Douglas Crimp

GB

I want to keep this in the present tense, because Douglas is still here. I might sob, I’m just putting that out there right now. Everyone here is both very familiar with and deeply influenced by Douglas’ work—that said, it has shaped us all differently. There are many different perspectives on Douglas and Douglas’ career present, which is why it’s important that we’re all gathered here together. Ryan reached out to me and asked who would be appropriate for such a conversation, and I told him who I thought would be best—selfishly, I also just wanted to see you all. [Laughs.] Ryan and I also selected the texts for this conversation—“On the Museum’s Ruins,” “Mourning and Militancy,” and “Action Around the Edges”—which I thought were three good nodal points. Of course, we could mention other works as well—we’re certainly all familiar with Douglas’ work on cinema and dance, as well as his memoir. We can all take different pieces and address them as it seems fit.

I don’t have a prompt in mind, but I do think that it might be good to go around and each say a bit about our respective relationships to Douglas, as well as what we’ve each been thinking about headed into this conversation. I can start. I was deeply influenced by Douglas’ work long before I met him. I had read his work in October, and was deeply influenced by his essays, particularly his writing on Fassbinder. I suppose I could tell the story of how we first came into contact, but it was really during his shift from the earlier October work to the AIDS activist work where Douglas and I first seriously engaged with each other. From that point on, we continued to engage with each other on many different levels about art and activism, as I imagine many of you have too. Mostly, what I shared with Douglas over the more than thirty years of our friendship was an ongoing conversation of our deepest commitments to art and to friendship.

RD

I knew Douglas for almost forty-five years. We met in graduate school and became extremely close friends as we struggled through an intellectually stimulating but emotionally difficult PhD program. We attended countless films, concerts, and dance performances together. Douglas introduced me to one of my great loves—George Balanchine’s choreography. He was also my colleague and editor. We regularly discussed each other’s work. He was the best person to complain with, and I miss him terribly.

JAS

It is difficult for me to talk about because there’s Douglas the friend, and then there’s Douglas the icon that I admired from afar long before I met him. I was in graduate school in the late 1980s and early ’90s and I was reading Douglas then, especially the AIDS essays. I was always very taken with the sharpness of his critiques. I love the way in which his theoretical work was immediately political, whether he wrote about AIDS, in which case it was, of course, inevitable, or about the museum, art institutions, the concept of art and its social effects. For me there was always a sort of street-wise quality about his work. It was never just academic, even though it was rigorous and intellectually compelling. Things were immediately sort of operative and useful at a social and political level, and I absolutely loved that about his way of thinking.

And then I met him and I was taken with Douglas as a person, just as I had been with his writing. We met in September of 1999 at a conference in Graz, Austria, at the art festival Steirischer Herbst, which included a small symposium on underground film and performance of the 1960s and ’70s organized by a group of young academics from Berlin. I met Marc then as well, so it was a very momentous conjunction. We saw each other a lot from ’99 until he died. That was also a time when I was going to New York a lot, starting in the summer of 2001. I’m based in Spain, but I taught at NYU in the winter and spring of 2002, and afterwards spent several months of the year in New York because my partner at the time was living there and because of how my teaching schedule was configured. That lasted until 2013 or so, when my teaching schedule changed and university duties increased, and I just couldn’t be there quite as often. But we still kept seeing each other several times every year. We went to the cinema and to art shows a lot, and I visited him very frequently at his place Downtown. I kept being influenced by him and admired his incredibly sharp radar for critical fluff and limpness, but I also loved his intellectual voraciousness and curiosity and his capacity for excitement and discovery. When we first met he was starting his Warhol book and I was also working on very related material, so that was another point of convergence. I will let others talk now. I’ll just say that he was a very big influence in ways that I’m not sure I can account for, and a dear friend I miss profoundly. I'm very happy you have called this, Ryan and Emmanuel. I was texting Marc earlier about how happy I was to revisit Douglas’s work. I’ve been totally flooded with memories of countless conversations, art shows, and major bitch sessions, of course. [Laughs.]

