Contemporary Authors

• AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987
• AIDS Demo Graphics Bay Press (Seattle, WA), 1990
• On the Museum's Ruins MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1993
• Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002
• Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970s to the Present MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2010
• "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2012
• Before Pictures Dancing Foxes Press/University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2016

1. Before pictures https://lccn.loc.gov/2016014270 Crimp, Douglas, author. Before pictures / Douglas Crimp. Brooklyn, New York : Dancing Foxes Press ; Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. 307 pages ; 24 cm N7483.C75 A3 2016 ISBN: 9780226423456 (cloth : alk. paper) 2. "Our kind of movie" : the films of Andy Warhol https://lccn.loc.gov/2011034255 Crimp, Douglas. "Our kind of movie" : the films of Andy Warhol / Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2012. xv, 171 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm. PN1998.3.W366 C75 2012 ISBN: 9780262017299 (hardcover : alk. paper)0262017296 (hardcover : alk. paper) 3. Mixed use, Manhattan : photography and related practices, 1970s to the present https://lccn.loc.gov/2010016514 Mixed use, Manhattan : photography and related practices, 1970s to the present / edited by Lynne Cooke and Douglas Crimp ; with Kristin Poor. Madrid : Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía ; Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2010. 303 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 28 cm. NX511.N4 M59 2010 ISBN: 9780262014823 (hardcover : alk. paper)0262014823 (hardcover : alk. paper) 4. Melancholia and moralism : essays on AIDS and queer politics https://lccn.loc.gov/2001044076 Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and moralism : essays on AIDS and queer politics / Douglas Crimp. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2002. 319 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. RA643.8 .C754 2002 ISBN: 0262032953 (hc. : alk. paper) 5. On the museum's ruins https://lccn.loc.gov/93022531 Crimp, Douglas. On the museum's ruins / Douglas Crimp ; with photographs by Louise Lawler. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c1993. xix, 348 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. N420 .C75 1993 ISBN: 0262032090 6. AIDS demo graphics https://lccn.loc.gov/89081756 Crimp, Douglas. AIDS demo graphics / Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston. Seattle : Bay Press, 1990. 141 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 21 cm. RA644.A25 C75 1990 ISBN: 094192016X (pbk.) : 7. AIDS : cultural analysis, cultural activism https://lccn.loc.gov/88011148 AIDS : cultural analysis, cultural activism / edited by Douglas Crimp ; contributions by Leo Bersani ... [et al.]. 1st MIT Press ed. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1988, c1987. 270 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. RA644.A25 A357 1988 ISBN: 0262530791 (pbk.)026203140X (hard)

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crimp

  Douglas Crimp
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Douglas Crimp (born 1944) is an American professor in art history based at the University of Rochester.

  Contents [hide]
  1 Biography
  2 Overview
  3 Bibliography
  3.1 Books
  3.2 Interviews
  3.3 Critical studies and reviews
  4 References
  5 External links
  Biography[edit]
  Born in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, Crimp went to Tulane University in New Orleans on a scholarship to study art history.[1] His career started after moving to New York in 1967, where he worked as a curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim Museum and as an art critic, writing for Art News and Art International. In 1967 Crimp worked briefly for the couturier Charles James, helping him organize his papers to write his memoir.[2]

  Between 1971 and 1976 Crimp taught at The School of Visual Arts before enrolling graduate school at the Graduate Center at CUNY where he studied contemporary art and theory with Rosalind Krauss. In 1977 he became the managing editor of the journal October, which had been founded by Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in 1976. He was quickly appointed to be a co-editor, and he was a central figure in the journal until he left in 1990.[3]

  Shortly after he left October, Crimp taught gay studies at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1992 he began teaching in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester, where he is now the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History.

  Overview[edit]
  Crimp has been an important critic in the development of postmodern art theory. In 1977 he curated the influential exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, presenting the early work of Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, Philip Smith, Troy Brauntuch, and Robert Longo. Two years later he elaborated the discussion of postmodern artistic strategies in an essay with the same title in October, including Cindy Sherman in what came to be known as the Pictures Generation. In his 1980 October essay On the Museum's Ruins he applied the ideas of Foucault to an analysis of museums, describing them as an "institution of confinement" comparable to the asylums and prisons that are the subjects of Foucault's investigations.[4] His essays on postmodernist art and institutional critique were published in the 1993 book On the Museum’s Ruins.

  In 1985, Crimp was one of numerous art critics, curators, and artists who spoke at a General Services Administration hearing in defense of Richard Serra's controversial public sculpture Tilted Arc, which had been commissioned as a site-specific piece for Federal Plaza in New York and was ultimately removed in 1989.[5]

  In 1987 Crimp edited a special AIDS-issue of October, entitled AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. In his introduction to the edition Crimp argued for "cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS and its cultural consequences."[6] During this time he was an active member of the AIDS-activist group ACT UP in New York. Mourning and Militancy (1989) discusses the connections between the artistic representations of mourning and the politic interventions of militancy. Crimp argues that these two opposing positions should be allowed to co-exist.[7] In 1990 he published a book entitled AIDS Demo Graphics on the activist esthetics of ACT UP together with Adam Rolston. Crimp’s work on AIDS has been seen as an important contribution to the development of queer theory in the US. In 2002 he published all his previous work on AIDS in the book Melancholia and Moralism – Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics.

  In 2016, Crimp published his memoir, Before Pictures, on the relationship between the art world and the gay world in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.[8]

  Bibliography[edit]
  This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
  Books[edit]
  Crimp, Douglas, ed. (1988). AIDS : cultural analysis, cultural activism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
  AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.
  On the Museum's Ruins. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993.
  Melancholia and Moralism - Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.
  "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
  Interviews[edit]
  Tina Takemoto: The Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp Art Journal, 2003.
  Mathias Danbolt: Front Room Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp in Trikster - Nordic Queer Journal #2, 2008.
  Critical studies and reviews[edit]
  Wilson, Jake (April 2013). "Elbows on his knees". Australian Book Review. 350: 44. Review of "Our kind of movie".
  References[edit]
  Jump up ^ "Sarah Schulman Interviews Douglas Crimp" (PDF). ACT UP Oral History Project. Retrieved 2008-09-27.
  Jump up ^ "Mathias Danbolt, Front Room – Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp". Trikster – Nordic Queer Journal #2, 2008. Retrieved 2008-09-26.
  Jump up ^ "ibid.".
  Jump up ^ Andrea Fraser in Ana María Guasch, Joseba Zulaika, Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim, University of Nevada Press, 2005, p39. ISBN 1-877802-50-6
  Jump up ^ "Excerpt". The Trial of Tilted Arc. SFMOMA. Retrieved October 5, 2012.
  Jump up ^ David Deitcher in Julie Ault, Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, Philip Yenawine, Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, NYU Press, 1999, p106. ISBN 0-8147-9351-7
  Jump up ^ Gabriele Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s, Manchester University press, 2001, p16. ISBN 0-7190-4711-0
  Jump up ^ Velasco, David. "David Velasco on Douglas Crimp's Before Pictures". artforum.com (in en_US). Retrieved 2017-03-30.

• Rochester - http://www.rochester.edu/news/experts/faculty-experts/douglas-crimp/

  Douglas Crimp is the author of On the Museum’s Ruins, 1993; Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 2002; and “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, 2012, all published by the MIT Press. He was the curator of the landmark Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in 1977 and, from 1977 to 1990, an editor of the quarterly journal October, for which he edited the influential special issue AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism in 1987. With Lynne Cooke, he organized the exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present for the Reina Sofía in Madrid in the summer of 2010, and he was a member of the curatorial team for the 2015 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. Before Pictures, Crimp’s memoir of New York in the 1970s, will be published in 2016.

• Monoskop - https://monoskop.org/Douglas_Crimp

  Douglas Crimp (1944) is an art critic and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. He was the curator of the landmark Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in 1977 and, from 1977-1990 an editor of the quarterly journal October. With Lynne Cooke, he organized the exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices 1970s to the Present for the Reina Sofía in Madrid in the summer of 2010, and he was a member of the curatorial team for the 2015 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1.

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Douglas-Crimp/e/B001HCXY3A

  Douglas Crimp began writing art criticism for Art News and Art International in the early 1970s and has published widely in such magazines as Artforum and Art in America as well as in scholarly journals. He has worked as a curator, co-organizing Mixed Use, Manhattan for the Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2010, and Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2015. He is well known as a theoretician of postmodernism in the visual arts owing to his 1977 Artists Space exhibition, Pictures; his editorship of the journal October from 1977 to 1990; and his writings on art practices and institutions collected in his 1993 book On the Museum’s Ruins. He edited a special issue of October on AIDS in 1987 and wrote extensively about AIDS in the ensuing years. His art criticism has been recognized with Art Critics Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction on Art Criticism from the College Art Association, and a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester; he has also taught at NYU, the University of Manchester, UCLA, Princeton, Rutgers, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and the Cooper Union.

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/08/pictures-interview-douglas-crimp/

  Quoted in Sidelights: I don’t feel it’s a book about me. It’s about New York in this period.
  It has autobiographical elements in it, but I wasn’t attempting to reconstruct a past in a memoir-like way. It is based on these things I did during the first ten years I lived in New York, like working at the Guggenheim or at ArtNews, but I always thought of it as a critical project, too.
  it’s a critical project and a research project, a scholarly project and a kind of cultural history.
  I wanted to show that this was a period that I don’t have regrets about.
  Before Pictures: An Interview with Douglas Crimp
  By Sarah Cowan November 8, 2016 AT WORK

  DOUGLAS CRIMP AT THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, C. 1970. PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.

