{"id":192232,"date":"2017-01-06T14:32:41","date_gmt":"2017-01-06T19:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=192232"},"modified":"2019-07-08T15:33:08","modified_gmt":"2019-07-08T19:33:08","slug":"crimp-memoir-192232","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/crimp-memoir-192232\/","title":{"rendered":"Douglas Crimp revisits art world, gay culture of 1970s New York"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"embed-container\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ox7bvq-F3aI\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div>\n<p>After art critic Douglas Crimp moved to the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan in 1969, he became a regular customer at Max\u2019s Kansas City, a restaurant and art bar on Park Avenue. Max\u2019s had two rooms, one in front and one in back, and members of Andy Warhol\u2019s Factory could reliably be found in the latter. As he passed through the front room, Crimp would greet the \u201cartist-regulars\u201d he had come to know during his first two years in the city, but he found himself inexorably pulled to the back, whose \u201ccharged atmosphere\u201d he loved.<\/p>\n<p>The divisions between the rooms \u201cmirrored 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\u2019s word,\u201d writes Crimp in his new book, <em>Before Pictures<\/em> (University of Chicago Press, 2016).<\/p>\n<p>The <em>Village Voice<\/em> has called it a \u201cprofound, delectably gossipy memoir,\u201d while the <em>New Yorker<\/em> termed it an \u201cexhibition-as-memoir,\u201d with its story significantly relayed through the 150 illustrations that fill it.<\/p>\n<p>But Crimp\u2014the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and a professor of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/college\/vcs\/\"><strong>visual and cultural studies<\/strong><\/a>\u2014rejects the label of memoir, which he suggests doesn\u2019t capture his narrative method and puts the emphasis on him rather than on the historical moment he depicts.<\/p>\n<div class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"background-image: url('https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/douglas-crimp-before-pictures.jpg'); width: 450px; height: 350px; margin-bottom: 5px;\"><\/div>\n<p style=\"font-size: 9pt; text-align: center;\">VIEW FINDER: Crimp depicts an era through text and art, such as this image, &#8220;Pier 18: Hands Framing New York Harbor,&#8221; by John Baldessari and Shunk-Kender.<br \/>\n<em>(Shunk-Kender \u00a9 J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20) \/ Courtesy of John Baldessari.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The book \u201cmoves from anecdote to criticism to research, back to anecdote, and so forth, and also from my gay life to my art world life,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p><em>Before Pictures<\/em> was inspired years before it was written, by Crimp\u2019s 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\u2019t experienced gay life in 1970s New York. Writing about his life in that era would be a means of resisting a \u201crevisionist narrative that was being promulgated: that the 1970s represented gay men\u2019s immaturity and led inevitably to AIDS, which in turn made us grow up and become responsible citizens,\u201d Crimp told <em>Out Magazine<\/em> in September.<\/p>\n<p>After spending his childhood in Coeur d\u2019Alene, Idaho, he went to college \u201cas far away as possible in every respect,\u201d he writes, moving to New Orleans and enrolling at Tulane\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI 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\u2014and I was able to do that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<p>The book, structured around Crimp\u2019s changing addresses, tells the story of his life in the city from the late 1960s through much of the \u201970s, concluding with his curation of the 1977 exhibition \u201cPictures\u201d at the gallery Artists Space. Crimp first became renowned as a critic of the \u201cPictures Generation\u201d\u2014a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, whose work reflects the media-driven, consumerist world in which they grew up.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMy own life and aesthetic attitudes reflected the ambivalence and fears that were still operative about homosexuality,\u201d he writes, \u201cabout whether art could be a manly enough profession and about what kinds of art qualified as most manly. . . .\u201d He calls the division \u201cbetween the art world and the queer world\u201d something that he \u201cwould negotiate throughout my first decade living in New York City.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Crimp is the author of five other books, including <em>\u201cOur Kind of Movie\u201d: The Films of Andy Warhol<\/em> (MIT Press, 2012) and <em>Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics<\/em>, (MIT Press, 2002). He also edited <em>AIDS: Cultural Analysis\/Cultural Activism<\/em> (MIT Press, 1988), a special issue of the art journal <em>October<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI first met Douglas through his writing when I was in graduate school,\u201d says Joan Saab, chair of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/AAH\/\"><strong>Department of Art and Art History<\/strong><\/a>. When she came to Rochester 15 years ago, she was intimidated to become his colleague\u2014an apprehension that she says was soon dispelled by his generosity to fellow faculty and his engagement of students.<\/p>\n<p>Crimp\u2019s book \u201cbrings all the warmth and intellectual rigor of his classroom to the printed page,\u201d she says. \u201cHe seamlessly balances his art criticism with his emerging activism, without ever losing his warm and compelling voice. It\u2019s a tour de force.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><em>Before Pictures,<\/em> a new book by art and culture critic Douglas Crimp, brings together anecdote, criticism, research, and illustration to describe the art world and gay life in New York City in the 1960s and &#8217;70s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":752,"featured_media":202412,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13092],"tags":[20452,21832,21522,16072],"class_list":["post-192232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-arts","tag-book-authors","tag-douglas-crimp","tag-graduate-program-in-visual-and-cultural-studies","tag-school-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Douglas Crimp revisits art world, gay culture of 1970s New York<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/crimp-memoir-192232\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Douglas Crimp revisits art world, gay culture of 1970s New York\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Before Pictures, a new book by art and culture critic Douglas Crimp, brings together anecdote, criticism, research, and illustration to describe the art world and gay life in New York City in the 1960s and &#039;70s.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/crimp-memoir-192232\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"News Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" 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