{"id":104618,"date":"2016-11-08T12:13:24","date_gmt":"2016-11-08T17:13:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=104618"},"modified":"2016-11-08T17:19:03","modified_gmt":"2016-11-08T22:19:03","slug":"pictures-interview-douglas-crimp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/11\/08\/pictures-interview-douglas-crimp\/","title":{"rendered":"Before Pictures: An Interview with Douglas Crimp"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Douglas Crimp at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, c. 1970. Photographer unknown.<\/p><\/div>\n

In September, the art historian Douglas Crimp was speaking about his new book, <\/em>Before Pictures<\/a>, at the Whitney Museum when the slide projection was turned off and the screen 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 <\/em>Day\u2019s End\u00a0in 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 \u201cvast and hauntingly beautiful\u201d structures he describes had long ago been flattened into a parking lot for the Department of Sanitation.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Before Pictures begins in the late sixties and ends in 1977, the year Crimp curated the \u201cPictures\u201d 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\u2014for Crimp and for art history at large\u2014when 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 <\/em>ArtNews writer, including cinema, disco, fashion, ballet, and men. <\/em>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<\/small>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Crimp served an anxious role as the fulcrum between the avant-garde of both the queer and the art worlds. He would enter Max\u2019s 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\u2019s Factory. <\/em>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 \u201cDISSS-CO,\u201d an almost ethnographic account of disco clubs written as if by an embedded journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

But Crimp\u2019s main subject is Manhattan, and though he\u2019s describing Matta-Clark\u2019s film <\/em>City Slivers when he writes, \u201cWe glimpse the city in pieces, in the background, in our peripheral vision\u2014and in recollection,\u201d 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\u2019s endurance: these are places comfortingly ignorant of the city\u2019s drastic changes.<\/em><\/p>\n

The personal photograph that concludes the book shows Crimp\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>

Joan Jonas, Songdelay<\/i>, 1973, still from a black-and-white film in 16 mm, 18 minutes 35 seconds. Courtesy and \u00a9 the artist.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

Exactly. I don\u2019t feel it\u2019s a book about me. It\u2019s about New York in this period. I resisted University of Chicago\u2019s interest in putting A MEMOIR<\/small> on the cover. For me, it\u2019s a hybrid. It has autobiographical elements in it, but I wasn\u2019t attempting to reconstruct a past in a memoir-like way. It is based on these things I did during\u00a0the first ten years I lived in New York, like working at the Guggenheim or at ArtNews<\/em>, 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\u2019d possibly write about him now. So it\u2019s 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\u2019m also doing research and making discoveries, and that\u2019s where a lot of the chance comes in. The prime example in the book is when I pulled Derrida\u2019s Of Grammatology <\/em>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\u2019s balletomania and our reading of poststructuralist theory. Right now in the world of dance studies in the academy there\u2019s a very strong attempt to bring theory to bear upon dance. And in a way I\u2019m trying to enact my version of that. But I\u2019m doing it through the fact that there was this time in the seventies when the two things really were simultaneous but we weren\u2019t consciously thinking about them together.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mean you weren\u2019t chatting about Derrida when you were at the ballet?<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

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\u2019t sitting there for any other reason than that\u2019s 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\u2019s choreography.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Did you feel early on that you had to compartmentalize the various parts of your life\u2014your life as a gay man, as a cinephile, as a disco lover, as a balletomane?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

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\u2019t a completely secret life, but I wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019t think that I\u2019ve continued with that compartmentalization. Moreover, I\u2019ve 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<\/small> as a subject. And then coming back to Warhol\u2019s films for my book Our Kind of Movie<\/em>, I didn\u2019t come back as the person I was pre-AIDS<\/small> at all, I came back with a queer-theory perspective. I think there\u2019s a tendency, especially among professional academics, to carve out a field and to keep mining that field. Of course, you can\u2019t do it all, so you\u2019re always partial, but to limit yourself to a narrow field or canon, I just think it\u2019s sad. It\u2019s not really a judgment about scholarship, it\u2019s a judgment about life.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (from the Pier Photographs series)<\/i>, 1975\u201386. Courtesy and \u00a9 the Alvin Baltrop Trust<\/p><\/div>