  In September, the art historian Douglas Crimp was speaking about his new book, Before Pictures, at the Whitney Museum when the slide projection was turned off and the såcreen rose, revealing the sunlight bobbing on the Hudson River and a view of Pier 52. It was there that, forty years prior, Gordon Matta-Clark had carved his monumental and illicit work Day’s End in an abandoned warehouse and Crimp had gone cruising for sex. The piers were known to be dangerous, Crimp writes, but at the time he had no fear of them, except the anxiety that their lure was distracting him from his work. Now the seventy-two-year-old was backlit against a thoroughfare of joggers and Citi Bike riders along Eleventh Avenue. The “vast and hauntingly beautiful” structures he describes had long ago been flattened into a parking lot for the Department of Sanitation.

  Before Pictures begins in the late sixties and ends in 1977, the year Crimp curated the “Pictures” exhibition at Artists Space, the first show to organize and name a burgeoning generation of artists who appropriated recognizable cultural imagery and reframed it with a critical perspective. It recuperates a time when the show had yet to develop its mythic status—for Crimp and for art history at large—when the struggling writer was making his way as an autodidact in contemporary art and a young man with eclectic passions beyond his day job as an ArtNews writer, including cinema, disco, fashion, ballet, and men. Before Pictures is a celebration of a kind of youthful naivete. By leaving off where he does, Crimp allows gay liberation a lust and romance that would, over the course of the next decade, be moralized, rarefied, and nearly lost by AIDS.

  Crimp served an anxious role as the fulcrum between the avant-garde of both the queer and the art worlds. He would enter Max’s Kansas City and greet the arguing elite of minimalist art on his way to the back, where he could party with the drag queens of Warhol’s Factory. Before Pictures resists the linearity of memoir; lavishly printed with color images, its pages offer an accumulated visual-cultural archive of a mind antichronological and unintuitive; Crimp freely admits a hazy memory, filling in the gaps with analysis and research. He sometimes takes a line of thought with the risk and thrill of a tightrope walker headed across a canyon: connecting Daniel Buren to Charles James, Derrida to Balanchine, Richard Nixon to the Cockettes. He revises old writing and sometimes refutes it; he includes unpublished fragments, like a Tajin recipe from his Moroccan cookbook and “DISSS-CO,” an almost ethnographic account of disco clubs written as if by an embedded journalist.

  But Crimp’s main subject is Manhattan, and though he’s describing Matta-Clark’s film City Slivers when he writes, “We glimpse the city in pieces, in the background, in our peripheral vision—and in recollection,” the line could be a succinct description of the book itself. New photographs by Zoe Leonard printed on the cover and between chapters, document the buildings and neighborhoods Crimp lived in during this period. Their black-and-white neutrality suggests architecture’s endurance: these are places comfortingly ignorant of the city’s drastic changes.

  The personal photograph that concludes the book shows Crimp’s apartment in the landmark Bennett building downtown, where he moved in 1976, pretending to be an office tenant. He lives there to this day. He invited me over to talk about the book, and we sat at his windows overlooking all of lower Manhattan.

  JOAN JONAS, SONGDELAY, 1973, STILL FROM A BLACK-AND-WHITE FILM IN 16 MM, 18 MINUTES 35 SECONDS. COURTESY AND © THE ARTIST.

  INTERVIEWER

  Even though this book could be called a memoir, it comes across as an academic work that incorporates personal stories, rather than a tell-all.

  CRIMP

  Exactly. I don’t feel it’s a book about me. It’s about New York in this period. I resisted University of Chicago’s interest in putting A MEMOIR on the cover. For me, it’s a hybrid. It has autobiographical elements in it, but I wasn’t attempting to reconstruct a past in a memoir-like way. It is based on these things I did during the first ten years I lived in New York, like working at the Guggenheim or at ArtNews, but I always thought of it as a critical project, too. I would be rereading what I wrote about Ellsworth Kelly, for example, and thinking about what I’d possibly write about him now. So it’s a critical project and a research project, a scholarly project and a kind of cultural history. It was very associative. I let the flow of the writing take me to things, but I’m also doing research and making discoveries, and that’s where a lot of the chance comes in. The prime example in the book is when I pulled Derrida’s Of Grammatology off the shelf and found penciled-in seat numbers that I would buy for the ballet during my balletomania period with Craig Owens. Who would have remembered anything like that? But when I wrote the chapter on Balanchine, I tried to think through whether there was an unconscious relation between my and Craig Owens’s balletomania and our reading of poststructuralist theory. Right now in the world of dance studies in the academy there’s a very strong attempt to bring theory to bear upon dance. And in a way I’m trying to enact my version of that. But I’m doing it through the fact that there was this time in the seventies when the two things really were simultaneous but we weren’t consciously thinking about them together.

  INTERVIEWER

  You mean you weren’t chatting about Derrida when you were at the ballet?

  CRIMP

  No, not that I can remember. In the book I explain that our seats were always at a high oblique angle and that looking back I think it allowed us to read the proscenium like a Derridean frame. But we weren’t sitting there for any other reason than that’s what we could afford. If we could be sitting next to Lincoln Kirstein in the first ring straight on we would have been, of course. But I think our seats did affect my understanding of Balanchine’s choreography.

  INTERVIEWER

  Did you feel early on that you had to compartmentalize the various parts of your life—your life as a gay man, as a cinephile, as a disco lover, as a balletomane?

  CRIMP

  Certainly. The main compartmentalization was that I had my gay world and I had my art world. They had some overlap, but I remember very well that I would go out with my good friends in the art world and have dinner, and they would go home and I would go out dancing, or go out cruising. It wasn’t a completely secret life, but I wouldn’t say, I have to go now because I have to go out cruising. Now, because my subjectivity is part of how I approach writing, I don’t think that I’ve continued with that compartmentalization. Moreover, I’ve allowed myself to write about things that are not my quote, unquote field, so I write about dance now. I made a big swerve when I moved from art criticism to cultural studies and queer theory and AIDS as a subject. And then coming back to Warhol’s films for my book Our Kind of Movie, I didn’t come back as the person I was pre-AIDS at all, I came back with a queer-theory perspective. I think there’s a tendency, especially among professional academics, to carve out a field and to keep mining that field. Of course, you can’t do it all, so you’re always partial, but to limit yourself to a narrow field or canon, I just think it’s sad. It’s not really a judgment about scholarship, it’s a judgment about life.

  ALVIN BALTROP, UNTITLED (FROM THE PIER PHOTOGRAPHS SERIES), 1975–86. COURTESY AND © THE ALVIN BALTROP TRUST

  ALVIN BALTROP, UNTITLED (FROM THE PIER PHOTOGRAPHS SERIES), 1975–86. COURTESY AND © THE ALVIN BALTROP TRUST

  INTERVIEWER

  Another way those compartments come up in the book is the actual complication of the personal with the professional, as in the case of your sexual encounter with Ellsworth Kelly and the fact that you were writing about him in “Opaque Surfaces” for the Arte come arte catalogue.

  CRIMP

  Actually, it was after “Opaque Surfaces” that I met Kelly. It was at the end-of-the-season party at Betsy Baker’s house, right when my boyfriend Christian was moving to Europe, and I remember drinking at the party and flirting with him and then he asked for my phone number. It’s not to say that I didn’t know the artists that I wrote about. I knew Joan Jonas, for example, when I wrote the essay on her in 1976, and though she wasn’t someone I slept with, she was someone that I had a friendship with. I think that’s true in the art world in general, that critics and artists know each other. And I don’t feel that’s any kind of an ethical problem. I’ve never been someone particularly desiring of knowing famous artists. I never met Andy Warhol, for example. In fact I didn’t want to meet him, because Holly Woodlawn was living with me briefly while she was shooting Trash, and what I learned from her about the Factory did not make it attractive to me. They were very exploitative of her. I think she was paid fifty dollars for doing Trash, or something like that, and at a certain point she wrote a fraudulent check on the Factory and she went to jail and they did not spring her from jail.

  INTERVIEWER

  But to that same point, that personal knowledge didn’t prevent you from writing a book on Warhol’s films.

  CRIMP

  No, on the contrary, I’ve taught courses on Warhol and I’ve read all the literature and generally I was trying to interrupt all the clichés about Warhol, such as the attitude that he was exploitative and passive. And so all of this is to say that when it comes to writing about artworks, sure, if you know the artists intimately that will probably affect how you read their work, but maybe not. And in any case, once I get to the work I’m really interested in the work itself. I don’t think the artist has total control over his or her own work. The artist, too, has an unconscious. It’s something that I grapple with a lot, because it’s fairly standard practice now that Ph.D. students work on living artists and they interview them. I think it’s a wonderful experience, but I don’t think it’s a requirement. I don’t know how much the answers to questions like, Why did you do this, what were you thinking when you did that? should inform the critical work.

  INTERVIEWER

  This book exemplifies the notion that you might say or write something and not stand by it later.

  CRIMP

  True. Only in writing this memoir did I go back and read the two pieces I had written about Ellsworth Kelly, and I couldn’t have told you before I started writing this that I had reversed myself in my thinking about his work. I don’t feel that I have to make a claim that I was right. I wrote with the idea that you could include your own subjectivity, that you could combine memory with research, that you could return to things that you yourself have written and rethink them, which is something I’ve done throughout my career. It really starts with my AIDS writing in the late eighties, when I wrote “Mourning and Militancy” for October. That was a moment when my own subjectivity really came into play in my writing, and even more later, because I wrote an essay about seroconverting. It was deeply personal stuff and coincided with my own participation in the then-burgeoning field of queer theory.

  douglas-crimp-cover

  INTERVIEWER

  I found this quote in “Mourning and Militancy” that reads, “I only want to draw an analogy between pathological mourning and the sorry need of some gay men to look upon our perfectly liberated past as immature and immoral.” I see this book as an expression of that statement. It’s truly a before-AIDS book, and because we know that just after it ends there will be so much loss, it makes your memories watching the sunset over New Jersey from the piers that much more romantic.

