(An Appropriate Distance)


FROM THE MAYOR'S DOORSTEP

A native of Manhattan with a progressive background, Piri Halasz earned her Phi Beta Kappa key while majoring in English literature at Barnard. She then worked at Time magazine for six years as a researcher, primarily in business news, and for another six years as a writer. As a writer, she dealt with many subjects, including obituaries, celebrity gossip, books, life styles and world affairs, though almost no women were allowed to write for Time during that period. In 1966, she became the first woman in living memory to write a cover story for the magazine, and not just any cover: it was the famous (or notorious) one on “Swinging London.” As a byproduct, she was invited by Coward McCann to write A Swinger’s Guide to London (originally published in 1967, used copies still on sale through Amazon, reprinted in paperback in 2010 under the aegis of the Authors Guild “Back in Print” program).

Following the London cover, Halasz was assigned to the Art page for Time. After two-and-a-half years of covering that subject, she decided she loved it more than she loved Time, quit, and went back to graduate school. She took her PhD in art history from Columbia University, and has taught at Columbia, Hunter College, C. W. Post Center/​Long Island University, Molloy College, and Bethany College in West Virginia. She has also published more than two hundred hard-copy articles, primarily on art, in The New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, ARTnews, NYArts, and elsewhere. Her online column/​newsletter of art criticism and comment, From the Mayor’s Doorstep, commenced publication in 1996, and became a blog in 2010. She has contributed to artcritical.com and a gathering of the tribes.

In 2009, Halasz published A Memoir of Creativity: abstract painting, politics & the media, 1958-2008, a book which utilizes this rich biographical background to introduce a radical theory regarding abstract painting. The book argues that abstract painting is not non-representational, as most people think, but instead a new form of representation. The abstract image in a painting is ambiguous or “multi-referential,” but not haphazardly so. Instead, it represents a combination of forms that the artist has seen in the external world, stored in the unconscious regions of his or her mind, and synthesized onto the picture plane (without realizing that s/​he was doing so). Each viewer will be reminded of different objects by this ambiguous image, depending on how her or his viewing experience corresponds to that of the artist. Obviously, this correspondence will be greatest among viewers who are alive when the artist is, and whose surroundings correspond most nearly to those of the artist, but no one perception is the ONLY right one, and all have some validity (if only to the second degree, meaning when the viewer is reminded of something that can at best be similar to what the artist would have seen).

Since Halasz discovered this principle, in 1983, she has met with incomprehension and/​or resentment from many quarters. The biggest problem appears to be the idea that the image on the picture plane represents something that the artist has seen, so that the image is in fact conveying a picture of something to the viewer (or rather, conveying different pictures to different viewers). Somehow the idea that communication actually takes place between the abstract artist and the viewer is one that many observers can't face.

Eventually, Halasz decided that her best chance of enabling readers to grasp her concept was to tell how she developed it from many personal and professional experiences. Along the way, she found herself re-creating a political and social context not only for the theory but all the art that she has encountered. Thus the book incorporates a wealth of historical detail from over the past half-century, much of it seen through the mass-media environment that chronicled so much of this history initially. That book closes with a startling insight into the American electorate of the 21st century, an insight originally developed in the wake of 9/​11. In brief, Halasz argues that the rightward drift in U.S. politics since 1950 can be explained by the occupational shift in the work force, with the proportional rise of the white-collar population, which is constitutionally more likely to identify and sympathize with the wealthier classes, even if it isn't wealthy itself, and the proportional decline of the blue-collar population, which is more likely to recognize its true relationship to the upper classes. In 1950, 40 percent of the U.S. work force was white-collar (managerial, professional, sales, technical and clerical) and 60 percent was blue-collar or blue-collar type jobs and farmers. In 2000, this proportion was exactly reversed, and the ratio has undoubtedly become far more lopsided in the decade since.

A Memoir of Creativity has met with some sympathetic reviews, posted elsewhere at this websiste.

Dr. Halasz lives and works in Manhattan, where she enjoys theater, movies, charades, and bridge. She has several unfulfilled ambitions. One is to write (and publish) a scholarly (non-autobiographical) book justifying her theory of multireferential imagery in terms of neurology(as oppposed to Freudian psychology), and applying it not only to Analytic Cubism and Jackson Pollock (as she has, in the past), but also to Mondrian (whom she has done preliminary work upon, but never published about). A second ambition is to update (and publish) her work on "the disenfranchised Left," a theory that is even more applicable today than it was when she originally developed it in 2001. Her third ambition is to publish a digital collection of the first 15 years of "From the Mayor's Doorstep."