Richard Milazzo

Richard Milazzo is a critic, curator, publisher, independent scholar and poet. In the 1970s, he was the editor and co-publisher of Out of London Press. Among the books he edited were The Syntactic Revolution: Collected Writings of Abraham Lincoln Gillespie (New York, 1980) and the first English facsimile edition of Pontormo’s Diary (New York, 1982). Other titles included the first monograph on Vito Acconci by Mario Diacono, Discussion by Annina Nosei-Weber and Robert Pincus-Witten’s Postminimalism. In 1981, he co-edited La rosa disabitata 1960-1980 for Feltrinelli, one of the first anthologies to document the post-Gertrude Stein ‘Language’ writing movement in America, which included the writings of Vito Acconci, Charles Bernstein, John Cage, Clark Coolidge, Lyn Hejinian, Dick Higgins, Frank Kuenstler, Jackson Mac Low, Bob Perelman, Bern Porter and Jerome Rothenberg, among others.

Since 1982, he has worked internationally as a critic and curator in the art world. His exhibitions and critical writings with Collins & Milazzo brought to prominence a whole new generation of artists in the 1980s. It was their exhibitions and writings that originally fashioned the theoretical context for a new kind of Conceptual Art – one that argued simultaneously against Neo-Expressionism and the Pictures generation –, and it was through this context that the work of many of the artists associated with Neo-Conceptualism (or what the critics reductively called “Simulationism” and “Neo Geo”) was first brought together – artists such as Ross Bleckner, James Welling, Peter Nadin, Kevin Larmon, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Gretchen Bender, Peter Nagy, Sarah Charlesworth, Mark Innerst, Allan McCollum, Peter Halley, Jonathan Lasker, Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Philip Taaffe, Robert Gober, Not Vital, Saint Clair Cemin, and Annette Lemieux. He would later, in the late 1980s and 1990s, go on to support such artists as Sal Scarpitta, Meg Webster, Lawrence Carroll, Vik Muniz, Fabian Marcaccio, Alessandro Twombly, Elliot Schwartz, Bill Rice and Michel Frère, among others. In the early 1980s, he co-published and co-edited Effects: Magazine for New Art Theory in the East Village, and from 1986 to 1988 he was the American co-editor of Kunstforum (Cologne). Among the many publications of those years were Radical Consumption and the New Poverty (New York: New Observations, 1987); Art at the End of the Social (Malmö, Sweden: The Rooseum, 1988); and Hyperframes: A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art, the lectures they delivered as Senior Critics at Yale University in 1988 and 1989. The lectures were originally published in 1989 and 1990 in two volumes in a bilingual English and French edition in Paris, with Editions Antoine Candau, and became known as the “Green Books.” They were recently reissued in an Italian edition by Campanotto Editore in Udine, in 2005. In 1991, he co-edited An Anthology of Statements Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of White Columns (New York: White Columns, 1991).

He co-curated and curated exhibitions in such galleries and museums as Nature Morte (NY), International with Monument (NY), White Columns (NY), C.A.S.H./Newhouse (NY), Postmasters (NY), Tibor De Nagy (NY), Diane Brown (NY), CEPA (Buffalo, NY), Margo Leavin (Los Angeles, CA), S.L. Simpson (Toronto, Canada), American Fine Arts Co. (NY), Massimo Audiello (NY), Lia Rumma (Naples, Italy), Galerie Albrecht (Munich, Germany), John Gibson (NY), 303 Gallery (NY), the Rooseum (Malmö, Sweden) Meyers/Bloom (Santa Monica, CA), Greenberg/Wilson (NY), Tony Shafrazi (NY), Sidney Janis (NY), Fay Gold (Atlanta, GA), The Hopper House (Nyack, NY), Annina Nosei (NY), Emilio Mazzoli (Modena, Italy), James Danziger (NY), and Alain Noirhomme (Brussels, Belgium), among others. Interviews with and writings on Collins & Milazzo’s critical and curatorial work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Artscribe International, Village Voice, Art & Auction, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Criterion, II Giornale dell’Arte, The New York Times Magazine, HG, New Art Examiner, Galeries Magazine, Flash Art, among others.