  CRIMP

  This book is motivated by my experience with my younger friends in ACT UP, and it is precisely that narrative that I’m resisting in my AIDS work and in “Mourning and Militancy,” that moralizing notion that this period of the 1970s was a period of immaturity. I don’t introduce this book by saying that it has an agenda about recuperating the pleasures of gay life in the 1970s before AIDS. I’m perfectly happy to leave it implicit. I wanted to show that this was a period that I don’t have regrets about. What I had hoped to do from the beginning was to complicate the narratives that we have about the art that was made in New York in the 1970s and about the political developments of the gay scene and public sexual culture in that period of time. Those two aspects of New York life at that time, which were so much a part of me, are not talked about very much in the same space. So the queer world and art world complicate each other, but also the anecdotal voice complicates the critical voice.

  INTERVIEWER

  Does this book strike you as the story of an art critic that could not happen today? What does it mean for this book to be published now?

  CRIMP

  At the end of the final chapter I talk about how in the rewriting of the Pictures essay it seemed to me that I had to make a case for the historical necessity of that art and how it followed in a particular canonical lineage. And now I’ve given up the sense that the way you judge a work of art is through a particular historical narrative, the Greenbergian idea of a historical necessity. The art world was really small then, you could actually have the idea that I did, that you could figure it out and you could say, This is the right narrative, and now I don’t think you could do that because it’s so vast, there’s so much. It makes me realize that even back then it couldn’t have been as comprehensible as I believed it was. Your relation to what is offered to you in the world is precisely relational. I think there’s continuity in the unknowability and the fact that one has to understand oneself as never able to know totality.

• University of Rochester Web site - http://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/crimp-memoir-192232/

  Quoted in Sidelights: Crimp first became renowned as a critic of the “Pictures Generation”—a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, whose work reflects the media-driven, consumerist world in which they grew up.

  Douglas Crimp revisits art world, gay culture of 1970s New York
  January 6, 2017
  After art critic Douglas Crimp moved to the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in 1969, he became a regular customer at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and art bar on Park Avenue. Max’s had two rooms, one in front and one in back, and members of Andy Warhol’s Factory could reliably be found in the latter. As he passed through the front room, Crimp would greet the “artist-regulars” he had come to know during his first two years in the city, but he found himself inexorably pulled to the back, whose “charged atmosphere” he loved.

  The divisions between the rooms “mirrored divisions in the art world that were fairly pronounced in those days, divisions between tough-minded Minimal and Conceptual art and the glam performance scene, between real men and swishes, to use Warhol’s word,” writes Crimp in his new book, Before Pictures (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

  The Village Voice has called it a “profound, delectably gossipy memoir,” while the New Yorker termed it an “exhibition-as-memoir,” with its story significantly relayed through the 150 illustrations that fill it.

  But Crimp—the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and a professor of visual and cultural studies—rejects the label of memoir, which he suggests doesn’t capture his narrative method and puts the emphasis on him rather than on the historical moment he depicts.

  VIEW FINDER: Crimp depicts an era through text and art, such as this image, “Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor,” by John Baldessari and Shunk-Kender.
  (Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20) / Courtesy of John Baldessari.)

  The book “moves from anecdote to criticism to research, back to anecdote, and so forth, and also from my gay life to my art world life,” he says.

  Before Pictures was inspired years before it was written, by Crimp’s realization that many of his fellow activists in ACT UP, an advocacy group formed in response to the AIDS crisis, were decades younger than he and so hadn’t experienced gay life in 1970s New York. Writing about his life in that era would be a means of resisting a “revisionist narrative that was being promulgated: that the 1970s represented gay men’s immaturity and led inevitably to AIDS, which in turn made us grow up and become responsible citizens,” Crimp told Out Magazine in September.

  After spending his childhood in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, he went to college “as far away as possible in every respect,” he writes, moving to New Orleans and enrolling at Tulane’s School of Architecture. He explored local gay culture and also pivoted from architecture to art history. In 1967 he moved to New York, taking up residence first in Spanish Harlem.

  “I moved at a time when New York was virtually bankrupt and rents were cheap and I could imagine myself becoming an art critic by simply joining the art world and participating—and I was able to do that,” he says.

  The book, structured around Crimp’s changing addresses, tells the story of his life in the city from the late 1960s through much of the ’70s, concluding with his curation of the 1977 exhibition “Pictures” at the gallery Artists Space. Crimp first became renowned as a critic of the “Pictures Generation”—a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, whose work reflects the media-driven, consumerist world in which they grew up.

  “My own life and aesthetic attitudes reflected the ambivalence and fears that were still operative about homosexuality,” he writes, “about whether art could be a manly enough profession and about what kinds of art qualified as most manly. . . .” He calls the division “between the art world and the queer world” something that he “would negotiate throughout my first decade living in New York City.”

  Crimp is the author of five other books, including “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (MIT Press, 2012) and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, (MIT Press, 2002). He also edited AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (MIT Press, 1988), a special issue of the art journal October, later republished as a book. It was the first book-length publication on the cultural meaning of AIDS and propelled Crimp into the AIDS activist movement.

  “I first met Douglas through his writing when I was in graduate school,” says Joan Saab, chair of the Department of Art and Art History. When she came to Rochester 15 years ago, she was intimidated to become his colleague—an apprehension that she says was soon dispelled by his generosity to fellow faculty and his engagement of students.

  Crimp’s book “brings all the warmth and intellectual rigor of his classroom to the printed page,” she says. “He seamlessly balances his art criticism with his emerging activism, without ever losing his warm and compelling voice. It’s a tour de force.”

  Tags: Arts and Sciences, book authors, Douglas Crimp, Program in Visual and Cultural Studies
  Category: The Arts

  Contact Author(s)
  Kathleen McGarvey
  kathleen.mcgarvey@rochester.edu
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• University of Rochester School of Arts and Sciences Web site - http://www.sas.rochester.edu/aah/people/faculty/crimp_douglas/

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  Douglas Crimp
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  PhD, Art History, City University of New York, 1994

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  Photo credit: Dorothea Tuch
  Photo credit: Dorothea Tuch

  In residence fall semesters only.

  Graduate Courses Taught
  AH 513 Architecture, Photography, Modern/Postmodern
  AH 550 Topics in Contemporary Art & Criticism: Warhol
  AH 511 Art, Dance, and Film
  AH 481 Art and the City
  AH 484 Modern Architecture and Urbanism: L.A. Modern
  Undergraduate Courses Taught
  AH 281 Art and the City
  AH 284 Modern Architecture and Urbanism: L.A. Modern
  AH 311 Art, Dance, and Film
  AH 313 Architecture, Photography, Modern/Postmodern
  AH 350 Topics in Contemporary Art & Criticism: Warhol
  Selected Publications
  Books
  “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2012.
  Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002.
  On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993 (Getty Publication Grant).
  AIDS Demo Graphics (with Adam Rolston), Seattle, Bay Press, 1990 (nominated for Lambda Book Award).
  AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (editor), Cambridge, MIT Press, 1988 (Excellence in publishing Honorable Mention, Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division; Special Recognition, Words Project for AIDS).
  Exhibition Catalogues
  Mixed Use, Manhattan: Photography and Related Practices, 1970 to the Present (with Lynne Cook), Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and Cambridge, MIT Press, 2010; see interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyzmng2Mh44
  Pictures, New York, Artists Space, 1977.
  Articles in Journals and Anthologies
  “You Can Still See Her: The Art of Trisha Brown,” Artforum, January 2011.
  “Dancers, Artworks, and People in the Galleries,” Artforum, October 2008.
  “Yvonne Rainer, Muciz Lover,” Grey Room 22, Winter 2006.
  “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” Social Text 59, Summer 1999.
  “Mourning and Militancy,” October, Winter 1989.
  “Pictures,” October, Spring 1979.
  Interviews
  Mathias Danbolt, “Front Room—Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp,” Trikster, http://www.trikster.net/2/crimp/1.html
  Tina Takemoto, “The Melancholy of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp,” Art Journal 62, no. 4, Winter 2003; Japanese translation in InterCommunication (Tokyo) 51, Winter 2005.
  Selected Awards/Grants
  Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, 2011
  Sixteenth Annual David R. Kessler honoree, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2007
  Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, Program for the Study of Sexuality, Gender, Health, and Human Rights, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 2000
  Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, College Art Association, 1988
  Art Critics Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1984
  Art Critics Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1973
  Affiliations
  Editor, October, 1986-90; Executive Editor, 1983‑86; Managing Editor, 1977-1983
  Guest Curator, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2009-2010
  Guest Curator, Artists Space, New York, 1977
  Advisory Board, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York
  Advisory Board, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts
  Advisory Board, InVisible Culture, University of Rochester
  Current Projects
  Dance/Film, in progress.
  Before Pictures, in progress.
  Department of Art and Art History
  University of Rochester
  506 Morey Hall
  P.O. Box 270456
  Rochester, NY 14627

  (585) 275-9249
  aah_vcs@mail.rochester.edu

  Copyright © 2013–2017. All rights reserved.
  University of Rochester | AS&E | AAH
  Accessibility | Text | Web Communications

Quoted in Sidelights: present a counterhistory of the AIDS
epidemic. Throughout, Crimp demonstrates an unflinchingly critical gaze in the face of crisis and a determination to articulate a genuinely
humane political vision.
Melancholia and Moralism makes two offerings: First, a history
lesson, not a cautionary tale or an elegy but a record of activism and engagement; and second, a provocation--for those of us who know and paid
the price, or for those of us, like myself, who benefit in so many innumerable ways from those who did, "How do we make what we know
knowable to legions?"

