Misfitting Together

Abstract

Misfitting Together Jon Davies (bio) Before Pictures by Douglas Crimp. Brooklyn, NY: Dancing Foxes Press, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. 288, 151 illustrations. $39.00 cloth. This lavishly illustrated book charts art historian and critic Douglas Crimp's first decade in New York from his arrival in 1967 up to his curating the much-mythologized exhibition Pictures at Artists Space in 1977. While Crimp is perhaps best known for this project, his 1987 AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism special issue of October—where he worked as an editor for thirteen years (247)—and his 2002 Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics are invaluable volumes in queer cultural studies. Crimp has been a mentor to and influence on a generation of queer practitioners and thinkers, providing a model for how to gracefully articulate politics, aesthetics, and affect in times of crisis, famously declaring of AIDS that ultimately, "It is our promiscuity that will save us."1 A striking anecdote from his 1989 essay "Mourning and Militancy" that reappears in Before Pictures reads, In 1977, while I was visiting my family in Idaho, my father died unexpectedly. He and I had had a strained and increasingly distant relationship, and I was unable to feel or express my grief over his death. After the funeral I returned to New York for the opening of an exhibition I'd organized [Pictures] and resumed my usual life. [End Page 141] But within a few weeks a symptom erupted which to this day leaves a scar near my nose: my left tear duct became badly infected, and the resulting abscess grew to a golf-ball sized swelling that closed my left eye and completely disfigured my face. When the abscess finally burst, the foul-smelling pus oozed down my cheek like poison tears. I have never since doubted the force of the unconscious. (247) Crimp's memoir of his first decade in New York—which, not incidentally, also saw the emergence of a thriving gay sexual subculture—similarly seeks to retroactively return the body and its drives to his youthful intellectual engagement with the discourse of contemporary art. Often Crimp's juxtapositions of gay life and art world, personal and professional, are stark, suggesting that they can only partially be bridged with the passing of time and with recourse to the queer vocabulary that Crimp himself has helped develop. (David Velasco's review of Before Pictures in Artforum aptly observes that Crimp's writing itself seems to dance between "memoir" and "theory" from "paragraph to paragraph."2) The book is loosely structured by the neighborhoods and the specific addresses that Crimp lived in as he moved south from Spanish Harlem to Chelsea to Greenwich Village to Tribeca and finally to the Financial District apartment in the beautiful Bennett Building that he has inhabited since 1976. The first chapter discusses his escape from his family in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, in 1962, and his early art studies in New Orleans. His architecture education there, under the tutelage of a "spectacularly flitty" professor, toured him through ancient temples, Renaissance palazzi and local Gothic revival houses (9); these seemed to become spaces of imagination and possibility for him, glamorous alternative "homes" to the nuclear family he fled. This attention to the affective energies of private and public spaces inflects Crimp's narration of the built landscape of New York, whose changes greatly influenced the city's artistic production. Where Crimp lived played a determining role in which world he fell more into; his move from the Village to Tribeca, for example, came from a decision to "get serious about being an art critic" and "exchange … one scene for another" (148). When Crimp arrives in New York, he seems to effortlessly fall into an art world full of opportunity—a small scene marked by an openness and ease, which now seems as unimaginable as cheap, cavernous Manhattan lofts. Max's Kansas City, with the "tough-minded" male artists in the front room and the camp, [End Page 142] queer Warhol crowd in the back, is Crimp's spatial metaphor for his own split consciousness and youthful ambivalence about how gay and art worlds fit...