Douglas Crimp

Douglas Crimp (born 1944) is an American professor in art history based at the University of Rochester.

Biography

Born in Idaho, Crimp went to Tulane University in New Orleans on a scholarship to study art history.^[1] His career started after moving to New York in 1967, where he worked as an art critic, writing for different magazines such as Art News. In 1968 Crimp started working at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as a curatorial assistant, and later on he worked briefly for the couturier Charles James, helping him write his memoir.^[2]

Between 1971-1976 Crimp taught at The School of Visual Arts before enrolling graduate school at the Graduate Center at CUNY where he studied contemporary art and theory with Rosalind Krauss as the teacher. In 1977 he was hired to be the managing editor of the journal October, that had been founded by Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe in 1976. He was quickly appointed to be a co-editor, and he was a central figure in the journal until he quit in 1990.^[3]

Shortly after he left October, Crimp started teaching in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester, where he later has been promoted to be the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History.

Overview

Crimp has been an important critic in the development of postmodern art theory. In 1977 he curated the influential exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, presenting the early work of Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, Phillip Smith, Troy Brauntuch, and Robert Longo. Two years later he elaborated the discussion of postmodern artistic strategies in an essay with the same title in October, including Cindy Sherman in what was to be known as The Pictures Generation. In his 1980 October essay On the Museum's Ruins he applies the ideas of Foucault to an analysis of museums, describing them as an "institution of confinement" comparable to the asylums and prisons that are the subjects of Foucault's investigations.^[4] His most important work on postmodernist art and institutional critique was published in the 1993 book, On the Museum’s Ruins.

In 1987 Crimp edited a special AIDS-issue of October, entitled AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. In his introduction to the edition Crimp argued for "cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS and its cultural consequences."^[5] During this time he was an active member of the AIDS-activist group ACT UP in New York. Mourning and Militancy (1989) discusses the connections between the artistic representations of mourning and the politic interventions of militancy. Crimp argues that these two opposing positions should be allowed to co-exist.^[6] In 1990 he published a book entitled AIDS Demo Graphics on the activist esthetics of ACT UP together with Adam Rolston. Crimp’s work on AIDS has been seen as an important contribution to the development of queer theory in the US. In 2002 he published all his previous work on AIDS in the book Melancholia and Moralism – Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics.

Crimp is currently working with two book projects, one memoir with the working title Before Pictures, on the relationship between the art world and the gay world in New York in the 1960s and 1970s; and one book of essays on Andy Warhol’s films entitled Our Kind of Movie.^[7]

Bibliography

Books by Crimp

• AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (ed.), MIT Press, 1988.
• AIDS Demo Graphics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.
• On the Museum's Ruins. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993.
• Melancholia and Moralism - Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

Interviews

• Tina Takemoto: The Melancholia of AIDS: Interview with Douglas Crimp Art Journal, 2003.
• Mathias Danbolt: Front Room Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp in Trikster - Nordic Queer Journal #2, 2008.

References

1. ^ "Sarah Schulman Interviews Douglas Crimp". ACT UP Oral History Project. http://www.actuporalhistory.org/interviews/images/crimp.pdf. Retrieved 2008-09-27. 
2. ^ "Mathias Danbolt, Front Room – Back Room: An Interview with Douglas Crimp". Trikster – Nordic Queer Journal #2, 2008. http://trikster.net/2/crimp/1.html. Retrieved 2008-09-26. 
3. ^ "ibid.". http://trikster.net/2/crimp/3.html. 
4. ^ Andrea Fraser in Ana María Guasch, Joseba Zulaika, Learning from the Bilbao Guggenheim, University of Nevada Press, 2005, p39. ISBN 1877802506
5. ^ David Deitcher in Julie Ault, Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, Philip Yenawine, Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, NYU Press, 1999, p106. ISBN 0814793517
6. ^ Gabriele Griffin, Representations of HIV and AIDS: Visibility Blue/s, Manchester University press, 2001, p16. ISBN 0719047110
7. ^ "Danbolt, Op.cit.". http://trikster.net/2/crimp/1.html. 

External links

• Homepage at University of Rochester
• Biography

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Name	Crimp, Douglas
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Date of birth	1944
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