RH

I met Douglas when I first interviewed for my job at Rochester. We worked closely together  in Rochester, of course, but also in New York and beyond. We came to Berlin, thanks to Marc. We did a lot of stuff together. I think one moment that really came back as I was rereading for today was this: the first year I was teaching here in Rochester, I wrote an article on Gerhard Richter about his paintings of his young son and his nursing wife. I gave the article to Douglas in draft form. When he gave it back to me, he said, “You know Rachel, I don’t really believe in polemics. I’m not interested in writing that way anymore.” [Laughs.] One of the pleasures of reading, just going over these three selections you made, was like this super strong sense of the successive selves of Douglas, the aggregate. But there’s also the distinct moments in his life, when he just occupied each one, each self, as if it was the real one. And I love that: that this person who I came to know as a thinker of militancy, a thinker of activism, a thinker of also what we do when we’re not being militant, would be able to say that to me. It was just kind of amazing.

JGP

It’s lovely to be here. And thank you all for having me. I’m one of the people who did not have the privilege of knowing Douglas as a friend. And that’s partly a fact of our generational difference, but there are still two wavelengths that guided me as I was re-reading and thinking in advance of our conversation. Douglas is one of a few cherished people in my autobiography whose published work exerted such a pull on me as a young person that it reshaped my life. The whip smart, gay flair I encountered in reading his work in college made me think, “Oh, if I could be trained to think and write like this, I should keep going to school forever.” I’d love to write like Douglas Crimp one day. Reading Douglas also represented the clumsy need to generate prefaces or antecedents for someone interested in gender and sexuality when those were still relatively new and fragile as legitimate career paths.

“Mourning and Militancy” was an essay that I read again during my first semester in graduate school, when I had just moved to New York City. Somehow it felt addressed to a question facing me at 21: what’s a little wayward fag like me going to do with myself in this storied place called New York? Reading the essay was like trying to learn to be an inheritor of something that dazzled and inspired me—an older gay culture I had not participated in—something from which I also could only be dislocated from in interesting, productive ways, as I measured my distance from it over time.

And then more recently, since I’m a historian by trade, and perhaps because I don’t work on art and I think I’m pretty bad at talking about aesthetics, I have come back to Douglas’s work in thinking about what constitutes archives of working class gay life in the 1970s and ’80s, which is one of the primary places I return to understand trans women’s history. Archives created inadvertently or otherwise by artists have become important sources for thinking about lives on the edges, so to speak, even in “cosmopolitan” places like New York City, where underclasses have often set the terms for what is en vogue or avant-garde in the art world. It’s not just that these lives on the edges haven’t yet fit into a prevailing historical imaginary, if I’m thinking of poor trans women’s lives—it’s not that they were absent, they’re actually there in the historical record, they’re everywhere. Yet the evidentiary records of poor trans women’s lives still don’t quite have the status of thinkability that we might want to confront in what traces were indexed by artists in the city decades ago.

Finally, there’s something in Douglas’ work that speaks to the dilemma of being a social and political problem, and not just a problem of intellectual methodology or finding the right theory. Douglas’ insistence on emerging politically out of the confinement of being labeled a problem remains life-giving, to me. The energy or spirit animating his political writing confers the kind of energy that I so often need replenished. And so even if I don’t have a personal relationship to Douglas, I feel incredibly lucky to be animated by the energy of someone who seemingly stored so much raw political potential in his published writing that we can continue to return to it, to withdraw some of what we need to fight on in the present as inheritors of the dreams of a certain gay world that has otherwise been swept away.

