#douglas crimp

[garadinervi]

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, (weatherproof steel), 1981 [installed at Federal Plaza, New York, NY; removed March 15, 1989] [MoMA, New York, NY. © Richard Serra / ARS, New York]

Bibl.: Rosalind E. Krauss, Richard Serra / Sculpture, Edited and with an introduction by Laura Rosenstock, Essay by Douglas Crimp, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1986, p. 137 (pdf here)

[certainwoman]

“Gay people invented safe sex. We knew that the alternatives— monogamy and abstinence— were unsafe, unsafe in the latter case because most people do not abstain from sex, and if you only tell them “just say no,” they will have unsafe sex. We were able to invent safe sex because we have always known that sex is not, in an epidemic or not, limited to penetrative sex. Our promiscuity taught us many things, not only about the pleasures of sex, but about the great multiplicity of those pleasures. It is that psychic preparation, that experimentation, that conscious work on our own sexualities that has allowed many of us to change our sexual behaviors— something that brutal “behavioral therapies” tried unsuccessfully for over a century to force us to do— very quickly and very dramatically.

(...)

All those who contend that gay male promiscuity is merely sexual compulsion resulting from fear of intimacy are now faced with very strong evidence against their prejudices. For if compulsion were so easily overcome or redirected, it would hardly deserve the name. Gay male promiscuity should be seen instead as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality. Indeed, it is the lack of promiscuity and its lessons that suggests that many straight people will have a much harder time learning “how to have sex in an epidemic’’ than we did. This assumption follows from the fact that risk reduction information directed at heterosexuals, even when not clearly anti-sex or based on false morality, is still predicated on the prevailing myths about sexuality in our society. First among these, of course, is the myth that monogamous relationships are not only the norm but ultimately everyone’s deepest desire. Thus the message is often not about safe sex at all, but about how to find a safe partner”

Douglas Crimp, How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic

[bestyoungk]

[vitruvianmanbara]

just curious but why are you so into st sebastian? like ive been following you for long enough to know your interests in the classical and in eroticism vary far and wide (as a true connoisseur's should 🫡) but why return to that particular iteration over and over

Hmmm this was a harder question to answer than I thought it would be! I think I initially became interested in the various depictions because I noticed how they have been and continue to be reiterated in all types of media, not just the visual arts....artists of all sorts do this with religious motifs, but Sebastian's historical associations with homosexuality (and his role as a plague saint) make those depictions particularly fascinating to me.

It's difficult for me to write a coherent analysis on this, but some aspects of his gay icon status I find really interesting - quotes are pulled from the fantastic article "Losing his religion - Saint Sebastian as contemporary gay martyr" by Richard A. Kaye:

That he is primarily depicted as a solitary figure, something that might seem at odds with the way even classical representations of him are read as gay or sexually ambiguous

A great quote about the above: "The martyr's self-absorbed detachment of visual affect is a fundamental aspect of his intricate mythology, for an archetypal image of an ecstatically self-preoccupied nude male would seem to grant erotic permission to nobody, and, yet, paradoxically to every viewer. In rough psychoanalytic terms, then, the martyr provides the opportunity for an unobstructed, unmediated erotization [...] As with the solitary youth depicted in Michelangelo's David or Hippolyte Flandrin's Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer [...], Sebastian's basic narcissism provides for what might be terms a polymorphously perverse response on the part of the viewer." (p.90)

Depictions are so frequently located at the intersection of alternative modes of male eroticism (the erotic as a solo activity, an invitation to freely regard the vulnerable exposed body, the "feminized" posing typical to some St. Sebastian art) and death, lending themselves to associations with gay sexuality and sadomasochism. The facts that 1) in the Bible, Sebastian continue to survive after being shot full of arrows, and 2) is so often depicted responding to penetration with either an expression of calm acceptance or with facial & body language that straddle the line between pleasure and pain, lend themselves to associations of voluntary participation in alternative, marginalized forms of pleasure.

