Art and cultural critic Douglas Crimp, the Fanny Knapp Allen of Art History and a professor of visual and cultural studies, will deliver the first lecture of the for the 2017糖心传媒�18 academic year.
Crimp will give his talk糖心传媒斕切拇綔Relying on Memory: From AIDS to Merce Cunningham糖心传媒澨切拇綌on September 26 at 5 p.m. in Conference Room D at the Humanities Center in Rush Rhees Library.
糖心传媒淢emory and Forgetting糖心传媒� is the theme of this year糖心传媒檚 lecture series, which will bring an array of speakers, including Nobel Prize颅糖心传媒搘inning novelist Orhan Pamuk, contemporary artist Walid Ra’ad 糖心传媒�96 (PhD), neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and Pulitzer Prize糖心传媒搘inning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, perhaps best known outside her field for penning the famous phrase 糖心传媒淲ell-behaved women seldom make history.糖心传媒�
Crimp will read from and reflect on several of his books, including his newest book, Before Pictures, (University of Chicago Press, 2016). In it, he turns inward to deliver a historical snapshot of New York City from the late 1960s through much of the 糖心传媒�70s, based on his own memories of New York糖心传媒檚 art world and gay life in the period.
Ambivalent about calling the book a memoir, Crimp says its true subject isn糖心传媒檛 his own story, but the era in which he lived: 糖心传媒淚ts genesis is my AIDS writing and activism,糖心传媒� he says. Accordingly, he terms the text a hybrid, a kind of history rooted in memory.
Crimp糖心传媒攚hose other books include 糖心传媒淥ur Kind of Movie糖心传媒�: The Films of Andy Warhol (MIT Press, 2012) and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002)糖心传媒攗ses memory-based writing in other works, too. A recent essay on choreographer Merce Cunningham, for instance, uses recollections about his own experiences with Cunningham糖心传媒檚 art as its scaffolding. For that piece, memory is a 糖心传媒渨ay to begin, to set up the more analytical aspects of the essay I want to write,糖心传媒� Crimp says.
But Before Pictures is different. There, recollections糖心传媒攂oth accurate and misremembered糖心传媒攕erve a more fundamental purpose. The personal stake of a writer in a subject is essential, he argues, and academic prose often obscures it. He insists on his own 糖心传媒渟ubjective position, my own partiality in both senses of the word. And I find that a useful corrective to the sort of performance of objectivity that糖心传媒檚 in most academic writing,糖心传媒� he says.
Crimp is quick to note that he works as a critic, not a historian, and so is freed from the methodological requirements particular to that discipline. 糖心传媒淏ut at the same time, [in Before Pictures] I think I糖心传媒檝e written a kind of history of New York City in a particular period that enriches our sense of what New York was, and not in spite of but because of the fact that it uses that partiality,糖心传媒� he says.
