Misfitting Together Jon Davies Jon.Andrew.Davies@Gmail.Com

Criticism

Volume 60 | Issue 1 Article 9

Misfitting Together Jon Davies [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Davies, Jon () "Misfitting Together," Criticism: Vol. 60 : Iss. 1 , Article 9. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol60/iss1/9 MISFITTING This lavishly illustrated book charts art historian and critic Douglas TOGETHER Crimp’s first decade in New York Jon Davies from his arrival in 1967 up to his curating the much-mythologized Before Pictures by Douglas Crimp. exhibition Pictures at Artists Space Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes in 1977. While Crimp is perhaps Press, and Chicago: University of best known for this project, his Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 288, 151 1987 AIDS: Cultural Analysis/ illustrations. $39.00 cloth. Cultural Activism special issue of October—where he worked as an editor for thirteen years (247)—and his 2002 Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics are invaluable volumes in queer cultural studies. Crimp has been a mentor to and influence on a gen- eration of queer practitioners and thinkers, providing a model for how to gracefully articulate politics, aesthetics, and affect in times of cri- sis, famously declaring of AIDS that ultimately, “It is our promiscuity that will save us.”1 A striking anecdote from his 1989 essay “Mourning and Militancy” that reappears in Before Pictures reads,

In 1977, while I was visit- ing my family in Idaho, my father died unexpectedly. He and I had had a strained and increasingly distant relation- ship, and I was unable to feel or express my grief over his death. After the funeral I returned to New York for the opening of an exhibition I’d organized [Pictures] and resumed my usual life.