There is some interesting scholarship on the way St. Sebastian's association with gayness track onto the medicalization of homosexuality - early sexologists like Hirschfeld actually explicitly identified images of St. Sebastian as ones that "inverts" tend to be drawn to.

The politicization of Sebastian imagery post-Stonewall and AIDS is something not often talked about (on here at least), but is really fascinating. Some people soured on him post-Stonewall, seeing him as too passive an icon for the politically charged moment.

With AIDS, "Sebastian the historic soldier comes to represent the militant, newly politicized homosexual, beautifully exposed to his fate but non-passively [...] In the late 1980s and early 1990s, one witnesses a double transformation of Saint Sebastian: first, as a saint invoked to ward off the plague [...] and, second, as a politically charged figure signifying not so much sado-masochism as government neglect and social hostility. As such, Saint Sebastian symbolically encapsulates (and partly resolves) what the critic Douglas Crimp has identified as two vital, supposedly irreconcilable, components of gay culture in the age of AIDS: the labour of mourning and the work of political activism." (p.98)

Something I haven't seen discussed in the scholarship on Saint Sebastian and AIDs is an analysis of Sebastian being tended by Saint Irene imagery...not sure if it's unexplored or if I just haven't found it yet, but I think of this a lot in association with lesbian blood drives, as well as a group of nuns & a female pastor I know who have shared stories with me about caring for men with AIDS (and eventually arranging their funerals and burials) when their families would not show up.

Anyway...you get the idea! I love the way the eroticism of Sebastian imagery has been received and richly interpreted in so many ways across history, the explicit tie ins to issues of gay self-identity and politics definitely make him of special interest to me! 🏹

[lya-dustin]

I seek to hold the wind

Chapter 1

Taglist: @arrthurpendragon @ocappreciationtag

Gif by @diversehistorical

298 after the Conquest.

“Will I have to mourn him as a cousin or my betrothed?” Jocelyn asked her mother when a raven came saying Cousin Douglas Flint, second son to Willamina Dustin, Lady of Flint’s Finger, had died quite scandalously.

His heart gave out as he came inside the scullery maid, or so her uncles had said when they came to escort them to Rochester, the seat of House Flint this morning.

But if anyone asked, he died in his sleep.

“Cousin, only my goodsister and I knew he was betrothed to you.” Mother said as she gave her the letter from Aunt Willamina. “A funeral so close to the King’s visit, with any luck we will be out of mourning when the royal party crosses the Neck. No one wants to kiss a girl in black.”

You would think with the amount of black mama wears would ever stop Beron, her Sergeant and long-time lover, from sharing her bed and doing so much more than kissing.

And sure enough, not even seven weeks after Doug the Drunk’s funeral, Jo is wearing yellow damask silk to attend the King’s Feast.

“I am sorry for your loss, Lady Jocelyn.” Robb Stark says when he approaches her to avoid dancing with a giggling Cerenna Lannister “Douglas will be missed.”

He says as if Doug the Drunk hadn’t vomited on Robb on the first tourney Stark let him participate in earlier this year in White Harbor.

“Please, even my auntie will not miss him, he was a sot.” Jo said as they took their places and he tried his best not to laugh at her words lest Prince Joffrey took offense again.

Joffrey ---a cruel and irritating little shit--- Baratheon and Sansa ---who is as red as her hair--- Stark take precedence even if Robb and Jo can see well over the top of their heads.

The music begins and the prince makes a comment at how antiquated the dance is after Sansa tells him it is her favorite.

Robb grimaced at the words, and she finds it adorable to know how much he cares for his little sister.

She wouldn’t mind being betrothed to him. If only mama did not hate his father so vehemently.

“I was relieved to know the rumor of your engagement was false.” Robb said almost hopefully.

If she had mourned Doug as a fiancé, Jocelyn would be stuck in black crimped wool for nigh on a year.

“So am I, if you must know, I hope I will have the same privilege regarding you and her highness.” Jo whispers just as the dance calls for them to change partners.

“She is eight, my lady.” He comes close enough in the next step for her to smell northern whiskey in his breath.