JF

I met Douglas in 1991, I think. He came to give a talk—it was “Right On, Girlfriend!”—at Duke University, where I was a graduate student in the Literature Program, working with Eve Sedgwick and Michael Moon. We were all excited to be in the midst of the emergence of queer theory. When he came to give his talk, he was already an intellectual and political hero for me, because in the midst of the AIDS crisis he had been fearless about making politically urgent statements in public that one knew were going to be met with negative feedback.  I had been electrified by essays like “How to Have Promiscuity In An Epidemic,” where Douglas insisted on affirming gay sex in the midst of a nearly universal moral condemnation of it. His capacity for fearlessly speaking up—just saying “the thing”—seemed to be an act of speaking for the people who were being excluded, marginalized or damaged by a given ideology or set of institutional practices. I saw the courage this required, but also I saw that it displayed a talent for being attuned to group experience in a way that enabled him to give voice to something that others wished they could say about their experience, but did not yet know how to say. Seeing Douglas do that changed my world—it showed me that was a thing one could do. He did it. I wanted to be more like that.

I really admired that courage and the centeredness it required, like he just knew what he wanted to do. I was deliriously happy to talk to him at the party and Eve and Michael’s house after that talk, and not long after that, my friend José Muñoz and I took up Douglas’s offer to contact him if we were in New York. With characteristic generosity, he treated us to a fabulous queer weekend, taking us to La Escuelita for my first NYC drag show, and then later, with Michael Warner, to the legendary gay bar The Spike. I saved the Spike matchbook on which he had scribbled his phone number for many years. After that I saw Douglas whenever I was in New York, and saw him quite regularly when I spent longer stretches in the city. Like many of us, I went to lots of aesthetic events with Douglas—dance, art, opera. He was a great companion for aesthetic events of all kinds. We were both working on books on Andy Warhol at the same time. So that was also a major kind of point of convergence for us.

As we became friends, he became a model to me not only for what it meant to be an intellectual, but also for what it meant to be a friend. I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend so consciously and thoughtfully committed to the practice of friendship as itself a political and ethical component of just what it means to be a person in the world. And part of that, as Ros mentioned, was complaining. It’s true, there was no one better to call up and just complain about whatever with, and he would never get annoyed, or at least never admit to being annoyed at one’s complaining.

Rereading these pieces today, I’ve found myself thinking about—this echoes what Rachel was saying—Douglas’s capacity to fully occupy what he was doing at the moment, and just to be all in, and also the ongoing inter-penetration of his social world of friends and comrades and his intellectual work. I think that those things were always intertwined. And that’s also just something that’s really influenced me in terms of how I think about my life. So anyway, yeah, I’m really delighted to be here. It’s great to see everybody and to have a chance to think and talk about Douglas together.

MB

Hi, everybody. I’m so happy and honored to get to be in this Brady Bunch with you all. [Laughs.] Gregg introduced me to Douglas in 2015, after a performance we did together organized by Every Ocean Hughes at Participant Inc. But Douglas’ work was important to me long before—my group of friends in college passed around his essays on AIDS and queer politics, along with writing by José Muñoz. They really informed our consciousness in the world. But then I got to meet Douglas through Gregg, which is really how I got to meet all of you. And witness up close, like Jonathan said, this model of friendship that you all have demonstrated and built over decades, with Douglas and with each other, and which you generously welcomed me into. I was like, oh, this is what we can do with each other!

Douglas was such a devoted friend and also audience member, and would come to every single performance that I did—even through being sick—sometimes multiple times, as would Gregg. He came to my performance at the Whitney with Rachel just a few weeks before he died, and we talked about the show as I was making it. I was so blessed to get to talk to him about my work and performance in general—he introduced me to so much. And he and T. Lax and Mia Locks curated me into an exhibition at PS1 in 2015, so we got to work together that way, too. And then I really got to spend more time with him in the period of his dying, which was a profound life-changing gift to get to be in this circle of care and friendship, and witness that chapter of his life, and that chapter of his thinking and his being.

