All posts tagged: Visual and Cultural Studies

After Douglas Crimp Questionnaire Response: Janet Wolff

VCS in the 90s It’s now thirty years since I arrived in Rochester, taking over as VCS director from Mieke Bal in the program’s second year.  I think I am right in recalling that Douglas came the following year – 1992.  Michael Holly as Chair of Art and Art History had brought us both to Rochester, and we worked closely together until she left (for the Clark Art Institute) in 1999.   I left (for Columbia University, and then later home to England) in 2001.  So for most of the 90s we worked together, the three of us.  We were a great team, with an effortless and easy collaboration and division of labor – our offices next door to one another, dropping in and out for chats and consultations.  It was the best job of my life, and I still miss it.  Now, of course, I also really miss Douglas.  We kept in close touch and met regularly in New York.  He also came to Manchester on two occasions on a Simon Visiting Fellowship which …

Learning from Douglas: A Course Schedule

by Peter Murphy Art and the City: New York in the 1970s (Fall 2015)Monday 2-4:40PM, Morey 524Professor Douglas Crimp When I walked into the seminar room and saw the word “Cruising” projected onto the vinyl screen, I thought, with a budding sense of satisfaction, “This is why I’m in grad school.” For years, I had fantasized about the Hudson River piers that David Wojnarowicz writes about in Close to the Knives; now I had the chance to learn from someone who experienced them, someone who was there. Douglas quickly reminded me that while the pleasures found at the piers were invigorating (sex, friendship, sunbathing), there was also danger present at every turn (robbery, assault, murder) and every step (the wood was so decayed that it could give way). Our discussion of Alvin Baltrop’s photographs made this starkly clear: in addition to the alluring images of beautiful men fucking in dilapidated settings, there are also images of corpses and police investigations. This distant violence, as well as Wojnarowicz’s intoxicating way of writing about these dangers, informed …