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with Douglas Crimp

The following is excerpted from a conversation conducted on February 16, 2019 between Douglas Crimp and two of this volume’s editors, Joan Saab and Catherine Zuromskis. Our discussion drew from a set of general questions the editors had devised to reflect on the status of visual studies today, and from our responses to Crimp’s recent book Before Pictures (Crimp 2016). We also include passages from some of Crimp’s most influential works of scholarship in the field of visual studies that informed our conversation. Editorial brackets [] mark material supplemented by the volume editors both in the discussion and in the excerpts.

Q: Visual culture studies has long sought to connect the work of the academy to activism and culture outside the classroom or university setting. One of the things that have always defined your work in both form and content is the way you weave together the personal, the political, and the aesthetic. Can you talk about the ways in which your identity, both as an art critic and as a gay man, has informed your visual studies scholarship?

The introductory chapter of Before Pictures ends with the short description of Max’s Kansas City [i.e. the New York City art bar and restaurant that once counted Andy Warhol among its regulars].

Max’s had two rooms—a long, narrow one in the front along the length of the bar and a square one in the back dominated by a Dan Flavin sculpture hung above a booth in one corner bathing the room in florescent red. The back room where we always went was the haunt of the latter‐day Factory crowd … To get to the back room, I had to traverse the front one, where I would see and briefly greet some of the artist‐regulars I knew by then. I was always a bit self‐conscious about not stopping to spend time with them, but the queer goings‐on in the back were what drew me to Max’s … The front and the back rooms at Max’s mirrored divisions in the art world that were fairly pronounced in those days, divisions between tough‐minded Minimal and Conceptual art and the glam performance scene, between real men and swishes, to use Warhol’s word. Of course, we now know that the divisions were not so hard and fast, but in those days most artists wanted to keep up a front, even in the supposedly anything‐goes—and goes together—Max’s. My own life and aesthetic attitudes reflected the ambivalence and fears that were still operative about homosexuality, and about whether art could be a manly enough profession and about what kinds of art qualified as manly. (Crimp 2016, 14)

I use the front room and the back room as a kind of metaphor for the negotiation I felt I had to make as a young art critic and as a queer person in the art world. When I wrote “Getting the Warhol We Deserve” (Crimp 1999), I was already thinking about that scene. Even though it has that title, I wasn’t yet thinking of a visual and cultural studies project about Andy Warhol, or about Andy Warhol’s films, but what I projected in that essay was something about this queer milieu that I experienced at the tail end in Max’s Kansas City. [That milieu] involved Warhol centrally, of course, and the Warhol scene—although, by the time I started to go, Warhol wasn’t going there anymore because he had been shot. The back room consisted of the Warhol scene, but also the Theatre of the Ridiculous and other underground figures—musicians, filmmakers, and so on—and I was thinking, let’s look at what a queer New York was like, the one that I came into, the one that was, in some sense, welcoming me in the second or third year after I came to New York. The new queer world I found at that point differed from what I thought I might find, which was some sort of replication of what I had encountered in New Orleans in the years before moving to New York. There’s a direct autobiographical element in my theorizing about how we could “get the Warhol we deserve,” or about how we could think of a project that would illuminate a certain cultural milieu that has never been interrogated as a single phenomenon or as a series of related phenomena.

In the years following publication of [Simon] Watney’s short essay [“The Warhol Effect”], what Watney calls the “ongoing critical intelligence and sensibility of the Warhol effect” has continued to exert its pressure on us to move away from the narrower prerogatives of art history and toward the broader inquiry of cultural studies. And in so doing, perhaps a lasting Warhol effect has been to make possible expansive approaches to contemporary art more generally, or at least to those contemporary art practices that insist on their articulation with broader social practices. (Crimp 1999, 50)

“Getting the Warhol We Deserve” was an immediate response to the attack on visual studies carried out by October. But in its first drafts the essay didn’t include a section on Warhol. Then Hal Foster’s Return to the Real came out, and that’s how I ended up with that example of declaring stakes in the argument that you are making: what is in it for you, and why do you want to make that argument?

If, as Foster claims, “the shift from art history to visual culture is marked by a shift in principles of coherence—from a history of style, or an analysis of form, to a genealogy of the subject,” the real significance of this move is that this subject—the subject constructed in representation, the viewing subject, the popular audience, the fan, indeed the other—cannot be theorized from a position outside that genealogy. The subject of the discourse, like its object, cannot be exempt from the questions of historicity and relationality (of self and other) that are raised by the theory of subjectivity itself. This does not—in fact cannot—entail assuming a coherent subject position in advance. Rather it means recognizing the contingency, the instability of one’s own position, the necessarily situated place from which one speaks, the fragmentation and partiality of one’s vision. And more, it means recognizing how one’s position is constituted, through what exclusions it is secured… When Foster argues that a shift from art history to visual culture—or what I insist on calling cultural studies—entails a loss of history, what he seems really to mean is the loss of art history, the historicity of artistic forms as they are understood through the deferred action of avant‐garde practices in the present. But far from abandoning history, cultural studies works to supplant this reified art history with other histories … What is at stake is not history per se, which is a fiction in any case, but what history, whose history, history to what purpose. (Crimp 1999, 57–8, 60)

If we can agree that meaning is not just something that is there in the work to be ferreted out, but rather something that we are adding to the work through our interpretations, then we should ask why we want to add this or that thing. What does it do for us? What does it do for the politics that we inhabit?