I think about him all the time. Revisiting these essays doesn’t feel nostalgic, it feels profoundly prescient and relevant. Like all of us, I am thinking about the current genocide that Israel is carrying out in Gaza and the ways in which “Mourning and Militancy” and just so much of his thinking feels so urgent. So many of us have been explicitly drawing on ACT UP organizing and thinking, and through Gregg and through Douglas and so many people, in creating ways of responding to this crisis, and ways of demilitarizing mourning, and ways of intervening into US state abandonment and premature death and complicity. His work and these essays and him and this conversation feels incredibly relevant. I’m really grateful to be here.

EO

Thank you, Morgan. Let’s bring it home, Marc.

MS

[Laughs.] Okay, thanks. Hi, everyone. I first got introduced to Douglas’ work when I was out of school. I kind of left—or got kicked out of—school. I was living in Los Angeles, waiting tables—this was the late 1980s, early ’90s. I started getting very energized by performance and by AIDS activist video work. At that time, it was the work of ACT UP and the cultural theory that Douglas and others were producing that actually led me to decide to go back to school, because I saw that there could be a relevance to academic work, to intellectual thought, that it could have some bearing on one’s life. Douglas’ essay, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” for myself and many young intellectual art fags who happened to read October in their early mid twenties—that essay did help me figure out how to save my life and continue to have a promiscuous sexual life in the epidemic. The idea that thought and academic writing can have that kind of practical effect was something that made me decide that I wanted to throw my hat into the ring—to get involved in and try to see what I can do as a scholar as well.

I didn’t meet Douglas until many years later. My then boyfriend, Daniel, had the great opportunity of meeting Douglas in the early ’90s when he was workshopping his amazing essay “Right on Girlfriend” in Los Angeles. I don’t know why I wasn’t there, I was away somehow, but Daniel was in a small group session with Douglas as he was reading and discussing that essay. I only met him in 1995 when he was a visiting professor in art history at UCLA, where I was studying in the critical studies in film and media program. I was incredibly intimidated to talk to him, both because I knew his work and because, I have to say in this round, he was a friend of Gregg Bordowitz. It really intimidated me, because Gregg Bordowitz was a hero for me, because of Gregg’s video work, like Fast Trip, Long Drop, helped me—and I think so many of us—to rethink our relationship to death and dying and the possibility of collective resistance and the complications of representation in the face of unclear and uncertain goals, both political, aesthetic, ethical, and emotional. So, there are many reasons why I was so intimidated to meet Douglas. But his friendship with Gregg was definitely one of them.

And then Douglas and I became good friends. I was able to get him to be on my dissertation committee. He just remained such a close friend and influence. Going back and reading these essays, it confronted me again with two things that I've often found exciting in Douglas' work and inspiring​​—and sometimes perplexing, I have to say—which is his willingness to revisit his own work and critique it. And, in a sense, especially for someone who would take such strong positions, his ability to go back to his earlier work, and say, “I was wrong there.” Like, “Oh, god, why did I have to criticize Lee Edelman at the start of ‘Mourning and Militancy.’ That was a little short-sighted of me.” I find that to be an incredibly inspiring role model for academic work, particularly coming from someone who has this reputation, and who has been called a Stalinist or strong headed in his positions, to see that this person is interested and willing to return to and rethink those positions. I also think it would be interesting to think about the times when he didn’t do that. What positions did he take that maybe some of us would want to critically engage with, but that he somehow didn’t? That interests me.

I also was really taken by hearing what everyone says, which is just so resonant with my experiences of Douglas. His kind of living, his interest in friends and friendship as a political, ethical, intellectual model, his general interest and curiosity for people, for objects, for thought, is part, it seems to me, of his thinking process, his writing process, the way he creates arguments. I had forgotten, for instance, what long quotes he has from Flaubert or Foucault in “On The Museum’s Ruins,” and how in that sense so much of the argument in that essay emerges almost through a kind of montage principle between his thoughts and the long quotations he chooses. Looking at this again, I came to think of it as part of Douglas’ interest in how people think and how other writers think, and ways of trying to engage with that. In a sense, it’s almost as if he needs an intercessor—a Deleuzian term, Douglas maybe wouldn’t like that that I’m using a Deleuzian term—but I feel like he needs a Gegenüber, as we’d say in German, an intercessor in order for him to start activating his really massive intelligence and his way of thinking. Maybe we all do, I know I do. I find that to really be a key part of Douglas’ critical sensibility throughout anything he’s writing, even if it’s a critical intercessor with whom he massively disagrees, like Andrew Sullivan or Randy Shilts or whoever. That generates his critical acuity, or catalyzes it.