But within a few weeks a as he moved south from Spanish symptom erupted which to Harlem to Chelsea to Greenwich this day leaves a scar near Village to Tribeca and finally to the my nose: my left tear duct Financial District apartment in the became badly infected, and beautiful Bennett Building that he the resulting abscess grew to has inhabited since 1976. The first a golf-ball sized swelling that chapter discusses his escape from closed my left eye and com- his family in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, pletely disfigured my face. in 1962, and his early art studies When the abscess finally in New Orleans. His architecture burst, the foul-smelling pus education there, under the tutelage oozed down my cheek like of a “spectacularly flitty” professor, poison tears. I have never toured him through ancient tem- since doubted the force of the ples, Renaissance palazzi and local unconscious. (247) Gothic revival houses (9); these seemed to become spaces of imagi- Crimp’s memoir of his first nation and possibility for him, decade in New York—which, not glamorous alternative “homes” to incidentally, also saw the emer- the nuclear family he fled. This gence of a thriving gay sexual attention to the affective energies subculture—similarly seeks to ret- of private and public spaces inflects roactively return the body and its Crimp’s narration of the built land- drives to his youthful intellectual scape of New York, whose changes engagement with the discourse of greatly influenced the city’s artis- contemporary art. Often Crimp’s tic production. Where Crimp juxtapositions of gay life and lived played a determining role in art world, personal and profes- which world he fell more into; his sional, are stark, suggesting that move from the Village to Tribeca, they can only partially be bridged for example, came from a decision with the passing of time and with to “get serious about being an art recourse to the queer vocabulary critic” and “exchange . . . one scene that Crimp himself has helped for another” (148). When Crimp develop. (David Velasco’s review arrives in New York, he seems to of Before Pictures in Artforum aptly effortlessly fall into an art world observes that Crimp’s writing itself full of opportunity—a small scene seems to dance between “memoir” marked by an openness and ease, and “theory” from “paragraph to which now seems as unimaginable paragraph.”2) as cheap, cavernous Manhattan The book is loosely structured lofts. Max’s Kansas City, with by the neighborhoods and the spe- the “tough-minded” male artists cific addresses that Crimp lived in in the front room and the camp, ON BEFORE PICTURES 143 queer Warhol crowd in the back, throughout: he scrutinizes his past is Crimp’s spatial metaphor for his writing in an effort to grasp the own split consciousness and youth- biases behind it, while also com- ful ambivalence about how gay menting on various editorial indig- and art worlds fit (14), or rather nities he has suffered. how they were always “misfitting The cast of characters that together,” to borrow a chapter title “misfit together” through Crimp’s from his 2012 book “Our Kind of retrospective lens include his for- Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol. mative encounters with the “drap- Crimp’s present-day attempt to ery” of conceptual artist Daniel “read” desire into his early career, Buren and of couturier Charles to use memoir to limn the divide James (32), as well as grappling “between the art world and the with the venerable Agnes Martin, queer world” (15)—a project that who dominates the essay “Back to remains tantalizingly unfinished— the Turmoil.” The chapter “Art is matched by his sensitivity to the News Parties” centers on John power of fiction. Early on he quotes Ashbery and his coterie, for whom Rosalyn Deutsche on history as a Surrealism was a key touchstone narrative fiction, “an image of life and whose more personal, lyrical that is and can only be imaginary” writing style provided an alternate (25). This attempt to reconcile “art” path. Crimp notes, “I was deter- and “gay” becomes all the more mined to find a critical position moving for its impossibility and that circumvented both the poetic the tenuousness of the intersections approach associated with Art News he finds. Each distinct essay seems and the Greenbergian formalism to try on a different strategy for a that held sway among many of the queer reconciliation of serious and Artforum critics. . . .” (103). “Hotel decorative, Apollo and Dionysius, des Artistes” chronicles Crimp’s classicism and romanticism, real obsessive following of Watergate man and swish, front room and while sunning on Fire Island, back. Crimp’s mind/body split is and also reveals that Ellsworth nicely captured in “Disss-co (A Kelly was into “shrimping,” or Fragment)” where he admits to toe-sucking (122)—an image now thinking at the disco, analyzing his seared into my mind. Here Crimp experience rather than submitting reflects on how power differences whole-heartedly to it (192). His animated art and gay scenes alike, dancing body never fully conquers with Kelly a key participant in his overactive mind (199). Crimp’s both Crimp’s sexual life and in his investment in looking anew is art-world pursuits. (These essays also evident in the intensity of the tend to end with a terse conclu- literal re-reading he undertakes sion where the figures that had 144 Jon Davies productively “misfit” are made to know or possess the city beyond our fit together more overtly.) immediate experience of it in the In addition to urban and archi- moment of use. . . . We glimpse the tectural spaces, the body is central city in pieces, in the background, in to Crimp’s memoir as the nexus our peripheral vision—and in rec- between his passion for danc- ollection” (181). ing—as visible in “Disss-co (A In his final essay, “Pictures, Fragment),” inspired by his notes Before and After,” Crimp is for an unwritten essay on disco haunted by his omission of Cindy from the mid-1970s—and his ini- Sherman from the exhibition. Her tiation into balletomania via fellow attention to the city as a space of critic Craig Owens. As Crimp’s self-fashioning, fantasy and threat interest in performance comes to in her Untitled Film Stills resonates the fore in the second half of Before with Crimp’s memoir’s main pre- Pictures, the two solitudes find a occupations. Part of his retrospec- greater harmony. “Action Around tive look at his youth, then, entails the Edges” begins with his love imagining how the exhibition for Yvonne Rainer and the Grand Pictures could have reflected him- Union dance group, before discuss- self—and the “back room” part of ing how Manhattan’s de-industri- his life—and the streets of New alization in the early 1970s shaped York more than it did. In this chap- artists’ works ranging from Peter ter he goes into detail about the Hujar’s “cruising pictures” (156) research and curating of Pictures, and Louise Lawler’s Birdcalls to the writing and revision of his the large-scale Projects: Pier 18 that accompanying essay, and the proj- saw twenty-seven male artists such ect’s storied legacy as it mutated as Dan Graham and Vito Acconci from small exhibition to bellwether perform on one of the west-side of a broader “artistic tendency” piers, which were a hotbed of gay (275). Before Pictures’s concluding sex, debauchery, and “danger.” words suggest that the New York These heterosexual male perfor- art scene between 1967–1977 then mances inadvertently echoed gay seemed “small enough to seem cruising rituals, rerouting a sub- fully comprehensible” in a way that cultural aura of risk toward often “no longer holds true.” He contin- macho aesthetic ends. Crimp jux- ues, “And because it is so clearly not taposes Gordon Matta-Clark’s true now, it seems unlikely that it iconic 1975 Day’s End at Pier 52 could really have been true then” with photographer Alvin Baltrop’s (278). candid photos of sex at the piers, George Balanchine and balle- and suggests that Joan Jonas’s 1973 rina Suzanne Farrell are the focus of Songdelay “thwart[s] our desire to the chapter “Agon.” The “oblique ON BEFORE PICTURES 145 angle” of the seats from which he precisely the life-blood of queer and Owens watched Balanchine’s communities, built as they were ballets (231) becomes another spa- on desire and fabulation. (Think tial metaphor: not only modern of the gay male Hollywood fan- and postmodern but “front” and dom that focused on larger-than- “back” become unmoored and life female stars or the ambiguous unstable through a change of per- pleasures of lesbian pulp novels in spective. Crimp concludes, with the postwar era.) Queer cultures the help of Derrida, that “aesthet- have not typically sought to reveal ics is not about what is intrinsic and or purge illusionism but instead to what is extrinsic to the work of art recognize—with both adoration but rather is about the impossibility and shade—how it can be decisive of distinguishing between the two” for world-making and psychic sur- (235). Performance, and dance in vival. Crimp’s self-historicization particular, open up new pleasures in Before Pictures lovingly perfor Crimp, and the erotics he finds forms the very tensions it unpacks in Balanchine’s ballets are brought and, in doing so, opens up fruitful to bear on a more analytic artwork avenues for future fleshing-outs like Jack Goldstein’s film A Ballet of the dynamics between the sex- Shoe (1975), which he discusses in ual, the social, the formal, and the “Pictures, Before and After.” aesthetic. One aspect of the irreconcilabil- ity of the art and gay worlds that Jon Davies is a curator and writer. He is Crimp does not explicitly take up currently a PhD candidate in Art History at Stanford University. One of his research is the gendered tension between a interests is video art's capacity for intimacy modernist narrative of art history and gossip, and how it catalyzed artists' dominated by debate over prece- sexual and social experimentation in the dence and influence—the domi- 1970s–80s. nant paradigm that shaped Crimp’s approach—and the messier, more labyrinthine circuits that queer NOTES cultural lineages follow. How 1. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have might the ethos of the Cockettes, Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October for example, trouble a teleology of 43 (Winter 1987): 253. modernist painting? Similarly, the 2. David Velasco, “Dance, Memory,” Artforum 55, no. 7 (March 2017), https:// bugaboo to be vanquished in “seri- www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=2017 ous” art at the time was illusionism 03&id=66674315–16. (129), which one could argue was