Douglas Crimp

This article aims  to reconstruct the principal aspects of  Walter Benjamin’s essay  “Little  History of  Photography”  and its North American reception in the 1970s. To do so, I will turn to the work of Douglas Crimp and to the controversies concerning photography and Clement Greenberg’s modernist paradigm, paying special attention to the role Benjamin played in them. Furthermore, I will argue that the debates on the photographic and contemporary art theory can benefit from an interconnected reading of Benjamin and Crimp

This essay, taken from my upcoming book A Gossip of Images (Duke University Press), considers the intimate and indiscreet circulation of images beyond the context of individual films and the moment of spectatorship. Referring specifically to the mobilization and transformation of Hollywood star images in queer counterpublics, the essay argues for the necessity of an expanded definition of gossip, not merely as a means of oral communication, but as a mode of image circulation.

In “The Haunting of a Modernism Conceived Differently,” Matthew Bowman reexamines some of Crimp’s groundbreaking essays published in October that established postmodernism as a crucial theoretical concept answerable to recent developments in art and its criticism. He discusses how categorial separations that are thought to be integral to modernism (e.g. medium specificity and teleology) are undercut in Crimp’s proposal of a “modernism conceived differently” that figuratively haunts his theorization of postmodernism. Bowman seeks to recover the relation of postmodernism to this alternative modernism in several examples of Crimp’s influential scholarship. He aims not to treat this other modernism as an intellectual aberration, a failure of argumentative consistency, but rather to spotlight its critical fecundity and its betokening of Crimp’s early interest in deconstruction.

This essay is part of a special issue of InVisible Culture dedicated to Douglas Crimp. See its contents here: https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/table-of-contents-issue-35-after-douglas-crimp/

If communication, reportage, description, and judgment are key elements of the receptive role played by art-critical publications, it’s important to acknowledge on specific occasions such journals also have a productive mediatory function, too. They don’t merely disseminate as if passively a pre-given situation, but may actively construct that situation, define its infrastructure and parameters, and do so whilst under the guise of reportage. In these cases art criticism becomes a dialectic of reception and production, both constituted by and constituting its objects of study.

This paper analyses the early years of the influential art journal October according to the thematic indicated above. Beginning in 1976, October established itself as  arguably the foremost art-critical voice of a burgeoning postmodernism. Significant essays published between 1976-1981 on the index, the expanded field of sculpture, allegory, and photography served as trajectories leading to a deeper understanding of postmodernism and an emergent generation of artists sceptical of their late-modernist inheritance. However, this paper contends that October didn’t merely report and analyse then-recent cultural developments, but actively contributed and constituted those developments through a dialogical relationship between critics and artists.

Therefore suggesting that any critical-historical reappraisal of postmodernism would be incomplete without apprehending October’s collaboration with artists in moving beyond late-modernism, this paper aims to demonstrate that much of our contemporary sense of what comprises postmodernism for the visual arts is fundamentally rooted in the intellectual positions advanced by October during 1976-1981. It shall, then, succinctly explicate key arguments vis-à-vis postmodernism established within the journal’s pages, thereby presenting the capability of the art press to intermingle the reception and production of emergent cultural hegemonies.

After works by Chris Marker, Gerhard Richter, James Coleman, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Nancy Davenport, and Alex Verhaest, to name just a few, how can we update Walter Benjamin's question, "the [real] question is not whether photography is art...but whether the invention of photography had not changed the entire character of art"? Does the status of photography remain intact after the advent of, say, 'GIF' archives? By (re)reading Kracauer, Benjamin, Krauss, Crimp, Baker, Costello, Mulvey, Bellour, Azoulay and Steyerl carefully, we will draw increasingly fuzzy boundaries between picture, photography and cinema anew, along with their contour lines.

This paper is a provisional genealogical project, which aims to track the historical context of cruising in NYC from a 'placeness' rooted in the geography of the city to its dematerialization and instrumentalization via the mediated technologies of 'hookup apps' such as Grindr and Scruff. These apps are unpacked as 'capture apparatuses' that provide new forms of 'grammars of action' which change the sociotechnical organization of human activity at the level of gay intimacies and desire. At the same time I map out cruising as a spatializing gesture that can be tacked in its relation to privacy and publicity and the many ways in which it becomes tied to to gay sociality and the makings of a counter public.

Abstract: Michel Foucault’s legacy in shaping understanding of the museum and its ideological operations is well established in the field of museum studies. Tony Bennett’s adaptation of the ‘disciplinary complex’ in his ‘exhibitionary complex’ essay of 1988 marshalled Foucauldian theory into the field’s mainstream, and contributed to the subsequent methodological shift known as ‘the new museology’ or ‘critical museum studies.’ Less recognised are Foucault’s contributions to theorisations of the museum by modernist art history. Focusing on a passage from his essay ‘Fantasia of the Library’ and its reception by Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and others, this article reflects on Foucault’s outsized impact on recent modernist art history. It concludes that Foucault’s commentary stimulated art history to engage with the museum, but at the same time, constrained the field’s conception of modernism’s geographies, protagonists, and institutional formations.