EO

Thank you, Marc. I came to be a student of Douglas’ work while I was studying at Eugene Lang’s The New School by way of professors of mine who were in the PhD Performance Studies program at NYU. I would also always hear David Velasco talk about his friendship with Crimp when I first was getting to know David and then later when I became his editorial assistant at Artforum. But Douglas existed, for me, in the social fabric of New York. His work drove theories and cemented desires that, as most of you have noted, weren’t so commonplace that he gave visual language and life to, by building out a world we could all inhabit on our own terms. I want to start the conversation with “On the Museum’s Ruins,” specifically. This is just my reading of the text, which informed how I wanted to guide this conversation, but the first question it raised for me happens to deal with endurance. This work is still very much in its becoming. So, the question I want to pose has to do with its lasting relationship to the present. What are the needs of the present? Are we concerned with keeping history alive? Does it matter? Let’s dance, people.

GB

I appreciate that question, Emmanuel. I have a desire to hear Ros speak about that text in particular, because Ros was studying at CUNY with Douglas when he wrote it. I think Ros is best situated to explain what the program at CUNY was, what Douglas’ critique of the museum—which he developed alongside Ros’ work as well as the work of others in the program—was, and what the significance of that text was in the moment. I think a historically situated perspective might help to reveal why the text is still relevant to the present.

RD

Thanks, Gregg, I appreciate that because I knew Douglas during periods of his life when most of you didn’t, in graduate school, as I’ve said, and for the entire time he was at October. He was not a hero to me. I admired and loved him enormously, but by the time we met, I’d endured too much heroization of men. Also, I knew how vulnerable Douglas was and how much he suffered, including as a child, a gay child who was made fun of and bullied. As an adult, he suffered when people criticized or attacked him harshly, which of course happened regularly, given the strong stands he took, or when he was ignored. I think his insecurity was also a strength because it prompted him to change his mind, which he did quite often.

To answer your question, Gregg, at the PhD program at CUNY’s Graduate Center, during the years Douglas and I attended, there was a kind of a revolution taking place in art historical practice. Rosalind Krauss who taught there and whom Douglas worked closely with and whom I was most interested in intellectually, was bringing post-structuralist theories, Frankfurt School theory, particularly that of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and photographic theory to bear on our discipline. We were challenging the idealist aesthetic ideas that informed American formalism, with its notion that the work of art is autonomous and apart from everyday life.

Douglas’ work on postmodernism and representation was a major part of this pursuit, beginning with “Pictures,” his essay of the late 1970s, which I think was the one that preceded “On the Museum’s Ruins,” which we all re-read in preparation for this discussion. I was struck, again, by Douglas’ brilliance, and also by the fact that, as Marc suggested, it was so collage-like, almost free associative. Douglas doesn’t make explicit transitions between the various pieces of text he assembles.