Beyond the AIDS quilt
Richard Kim
The Nation.
275.23 (Dec. 30, 2002): p28.
COPYRIGHT 2002 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
MELANCHOLIA AND MORALISM: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. By Douglas Crimp. MIT. 319 pp. Paper $29.95.
Last year marked the "twentieth anniversary" of AIDS, a grim occasion, to say the least, that put major US newspapers in an unenviable
predicament. Any assessment of the epidemic was bound to be an indictment, and not the sort we generally like to read about, in which the guilty
are few and absolutely so, and the innocent many and untainted. Any writer willing to connect the dots would conclude that the systemic political
response to AIDS has been a signal failure. While the advent of antiretroviral therapy has dramatically lowered the number of AIDS-related
deaths in Western nations (in the United States from over 51,000 in 1995 to just over 15,000 in 2001), the vast majority of HIV-positive people
now live in the developing world and have little or no access to treatment. In the United States, AIDS is the leading cause of death among young
black men, and racial minorities account for more than 70 percent of new infections. The current demographics of AIDS, marked as they are by
severe economic and racial inequality, were not preordained. AIDS is a preventable and treatable disease, and it exists as it does because it was
allowed to unfold this way, through the same kind of gross political negligence that permitted the disease to become an epidemic in the first place.
Into this damning context rushed the most beguiling of narratives, one that began with "How AIDS Changed____" and, with minor variations,
depending on what filled the blank (pick one: America, New York, San Francisco, Art, Literature, Medicine, Culture, Sex), presented AIDS as
both a natural and redemptive phenomenon. We couldn't really do anything about the fact that people got AIDS and died from it (and still do), so
the story went, but it sure made us better writers, artists, doctors, scientists, philanthropists, a better and more humane people. This is hypocrisy
and denial at its most pathetic and, because it instills a sense of powerlessness and feckless optimism, at its most dangerous. It is precisely in this
moment of danger that reading one of the AIDS movement's most prolific and astute writers is vital--as diagnosis, to begin with, and, may I
suggest, as political curative too.
Trained as an art critic and historian, Douglas Crimp edited the 1988 anthology AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism and co-wrote (with
Adam Rolston) 1990's AIDS Demo Graphics, an account of ACT UP's activism through its graphic propaganda. Groundbreaking books, they
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started, along with Cindy Patton's Sex and Germs: The Politics of AIDS and Simon Watney's Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS and the Media,
the still-small field of AIDS scholarship and made key contributions to cultural studies, queer theory and science studies.
Melancholia and Moralism, however, marks the first time that Crimp's own writings on AIDS have been collected in a single volume. Crimp's
essays, composed over the past fourteen years, many during the late 1980s and early '90s, when he was a member of ACT UP and editor of the
journal October, were intended as immediate political and intellectual interventions. Individually many merit rereading today. Consider, for
example, Crimp's critique of the art world's early response to AIDS:
Within the arts, the scientific explanation and management of AIDS is
largely taken for granted, and it is therefore assumed that cultural
producers can respond to the epidemic in only two ways: by raising money
for scientific research and service organizations or by creating works that
express the human suffering and loss.
Crimp's concern then was that the very ability of representations of AIDS to raise money and generate publicity were predicated on the extent to
which the disease itself was depoliticized, sanitized, deracinated from its social and political conditions. Now consider the recent Bono-led, allstar
benefit recording of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," a glossy production so detached from the actual experiences of people with AIDS in
the Global South that half the profits were diverted without protest to United Way's September 11th Fund. When AIDS charities are big business
and global AIDS a cause celebre, Crimp's admonition against a form of "aesthetic idealism that ... blandly accepts art's inability to intervene in the
social world and simultaneously praises its commodity value" ought to be heeded and amplified.
Crimp called for a more engaged response to AIDS, one that required a "rethinking of all of culture: of language and representation, science and
medicine, health and illness, sex and death, the public and private realms." It is this expansive vision that has guided all of Crimp's work on
AIDS, and thus, read end-to-end, his essays become more than individual polemics. Collectively they present a counterhistory of the AIDS
epidemic. Throughout, Crimp demonstrates an unflinchingly critical gaze in the face of crisis and a determination to articulate a genuinely
humane political vision. This task is difficult enough when one is taking on the homophobia of people like Jesse Helms (who suggested the
quarantine of HIV-positive people), William F. Buckley (who proposed that "everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed" on the forearm
and buttocks) and Jerry Falwell (who claimed that AIDS was God's punishment of homosexuals), or even the purportedly liberal editors of the
New York Times (who didn't deign to mention AIDS for five years, and when they finally did, cheerily observed that "once all susceptible
members [of specific risk groups] are infected, the numbers of new victims will decline"). The task becomes especially treacherous when one
takes on sacred cows like Randy Shilts, Larry Kramer and the NAMES Project AIDS quilt, or the deeply ambivalent contradictions within the art
and activist worlds from which Crimp writes. There are no guarantees here, no places to rest. Crimp's essays are shot through with a profound
sense of urgency and flashes of brilliant anger, and if some of the earlier pieces now read as a bit breathless, that is understandable. Breath was
precious then.
For gay men of Crimp's generation, those who came of age during Stonewall and encountered the epidemic in their prime, AIDS was devastating,
representing not just loss of life, although death was certainly pressing, but loss of the entire sexual culture around which gay liberation was built:
the "back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes." Crimp acknowledges that to "those
who have obeyed civilization's law of compulsory genital heterosexuality ... to say that we miss uninhibited and unprotected sex as we miss our
lovers and friends will hardly solicit solidarity, even tolerance," but the absence can't be stressed enough, nor can it be readily and transparently
understood, even by those who lived through it. Thus we come to the first theme of Crimp's anthology--melancholia.
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In Freud's classic formulation, melancholia is a form of unsuccessful mourning, a "turning away from every active effort that is not connected
with thoughts of the dead," "an exclusive devotion to its mourning, which leaves nothing over for other purposes or other interests." For Freud,
melancholia is an unconscious formation, a "turning away from reality," in contrast to mourning, which is avowed, a conscious grappling with
loss and a return to reality, to "normal" life. For gay men, however, the return to "reality" or "normal" life proved impossible, nor did it hold much
promise.
Consider, for example, the obituary, a normally dignified ritual of public mourning that for gay men only presented homophobic options at every
turn. Either AIDS was erased entirely or, in vicious mimicry of pre-Stonewall-era cryptography, coded as "cancer" or "pneumonia." Not that full
disclosure offered a more sympathetic set of representations. As Crimp points out, "AIDS has often resulted in a peculiarly public and unarguable
means of outing." The cumulative effect of public AIDS deaths confirmed the Stonewall slogan "We are everywhere," but only again as perverse
fulfillment of that old homophobic joke. The only known homosexual was a dead homosexual. And that suddenly incontrovertible knowledge
itself, that homosexuals exist, that they have lives, careers, friends and especially lovers, was so abhorrent to straight America that it could only
be alluded to through euphemism (as the deceased's "longtime companion") or, in its more malevolent instances, as genocidal fantasy--a
voyeuristic desire to survey the dying-dead gay male body, to speculate about what it did, where and with whom, to express disgust at it (as many
a public health official and senator did) and then, finally, to be glad of its death. Like insecticide, as another joke goes, "AIDS Kills Fags Dead."
So when Crimp discusses these "daily assaults on our consciousness" and concludes that "seldom has a society so savaged people during their
hour of loss," he is not overstating the case. It was not just that there was a "social interdiction on our private efforts [at mourning]," but also that
the very counterculture that had sustained gay men during liberation, that had created an alternative set of ideals and values, was itself under
assault. As Crimp puts it, "much of what had been most vital in my life--most adventurous, experimental, and exhilarating; most intimate,
sustaining, and gratifying; most self-defining and self-extending--began slowly but surely to disappear. A world, a way of life, faded, then
vanished." Gay sex, not just the act itself but the social networks and knowledges it had created, was now under a shadow of revulsion, suspicion,
guilt and fear. That these sentiments emanated as much from within the gay community as from without was perhaps the central paradox of gay
male life in the late twentieth century. Under these circumstances, it would have been an exercise in self-abjection to attempt a return to
normalcy--not that some didn't try, which brings us to the second theme of Crimp's anthology: moralism.
When Crimp speaks of moralism he is not referring to the right-wing varieties but rather to "the moralism adopted by the very people initially
most devastated by AIDS in the United States: gay men." Rather than continuing to combat the homophobia that structured the dominant
response to AIDS, many gay men came to identify with the repudiation of gay male sexuality, believing, for example, that it was the pathological
promiscuity of gay male culture that caused the epidemic, rather than political mendacity and medical malfeasance. For Crimp, this selfincrimination
is not only depoliticizing but becomes moralizing when it is projected onto others while disavowed in oneself. It contravenes one of
the ethical mandates that called HIV-negative people to the AIDS movement in the first place: that if you were at all sexually active, it was only
by a stroke of luck that you were fighting for the lives of others, and not also for your own.
For Crimp, moralism represents a turn away from ethics, if by ethics one means not a set of proscriptions known in advance but rather a space of
deliberation, freedom and responsibility. Ethics, as Michel de Certeau said, "defines a distance between what is and what ought to be. This
distance designates the space where we have something to do." Many took up the ethical challenges AIDS presented, developing, for example,
the practices of safe sex not out of fear or repression but, as Crimp documents in his crucial essay "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,"
out of a genuine love for sex, its animating spirit and its psychosocial possibilities. But as the AIDS epidemic wore on, Crimp witnessed a "turn
away from AIDS and a turn towards conservative gay politics," and his argument, that this moralism stems from melancholia, explains much.
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Freud's melancholiac suffers from a "fall in self-esteem." He expresses a "dissatisfaction with the self on moral grounds" and "represents his ego
... as worthless, incapable of any effort, and morally despicable." Moreover, the melancholiac "does not realize that any change has taken place in
him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past and declares that he was never any better." As Crimp sees it, this psychic process became
inscribed in the social narrative told by and about gay men, one that goes something like this:
Prior to AIDS, gay men were frivolous pleasure-seekers who shirked the
responsibility that comes with normal adulthood.... Gay men only wanted to
fuck (and take drugs and stay out all night and dance).... Then came AIDS.
AIDS made gay men grow up. They had to find meaning in life beyond the
pleasure of the moment. They had to face the fact that fucking has
consequences. They had to deal with real life, which means growing old and
dying. So they became responsible. And then everyone else accepted gay men.
It turns out that the only reason gay men were shunned was that they were
frivolous pleasure-seekers who shirked responsibility. Thank God for AIDS.
AIDS saved gay men.
This prevailing narrative, superficially redemptive but deeply self-abasing, has found perhaps its most self-righteous outlet in Andrew Sullivan,
whose books Virtually Normal and Love Undetectable present AIDS as an opportunistic moment, not for the continued survival and extension of
gay culture but for its wholesale repudiation, its dissolution into the "silent" majority of normal America. Crimp introduces Melancholia and
Moralism with a new essay that critiques Sullivan's belief that the "powerfully universalizing experience" of death changed the "psychological
structure of homophobia," replacing the "strong fear of homosexual difference" with an "awareness of homosexual humanity." Having recounted
just how cruel straight America was to gay men with AIDS, we need not dwell on Sullivan's assertions, except to say that the AIDS deaths
Sullivan believes were such humanizing and universalizing experiences were brutally dehumanizing and marginalizing for the people to whom it
mattered most.
But as Crimp amply demonstrates, such rhetoric appears throughout the history of AIDS, and not always in such clearly neoconservative
formulations as Sullivan's. It is the organizing principle of San Francisco Chronicle journalist and liberal media darling Randy Shilts's book And
the Band Played On, which, as Crimp argues, mobilizes an already existing "phobic fantasy" of the "sexually voracious, murderously
irresponsible homosexual" in the story of "Patient Zero," Gaetan Dugas, the airline steward who allegedly single-handedly "brought AIDS to
North America." It can be found in Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen's programmatic tome After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear
and Hatred of Gays in the 90s, which presents gays as valueless, "single-minded, selfish sexual predators" and "pathological liars" who need to
"clean up [their] act" and present America with "positive images." It figures prominently in Larry Kramer's harangues against gay men for having
a "death wish," for bringing AIDS "upon ourselves by a way of living that welcomed it." And it finds its latest incarnation in the writings of
Gabriel Rotello and Michelangelo Signorile, who, as Crimp discusses in his closing essay, "Sex and Sensibility," advance the notion that gay
promiscuity is either socially or ecologically self-destructive, thus legitimizing a sex panic against public sexual culture in New York City that
was part of Rudy Giuliani's "quality of life" campaign.
To say, however, that melancholic moralism represents "internalized homophobia" is to miss the point. If only homophobia were in fact merely
internal. Individual instances of moralism may be unseemly, but when moralism becomes public policy and official script, the consequences, as
Crimp demonstrates, are "disastrous." Crimp's concern all along is that moralism transfers the political responsibility for AIDS from policymakers
to the people most affected by it. To say that gay men deserved AIDS, that by nature or culture they somehow welcomed it, is to provide
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an absolution to all those who refused to do anything about AIDS, who denied its existence, declined to fund clinical drug trials, failed to
implement needle exchange and struck any mention of homosexuality from safe-sex curriculums. Likewise, to repudiate the sexual ethos of gay
liberation is to fail to recognize that, far from "spreading AIDS," gay liberation's sexual culture created the social networks and ethical basis from
which the fight against AIDS proceeded. As Crimp argues,
Gay men's behavior throughout the AIDS epidemic has been profoundly
self-protective. In our struggle to protect our lives, many of us have also
fought to preserve the publicly accessible sexual culture that has nurtured
us, provided a sense of community, solidarity, and well being--given us, in
fact, the courage and will to save ourselves. Where did we learn about safe
sex? From the government? In school? Of course not. We learned about safe
sex in our own community, from each other, in bars, bathhouses, and sex
clubs.
And finally, to say that AIDS made gay men better, truer people is to suggest that all those AIDS deaths were somehow necessary, acceptable. It
was in adamant opposition to this sentiment that AIDS activists mobilized to form ACT UP. For those who lived through what Vito Russo called
"a war that's happening only for those people in the trenches," for those who attended "two funerals a week" and spent "their waking hours going
from one hospital to another, watching the people they love die slowly of neglect and bigotry," AIDS was absolutely unacceptable. It was an
emergency, a crisis. As Crimp points out, because ACT UP's militancy germinated from this sense of crisis, AIDS activism developed a certain
antagonism to any attempt to make the disease and its deaths palatable, bearable.
So when the art world marked December 1 as "A Day Without Art" to commemorate AIDS deaths within their community (educating, raising
money and providing space for AIDS-related art along the way), Crimp appreciates the gesture, but has to ask: What, just one day? "If art
institutions were to recognize what I called a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis, it seems obvious that they would consider 364
more days a year during which they might act as if they knew a crisis existed." In 1991, when Magic Johnson announced he had acquired HIV
(through heterosexual intercourse, he emphatically maintained), mass media, the sports world and the political establishment hastened to
accommodate him. The do-nothing-on-AIDS President George (H.W.) Bush appointed Johnson to the National Commission on AIDS, confessing
only then that he "hadn't done enough about AIDS." Crimp acknowledges the potentially progressive political consequences of Magic's
disclosure, but asks: Why him? Why now? As Crimp argues, it is another, tacit form of homophobia the gay community must endure "every time
we see Magic accomplish something we've worked for so tirelessly for years, to no avail."
The ambivalence of mourning and its relation to activism, then, might be said to constitute the final, overarching theme of Melancholia and
Moralism, one that Crimp most eloquently captures in his short essay on the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. On the one hand, the quilt provided a
"private mourning ritual" for the loved ones who stitched together each intimate panel, as well as a "collective mourning ritual" for those who
visited the quilt and shared the experience with others. On the other hand, the vast expanse of the quilt, laid out for mass consumption on the
Washington Mall and televised around the world, functioned as a "spectacle of mourning, [a] vast public-relations effort to humanize and dignify
our losses for those who have not shared them." Crimp wonders here if this second function of the quilt provides a "catharsis, an easing of
conscience, for those who have cared and done so little about this great tragedy?"
For AIDS activists, then, to mourn meant to dilute death's meaning, to share it with those who ought rather to be held responsible. To mourn
meant to capitulate, to accept death, when "in an epidemic that didn't have to happen ... every death is unacceptable." And yet, as Crimp points
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out, "death itself can never finally not be accepted. We have to accept death to continue to live." And here you get to the secret heart of
Melancholia and Moralism, the wisdom that sets Crimp apart. For all its fiercely and finely argued points, Melancholia and Moralism is a deeply
sympathetic book. Crimp's insistence that we continue to confront AIDS is tempered by an understanding of why we might want to look away,
and a keen awareness that for some the acceptance of AIDS and its losses is just business as usual, and for others it represents a relief from
despair, a rest, at whatever price, from struggle.
Throughout the heyday of ACT UP, the activist antagonism to mourning was paired all along with a more hopeful vision, that one day the AIDS
crisis would be over. And in a sense, in the West, it is. AIDS, as Crimp writes, has become "`normalized' as just one item on a long list of
supposedly intractable social problems." Like poverty, crime or homelessness, AIDS is now a permanent, managed disaster. AIDS activism itself
has become professionalized, dispersed into social service agencies, human rights groups, medical industry conferences and a long list of
charitable organizations. AIDS issues have been divided among various constituencies, split most notably between those in the Global South and
those in the Western world; and for the latter, death itself has become less palpable, more abstract, a number that happens over there. The psychic
transference of melancholia to moralism that Crimp so acutely diagnosed within gay male culture has replaced the conjunction of death and
homosexuality with an altogether different "image repertoire," that of the resolutely healthy (gay) male body, ready to get married or to join the
military, ready to die, not for sex but for his country.
Under these bewildering circumstances, Crimp's insistence that we continue to think intelligently and ethically about AIDS is well taken. But it
leaves gay men of my generation, those of us in our 20s, in something of a quandary: How? For us, who scarcely remember a time before AIDS,
the danger is that there appears to be no danger at all. Our lives, our sex lives and our lives as gay people, seem to me to be marked by either a
blithe sense of security or a distant and uncertain fear. We did not experience the culture of gay liberation, nor did we lose it. We did not invent
safe sex; we were taught it as doctrine, in high school sex-ed classes by teachers who broached the topic with clinical disinterest. We are fortunate
enough to live in a time and place in which AIDS is not immediately marked by death. But if the terms and conditions of the AIDS epidemic are
different, then the political negligence that characterized the early response to the epidemic is still very much alive; indeed, its reach is global.
And so as we think about what must be done today and how and for whom, Melancholia and Moralism makes two offerings: First, a history
lesson, not a cautionary tale or an elegy but a record of activism and engagement; and second, a provocation--for those of us who know and paid
the price, or for those of us, like myself, who benefit in so many innumerable ways from those who did, "How do we make what we know
knowable to legions?"
Richard Kim is a PhD candidate in American studies at New York University.
Kim, Richard
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kim, Richard. "Beyond the AIDS quilt." The Nation, 30 Dec. 2002, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA98858899&it=r&asid=45536cb95b840f3de685dd7c4dee9a3b. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A98858899

