Who – and What – Gets Remembered? Associate Professor of Art History Unearths a Hidden History of Art Criticism

By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences 

In a small room in an apartment in Venice, Jennifer Sichel discovered the original cassette tape recording – and context – of one of Andy Warhol’s most famous quotes: “I think everybody should like everybody.” 

Pulled from a redacted - and once lost - recorded interview with art critic Gene Swenson, Sichel’s research uncovers and brings to light this queer critic’s contributions to art, with his papers and cassettes once stored under a bed in Italy which have now found a permanent home in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art thanks to her research. 

"The interview is actually redacted, line by line. Swenson and Warhol are talking about queerness and homosexuality the whole time, so when Warhol says, ‘I think everybody should like everybody,’ they are talking about liking men and women sexually in every other way,” Sichel said of the quote’s initial meaning and now updated historical context. 

Associate Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art History and Director of Graduate Studies of the MA Program in Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Hite Institute of Art + Design, Sichel is the author of Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices, a book that explores the work of two critics who challenged traditional ideas about who gets to define and interpret art.  

“You have all of this intensely creative material that circulated widely on the ground in New York in underground newspapers, via exhibitions, via other texts, via less recognized media like cassette tape recordings. So, all of this important, intensely creative material circulated on the ground in New York, but kind of fell through the cracks of art history. A goal of the book is to tell that story. But another goal of the book is methodological - to ask what we value as art and why we value it,” she said. 

Through engaged archival work, Sichel excavated from the archives certain objects that art historians haven't been in the habit of valuing as art.  

"What happens if we pay attention to these drafts, pay attention to these recordings, give them this sort of sustained critical analysis that we give to art. What kind of stories and what kind of art history can we then write?” Sichel asks. 

The book examines a white male dominated hegemony that set the agenda for art criticism and looks at alternative practices and modes of writing, including embodied subjective modes of writing. 

"Even before she moves into writing explicitly political accounts of her life as a lesbian in the late 60s and early 70s, Jill Johnston is invested in describing not just what she's watching, but rather the whole embodied experience of watching experimental avant-garde dance—how dance puts pressure on the relationship between the audience and the dancer. She focuses her criticism not just on the dance, but really on the awkwardness or the loveliness or the intimacy of that relationship.” 

Sichel’s journey to discovering Swenson’s papers and thus protecting his archive for generations to come all began when she was working on her dissertation a decade ago when his archive was still vastly unknown. Swenson died tragically in 1969. Much of his art collection went to the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas, but no one really knew where Swenson’s papers were located.  

“They had certain papers related to the acquisition of the collection, but not the archive,” Sichel said. “And I'd heard rumors. There were elderly artists who were kind of, you know, on the ground in the 60s saying, ‘oh yeah, the papers are still around.’ And so, I thought, the papers have to still be around.” 

Kate Meyer, curator at the Spencer Museum, recommended that Sichel reach out to a critic named Henry Martin, who has since passed away. Martin had wanted to publish a posthumous anthology of Swenson's writings. Sichel got a hold of his e-mail address.  

"I spent time in this little apartment in Venice in a room by myself, and got to spend 3 weeks just poring over these papers. And then I photographed everything because I didn't know what was going to happen to them,” she said. 

At the time, Sichel was a pre-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and ultimately worked with a colleague there, Josh T. Franco, to acquire Swenson’s papers for the Smithsonian.  

"The papers made their way to the Archives of American Art a few years ago, but they had basically been stored under a bed in Venice for 50 years. You can imagine how moldy they were.” 

Sichel wants students today to know that they don't have to inhabit a certain preconceived notion of what it means to have the authority to give a critical evaluation or to judge a certain thing or to write in a certain way. 

“Instead, they can mine different spaces, including their own experience, to aggrandize a different kind of authority to approach art with,” Sichel said. “You don't have to fit your ideas in a box in order to be a critic, and you don't have to then also fit your criticism into the standard boxes where criticism goes.” 

“At the same time, there’s an efflorescence of alternative spaces,” she said. “The barrier to entry is much more open. Students can build their own websites and platforms, create their own alternative venues, and print their own zines. That’s something I encourage my students to really think about.” 

For her, that kind of creative independence is an extension of the writing itself. 

“It’s about not just doing the writing but also building the infrastructures you want to see — where your writing can not only find a home, but where you can build that home alongside the writing.”