For its thirty-third issue, InVisible Culture1 invites scholarly articles and creative works that engage with the legacy of Douglas Crimp (1944-2019). Douglas was foundational to InVisible Culture and its institutional home, the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. The first issue of InVisible Culture included his essay “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” in which Douglas used Warhol’s gayness as an interpretative hinge while also advocating for the importance of cultural studies’ contributions to art criticism. Besides his profound influence on art scholarship, Douglas’s pedagogy reverberates through the work of those he taught and mentored in various academic and art institutions. We invite contributors to reflect on the myriad ways in which Douglas’s legacy impacts the pasts, presents, and futures of art history and cultural criticism.
Throughout his career, Douglas made crucial contributions to art theory, queer theory, and cultural studies. In 1977, Douglas curated the seminal exhibition Pictures at New York’s Artists Space, which established him as one of postmodern art’s major interlocutors. He continued to spur critical engagements with art institutions and postmodernism with his many essays in October and his 1993 book On the Museum’s Ruins . During the rise of the AIDS crisis, Douglas turned to what he called “cultural activism”; his writings later collected in Melancholia and Moralism (2002) helped galvanize a generation of queer activists. Further, he wrote influentially on Warhol, the New York art scene of the 1970s, modern and contemporary dance, and film. Alongside his conceptual and critical acuity, one distinctive feature of Douglas’s work is the way he integrated the self and personal experience into his writing—a trait he most fully realized in his 2016 book Before Pictures .
As well as engaging with Douglas’s oeuvre, we invite contributors to engage with artist Louise Lawler’s question, “What would Douglas Crimp say?,” published in October earlier this year, by reflecting on how his scholarship and activism may help us make sense of the present historical conjuncture.
- 1. InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.