His father would never let him drink more than what was offered at the table, but Jo knew you did not need to look too far for a flask, or even a whole bottle.

“Had you need of some liquid courage to say that, my lord?” Jocelyn asks coyly as they parted for the next step.

There would be no other boy than him, she is sure of it.

Jo tries not to giggle ---mother hates the sound--- as she comes to share a bed with Fiona Stout, her companion.

“He asked if he could accompany me on a ride tomorrow, Fi!” Jocelyn squeals as quietly as she can.

It was not proper to be alone without a chaperone, and while she did take a guard and sometimes a companion, it was quite serious to accompany her on her morning ride.

Today, Fiona and Wynafryd Manderly accompanied her. Wylla would have come, but Lady Leona was so embarrassed when the Queen insinuated her to be a bad mother for letting Wyl dye her hair as green as their sigil that she is to be hidden until they leave.

“He is so handsome.” Fi giggles as he comes with his obscenely large wolf, his father’s ward ---who last night stole Fiona’s first kiss during a reel--- and his sullen half-brother.

They were utterly different in their coloring, but they shared many features thus clearing Catelyn Stark of the many rumors that surrounded her when she showed up with a red-haired baby nearly five and ten years ago.

Rumors that mother fanned at the expense of people thinking Brandon Stark could impregnate a woman seven months after his untimely demise.

“I was afraid you would not come, Lord Stark.” Jo gives him her most charming smile ---which she does not have to force like she did with the king last night--- and tries not to melt when he greets her with one in return.

“He dragged us out of bed just for the chance to see your ladyship’s loveliness.” Greyjoy japes and winks at her ladies for good measure.

“Mother would have my head if we did not keep things proper, Lady Jocelyn. I hope you do not mind the company.” Robb is not bothered by his friend’s words and dismisses the grooms to help her onto her saddle himself.

A nobleman in every sense of the word.

She would give up the Barrows to be his lady wife, she thinks.

[palms-upturned]

We base this ethics of promiscuous care on AIDS activist theory from the 1980s and 1990s, specifically the essay ‘How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic’, by the academic and ACT UP activist, Douglas Crimp.

This essay was a response to the idea, advanced not only in the media but also by gay leaders, that one origin of the AIDS epidemic lay in the sexual promiscuity of gay men. Crimp retorted that what the so-called promiscuity of post-Stonewall sexual cultures actually meant for the epidemic was that gay men ‘multiplied’ ‘experimental’ sexual practices, beyond the penetrative sex that was one of the more common routes of HIV transmission. He writes that some gay leaders ‘insist that our promiscuity will destroy us when in fact it is our promiscuity that will save us’. Here Crimp uses the concept not in the sense of ‘casual’ or ‘indifferent’, but in that of multiplying and experimenting with the ways gay men were intimate with and cared for each other. These experimental intimacies ultimately served as the basis for the safer sex initiatives, developed by groups like ACT UP, that went on to save countless lives.

In the same spirit, we must also care promiscuously. In advocating for promiscuous care, we do not mean caring casually or indifferently. It is neoliberal capitalist care that remains detached, both casual and indifferent, with disastrous consequences. For us, promiscuous care is an ethics that proliferates outwards to redefine caring relations from the most intimate to the most distant. It means caring more and in ways that remain experimental and extensive by current standards. We have relied upon ‘the market’ and ‘the family’ to provide too many of our caring needs for too long. We need to create a more capacious notion of care.

The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto

[talbottoarbus]

Mini research paper - Kayla Gilly

“I feel I'm anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren't self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear.”

—- Cindy Sherman 

Cindy Sherman’s photographs interrogate our culture’s construction of identity, appearance, and femininity. In her most notable body of work, Untitled Film Stills (1977-1980), Sherman disguises herself as various generic female characters and stereotypes. The series contains sixty nine black and white images in which Sherman becomes both the photographer and the subject as she mimics tropes of female heroines from 1950s and 60s Hollywood films. Untitled Film Stills catalyzed Sherman’s exploration of the superficiality of appearance, which has continued to be a core interest in her work over her forty year long career. 