With regard to the critique of Lee Edelman at the beginning of “Mourning and Militancy,” which I’m glad Marc referred to, I need to say that the PhD program Douglas and I were in was very painful for me and, later, for Douglas, because it was characterized by a contemptuous attitude on the part of the people interested in post-structuralism toward those applying different—admittedly, more conventional—approaches. Along with the intellectual excitement that we all felt, I was deeply troubled by this snobbish atmosphere, which I think poisoned our graduate experience. When I reread “Mourning and Militancy” I was struck not only by its brilliance and courage, but also by how completely unnecessary the Lee Edelman part is, how it could have been eliminated without any effect on the argument. It was included simply to provide a foil for Douglas’s argument. So in this way, Douglas actually was very polemical, at least in those days. Edelman was very hurt by it, and Douglas really regretted it later, when he had changed. Douglas underwent a very significant change, which can be observed in the switch in the voice of the essays we read, from third person in “On the Museum’s Ruins,” which is quite academic despite the collage quality we’ve noted, to first person by the time he writes “Mourning and Militancy.” The Edelman section seems like a holdover from the Graduate Center and October ethos, even as the essay reveals Douglas breaking away from that ethos. Yet at the same time there’s a certain continuity that drops out by the time he writes “Action Around the Edges,” which is willing to deal with the complexity of contradictions, for example, in its treatment of Gordon Matta-Clark: in which Douglas both recognizes the artist’s radicality and criticizes his homophobia.

EO

Could you be more explicit about his suffering and what continued to drive the work, being that suffering was so present? How did he live with that suffering? Where did that suffering live within his world?

RD

For one thing, it was counteracted by his courage and powerful intellectual and political commitment, another constant in his work, which was always marked by commitment to things he believed in and by an ethical refusal of conservativism, the refusal to “break with the break,” as Alain Badiou puts it. About his suffering, I don’t want to disclose any confidences: I’m sure we all had experiences with Douglas that we want to be careful about. Very close to his death, while I was with him in the hospital one day, he broke down weeping about the homophobia he and other friends had suffered in their childhood families. He was still profoundly hurt by it. The time he spent with his non-homophobic brother and sister in his final months was immeasurably important to him.

The period when he was breaking away from October was a nightmare for him. But it made it possible for him to bring his sexuality into his writing. Earlier, in his strictly art historical texts, his sexual experimentation remained separate from the artistic experimentation that interested him. In his final book, Before Pictures, the two are integrated.

EO

To me, “On the Museum's Ruins” reads like a dance—it feels like choreography.

RD

Interesting. Yes.

GB

Thank you, Ros. I want to return to the question you posed earlier, Emmanuel. History does matter—without it, there would be no point in having this conversation. I entered into this conversation precisely because I think that Douglas’ work—the entirety of his career—is all so deeply important. The importance of “On the Museum’s Ruins” is that it gives us insight into what defined “postmodernism” at that moment—that essay shows us that there was not one postmodernism, but rather many postmodernisms. Douglas was part of a postmodernism that conceived of itself as a political movement, one which was very much so critical of the apparatuses that staged and produced the credibility of artworks. That style of postmodernism was deeply polemical. It was a style inherited from the Left, particularly the Left of the 1960s and ’70s. That period really shaped the way in which Douglas took on polemics. Douglas was involved with the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance—he was very much a product of the liberation movements of the ’70s. The tone and sensibility of Douglas’ writing, both in October and also more generally, was specifically informed by the particular shape of liberation politics to which Douglas was deeply committed.

We can see that commitment take shape in “On the Museum’s Ruins.” That essay is very radical in the way that it breaks frame with traditional art historical models, particularly through the range of references Douglas employs. It expands the parameters of what can be legitimately included as references and coordinates for engaging art—not just artworks themselves, but also the ways in which artworks are exhibited. There’s a pronounced concern around reproducibility. Rauschenberg, in particular, becomes this kind of important coordinate for understanding the way in which postmodernism—or, Douglas’ definition of postmodernism, which emerges via Leo Steinberg and others—can continue to be mapped on to any number of contemporary artists who are using other means of digital or mechanical reproduction today. So, that essay is, in many senses, a precedent for understanding how technology continues to play an extremely important structuring role in relation to the ways in which we view and understand art, as well as the ways in which art is exhibited.

RD

Gregg, you’re giving “On The Museum’s Ruins”  a very strong political inflection. I think of it as more philosophical. Its critique of idealist aesthetics has political implications, but I’m not sure that Douglas thought of it as political. Similarly, I don’t view “Pictures” as a feminist essay. Its critique of representation was very useful for feminism, but Douglas wasn’t a feminist at that point. Am I wrong?