---
Quoted in Sidelights: intimate confessions exist comfortably beside insights about the work and lives of 20thcentury
creative luminaries.
leaves readers wanting more.
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Before Pictures
Publishers Weekly.
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p61.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Before Pictures
Douglas Crimp. Univ. of Chicago, $39 (288p) ISBN 978-0-226-42345-6
In this latest memoir from celebrated art and cultural critic Crimp (Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics), the personal
informs the critical and the critical informs the personal: intimate confessions exist comfortably beside insights about the work and lives of 20thcentury
creative luminaries. In 1977, he curated Pictures, the influential exhibit that serves as a reference point for this meditation on the art world
and queerness. Crimp moves seamlessly from America's conservative heartland in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to Tulane University and New Orleans
of the early 1960s, and finally to neighborhoods of New York City that played host to his development as a gay man and as a major figure in the
art world. Throughout his story peppered with famous people from poet John Ashbery and artist Pat Steir to intellectual Guy Hocquenghem and
even Arnold Schwarzenegger, Crimp reminds us that queerness informs how he sees, processes, and experiences the world: "I would have to
learn how and where to be queer all over again, since being queer is a matter of a world you can inhabit, not something you simply are." This
account is not a complete picture of a life in art: it is slant, oblique, and--yes--queer. Like the art Crimp investigates in portions of the book, his
work leaves readers with questions; he leaves readers wanting more. B&w photos. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Before Pictures." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444571&it=r&asid=4afb0d6594029f97f176637d8827496d. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444571