<\/a>

Alvin Baltrop, Untitled (from the Pier Photographs series)<\/i>, 1975\u201386. Courtesy and \u00a9 the Alvin Baltrop Trust<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

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 \u201cOpaque Surfaces\u201d for the Arte come arte<\/em> catalogue.<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

Actually, it was after \u201cOpaque Surfaces\u201d that I met Kelly. It was at the end-of-the-season party at Betsy Baker\u2019s 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\u2019s not to say that I didn\u2019t 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\u2019t someone I slept with, she was someone that I had a friendship with. I think that\u2019s true in the art world in general, that critics and artists know each other. And I don\u2019t feel that\u2019s any kind of an ethical problem. I\u2019ve never been someone particularly desiring of knowing famous artists. I never met Andy Warhol, for example. In fact I didn\u2019t want to meet him, because Holly Woodlawn was living with me briefly while she was shooting Trash<\/em>, 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<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

But to that same point, that personal knowledge didn\u2019t prevent you from writing a book on Warhol\u2019s films.<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

No, on the contrary, I\u2019ve taught courses on Warhol and I\u2019ve read all the literature and generally I was trying to interrupt all the clich\u00e9s 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\u2019m really interested in the work itself. I don\u2019t think the artist has total control over his or her own work. The artist, too, has an unconscious. It\u2019s something that I grapple with a lot, because it\u2019s fairly standard practice now that Ph.D. students work on living artists and they interview them. I think it\u2019s a wonderful experience, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a requirement. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

This book exemplifies the notion that you might say or write something and not stand by it later.<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

True. Only in writing this memoir did I go back and read the two pieces I had written about Ellsworth Kelly, and I couldn\u2019t have told you before I started writing this that I had reversed myself in my thinking about his work. I don\u2019t 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\u2019ve done throughout my career. It really starts with my AIDS<\/small> writing in the late eighties, when I wrote \u201cMourning and Militancy\u201d for October<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n

\"douglas-crimp-cover\"<\/a><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I found this quote in \u201cMourning and Militancy\u201d that reads, \u201cI 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.\u201d I see this book as an expression of that statement. It\u2019s truly a before-AIDS<\/small> 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.<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

This book is motivated by my experience with my younger friends in ACT UP, and it is precisely that narrative that I\u2019m resisting in my AIDS<\/small> work and in \u201cMourning and Militancy,\u201d that moralizing notion that this period of the 1970s was a period of immaturity. I don\u2019t introduce this book by saying that it has an agenda about recuperating the pleasures of gay life in the 1970s before AIDS.<\/small>\u00a0I\u2019m perfectly happy to leave it implicit. I wanted to show that this was a period that I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

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?\u00a0<\/p>\n

CRIMP<\/p>\n

At the end of the final chapter I talk about how in the rewriting of the Pictures<\/em> 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\u2019ve given up the\u00a0sense 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\u2019t think you could do that because it\u2019s so vast, there\u2019s so much. It makes me realize that even back then it couldn\u2019t 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\u2019s continuity in the unknowability and the fact that one has to understand oneself as never able to know totality.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Opening of Pictures<\/i> at Artists Space, September 1977. Photo by D. James Dee. Courtesy Artists Space<\/p><\/div>\n

Sarah Cowan is a freelance writer and a video editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 screen 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":792,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[184,3784,922,35,9241,25626,25627,1942,25628,25623,17,7643,21976,21780,25625,4555,1132,4062,11430,125,25624,7838,2422],"class_list":["post-104618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-1970s","tag-aids","tag-andy-warhol","tag-art","tag-artists","tag-artists-space","tag-artnews","tag-ballet","tag-balletomane","tag-before-pictures","tag-books","tag-disco","tag-douglas-crimp","tag-ellsworth-kelly","tag-gay-liberation","tag-gordon-matta-clark","tag-interviews","tag-jacques-derrida","tag-maxs-kansas-city","tag-new-york-city","tag-pier-52","tag-the-factory","tag-whitney-museum"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBefore Pictures: An Interview with Douglas 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