Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (1945–2024)
I FIRST MET JEREMY IN 1994, not long after graduating from CalArts with an MFA and deciding to make a go of it as a writer. The occasion was an interview for a special issue of the now-defunct journal Artweek on the topic of art schools. Jeremy was then running the graduate program at ArtCenter College of Design, which he had been hired to develop in 1986. His candor and reputation for intellectual rigor preceded him, so I prepared my questions cautiously. At the time, people still spoke of a “CalArts style,” noting a recognizable aesthetic emerging from that institution. I asked Jeremy if anything of the sort was pursued at ArtCenter. “No,” he replied firmly. “I think the day of the recognizable aesthetic is probably over. What we want instead is the unrecognizable aesthetic.” [1] Fighting words, and right on point. I would hear many more of these when I started teaching at this same school at the end of the ’90s.
To say that Jeremy did not immediately take to me would be an understatement. Sitting in on committee reviews, I recall some rather sharp rebukes to my comments, and that was the best of it. More often, as I spoke, he would make a show of studying his watch, yawning broadly, or else he would just leave the room. By way of consolation, a friendly colleague ventured that he was just testing me. As it turned out, they may have been right. One day, rushing to class, I passed him on a cigarette break, pacing about, deep in thought. Suddenly, he looked up and there was that genial smile, that winning gleam in his clear blue eyes, that refined British diction (but not effete, with just a hint of a drawl): “How are you, Jan?” All at once, it became obvious why so many students and faculty members loved him.
To complete the picture of the immensely charming man that Jeremy could also be, mention must be made of his dangling hand. A point of vigorous semiotic analysis among all who knew him, it could be read as an indicator of neither sexual orientation nor class affiliation. With four fingers languid and the fifth—the pinkie: the least practical—stiffly turned out, what it said was: I take frivolity seriously. This is a position he held on to tenaciously throughout his career as an educator, an author, and, above all, an artist. To Jeremy, frivolity was a tonic to all that was pious in art, a falsely serious and mind-numbing regime that he took to be the status quo. As he would narrate it, art became “boring” with the rediscovery of the readymade in the early ’70s. A baton was passed from Duchamp to Warhol, and thereafter to “appropriation and institutional critique and so on,” at which point “we became subject to a wholly anti-aesthetic discourse.” [2] Without exaggeration, one could say that Jeremy’s principal aim in life was to reverse the diktat of those who, as he so eloquently put it, sought to “get rid of aesthesis altogether and cut straight to the sermon.” [3] Aesthesis was his thing.
Jeremy often said he was lured to America by an exhibition entitled “Art: USA: Now” (1963) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which he visited around the age of seventeen. Then studying at the London University Institute of Education, he had come for the Pop art but stayed for Barnett Newman, entranced by the vastness of space in his paintings. In these widescreen works, he observed the realization of an ambition floated by the Impressionists—as he writes in his book Beyond Piety (1995), “to paint the world without drawing it first. To structure it through formlessness, an oxymoron…” [4] Such contradictions would come to dominate his own work as well, and the key to resolving them—though, it must be stressed, only provisionally—was color. Arguably, color became his chief subject, both for what it did on its own—as that which formlessly overflows every bounding line—and for what he could make it do, by structuring this event. But this is not to say that Jeremy was an old-school push-and-pull formalist, for equally consequential were the social and political contradictions he would encounter on American shores, teeming with outlaw puritans. These, too, found their colors upon his canvases: earthbound and cosmetic, refined and lurid, agreeable and intransigent—sometimes in equal measure.
Hence his staunch support for so much work that transgressed, or simply ignored, the modernist mandate of Abstract Expressionism and/or Color Field painting. The champion postmodernist Peter Halley received Jeremy’s undivided attention, and so did the lesser-known Shirley Kaneda, and no less so his former students Diana Thater and Liz Larner, to cite just two, who had only the most tangential relation to painting. A motley crew, they exemplified the notion that “the recognizable aesthetic is probably over”—and, in a perhaps more targeted manner, could be seen as mounting an opposition to a recognizably anti-aesthetic art. To Jeremy, the anti-aesthetic amounted to “an anti-intellectualism of intellectuals,” ideological posturing. [5] Any reader of the commentary he posted on Facebook in the latter years of his life would agree that he was politically committed to the point of obsession. Nothing was more alarming to Jeremy than those cultural operators who got Marx wrong.
I think that Jeremy’s initial suspicion of me had to do with my CalArts affiliation, an institution he saw as doctrinaire through and through. He was afraid that I would simply toe a vulgar party line. Jeremy had some hands-on experience with the school, having moved to California to teach there in 1980, at the height of its prestige. He stayed on for six years, during which time its originally freewheeling, experimental orientation congealed into a style, and one increasingly in thrall to ideals of representational responsibility. Then he left, just as he had left (for much the same reason) October, the journal he helped found—although this fact is sometimes omitted from the record. He left ArtCenter too; some would say he was pushed out. Jeremy moved around a lot and not always by choice. He believed in something and stood by his beliefs, which could bring him into hot waters. Jeremy ultimately affirmed that the seriousness of art has nothing to do with high-minded pronouncements but rather with what you make happen in the studio. His intellectual courage will be sorely missed.
NOTES
1. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, in Jan Tumlir, “A Conversation with Jeremy-Gilbert-Rolfe,” Artweek, May 6, 1993; 18.
2. Gilbert-Rolfe, in Joan Waltemath, “Jeremy Gilbert Rolfe in Conversation with Joan Waltemath, Brooklyn Rail, May 2005. See: brooklynrail.org/2005/05/art/jeremy-gilbert-rolfe.
3. Ibid.
4. Gilbert-Rolfe, “Irreconcilable Similarities,” Beyond Piety: Critical Essays on the Visual Arts, 1986–93 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); 51.
5. Gilbert-Rolfe, in David Shapiro, “Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe by David Shapiro,” Bomb, Fall 1978. See: bombmagazine.org/articles/1987/10/01/jeremy-gilbert-rolfe.