---
Quoted in Sidelights: dated
a needless insistence on the return to the "us vs. them" strategy
of confrontational politics.
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Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on
AIDS and Queer Politics
Jeff Ingram
Library Journal.
127.12 (July 2002): p105.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
MIT 2002. c.335p. photogs. index. LC 2001044076. ISBN 0-262-03295-3. $29.95. SOC SCI
The author of On the Museum's Ruins and editor of AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, Crimp (visual and cultural studies, Univ. of
Rochester) shores up the crumbling constructivist arguments in queer theory with a needless insistence on the return to the "us vs. them" strategy
of confrontational politics. He confronts the conservative gay politics that replaced the radical AIDS activism of the late 1980s and 1990s,
arguing that the AIDS epidemic is far from over and as such still plays a crucial role in queer politics. Crimp's arguments are weakened by his
reliance on essays that are mainly academic conference papers, most dating back 20 years. Critiques of Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On,
Jesse Helms's warfare against the National Endowment for the Arts, and decades-old PBS TV shows on AIDS are by now already dated. Because
most of the author's essays probably appear in conference publications, libraries need not purchase them again in this form, although academic
libraries with extensive queer studies collections may want to purchase this title out of convenience.--Jeff Ingram, Newport P.L., OR
Ingram, Jeff
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Ingram, Jeff. "Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics." Library Journal, July 2002, p. 105. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA89871345&it=r&asid=6ec9bc370a07a4e0c7f23fc428cd908e. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A89871345

---
Quoted in Sidelights: is nothing less than a history of recent activism written with critical intelligence and a guide to cultural criticism
written with the tenacity of an engaged activist.
constantly mindful of his own interested point of view as a critic and how it might guide and limit his own investigations
a contribution to scholarship and activism alike.

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Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer
Politics.
Alan W. Grose
Lambda Book Report.
11.3 (Oct. 2002): p34.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Lambda Literary Foundation
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
Full Text:
by Douglas Crimp
The MIT Press
ISBN 0-262-03295-3
HB $29.95, 324 pp.
Douglas Crimp, a noted scholar of art and culture and avigorous activist, has collected now a series of his essays spanning from the 1980s to the
recent present. Except for the introductory essay, "Melancholia and Moralism," these essays are all previously published and presented in
chronological order. The result is nothing less than a history of recent activism written with critical intelligence and a guide to cultural criticism
written with the tenacity of an engaged activist.
The theme of "moralism," though not explicitly defined by Crimp, seems to refer to the appeal, often largely rhetorical, to simplistic, vague or
nostalgic ideals that mask some less principled dismissal of one's opponent. Moralistic ideals, in turn, function to help individuals avoid harder
problems or concrete realities and the anxieties associated with them.
The chief pattern of moralism under Crimp's scrutiny is the loathing of gay sexual promiscuity that has cropped up among a strange set of
uncomfortable allies over the last two decades. Crimp shows that the hatred of gay sexual culture extends well beyond the rhetoric of gay-bashing
politicians, such as Jesse Helms, who hold that AIDS results from the sins of sodomy. In essays dating to the early days of AIDS activism, Crimp
shows that moralism turns up, among other places, in Randy Shilts' vilifying portrayal of the epidemiological fiction that was "Patient Zero," the
gay flight attendant accused of first spreading HIV/AIDS all over the continent of North America. More recently Crimp criticizes such figures as
conservative gay pundit Andrew Sullivan, who seems to hold that AIDS might be over if only gays could find the maturity to couple
monogamously, and columnist Michelangelo Signorile, who suggests that new HIV infections result from simple irresponsibility in the face of
knowledge of how HIV is transmit ted and its potential harms.
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Crimp's skill at demonstrating the fallacy of rhetorical maneuvers helps reveal the deeper problem animating these essays: What has happened,
particularly among gay activists, to account for the hold of such moralism over so many voices in our political discourses?
Crimp turns to psychological dynamics for an explanation. In "Mourning and Militancy," for example, Crimp suggests that an internal
psychological dynamic of "melancholia" might have driven the transformations of AIDS activism in the late '80s. Following Freud, he
understands melancholia as the pathological form of mourning in which one refuses to let go of a lost object, but fixes one's energies upon a
surrogate. Crimp argues that so much activism gave way to quietism in large part because activists did not possess sufficient means to mourn their
losses productively and thereby to get back to fighting the epidemic.
Crimp also takes on various struggles from projects in the arts to raise awareness of AIDS to the fight against the ban on service by out gays in
the military. He uncovers numerous instances of moralism by showing that all too often the cost of activist projects has been to disown the
concrete sexuality that so many fought so hard to be able to claim as their own. Again, subtle psychological dynamics help Crimp to explain the
willingness of latter-day moralists to abandon earlier victories of gay liberation.
I suspect that some might find in Crimp's essays a different kind of moralism from the ones he criticizes, a moralism that displaces the arguments
of Crimp's opponents with accounts of psychic processes of which they might not be immediately aware. To Crimp's credit, though, he is never
naive, but constantly mindful of his own interested point of view as a critic and how it might guide and limit his own investigations. This book
cannot help but be a contribution to scholarship and activism alike.
Grose, Alan W.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Grose, Alan W. "Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics." Lambda Book Report, Oct. 2002, p. 34. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA96376543&it=r&asid=1348cbd3be70c0fb355e0b19056d9a19. Accessed 14 May
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A96376543

---
Quoted in Sidelighta: written in the heat of political and social debates
maintain their relevance in a changed world,
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Melancholia and moralism: Essays on AIDS and queer
politics. (Nonfiction)
Publishers Weekly.
249.10 (Mar. 11, 2002): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2002 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
DOUGLAS CRIMP. MIT, $29.95 (336p) ISBN 0-262-03295-3
These 16 essays, originally published in journals or given as speeches between 1987 and 1995, cover the social and political consequences of
AIDS, topics increasingly ignored or downplayed. Crimp (On the Museum's Ruins), professor of visual and cultural studies at the University of
Rochester, casts a wide net in a variety of such interrelated fields: the politics of displaying AIDS-related art at museums, the use of the term
"politically correct" to attack politicized art about the epidemic, how the mainstream media covered Magic Johnson's announcement that he was
HIV-positive, the relationship of "outing" to AIDS activism. While writing in an academic tone, Crimp is unafraid of practical (and controversial)
topics, as in the 1987 essay "How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic" which traces how antisexual, homophobic attitudes about sex fueled
rather than halted the spread of AIDS, and will raise eyebrows even today. Crisp is also not afraid of criticizing other gay male writers, like
Randy Shilts and Andrew S ullivan, though his judicious comparison of Sullivan's AIDS status and his own recent HIV infection is both moving
and insightful. Almost all of these essays were written in the heat of political and social debates and maintain their relevance in a changed world,
though some readers will lament the lack of emphasis on AIDS in the developing world. (June)
Forecast: Crimp is associated with the October Group, scholars that include Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster; On the Museum's Ruins is an oftassigned
assessment of the institutionalization of art. This book should do very well on campus, and Crimp's name and scope will bring in a
nonacademic audience beyond lesbian and gay readers--but the crises in Africa, India and other nations have been the main focus of recent
debate.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Melancholia and moralism: Essays on AIDS and queer politics. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 11 Mar. 2002, p. 58. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA84153181&it=r&asid=97ff5fc721fa54b73c1bf442a4272a72. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A84153181

