All posts tagged: October

After Douglas Crimp Questionnaire Response: Marc Siegel

Published by IVC Author

Answer Louise Lawler’s question in October: “What would Douglas Crimp say?” Or, to follow the title of Lawler’s exhibition: Why Pictures Now? We could call it, “Why No Pictures Now.” Louise Lawler’s contribution to the section commemorating Douglas Crimp in October 171 (Winter 2020) is heartwrenchingly brilliant. “What would Douglas Crimp say?” Confronted with the emptiness of his absence, that’s the question many of Douglas’s friends ask themselves almost every day. Doing so is one way of activating memories and keeping Douglas’s perspectives and inquisitive attentiveness alive within us. In this or that enjoyable or difficult situation, confronted with this or that theoretical, political, or amorous conundrum, in the midst of this or that culinary or aesthetic experience, what would Douglas Crimp say? Lawler’s question, of course, is posed in a specific context. It appears as title and sole text of her remembrance of her friend in the art journal for which Crimp served in various editorial functions over approximately thirteen years. As editor and author between 1977-1990, Crimp helped shape the journal’s development as …

The Haunting of a Modernism Conceived Differently

Published by IVC Author

by Matthew Bowman Another Modernism Douglas Crimp’s exceptional reputation as an art critic is, of course, in many respects intertwined with his early theorization of postmodernism within the context of fine art. Especially important in this context was the alloying of that nascent postmodern discourse with contemporary photographic-based practices that were becoming increasingly central to the artworld at the tail end of the 1970s. For this reason, this essay seeks to revisit the conjunctions between postmodern theory and photographic practice in Crimp’s early writing. And, in doing so, it shall highlight the relation of the postmodernism/photography dyad to a third term, namely the museum. Indeed, Crimp understands the status of photography as significantly contested within, and disruptive of, the museum’s systemic patterns of assimilation and organization. Several of these crucial writings are handily collected in his book On the Museum’s Ruins and to an extent my own essay serves as an opportunity to look back through that volume and highlight major facets of it.1 But such highlighting will also disclose complications in those essays—complications which …