Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998) Norman Bryson I would like to begin by outlining a distinction between gay and lesbian studies and queer studies, as related yet distinct strands of thinking within art history and visual/cultural studies. I would not want to be divisive here; both modes of inquiry get important work done. Yet, their basic strategies could hardly be more different. The aim of this first section of the discussion is to create at least a provisional sense of the aesthetic and political aims of queer cinema. Later, I will be discussing Todd Haynes as pioneering throughout his career a particularly interesting kind of queer film-making, though our focus here will be on a single film, Poison, from 1990. In his introduction to the landmark volume Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History (1994), Whitney Davis explains that the intention of the anthology is to present “important but little known or new evidence, accompanied by original documentation and interpretation, as well as reconsiderations of relatively familiar events, objects, images or …

Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998) Douglas Crimp Two years after the unexpected death of Andy Warhol in February 1987, the Museum of Modern Art moved to consolidate his reputation as one of the greatest artists of the second half of the twentieth century. The huge retrospective exhibition of Warhol’s paintings seemed dedicated, as if once and for all, to the idea of “Warhol as Art History,” as the title of one of the catalogue essays forthrightly put it.1 This constricting of Warhol’s cultural complexity was already evident a year earlier, when the Dia Art Foundation devoted one of its series of discussions in contemporary culture to “The Work of Andy Warhol.” The five papers and discussion that followed sought, in varying ways, to situate Warhol art historically; the purely disciplinary picture of Warhol presented by the symposium is captured in Gary Garrels’s synopsis introducing the published proceedings: Charles Stuckey has drawn on traditional approaches of art history to examine Warhol’s work–the importance of original settings and environments to understand intent and meaning …

Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998) Michael A. Holly Writing about the distant past. Recycling images from a time long gone, putting them “on display” yet again. Why do art historians do it? What kinds of intellectual and psychic needs does it satisfy? In comparing history to science, Erwin Panofsky once poignantly remarked: “The humanities . . . are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what would otherwise remain dead. Instead of dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to stop, they penetrate into a region where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reactivate it;”1 a sentiment reminiscent of Walter Benjamin who claimed that “an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses of allegory.”2 By this reckoning, history-writing is an allegorical art of the first order. Often invoked as the trope that defines modernity, the concept is also appropriate for characterizing the postmodernist historian’s dilemma: why do those …

Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998) Stephen Melville I I want to start by talking a bit about imaginations of what we tend to call “historical distance,” and then to push that talk toward a thought about the forms of objectivity available to the history of art. In doing so I hope also to be able to demonstrate something of one art historical object; it is a part of my argument that there is no imagination of art history or art historical method that does not depend upon, does not emerge from, such demonstration. Let me begin by simply remarking there is no compelling reason in the nature of things to imagine that what separates us from the past is best named “distance” nor any particular reason to think that this separation is different in kind from other ways in which we are separated from one another (we don’t actually know what qualification “historical” is adding to the notion of a “distance”). This is, of course, not to say that the notion …

Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998) Keith Moxey Autobiography reveals gaps, and not only gaps in time and space or between the individual or the social, but also a widening divergence between the manner and matter of its discourse. That is, autobiography reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins on the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction.1 One of the most important questions haunting the writing of history in the wake of poststructuralism is that of identity and the definition of subjectivity.2 Poststructuralist authors as various as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida argued, not so long ago, that the autonomous subject of the humanist tradition, a subject capable of knowing both the world and itself, was a utopian dream of the European Enlightenment. This view of human subjectivity had to be abandoned in a period that recognized the existence of an unconscious mind, the opacity of language, and the role of discursive practices in the …

Issue 01: The Worlding of Cultural Studies (Winter 1998) Janet Wolff It is almost exactly ten years since I came to the United States from Britain, and exactly seven since I came to Rochester as Director of the Program in Visual and Cultural Studies. It is time to reflect on my complicated relationship to the discipline of sociology. And when I say that it is time, I don’t mean this biographically, but more in relation to recent intellectual developments within both sociology and cultural studies, as well as to the (mostly) antagonistic relationship between the two, at least in this country. In my opinion, cultural studies at its best is sociological. And yet, in the continuing cross-disciplinary dialogue that has characterized the field of cultural studies in the decade or so of its progress in the United States, the discipline of sociology has been notably absent. At the same time, within the field of sociology, the study of culture has expanded enormously in the last twenty years among sociologists of culture, and among those who …