of visual culture will not be overwhelmed by programs, requirements, and bureaucracy. At the same time, I feel that the contemporary moment in the humanities is one that renders many of the institutions of academic research and teaching quite precarious. If by “traditional disciplinary institutions” you mean art history, I have never felt that visual studies was the enemy of old‐fashioned art history. On the contrary, I have always viewed it as a necessary supplement to the study of works of visual art, if a sometimes “dangerous supplement” (to use Derrida’s terms). Dangerous only because it invites secondary reflection on what it means to see something as a work of art in the first place, rather than taking for granted a prescribed routine. In that sense, I think of visual culture as often allied with the artistic producers, the practitioners who create objects and experiences for us, just as much as with the historians and curators who frame its consumption. My own work has led me deeper into the foundations of art history through its more adventurous ambitions; for example, the project of an “image science” or general iconology would track the migrations of both verbal and visual metaphors across culture. Seeing through Madness contains a crucial chapter on the Mnemosyne Bilderatlas that shows how Aby Warburg’s grand project of a universal atlas of human emotions (the Pathosformel, “pathos formula”) was somewhere between a symptom and a therapeutic practice for managing his own mental suffering. Warburg’s atlas was capable of embracing Botticelli’s nymphs, Mussolini’s coronation, and the launching of the first zeppelin. What does it mean to want to “see it all,” to capture totalities with visual technologies? Georges Didi‐Huberman has suggested that Warburg’s effort to “set art history in motion” might have unleashed “something dangerous, something I would call symptomatic.”
To create a knowledge‐montage was … to reject the matrices of intelligibility. To break through the age‐old guard rails. This movement[,] with its new ‘allure’ of knowledge, created the possibility of vertigo … The image is not a closed field of knowledge; it is a whirling, centrifugal field. It is not a “field of knowledge” like any other. (Didi‐Huberman 2004, 12–13)
I suppose, therefore, that my message to visual culture studies in its relation to traditional disciplinary institutions is this: let’s stick together and learn from each other, and repel the barbarians and bean counters invading the upper reaches of academia. The heady days when visual culture was deemed worthy of denunciation by the editors of October magazine are long gone. We should be grateful that they took us seriously enough to attack us and helped in this way to launch us as a mildly insurrectionary movement.
Q: Visual culture studies has long sought to connect the work of the academy to activism and public scholarship outside the classroom or a university setting. How do you see the future of visual culture studies as a form of political action?
A: I am all for visual culture studies serving as a source of ideas and tactics for the critical exposure of the spectacle. But I don’t see it as uniquely positioned as a form of political action—not any more than other disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. We need historians, philosophers, literary scholars, art critics, anthropologists, game theorists and designers, political scientists, psychologists, queer theorists, disability studies, sound studies, editors, curators, environmentalists, and outsider artists to mobilize around the oldest objective of the humanities: to stay human while we are finding out what that could mean for the survival of our species—and many others as well.
References
1 Blake, William. 1982. “Descriptions of the Last Judgment.” In The Complete Poetry of William Blake, edited by David Erdman, 552–4. New York: Doubleday.
2 Didi‐Huberman, Georges. 2004. “Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies).” Foreword to Michaud, Philippe‐Alain, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, translated by Sophie Hawkes, 7–19. New York: Zone Books.
3 Forensic Architecture. n.d. Eyal Weizman > Forensic Architecture. https://forensic‐architecture.org/about/team/member/eyal‐weizman.
4 Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs‐Merrill.
5 Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
6 Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction.” In W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
7 Mirzoeff, Nicholas. 2011. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
8 Wilden, Anthony. 1972. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. London: Tavistock Publications.
Chapter 4 A Conversation
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