GB

No, you’re not wrong. I agree with you. Nobody is wrong.

RD

People are wrong. [Laughs.]

GB

I should note here that I’m deliberately talking about Douglas in a very dispassioned way because I don’t want to cry. I’m intentionally avoiding the autobiographical right now.

RD

I understand.

GB

But, I want to address the question that was posed: does history matter, and how does Douglas relate to history? There’s no disagreement between us, Ros. I think you’re right. Douglas did not perceive himself as an activist at that point. I met him a bit later, around the time that he started coming into his activism—the period where he started to think of his work as being grounded in a productivist or adjacent relationship to the AIDS activist movement. “On the Museum’s Ruins” was not affiliated with any activist movement. However, when I read it as a young person in art school, I received it as a politicized text.

RD

That makes a lot of sense.

GB

In studying with Craig Owens—another incredible teacher, and someone who was very important to both Douglas and myself—we received the institutional critique as a very strong political gesture, one which was clearly tied to liberation movements. We were reading this material in the early ’80s. I was part of a group of artists—which included Andrea Fraser and Mark Dion, among others—who were very much preoccupied with the institutional critique, which we took as a kind of political mandate within the art world. Perhaps we politicized the texts we were reading, in a certain way, but I do think that there were political stakes there, in the same way that I think there are political stakes in your work, Ros, and in Craig’s work, and in much of the work that was being done at that time around October.

I think it’s also significant to mention that the copy of “On the Museum’s Ruins” that we read was one that had been scanned out of The Anti-Aesthetic. The Anti-Aesthetic, which was a collection of material that Hal Foster had edited in 1983, was a book that many of us carried in our back pockets. It was the go-to text for understanding how we would be postmodernist. But again, there were many postmodernisms. I met many different players in the field of postmodernism around that time—when I was in Europe, for example, I attended a number of art school lectures by many proponents of differing versions of postmodernism. I even attended a conversation between Donald Kuspit and Craig Owens at the School of Visual Art, where the respective political stakes were clearly articulated—my alliance with Craig’s politics were solidified. So, I was very much aware of various definitions of postmodernism—the notion that postmodernism was pastiche and collage, or that postmodernism was the defeat of the base-superstructure dichotomy and a movement into a much more Althusserian, structural determinist model of capitalism, which was a reading that was present at the Whitney ISP at the time via Ron Clark and others. Postmodernism was also the banner under which marginalized people who had been excluded from the art world were able to enter it. So, postmodernism felt like a liberation movement in that it was through postmodernism that people of color, women, and queer people actually gained new levels of attention and exposure within the art world.

RD

The moment you’re describing is embodied, I think, in Craig’s “Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” where the agenda of postmodern feminism was so strongly articulated.

GB

Which is related to the sexual politics of both Douglas and Craig, respectively. While they were both out, out, out, gay, gay, gay, men in their daily lives, they were not in their work. The decision to come out in their work was a very significant turn for both of them. Craig came out in a book edited by Alice Jardine [Men in Feminism] with his essay “Outlaws.” But, the point is that they both had to come out in their work, which was a massive turning point. They were both influenced by feminism—though, I perhaps agree with Ros that Douglas was not an avowed feminist at that time. They were both trying to figure out how sexual politics related to their work, which was a question they both arrived at through their respective engagements with feminism. Feminism taught us that sexism and homophobia are both the effect of patriarchy. I think that was the link that led to an epiphany of sorts for both of them—it was what called them to come out in their work.

EO

I interviewed Hal on the 40th anniversary of The Anti-Aesthetic, which was last year—it came out in January of 1983. I understand what you’re saying about this exercise in language being political. It gave this large framework of what postmodernisms could be. It was a platform. It wasn’t necessarily a container—more like a gesture of all of these different futurities. To your point about them not having to come out in text, in reading these texts now, obviously I wasn’t on the ground in their moment in time, but they do read as queer texts because of how deeply observational they are. To your point about free thinking, Rosalyn, I think that free association has to do with a very studied consciousness. That’s why I think about endurance and the question: does history matter?