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AIDS Demo Graphics
Daniel Harris
The Nation.
251.23 (Dec. 31, 1990): p851.
COPYRIGHT 1990 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
Daniel Harris's essay on A IDS obituaries will appear in Break the Fatal Silence: The AIDS Crisis and Criticism (University of Toronto Press).
other essays by him will be published in forthcoming issues of Saimagundi, The Antioch Review and The Michigan Quarterly Review.
AIDS Demo Graphics. By Douglas Crimp, with Adam Rolston. Bay Press. 141 pp. $12.95.
When ACT upheld its first rally in 1987 against Burroughs Wellcome for gouging PWAs with its expensive prices for AZT, it seemed an
implausible, even fanciful, form of activism-at once campy, brash, shrill, hilarious and pragmatic. It appeared to herald the resurgence of a style
of militance perfectly tailored to the unsavory realities of the 1980s-the collusion of federal agencies and pharmaceutical companies, for instance,
or the unconscionable procedure of using placebo-controlled studies to test drugs on the terminally ill. As the casualties soared and the Reagan
Administration repeatedly shelved issues like education and funding, ACT UP became the ultimate grass-roots organization, a coalition of people
literally fighting for their lives to obtain experimental drugs entangled in red tape by a government whose agenda was quickly revealed by its
inertia and inefficiency. Three years after ACT UP strung up Food and Drug Administration head Frank Young in effigy, the organization has lost
its reputation for practicality and innovation and has been pilloried for its demagogy everywhere from The New York Times to The Nation. In
AIDS Demo Graphics, a self-styled "do-it-yourself manual" on how to make effective visual propaganda in the fight against AIDS, two of ACT
UP's most outspoken members, Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, squire us around on a pictorial tour of the coalition's history, revealing in the
process its strengths and weaknesses. From the book's dedication (to "the memory of the thousands who have died because of government
inaction in the AIDS crisis") the reader encounters an accusatory style symptomatic of one of ACT UP's most disturbing traits: its insistence on
deriving a moral etiology of a disease it systematically refuses to accord the status of a natural catastrophe, a viciously fortuitous event whose
virulence the government has certainly exacerbated but which it by no stretch of the imagination caused. In part, the naggingly tendentious
quality of this summary of three years of AIDS activism in New York is perfectly deliberate; the book is conceived as an antidote to conventional
media images of the epidemic, as an attempt to wrest the representation and discussion of AIDS out of the hands of corporate oligarchies and
place them into those of the people directly affected. To this end, the authors present detailed lists of the movement's specific demands along with
intelligent discussions of the origin and purpose of such signature graphics as the "Silence = Death" logo or the notorious subversion of a
Benetton ad in which there is a rivetingly erotic transposition of the models' sexes. The book also provides a number of inspiring examples of the
way the organization has attacked public figures like John Cardinal O'Connor, who led a disgraceful campaign to force the National Conference
of Catholic Bishops to rescind its decision to grant a limited exception to the church's traditional ban on contraceptives for purposes of curtailing
HIV infection. ACT UP memorialized his actions in a subway poster called "Know Your Scumbags," which portrayed the simpering O'Connor in
his liturgical headdress next to the baggy sheath of an enormous unrolled condom that echoed in latex the exact shape of the cardinal's face
hooded in its miter.
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And yet despite the strength of the dozens of powerful images presented in their illustrated history, Crimp and Rolston, like the organization
itself, allegorize and anthropomorphize the disease by depicting what is essentially a biological accident as the very incarnation of
institutionalized racism and homophobia. At times, as they make their very reasonable allegations of appalling federal indifference and
mismanagement, they talk about AIDS less as an illness than as a magnificently executed hate crime on a genocidal scale, as if government
officials and the far right were more culpable agents than HIV itself. The furious invective into which their arguments are constantly capsizinglike
the discussion of the Nazi death camps in the first chapter-should be seen not just as an example of the sort of impassioned rhetoric the
disease has inspired but as part of a continuum of reactions to AIDS by a culture all too willing to moralize disease. In this sense, the vision of
genocide presented side by side with the book's attractive reproductions of posters, crack-and-peel stickers and T-shirts is the flip side of the right
wing's vision of the epidemic as the wages of sin. There is an eerie identity of purpose between the way both the left and the right have scripted
AIDS, encouraged the American public to interpret it in moral terms and endowed it with their own damning partisan legends, whose
dissemination Crimp and Rolston, as well as the evangelical extremists with whom they share the misguided impulse to assign blame, promote
with their inflammatory sloganeering.
Graphic art plays a much more crucial role in ACT UP's tactics of informing and mobilizing the American public than it does in any other recent
social movement (to such an extent that the loose federation of so-called "affinity" groups comprises several artists' cooperatives that effectively
function as freelance ministries of propaganda). It is thus appropriate that Crimp, an art critic, and Rolston, an artist, chronicle the coalition's aims
and achievements by providing what is for all intents and purposes a catalogue raisonne of the images it has produced. Never before has a
political movement set about implementing its demands by means of such a calculated manipulation of the media, by plastering the urban
landscape with faux Madison Avenue advertisements that plagiarize existing ads or by drawing cartoon balloons containing messages about
government inaction that billow out of the mouths of models in fashion and cigarette ads at bus stops.
There are several ways of interpreting the image-centricity that Crimp and Rolston rightly identify as the hallmark of ACT UP's activism. Most
obviously, AIDS has cut a broad swath through major urban art communities, decimating the ranks of high-profile gay artists (at least one of
whom, Keith Haring, set an artistic precedent for ACT UP as an underground graffitist). But a much more important reason for the blizzard of
images with which ACT UP has covered major American cities is the intellectual foundation of the movement in recent attempts by postmodern
art and media theorists (like Crimp himself) to examine the means by which our knowledge of events is mediated by those who control the
information industry. Although academic critics have long held that their own efforts are vitally relevant to left politics, ACT UP is the first
practical application of the unwieldy apparatus of contemporary art and literary theory to grass-roots activism. As Crimp and Rolston explicitly
state, the coalition's media savvy derives from its members' convictions that they must generate their own set of countercultural images to
inoculate us against the oppressive racist, homophobic and misogynistic ideologies promoted by the church and the federal government. ACT
UP's image-centricity is thus not so much one of its major concerns as it is its very modus operandi.
The virtue of postmodernism for ACT UP is that it has encouraged the organization to insinuate itself like a computer virus into electronic
information systems hitherto available only to the power elite. But the failure of postmodernism for ACT UP in particular and grass-roots
activism in general is that it provides a pretext for naked self-promotion, the kind of photo-opportunism that allows ACT UP's media hounds to
watch their demonstrations through the eyes of the cameras they have calculatedly gathered around them. What other political movement would
inspire a book that fawns so adoringly over the cleverness of its methods, that gloats over its "brilliant use" of words and images and that
gleefully tallies the number of arrests and the amount of attention any one of their "actions" has garnered? Take, for instance, Crimp and Rolston's
description of the way the ACT UP affinity group Power Tools zapped the New York Stock Exchange by sneaking in incognito as bond traders
and then unfurling from the VIP balcony an enormous banner advising the floor to "Sell Wellcome." Several members of the group snapped
photographs of the event and then smuggled the cameras out to waiting ACT UP members, who made a beeline for the Associated Press, thus
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stage-managing their own media sensation. Some might call this an example of the coalition's ability to adapt itself to radical changes in the way
our knowledge of current events is shaped. But something less noble is surely at work here as well: a crass love of P.R., of bathing in the
limelight, of seeing one's image multiplied on TV screens across the country.
In the heart of San Francisco's Castro district, where I live, the ACT UP logo itself has so much cachet, offers such tangible proof of one's
membership in a snugly insular klatch of one's peers, that it has become the Gucci or Calvin Klein designer label of the 1990s, a clubbish insignia
that announces cliquishness rather than political conviction. There is even a San Francisco ACT UP affinity group called Boys With Arms
Akimbo whose members function almost exclusively as graphic activists, decorating boutique windows with their logo and posting impassioned
manifestoes full of lofty yet unsubstantiated claims to their cunning as postmodern propagandists.
As a gay man living at ground zero in one of the major AIDS war zones, I find myself profoundly ambivalent about ACT UP's preoccupation
with the rhetoric and visuals of activism, not because I disagree with any of the organization's views virtually every AIDS-related issue Crimp
and Rolston raise has merit) but because its histrionics interfere with something I consider the sine qua non of effective propaganda: the
communication of a movement's positions to the largest audience with the utmost clarity. ACT UP's intellectual narcissism prioritizes methods
over issues, so that the organization takes center stage, thrusting itself between its agenda and the American public. Its demonstrations, its
flamboyance, its coups de theatre reap the headlines and the soundbites-not the fight against AIDS, the ostensible object of its often ingenious
barnstorming. Despite its sensitive postmodern ecology of images and representations (reflected so accurately-at times, so immodestly-in AIDS
Demo Graphics), ACT UP is too in love with the act of demonstrating as an end in itself, with gazing fondly at its own reflection in the mirror the
media conveniently provide.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Harris, Daniel. "AIDS Demo Graphics." The Nation, 31 Dec. 1990, p. 851+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA9245150&it=r&asid=3aea429733f7cb1b3909f619a8b486e2. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A9245150

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AIDS Demo Graphics
Penny Kaganoff
Publishers Weekly.
237.27 (July 6, 1990): p63.
COPYRIGHT 1990 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Douglas Crimp with Adam Rolston. Bay Press, $12.95 ISBN 0-941920-16-X In what the authors call a "do-it-your-self manual, showing how to
make propaganda work in the fight against AIDS," they depict a history of demonstrations, sit-ins and similar steps taken by ACT UP and other
groups. The volume is illustrated with photos of the protests as well as graphics used in conjunction with them, such as a poster featuring a penis
and the words: "Sexism Rears Its Unprotected Head/Men: Use Condoms or Beat It" (according to Bay Press, Arcata Graphics, the book's original
printer, reneged on its contract with Bay, citing "sensitive" material). One typical entry, recounting ACT UP's civil disobedience at FDA
headquarters, is accompanied by a placard saying, "Time isn't the only thing the FDA is killing." Another describes the group Gran Fury's "samesex
kiss-in," publicized with two posters: one a WW II photo of kissing sailors, the other showing a lesbian couple from a 1920s stage play.
Slogans and images out-number substantiated arguments about appropriate approaches to take regarding AIDS, and this book will best suit those
already convinced of the efficacy of public and publicity-conscious protest as opposed to other forms of action. The authors are ACT UP activists;
Crimp is a freelance art critic and Rolston is an architect. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kaganoff, Penny. "AIDS Demo Graphics." Publishers Weekly, 6 July 1990, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA9197923&it=r&asid=cd96228892bfa0a0106f35466eb4d7b2. Accessed 14 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A9197923

Kim, Richard. "Beyond the AIDS quilt." The Nation, 30 Dec. 2002, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA98858899&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. "Before Pictures." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444571&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. Ingram, Jeff. "Crimp, Douglas. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics." Library Journal, July 2002, p. 105. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA89871345&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. Grose, Alan W. "Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics." Lambda Book Report, Oct. 2002, p. 34. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA96376543&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. "Melancholia and moralism: Essays on AIDS and queer politics. (Nonfiction)." Publishers Weekly, 11 Mar. 2002, p. 58. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA84153181&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. Harris, Daniel. "AIDS Demo Graphics." The Nation, 31 Dec. 1990, p. 851+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA9245150&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017. Kaganoff, Penny. "AIDS Demo Graphics." Publishers Weekly, 6 July 1990, p. 63. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA9197923&it=r. Accessed 14 May 2017.

