After Criticism New Responses to Art and Performance

by Butt, Gavin

• ISBN13: 9780631232841
• ISBN10: 0631232842
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-07-30
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

It has recently become apparent that criticism has fallen on hard times. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. This book explores contemporary approaches which have sought to renew criticism's energies in the wake of a 'theatrical turn' in recent visual arts practice, and the emergence of a 'performative' arts writing over the past decade or so. Issues addressed include the 'performing' of art's histories; the consequences for criticism of embracing boredom, distraction and other 'queer' forms of (in)attention; and the importance of exploring writerly process in responding to aesthetic experience. Bringing together newly commissioned work from the fields of art history, performance studies, and visual culture with the writings of contemporary artists, After Criticism provides a set of experimental essays which demonstrate how 'the critical' might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture.

Author Biography

Gavin Butt teaches in the Unit of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research interests encompass performance and performativity in the visual arts; queer theory; and queer cultures and their histories. He is the author of a book on gossip and homosexuality entitled Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the American Art World 1948–1963 (2005).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	vii
Notes on Contributors	viii
Series Editor's Preface	xi
Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism	1	(20)
Gavin Butt
Part I Performing Art's Histories	21	(58)
Solo Solo Solo	23	(25)
Rebecca Schneider
Binding to Another's Wound: Of Weddings and Witness	48	(17)
Jane Blocker
This is I	65	(14)
Niru Ratnam
Part II Distracted and Bored: The Critic Looks Elsewhere	79	(56)
The Trouble with Men, or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis	81	(20)
Jennifer Doyle
Utopia's Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johnston, and Queer Intermedia as System	101	(16)
Jose Esteban Munoz
Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture	117	(18)
Irit Rogoff
Part III Critical Response/Performative Process	135	(72)
Itinerant Improvisations: From ``My Favorite Things'' to an ``agency of night''	137	(19)
John Seth
The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language	156	(20)
Kate Love
A Transparent Lecture	176	(31)
Matthew Goulish
Selected Bibliography	207	(5)
Andrew Walby
Index	212