Policing Public Sex by Dangerous Bedfellows

I was pleasantly surprised to rediscover our exchange as a moment of connection. Looking back on this email exchange now, I can see clearly that Crimp was in fact patient and quietly generous in his direct replies to my questions, which were in any case hardly foolish. 4 I remember feeling terribly hurt that his reply to my long email was short, to the point, and seemed to disagree with many of my propositions, which I have since considered extremely naïve. I wanted to know if ACT UP’s protest in 1988 against Nicholas Nixon’s photographic portraits of people with AIDS at the Museum of Modern Art in New York had been informed by art historical precedents, such as Joyce Kozloff holding her baby in front of Picasso’s Guernica during a Guerilla Art Action Group protest against the Vietnam War in January 1970.

I thought that I understood clearly my own memory of emailing Crimp with my own set of extensive questions in February 2015, when I was starting out on my doctoral project, a psychoanalytic reassessment of art and the AIDS epidemic in the United States of America. The old proposal reveals the gaps in Crimp’s memory, an archival trace that reshapes a narrative of history. Since I hadn’t used that term in the original essay, he wondered, what had transpired in the meantime? When had I begun to think about postmodernism? Was it through my association with other October critics such as Craig Owens? Did I take the term from architectural discourse, where by 1978 it was used fairly regularly? I couldn’t remember. 1 In a footnote he describes receiving an e-mail from “a British graduate student” asking how he came to use “postmodernist” to describe the artists in Pictures in the revised version of his 1977 catalogue essay, published in October in 1979: 2 Crimp was “pleasantly surprised” to discover reference to “the rubric of postmodernism” in this proposal, an indication that he had been thinking of art in such terms already in 1976. In the opening paragraph of the chapter on disco in Before Pictures, Douglas Crimp writes of a folder of miscellaneous project papers he has kept from the 1970s, which includes an old, unpursued book proposal on the topic of contemporary art since Minimalism.

Policing Public Sex by Dangerous Bedfellows