• Walker Art Center Web log
  http://blogs.walkerart.org/performingarts/2016/12/28/douglas-crimp-before-pictures-john-killacky-memoir/
  Word count: 835

  Quoted in Sidelights:
  a prodigious New York intellect.
  he is his own archive. In reaching into his past, he fully embodies the present, and history benefits from this erudite and compelling storytelling.

  Before Pictures: John Killacky on Douglas Crimp’s New Memoir
  BY JOHN R. KILLACKY
  Douglas Crimp's 2011 Artforum feature on Trisha Brown, via academia.edu
  A spread from Douglas Crimp’s 2011 Artforum feature on Trisha Brown, via academia.edu

  Douglas Crimp is a prodigious New York intellect. In his curation and critical writing of the late 1970s, he identified a group of emerging visual artists, (i.e. Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and Sherrie Levine) appropriating popular culture images in subversive critiques. They were often referred to as the “Pictures Generation” after Crimp’s 1977 exhibition, Pictures, at the Artists Space gallery.

  In 1987, he edited a special issue of October magazine entitled “AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism.” His contribution to this groundbreaking collection illuminated the engaged art strategies of various ACT UP collectives: “Their work demands a total reevaluation of the nature and purpose of cultural practices in conjunction with an understanding of the political goals of AIDS activism.”

  His discursive essays brilliantly analyzed Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film, In a Year of 13 Moons, in October magazine, and Trisha Brown’s “wholly new lexicon of ordinary movement performed with effortless directness” in Artforum. Critically acclaimed books include “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics.

  Crimp’s latest, Before Pictures (2016), tenderly chronicles his initial years in New York City (1967–1977). Interwoven personal and professional stories create a vivid historical narrative of post-Stonewall Manhattan. Moving there after college, Crimp, “would have to learn how and where to be queer all over again” as gay sexual culture exploded around him.

  Early jobs included reviewing for ARTnews, organizing the papers of society couturier Charles James, and working as a curatorial assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, while hanging out with Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, and Joe Dallesandro. His first curatorial effort was an Agnes Martin exhibition in 1971 at the School of Visual Arts Gallery, where he was an adjunct professor.

  In this hybrid memoir, the author revisits his nascent critical thinking about Agnes Martin, realizing he had been wrong to reduce her aesthetic to mathematical minimalism. He also reconciles his contradictory views on Ellsworth Kelly’s “highly intelligent and accomplished painting,” and shares details of a failed liaison with the artist.

  Sexual trysts, both casual and loving, are a crucial part of his education with the West Side piers, Greenwich Village trucks, backroom bars, and outdoor public cruising as backdrops. His drug-enhanced years dancing at Flamingo, 12 West, and Paradise Garage are reverently described: “What is extraordinary about it (disco) and also show how it is symptomatic of a wider experience of pleasure in our society…”

  Crimp’s burgeoning cinephile-self attended Anthology Film Archives and his balletomane obsession with George Balanchine’s neo-classicism—“in which sharp angles replace soft curves, legs turn in as well as out, feet are flexed as well as pointed, and extensions are stretched to the breaking point”—was nurtured in the upper balconies of New York City Ballet’s State Theater.

  As his career progressed, Crimp sojourned downtown from Spanish Harlem to Chelsea, then to Greenwich Village, Tribeca, and finally landing in the Financial District, where he presently lives. Photographs and luminous descriptions of his various apartments function as framing devices for each of the chapters, with Crimp serving as a cultural anthropologist and architectural historian.

  The final chapter discusses Crimp’s career-defining Pictures exhibition, hailed by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl as “a movement-initiating, instantly legendary group show.” That same year, 1977, Crimp became managing editor of October magazine, and under his stewardship for the next thirteen years, it became required reading in the art world.

  However, Before Pictures primarily focuses on art and life in the formative decade prior to 1977. Back then he was convinced “with sufficient insight a critic could—even should—determine what was historically significant.” Reflecting back on these early years, he reconsiders: “Coming to the understanding that my knowledge of art can never be anything but partial has been liberating. It has allowed me to write about what attracts me, challenges me, or simply gives me pleasure without having to make a grand historical claim for it.”

  Douglas Crimp is a pivotal figure in contemporary art and AIDS cultural activism. Before Pictures fills in his backstory. Utilizing lived experiences as a primary source, he is his own archive. In reaching into his past, he fully embodies the present, and history benefits from this erudite and compelling storytelling.

  Before Pictures in available for purchase in the Walker Shop. John R. Killacky is Executive Director of Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, Vermont.

• Cleaver
  https://www.cleavermagazine.com/before-pictures-a-memoir-by-douglas-crimp-reviewed-by-gabriel-chazan/
  Word count: 1070

  Quoted in Sidelights: In both an act of scholarship and self-examination, Crimp offers a unique and varied exhibition of images and moments from his own coming of age and formation as an art historian.
  a quietly remarkable book
  a period of art history and a moment in New York is brought to life and newly complicated

  BEFORE PICTURES
  by Douglas Crimp
  University of Chicago Press/Dancing Foxes Press, 307 pages

  reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

  Douglas Crimp’s memoir Before Pictures invites readers into the lively artistic and queer worlds of 1960s to 1970s New York where Crimp was formed as an art historian. This is the same New York which brought him to curate Pictures, a small exhibit at Artist’s Space now considered pivotal to ideas about contemporary art. In the art history textbook Art Since 1900 (2004), Pictures is historicized as having given a platform to artwork meant to give “a new sense of the image as ‘picture’” and to “transcend any particular medium.” Here, Crimp embraces this transcendence in a different way. In his consideration, no single art form, from fashion to architecture, comes out as primary.

  On the inside covers of Before Pictures are two New York City subway maps from 1972. The book structured by the stops where Crimp has resided—it is Crimp’s many encounters, intellectual, artistic, sexual and architectural, on the city streets which anchor this memoir. Just as there are stops on the subway line, there are many different and often unexpected stops of interest in Crimp’s own intellectual journey leading to Pictures. One ramshackle building, “legendary among early art world inhabitants of Tribeca,” is featured in a Joan Jonas performance and later a Cindy Sherman photograph and happens to be “just down the block from where I lived in the mid-1970s.” Post-structuralism and love of dance intermingle in Crimp’s friendship with his fellow critic Craig Owens and their many nights at the New York City Ballet. Crimp shares a night with Ellsworth Kelly at Kelly’s apartment in the Hotel Des Artistes. With an early boyfriend, Crimp regularly attends Anthology Film Archives where he discovers a work by Joseph Cornell. The art history that Crimp recounts arises from the streets of New York and his experience of them.

  Douglas Crimp
  As this brief summary makes clear, Crimp takes many detours from the expected framing of his art historical moment, discussing as much how he found fascination in disco as in the galleries. The book deviates from any simple delineation of scholarship and life, finding its structure in Crimp’s movement around the city and thought, from the queer world to the art world. Crimp begins the book with a chapter on the division between the front rooms and back rooms of Max’s Kansas City, an art bar. These rooms are seen by Crimp to represent the division “between the art world and queer world” that he “would negotiate throughout my first decade living in New York City,” the time chronicled here. As a document of both the queer world and the art world of this period, Crimp’s writing here is extremely valuable.

  As Crimp notes at the end of the book, “the art scene as I experienced it in New York from 1967 to 1977 was small enough to seem fully comprehensible. That, of course, no longer holds true. And because it is so clearly not true, it seems unlikely that it could really have been true then.” This new sense of perspective “has allowed me to write about what attracts me, challenges me, or simply gives me pleasure without having to make a grand historical claim for it.” The excerpts of Crimp’s historical writing from the earlier period included in Before Pictures show a constant effort to historicize and place art within trends and moments. While sometimes this proves simple, occasionally, as in the case of the painter Agnes Martin, it becomes a challenge and perhaps a limitation. The greatest enjoyment of this book is seeing Crimp’s contemporary writing on art from his past liberated from simple historical argument, focusing on a multitude of types of art and open to complication. There is as much interest in pleasure, from wherever it comes, a trick or a photograph.

  Toward the end of the book, in his description of his friend Craig Owen’s translation of Derrida and commentary on his work, Crimp explains Derrida’s conception of ‘the Paragon’ (detachment/frame) and the idea that:

  we should attend to what aesthetic theory has heretofore excluded—the frame which supposedly differentiates the intrinsic from the extrinsic in a work of art. Derrida asks, What if aesthetics is not about what is intrinsic and what is extrinsic to the work of art but rather about the impossibility of distinguishing the two…In other words, heeding Craig’s call to turn our attention to the paragon, among those aspects of the frame to which we need to attend are its instability, the impossibility of locating, fixing its place with regard to art’s inside and outside.

  Within Crimp’s frame of the subway line and the time before Pictures, he moves past simple delineations of the intrinsic and extrinsic. The many frames of his life (historical, artistic and biographical) are made both central and destabilized. The political, social, and sexual context is placed equally alongside discussions of art. It is through its many diversions and side routes from a simplified frame that Before Pictures becomes such a quietly remarkable book. In both an act of scholarship and self-examination, Crimp offers a unique and varied exhibition of images and moments from his own coming of age and formation as an art historian. The images which are chosen here are all carefully selected and telling, including everything from Arnold Schwarzenegger posing at the Whitney to beautiful “cruising pictures” by Peter Hujar. A period of art history and a moment in New York is brought to life and newly complicated. The book allows us to see the omitted frame around Pictures and brings forward a new richness.

  Gabriel-Chazan

  Gabriel Chazan, a filmmaker and writer, is from Toronto, Canada. He is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College. He particularly enjoys writing about contemporary art and photography.

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