Very shortly after finishing that essay I began working on what came to be the Warhol book: “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol (Crimp 2012). At that time, queer theory was changing in various ways. My working title for the book was “Queer before Gay.” The idea was that the archaeology I was doing of that 1960s queer world that I came into contained a lesson we needed to learn about queer culture prior to the moment when it gets fixed as a gay rights movement. It’s a shift from culture to politics for one thing, or from “culture” in the restrictive sense to “politics” in the restrictive sense. Much of the work in gay and lesbian studies, for example, had been a chronicle of the gay movement as a predecessor to the gay liberation movement, and then to gay liberation itself. So, over the course of writing the Warhol book, I became less involved in questions of visual studies and more involved in issues of queer theory. I wanted to think about the Warhol films as cultural objects that I could read in a way that informed my own autobiography, my thinking about the world I came to inhabit. So, [as is true of Before Pictures], there are a number of moments in the Warhol book that are very much memoiristic.

Q: The genesis of visual culture studies was historically and conceptually grounded in postmodern theory and aesthetics. In a moment where many scholars are marking the end of postmodernism as a set of historical conditions and practices, can you speak to the ongoing urgency of visual culture studies as an aesthetic, social, and political project? Which concepts or principles of the field have you found most consistently useful or valuable over time?

Something that was absolutely central to postmodern theory was theorizing subjectivity.

That is one reason why an art such as [Jack] Smith’s—and Warhol’s—matters, why I want to make of it the art I need and the art I deserve—not because it reflects or refers to a historical gay identity and thus serves to confirm my own now, but because it disdains and defies the coherence and stability of all sexual identity. That to me is the meaning of queer, and it is a meaning we need now, in all its historical richness, to counter both the normalization of sexuality and the art historical reification of avant‐garde genealogy. Where will it come from, if not from cultural studies? (Crimp 1999, 64)

In the present moment we are in this terrible situation where something called “identity politics” is standing for what we would have called “vulgar identity politics.” Postmodern theory was critical of a stable subject, whatever the terms, whether it be race, class, gender, sexuality, or whatever. “Mario Montez, for Shame” was written as a way of thinking about singular subjectivities. With Mario Montez, it would probably be a trans identity, though that wasn’t yet the terminology in the discourse. That essay was a way of thinking about identifications and identities and disidentifications and so forth.

Warhol found the means to make the people of his world visible to us without making them objects of our knowledge. The knowledge of a world that his films give us is not a knowledge of the other for the self. Rather, what I see when, say, I see Mario Montez in Screen Test No. 2, is a performer in the moment of becoming exposed such that he becomes, as Warhol said, “so for real.” … It is our encounter, on the one hand, with the absolute difference of another, his or her “so‐for‐realness,” and, on the other hand, with the other’s shame, both the shame that extracts his or her “so‐for‐realness” from the already “for real” performativity of Warhol’s performers, and the shame that we accept as also ours, but curiously also ours alone. I am thus not “like” Mario, but the distinctiveness that is revealed in Mario invades me—”floods me” to use [Eve] Sedgwick’s words—and my own distinctiveness is revealed simultaneously. I, too, feel exposed. (Crimp 2012, 35–6)

I feel so hemmed in by the current attack on identity politics since the 2016 election. What do they mean by “identity politics”? Is it the fact that we are actually paying attention to serious issues like race? We know that there are people who would like to get rid of that as a category of thinking. But at the same time this rhetoric doesn’t allow for any kind of nuance, any kind of actual theory of subjectivity. For me, the real connection between what I was trying to do as early as my AIDS writing (Crimp 1988, Crimp and Rolston 1990, Crimp 2002), when I brought my own very intimate experience into my writing, was challenging myself to think hard about how to present myself as a subject of my writing.

Q: Can you speak a bit about crossing genres in your work, bringing that intimate experience into the writing of your most recent book, Before Pictures? How does this approach inform your process and the reception of the book?

A: A lot of people were curious as to how I managed to get from the anecdotal to the critical in such a smooth way in Before Pictures and I have no answer to that question. That book was so much about the pleasure of writing. And it was a pleasure that came from being freed from having to make a particular argument, I suppose. I could go where the writing took me; and sometimes that meant putting things aside and doing a whole lot of research on Watergate, for example, and that was fun! It was fun to do that research, it was fun to think what I could make out of it, and somehow that resulted in a kind of smooth flow of the prose between very different subject matters. I always knew what personal stories there were that chronologically belonged to a particular chapter’s given subject, whether the painters Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly, my stint as a reviewer for Art News, or disco.

You know, one thing that is missing from most reviews of Before Pictures is attention to the pictures. I’m always surprised by this because the book is so lavishly illustrated, and because every one of those pictures is the picture I wanted. I think the pictures tell the story too. You can almost flip through the book and read it visually. I suppose it is similar to the problem in the reviewing that many people seem to be hampered in their understanding of it by thinking of it simply as a memoir and comparing it to other memoirs and not noticing that it’s also art criticism, a picture book, a hybrid. But I don’t have much to complain about with Before Pictures. It’s a book I’m very happy with.