Beauty and the status of contemporary criticism

October

Volumn , Issue 104, 2003, Pages 115-130

  Hudson, Suzanne Perling ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61249472089     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/016228703322031730     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. Arlene Croce, "Discussing the Undiscussable," The New Yorker (December 26, 1994-January 2, 1995), pp. 54-60.
2. For an in-depth discussion of the NEA, see Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America, ed. Brian Wallis, Marianne Weems, and Philip Yenawine (New York: New York University Press, 1999);
3. Jane Alexander's Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2001);
4. and Michael Brenson, Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America (New York: New Press, 2001).
5. Hilton Kramer, "Notes and Comments," The New Criterion 13, no. 6 (February 1995), p. 3.
6. Homi Bhabha, "Dance This Diss Around," Artforum (April 1995), pp. 19-20.
7. Joyce Carol Oates, "Confronting Head-on the Face of the Afflicted," New York Times, February 19, 1995, sec. 2, p. 21.
8. Peter Schjeldahl, "The Good German," The New Yorker (March 4, 2002), pp. 84-85.
9. Peter Schjeldahl, "Notes on Beauty," Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics, ed. Bill Beckley with David Shapiro (New York: Allworth Press, 1998), pp. 53-59.
10. Hal Foster, "Semblance According to Gerhard Richter," Raritan 23, no. 3 (Winter 2003), p. 175.
11. Dave Hickey, "Enter the Dragon," The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art issues. Press, 1993), p. 13.
12. As quoted in Carol S. Vance, "The War on Culture," Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS, ed. Ted Gott (Melbourne: Thames & Hudson, 1994), p. 94.
13. Michael Rush, "In Santa Fe, Searching for the Meaning of Beauty," New York Times, July 8, 2001, sec. 2, p. 31.
14. Tim Rollins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: A.R.T., 1993), p. 14.
15. "I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution. All the ideological apparatuses are. replicating themselves, because that's the way culture works. So if I function as a virus, an impostor, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions." Gonzalez-Torres in A. Reinhardt, J. Kosuth, F. Gonzalez-Torres, Symptoms of Interference, Conditions of Possibility (London: Camden Arts Centre, 1994), p. 76.
16. Gonzalez-Torres's billboard projects-importantly sited outside the gallery or museum context-make especially clear the depth of his engagement with questions of the public and a public for his practice. "Untitled" of 1991, a printed billboard displayed in twenty-four locations around Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs in 1992, takes as its point of reference a 1986 case outlawing homosexual sodomy, although the image itself (an empty bed bearing the imprints and indexes of its now absent inhabitants) is decidedly ambiguous. A bed, the site of much legislation and censorship, is here rendered vacant-fluid in its meaning and open in its connotations-thus offering an oblique space of mnemonic identification for those who chose to engage with it. Other billboard projects were considerably less equivocal, however, as in 1989 Gonzalez-Torres had designed a billboard for New York City's Sheridan Square for the twentieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. Located not even a block from the site of the Stonewall Inn, this project hovered as a grave marker, or alternately and equally a television screen, a black rectangle with a running white caption across its lower register: "People with AIDS coalition 1985 Police Harassment 1969 Oscar Wilde 1895 Supreme Court 1986 Harvey Milk 1977 March on Washington 1987 Stonewall Rebellion 1969." Events that may be said to comprise a history of recent homosexuality trace a century of disenfranchisement and regimes of repression in no particular chronological order, refusing narrative resolution and ideological recuperation. For another related articulation of the stakes of community politics, see Gonzalez-Torres's work in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
17. As cited in Nancy Spector, Felix Gonzalez-Torres (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), p. 15.
18. Simon Watney, "Art From the Pit: Some Reflections on Monuments, Memory and AIDS," Don't Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS, p. 61.
19. As Hal Foster has suggested, as is the case with much late eighties art, such transgression often effectively served to strengthen the law rather than to profitably break it. See his The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 153-68.
20. As cited in Spector, p. 73.
21. Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston, AIDS Demographics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990), p. 16.