Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) (Patreon)

The art critic and queer theorist Douglas Crimp passed away a few days ago, on July 5, at the age of 74. Douglas was a professor of mine during the nineties, while I was completing a Masters in Art History at the University of Rochester, and we remained in intermittent contact in the years after that. I would be hard-pressed to fully express the extent to which my encounter with Douglas and his work helped shape my own thinking and critical practice; he was without a doubt one of the most influential professors in my life.

In curating the "Pictures" exhibition at Artists Space in 1977, and his subsequent work with the journal October, Crimp has rightly been seen as one of the foundational figures of poststructuralist / materialist art discourse in the 1980s and 90s, alongside colleagues such as Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Benjamin Buchloh, and the late Craig Owens. But whereas for most of those folks, these burgeoning questions of representation and identity were primarily theoretical, they had a direct political urgency for Crimp, as they coincided historically with the AIDS crisis. (It was the disease that claimed Owens' life so early on.) 

So for Douglas, questions of representation were never separate from concrete issues of power and survival. He was an aesthete, partial to modernist painting and experimental cinema, opera and modern dance, but battling in the streets with ACT-UP, and whereas some members of his October cohort (well, one in particular) found these commitments incompatible, for Douglas they were entirely coextensive. Barthes and Foucault were not just about taking pictures apart, like disassembling a car on the lawn. They were about understanding that all aspects of our lives are always already infused with social and political meaning. One ignores this at one's peril.

Douglas was a towering presence at Rochester, both literally (he was very tall) and figuratively. Some students, myself included, found him intimidating, but he could disarm you with a joke just as easily as he would tell you in seminar, straight up, that you were wrong about a textual point. The seminar I took with him on Freud and Foucault was formative for me for many reasons, not least of which was Douglas's frank admission that he was conducting the course in order to see whether these two competing theories of human desire could be reconciled. This was my first systematic introduction to Queer Theory, and I'll never forget one remark Prof. Crimp made that, while bruisingly hilarious, also brought the stakes of the course down to street level. "Of course masculinity is constantly failing to achieve the phallic ideal. I mean, just take a look around this room!"

When I left Rochester to apply to Berkeley, Douglas helped me. He was an early supporter of my interest in structural film at a time when most academics considered such work beneath contempt. Years later, I had the opportunity to review his lovely, timely book on Warhol's cinema, Our Kind of Movie. And we met for the first time in years when he came to speak at UH last year, pursuing a new scholarly passion, the experimental dance work of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. 

Douglas's final book, Before Pictures, is a bracing autobiography about gay life in New York in the 1970s, and as such it functions as cultural history as much as it traces the subject formation of a fascinating man. Read it, or his amazing essay "Mourning and Militancy," or check in again with On the Museum's Ruins, which has aged very well. And do read Masha Gessen's exquisite obituary in the New Yorker.

One final note: after leaving Rochester, I ran into Douglas at the Society for Film and Media Studies conference in Chicago. (I think he was there presenting early versions of his work on Warhol.) And when he saw me, he reached down, embraced me, and kissed my cheek. I was still an awkward young Texas boy, and never before had a grown man greeted me with such unabashed physical affection. And I knew that I was in the presence of a model of manhood I very much wanted to work to live up to.