He has taught, read, or participated in symposia and lectured at the University of Chicago (“‘Donna me prega’: Modern Poetry and Its Context”), Yale University (on Lacan), The Maryland Institute and College of Arts, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Tisch School of the Arts (New York University), The Museum of Modern Art (“Contemporary Art in Context”) in New York, The Glassell School of Art (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas), National Museum of American Art (Smithsonian Institute), Columbia University (New York), Jan van Eyck Akademie (Maastricht, Belgium), The Ghent Academy (Belgium), the High Museum (Atlanta, Georgia), among many others. He delivered the lecture “Rhetorical Answers: Curating and the Practice of Criticism” at The Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, in conjunction with the Lecture Series “Between Art and Life,” in celebration of Robert Rauschenberg’s receiving The Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has also lectured to Sotheby’s “Connoisseurship in Contemporary Art” seminar, and delivered a paper to the symposium, “The Convergence of Art and Philosophy,” with Jean Baudrillard, Joseph Kosuth and Peter Halley, at ICASA, New York University. He has also delivered a lecture on the work of Jeff Koons, “Against Interpretation; or, the Decline of Abstraction in Contemporary Sculpture,” at the New York Studio School, and a series of six lectures on Philip Taaffe at the Instituto Universitario di Architectura di Venezia; and a paper on poetics at Stony Brook University. He has given poetry readings at Beyond Baroque Foundation, Venice, CA.; and at Cornelia Street Café, Bowery Poetry Club, and the Russian Tea Room, in New York.

In the 1990s, he curated an exhibition space he founded, 11, rue Larrey at Sidney Janis Gallery, and co-founded and edits the publishing house, Edgewise Press. In 1996, he curated Realism After Seven A.M.: Realist Painting After Edward Hopper – An Exhibition of 25 Artists in Honor of the 25th Anniversary of the Hopper House; and, in 1998, he organized an art auction and benefit exhibition to relaunch Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review on line. He has curated, both in the United States and Europe, one-person exhibitions of the works of Malcolm Morley, Ross Bleckner, Sandro Chia, Abraham David Christian, Robert Longo, Saint Clair Cemin, Alessandro Twombly, Bill Rice, David Salle, Alex Katz, Mark Innerst, William Anastasi and Peter Nagy. He has written the major monographs, Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptor from Cruz Alta (New York: Brent Sikkema Editions, 2005) and The Paintings of Ross Bleckner (Brussels: Editions Alain Noirhomme, 2007).

Other art books are Malcolm Morley (a monograph); Caravaggio on the Beach: Essays on Art in the 1990s; Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things (a study of the sketches); and, most recently, the study The Flower Paintings of Ross Bleckner (Modena: Galleria Mazzoli Editions, 2011), which functions as the companion volume to The Paintings of Ross Bleckner, and a catalogue on the recent work of Mimmo Paladino (2012). A book of his early poetry, Alogon (1969-1981), was published by Tokyo Publishing House in Tokyo in May 2007. Several of these poems appeared in such magazines as Il Verri, Tam Tam, and others, before he stopped writing poetry in 1982 and later resumed writing it in 1993. Others books of poetry include Le Violon d’Ingres; Hotel of the Heart; Il facchino di Venezia (The Porter of Venice); Green Nights / Golgotha / Love’s Quarrel; Stone Dragon Bridge; An Earring Depending from the Moon; and Circus in the Fog. Most recent are Eastern Shadows (Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2010); Keats Dying in Your Arms (Brussels: Editions Passage St.-Hubert, 2010); With Grass Ropes We Dragged the World to Her in Wooden Boats: Poems of Jordan, Syria and Egypt 2008 (with accompanying works on paper by Alessandro Twombly) (Turin: Paolo Torti degli Alberti, 2011); Small China Moon (Udine: Campanotto Editore, in 2010); and Where Angels Arch Their Backs and Dogs Pass Through (Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2012).

Forthcoming are two volumes of poetry, In the Dark and Frost Heaves; two books of art criticism, According to What and Theory Sauvage; the study, Sandro Chia: Paintings, Sculptures, Drawings, Mosaics; and the monograph, Peter Nagy: Entertainment Erases History — Works 1982 to 2004 to the Present. He is also preparing monographs on Peter Halley, Donald Baechler, Robert Longo and Philip Taaffe. He lives and works in New York City.