https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/kauffman.pdf

Fondata da Rosalind Krauss e Annette Michelson nel 1976, la rivista «October» si pone immediatamente sulla scena internazionale come singolare spazio di discussione sul presente dell’arte e della critica, oggetto di analisi e di dense riflessioni che muovono dall’esigenza di ripensare in maniera radicale il sistema dell’arte e le sue egemonie. Fin dal titolo, un’esplicita citazione del film dedicato da Eisenstein alla rivoluzione sovietica, la rivista statunitense afferma infatti la propria natura militante, rivendicando la possibilità per la critica, e per l’arte insieme, di essere vettore di trasformazione delle strutture sociali e di pensiero attraverso l’azione politica della produzione culturale. Un processo di cui il volume, grazie ad un continuo confronto con le diverse voci che animano il dibattito sulle due sponde dell’oceano, ricostruisce i luoghi privilegiati – l’analisi mediale, la centralità della fotografia, la rilettura dell’avanguardia europea in termini antiformalistici –  dando conto degli esiti eterogenei e plurimi della condotta critica della rivista, dal periodo eroico della fondazione agli anni più recenti, in cui si nota un’istituzionalizzazione delle proposte che culmina nella pubblicazione di Art since 1900, il monumentale manuale di storia dell’arte firmato da alcuni tra i teorici più attivi sulle pagine di «October». Ad emergere con chiarezza da questo ampio lavoro di ricostruzione e di interpretazione è un quadro teorico denso ed estremamente articolato che conferma il ruolo cruciale delle riviste nell'elaborazione del contemporaneo discorso sull'arte e sulla critica.

reading of marcel broodthaers' museum in relation to some industrial poems. exploring the relation to benjamins concept of allegory in relation to the structuring of time as difference, delay and re-inscription in broodthaers' practice which is understood as a practice of writing in space.

All of us under its spell
We know that it’s probably magic

And indeed, it must be magic, for it is being sung to us by a Muppet, whose only skull or trace is the puppeteer’s hand, and when the hand is retracted, there is nothing: only gauzy belief. But the magic lies in the fact that gauze cannot bruise, and that is solace enough. Debbie Harry has a skull though, but she does not offer it to Kermit or to us, and that is OK too.

‘Michael Baxandall’, ‘Douglas Crimp’, ‘Marc Fumaroli’, ‘Ernst H. Gombrich’, ‘Griselda Pollock’, ‘Herbert Read’, ‘Colin Rowe’, ‘Viktor Stoichita’, ‘Edgar Wind’, ‘Rudolf Wittkower’, Enciclopedia dell’Arte Contemporanea, Roma: Treccani, 2021, I 314, I 647, II 181, II 269-70, III 698, IV 22, 143-44, 404,  723, 725.

When Kurt and Blaine—the much-anticipated gay couple in Ryan Murphy’s Glee— twinkletoed through an inevitably erotic rendition of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” I was in a dorm room filled with straight guys and their girlfriends who paid no attention to the emotional dénouement onscreen. I, however, was glued to the TV, watching their handsome faces, their lithe bodies so unlike mine, their filmic love that, in that moment, felt not like an imitation of life, but rather like reality. It was a reality that did not belong to me (I felt and feel more like Deborah Kass’s ugly but kind turkeys after Monet) but a world of possibility nevertheless opened up. I knew, we all knew, that this was coming when Blaine crooned “Teenage Dream,” itself a favorite song of mine, for Kurt, but with snow floating through the air and rape-adjacent lyrics, the dream was finally consummated—problematically and beautifully.

Paper proposal for a presentation that took place on February 13 2020, at CAA Chicago, as part of the panel "Frampton Comes Alive: Hollis Frampton and the History of Art":

Between November 5 and 27 1982 the 14 photographs of Hollis Frampton’s ADSVMVS ABSVMVS, In memory of Hollis William Frampton, Sr., 1913–1980, abest could be studied at the Visual Studies Workshop Gallery in Rochester, New York. The series and exhibition depicted a collection of dried, decomposed, skinned, and flattened plants and animals on black ground, and was presented to the visitors together with a brochure, which contained a short introductory text, Latin classifications of each specimen, miniature reproductions of their photographic representations, and short descriptive captions for each image. Between April 13 and May 13 2018 one original set of Frampton’s ADVSMVS ABSVMVS was presented at Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. The exhibition was conceived as a critical reiteration of Frampton’s own show in Rochester, and was conducted in collaboration with students, scholars and curators at Folkwang University of the Arts (Essen) and Free University Berlin. The project allowed all participants to conduct in-depth research on ADSVMVS ABSVMVS and its individual imagery and texts, understood as a complex collection of palimpsests, a system of referential opulence and an installation with its own spatial choreography. For the Hollis Frampton panel at CAA Chicago 2020 I proposed to present selected results from this educational and curatorial project. With my presentation I suggested to consider ADSVMVS ABSVSMVS as a key to retrospectively understand Frampton’s conceptual work with photography and film between 1958 and 1984 as a practice of performative appropriation and renegotiation of paradigms in the history and contemporary presence of both media.

Entretien avec le critique d’art Douglas Crimp sur les prises de positions théoriques et l’argumentaire qu’il déploie dans les années 1970 et 1980 ainsi que sur sa prise de distance d’avec la revue October lorsqu’il se met à défendre des pratiques militantes pour les droits des victimes du SIDA.