After Criticism

New Responses to Art and Performance

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Edited by Gavin Butt

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published August 2004, 232 pages, paper

ISBN 0631232842

It has recently become apparent that criticism is in trouble. Either commodification is deemed to have killed it off, or it has become institutionally routine. This book explores contemporary approaches that 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 that demonstrate how the critical might live on as a vital and efficacious force within contemporary culture.

Contents

Series Editor's Preface
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Gavin Butt
Part I: Performing Art's Histories:
1. Solo Solo Solo: Rebecca Schneider (Brown University)
2. Binding to Another's Wound: Of Weddings and Witness: Jane Blocker (University of Minnesota)
3. This Is I: Niru Ratnam (STORE)
Part II: Distracted and Bored: the critic looks elsewhere:
4. The Trouble with Men, or, Sex, Boredom, and the Work of Vaginal Davis: Jennifer Doyle (University of California, Riverside)
5. Utopia's Seating Chart: Ray Johnson, Jill Johntson and Queer Intermedia as System: José Esteban Muñoz (Tisch School of Art)
6. Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture: Irit Rogoff (Goldsmith College)
Part III: Critical Response/Performative Process:
7. Itinerant Improvisations: from ‘My Favorite Things’ to an ‘agency of night’: John Seth (Middlesex University)
8. A transparent lecture: Matthew Goulish (Art Institute of Chicago)
9. The Experience of Art as a Living Through of Language: Kate Love (Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design)
Bibliography
Index