The use of black and white film is effective to convey this ambiguity and distance. Sherman says, “the characters are questioning something – perhaps being forced into a certain role.” In most of the images, the subject looks or turns away from the camera. Since each still does not point to a particular reference or film, the black and white images help to unify the series. In each image, both Sherman and the character are grappling with concepts of identity and truth. Who really are these characters if their persona’s are only dictated by external societal expectations and pressures? Sherman comments on this issue saying, “I suppose unconsciously, or semiconsciously at best, I was wrestling with some sort of turmoil of my own about understanding women. The characters weren’t dummies; they weren’t just airhead actresses. They were women struggling with something, but I didn’t know what” ((Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills). The use of black and white sheds light on this “not-knowing,” or this subconscious turmoil Sherman portrays through her characters. 

Scholars have analyzed Sherman’s portrayal of “damsel in distress” heroines in Untitled Film Stills through the lens of the male gaze, a term coined by Laura Mulvey in 1975. According to Mulvey, women from  “literature to visual arts – have always been depicted from a masculine perspective as sexualised objects” (Ricci).  Sherman notes that she was “not consciously aware of this thing, the ‘male gaze.’ It was the way I was shooting, the mimicry of the style of black-and-white grade-Z motion pictures that produced the self-consciousness of these characters, not my knowledge of feminist theory” (Ricci). Untitled Film Stills has been interpreted as a defiance against the representation of women and their bodies in mass media. Sherman chose to make the printed images cheap and trashy looking, like they were found in magazines (Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills). Scholar Douglas Crimp designated Sherman’s work as ‘a hybrid of photography and performance art that reveals femininity to be an effect of representation.’ Sherman hopes that the series is “seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work,” but she does not identify with the feminist cause as the primary reason behind it. She tells Tate Magazine, “I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff” (Berne).

Regardless of Sherman’s stance on her work being linked to a feminist effort, Untitled Film Stills surfaces a compelling conversation regarding how artwork may reclaim women’s struggles, or glamorize them. In Sherman’s case, the work’s purpose is to call out the irony associated with classic feminine tropes and personas. Sherman’s visual depiction of  quintessential narratives of heroines existing under the patriarchy is a reclamation of women’s identity. The melodramatic images in Untitled Film Stills read as both provocative and cleverly satirical. The images ask the viewer to contemplate what remains when the costumes, makeup, and props are stripped away. To what extent is our identity a facade? Can women maintain unique identities despite social constructs, or do societal pressures make us ‘disappear?’ 

Works Cited

Berne, Betsy. "Studio: Cindy Sherman." Tate Magazine, 1 June 2003, www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/cindy-sherman-1938/studio-cindy-sherman. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.

"Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills – Her Groundbreaking Self Portraits." Public Delivery, 25 Nov. 2019, publicdelivery.org/cindy-sherman-untitled-film-stills/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.

Eckardt, Steph. "Cindy Sherman's Latest Guise: Extreme Vulnerability." W Magazine, 3 May 2016, www.wmagazine.com/story/cindy-sherman-metro-pictures-aging-interview. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.

Ricci, Benedetta. "Portraits of America: Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills." Artland Magazine, magazine.artland.com/portraits-of-america-cindy-shermans-untitled-film-stills/. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.

Vogel, Carol. "Cindy Sherman Unmasked." The New York Times, 16 Feb. 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/arts/design/moma-to-showcase-cindy-shermans-new-and-old-characters.html?auth=login-email&login=email. Accessed 12 Apr. 2023.

[wormcrusting]

Pictures generation:

A group of artists that emerged in the 1970s and ’80s whose works were united by the appropriation of images from mass media. Plucking images from television, film, and advertising, these artists produced work in a wide range of styles, including photography, film, video, and performance. The 1977 exhibition "Pictures" at Artists Space in New York, curated by Douglas Crimp, as well as Crimp’s associated essay, were seminal in defining the movement.

