrier, Jacques Boetsch, Francoise Giroud, and Herbert Marcuse, “Marcuse Defines his New Left Line,” New York Times, October 27, 1968, 87.
• [32] Kevin Floyd, The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 139.
• [33] Ibid., 122.
• [34] Herbert Marcuse, “Art as Form of Reality” in On the Future of Art: Sponsored by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ed. Edward Fry (New York: The Viking Press, 1970), 123–34. Emphasis in the original.
• [35] Marcuse, “Art as Form of Reality,” 126.
• [36] Battcock, “Marcuse and Anti-Art II,” 20.
• [37] Ibid.
• [38] Joselit, “Transformer: Gregory Battcock,” 511.
• [39] See: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (winter 1990), 105–43
• [40] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” Gay, May 18, 1970. The “friend” who works for Life that Battcock references is, quite likely, David Bourdon, who was indeed the arts correspondent for Life Magazine.
• [41] Gregory Battcock, “Art: Letter from Martinique,” New York Free Press, January 30, 1969, 12.
• [42] Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 1.
• [43] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” New York Review of Sex, June 1, 1969, 17.
• [44] Ibid.
• [45] Battcock, “The Last Estate,” New York Review of Sex, June 15, 1969, 17.
• [46] Chapter 2 of my forthcoming book Criticism without Authority, titled “The Disintegration of a Critic: Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston’s Protests and Panels,” includes an extended analysis of Johnston’s panel discussion.
• [47] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” (July 1, 1969), 16.
• [48] Battcock, “Marcuse and Anti-Art II,” 20.
• [49] Battcock, “The Last Estate,” June 1, 1969, 17.
• [50] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” Gay, September 28, 1970, 13. Clipping from Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–circa 1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [51] Jill Johnston, “Lois Lane Is a Lesbian (1),” Village Voice, March 4, 1971, 64. Emphasis original.
• [52] Gregory Battcock, “A la Recherche du Temps Trivial,” Arts Magazine,November 1970, 40–41.
• [53] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate: Queens in Queens,” The New York Review of Sex, August 16, 1969, 21. In the column, Battcock refers to an incident in Queens in which, according to an article in the New York Times, a “vigilante committee” of 30 to 40 men had been set up in the neighborhood to “harass the homosexuals” in the park at night. The article quotes a woman as saying “Yeah, the vigs [sic] would go out at night and pick on the fags until the fags couldn’t take it any more,” and then they chopped down the trees in an act of vandalism with no repercussions from the police. See: David Bird, “Trees in a Queens Park Cut Down as Vigilantes Harass Homosexuals,” New York Times, July 1, 1969, 1, 29.
• [54] Battcock, “The Last Estate: Queens in Queens,” 27.
• [55] Gregory Battcock, “The Last Estate,” Gay, May 24, 1971. Clipping from Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–circa 1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This quote is also reproduced in Joseph Grigely, “Introduction: The Battcock Factor” in Oceans of Love: The Uncontainable Gregory Battcock, ed. Joseph Grigely (London: Koenig Books, 2016), 3. Emphasis in the original.
• [56] These years also mark significance changes in Marcuse’s own position on art and politics, which culminated with the publication of The Aesthetic Dimension in 1977. See: Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1977).
• [57] Advertisement on Trylon & Perisphere letterhead with a detachable order form. Clipping, Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–circa 1980, folder 2.22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [58] “Editorial: A Statement,” Trylon & Perisphere 1 (November 1977), 3.
• [59] Letter from Battcock addressed to “Dearest, Wittiest, and More Than Brilliant John George,” dated May 15, 1977. Gregory Battcock papers, 1952-circa 1980. Folder 2.22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [60] “Evaluations of Equality,” Trylon & Perisphere 1 (November 1977), 17.Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–circa 1980, folder 2.22. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [61] Joselit, “Transformer,” 508.
• [62] Grigely, “Introduction: The Battcock Factor,” 34.
• [63] Letter from Battcock addressed to “Dearest, Wittiest, and More Than Brilliant John George,” dated May 15, 1977. Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–circa 1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [64] I am grateful for Daniel Spaulding’s incisive pushback on this point. Offering an alternative reading of Trylon & Perisphere, Spaulding suggests that in making space for racialized proletarian men to describe their experiences on the job, Battcock perhaps also offers a politics that complicates the automatic association of reproductive labor—cooking, cleaning, maintenance—with women in feminist theory.
• [65] Hiram Pérez, “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Social Text, vol. 23, nos. 3–4 (fall-winter 2005), 171.
• [66] Ibid., 185-86.
• [67] Document titled “Outline for a Novel on the Art World” dated December 30, 1979. Gregory Battcock papers, 1952–circa 1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
• [68] Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3.
• [69] Ibid., 24.
• [70] “Gregory Battcock interview by David Bourdon,” Culture Hero, vol. 1, no. 5 (n.d.), 11.
• [71] Gregory Battcock, “The Art Critic as Social Reformer—With a Question Mark,” Art in America 59 (September–October 1971), 26–27.
• [72] Gregory Battcock “Introduction,” in Jill Johnston, Marmalade Me (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1971), 12.
• [73] Gregory Battcock, document titled “INTRODUCTION TO JILL JOHNSTON,” included with letter addressed to Danny Moses dated November 25, 1973. Gregory Battcock papers, 1952-circa 1980, folder 2.33. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.