Perennially provocative, Richard Prince has blazed new trails for photography with his explorations of appropriation, identity, and the meaning of images in a mass-media culture. Throughout his career, he has photographed and cropped published advertisements and exhibited them as his own works, turned screenshots from women’s Instagram accounts into inkjet-printed-on-canvas pieces that sell for six-figure prices, and shown innumerable compositions that touch on sexual taboos. Prince’s irreverent practice made him an essential member of the so-called Pictures Generation of photographers; along with artists such as Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, he has pushed the boundaries of the medium since the late 1970s. Prince has exhibited extensively across the world in cities including New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Berlin. His work belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others, and has sold for millions on the secondary market.

[outweek30]

To The Editor,

I am enclosing two gift subscriptions to OutWeek for two friends of mine, both of them women. I don't generally take women to boys' bars or boys' events, and I don't give them boys' magazines. So by doing this I'm showing some trust in what your editorial in the first issue says about your commitment to rectifying the despicable Native's neglect of women. But the only way I think you can make good on that commitment is to get women on the editorial staff, and at the highest levels. This shouldn't have been a boys' venture to which the girls may or may not be invited to join later. It should have been girls and boys together from the beginning. But since it wasn't, please get some women on board.

Sincerely, Douglas Crimp October Magazine

— Letter to the editor, OutWeek Magazine No. 5, July 24, 1989, p. 6.

[garadinervi]

Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, (weatherproof steel), 1981 [installed at Federal Plaza, New York, NY; removed March 15, 1989] [MoMA, New York, NY. © Richard Serra / ARS, New York]

Bibl.: Rosalind E. Krauss, Richard Serra / Sculpture, Edited and with an introduction by Laura Rosenstock, Essay by Douglas Crimp, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1986, p. 52 (pdf here)

[certainwoman]

”The recent emergence of this small coterie of conservative, openly gay media spokesmen, who virtually monopolize discussion of lesbian and gay issues in the American mainstream media, is one of the contradictory effects of the relative success of struggles for lesbian and gay visibility and rights in the United States. These journalists have achieved and maintained their power— whether naively.w cynically— by adopting positions on lesbian and gay issues that are commonsensical, simplistic, reductive, and often classically homophobic. Nevertheless, thanks no doubt to the novelty of openly gay men occupying positions of national prominence, they have become minor celebrities even among many lesbians and gay men, winning community service awards, speaking engagements, and lucrative publishing contracts with trade publishers for books aimed at a gay market. They dominate discussion in the lesbian and gay press as well, which has, during this same conjuncture, mainstreamed itself as just one more variant of consumer lifestyle journalism. Whereas formerly the lesbian and gay press— usually local, financially insecure, and politically engaged— played a central role in constructing community and solidarity through fostering open discussion among a wide range of voices, the current gay media seek to deliver a privileged segment of self-identified gay people to product advertisers.Their means are no different from those of the American media more generally: They focus on celebrity, fashion, and entertainment.Anything truly vital about queer life and subcultural expression is considered too marginal for the magazines’ imagined readers. Politics is equally off-limits, except a narrowly defined politics of assimilation, on the one hand, and, on the other, a politics of manufactured controversy, highly sensationalized to bolster circulation.”

Douglas Crimp, Sex and Sensibility, or Sense and Sexuality (1998) 

[instachron]

Browsing through the stacks of the New York Public Library where books on the general subject of transportation were shelved, I came across the book by Ed Ruscha entitled “Twentysix Gasoline Stations,” a work first published in 1963 and consisting of just that: 26 gasoline stations. I remember thinking how funny it was that the book had been miscatalogued and placed alongside books about automobiles, highways, and so forth. I knew, as the librarians evidently did not, that Ruscha’s book was a work of art and therefore belonged in the art division. But now, because of the considerations of postmodernism, I've changed my mind; I now know that Ed Ruscha’s books make no sense in relation to the categories of art according to which art books are catalogued in the library, and that is part of their achievement. The fact that there is nowhere in the present system of classification a place for “Twentysix Gasoline Stations” is an index of its radicalism with respect to established modes of thought.

Douglas Crimp [Writer, theorist and critic, b. 1944, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, lives in Rochester, New York.]

© Mitch Cullin

Site | Instagram | Other Tumblr

[sapphicscholar]

Douglas Crimp (1944-2019), “Mourning and Militancy”

Yesterday Douglas Crimp, a trailblazing art historian, critic, and AIDS activist, passed away. This sad news inspired me to go back and reread his 1989 essay, “Mourning and Militancy.” It’s available free and in full online at: http://queerartpractices.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/crimp, and I’d encourage everyone to read it, to sit with it, to let it sit with you. The essay may be 30 years old now, but it is no less relevant for its positioning in a particular historical moment. For those who don’t have time, I’ve included a few key excerpts below. There is much to say about Crimp’s scholarship and his advocacy, but his words feel like the greatest honor to his life and legacy.

“But for anyone living daily with the AIDS crisis, ruthless interference with our bereavement is as ordinary an occurrence as reading the New York Times. The violence we encounter is relentless, the violence of silence and omission almost as impossible to endure as the violence of unleashed hatred and outright murder. Because this violence also desecrates the memories of our dead, we rise in anger to vindicate them. For many of us, mourning becomes militancy.”

---

“Through the turmoil imposed by illness and death, the rest of society offers little support or even acknowledgment. On the contrary, we are blamed, belittled, excluded, derided. We are discriminated against, lose our housing and jobs, denied medical and life insurance. Every public agency whose job it is to combat the epidemic has been slow to act, failed entirely, or been deliberately counterproductive. We have therefore had to provide our own centers for support, care, and education and even to fund and conduct our own treatment research. We have had to rebuild our devastated community and culture, reconstruct our sexual relationships, reinvent our sexual pleasure. Despite great achievements in so short a time and under such adversity, the dominant media still pictures us only as wasting deathbed victims; we have therefore had to wage a war of representation, too.

“Frustration, anger, rage, and outrage, anxiety, fear, and terror, shame and guilt, sadness and despair--it is not surprising that we feel these things; what is surprising is that we often don’t. For those who feel only a deadening numbness or constant depression, militant rage may well be unimaginable, as again it might be for those who are paralyzed with fear, filled with remorse, or overcome with guilt. To decry these responses--our own form of moralism--is to deny the extent of the violence we have all endured; even more important, it is to deny a fundamental fact of psychic life: violence is also self-inflected.”

---

“There is no question that we must fight the unspeakable violence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves. But if we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society, then we may also be able to recognize--along with rage--our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”

[fundgruber]

What all of these places had in common are traits of pariah culture: they were located in out-of-the-way neighborhoods in quickly refurbished spaces with the palpable feeling of being susceptible to a bust at any moment. You always knew that their days were numbered, that they would be shut down by the law, burnt down, or just abandoned for a new and better place to dance.

Douglas Crimp - DISSS-CO (A Fragment) From "Before Pictures", a memoir of 1970s New York

[modalities-of-care]

‘To an ever-greater extent, our experience is governed by pictures,’ Crimp wrote in his landmark catalogue essay, published in 1977. He continued: ‘Next to these pictures, first-hand experience begins to retreat, to seem more and more trivial. While it once seemed that pictures had the function of interpreting reality, it now seems that they have usurped it.’

[notesonfilm1]

Fast Trip, Long Drop (Greg Bordowitz, 1993)

Fast Trip, Long Drop (Greg Bordowitz, 1993)

http://www.ubu.com/film/bordowitz_fast.html

How did I miss Fast Trip, Long Drop when it came out?Sara Diamond, listed as an executive producer was then a friend of mine. And indeed I knew several of the people listed in the credits. Perhaps it´s because at the time I was moving through Montreal, Vancouver, Norwich and was then in Coventry, where I´d moved to, partly hoping to escape some of what…