RD

“On the Museum’s Ruins” clearly says that history matters. One of its main points is that art, definitions of art, and ideas about art are subject to historical variation and contingencies.

EO

Which is what we just witnessed happening in real time.

RH

I would love to also call on somebody. Can I do that? I really wanted to get back to the question of the present that you opened with, Emmanuel. I was also really taken by Ros’ evocation of an ethos of contempt—having also studied with Rosalind Krauss, that is sort of the background of my anecdote about being told not to reproduce this polemical framework, as if, like, that’s the only way to write.

RD

You mean Douglas telling you?

RH

Correct, right: he was trying to re-train me. He had also been through the same machine that I had just been through and he was like, “Hey, guess what? There’s another way to write, and also to live.” That’s what he was saying to me. But also as you really aptly named it, Ros, it’s like an ethos of contempt and certainty. And in our moment, it’s really hard, I think, to handle our own certainties and also some other modalities for being in the world. I’m thinking about what Morgan said about demilitarizing mourning, so I kind of wanted to call on you, Morgan. But I also wanted to think broadly about how we work now. I feel like this current moment in which so many of us are actively working to think about Palestine, to bring it into how we operate as critics, as teachers, as institutional workers, how to be, and also how to link it with the other liberation struggles, with queers of color and trans people, which is always happening, right? Which is what I think a lot of what I see going on in this moment. And that really helps lift that ethos of contempt and certainty from the framework that we mobilize as we try to figure out how to be.

And so I guess I just wanted to open it up. Because, of course, I think about Douglas, but as we see always when we read texts, there’s nothing scripted. There’s nothing that’s prescriptive in who Douglas was that’s going to tell us about how to be now. There’s a lot to guide us, but I just want to even think about some of the work, for example, Morgan, that I know you did at the end of his life, reading the Bible, and that you also did with him, Gregg. How do we all think about thinking at this moment?

MB

One thing I wanted to bring in was that this week, on January 23rd, ACT UP New York officially endorsed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement on the 33rd anniversary of the Day of Desperation, ACT UP’s 1991 action at Grand Central Station, which was organized under the banner “Money for AIDS, Not for War!” and “Fight AIDS, Not Arabs” to oppose the Gulf War. On this past October 30, to protest Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, Jewish Voice for Peace brought thousands of Jews and friends to Grand Central Station, to climb on those same exact platforms and cover up that same train platform, to again demand the US government “Fund Healthcare, Not Warfare.” Together we said “Not in our name.” I think, ACT UP NY’s statement is so beautiful and really draws out why Israeli settler colonialism and its current genocidal assault on Gaza is an assault on healthcare and on health, and why in this moment the US is cutting nearly $1 billion in AIDS funding, both domestic and international, and yet trying to approve $14 billion to fund the Israeli war machine.

I was struck by this line that he writes in “On the Museum’s Ruins,” on, “The fiction of the creating subject giving way to the frank confiscation, quotation, excerption, accumulation, and repetition of already existing images. Notions of originality, authenticity, and presence, essential to the ordered discourse of the museum, are undermined.”  We do this with activist interventions, too. This kind of remixing and referencing and cross-pollinating, which is very different from a reductive use of the AIDS crisis as metaphor or corollary, and instead about the interlockingness of all of our struggles for liberation.

I’m also thinking about the ways in which Douglas’ writing is asking us to include ourselves, perhaps especially the parts of ourselves that are less politically “neat.” The fact that he can talk so explicitly about sex and so explicitly about shame and so explicitly about ambivalence, we need that level of depth right now. We need that level of depth to talk about the ways in which a project like Zionism has penetrated our deepest emotional, affective, physical, corporeal domains and produces all kinds of contradictions and complexities that we can’t just kind of wash or wish away.

I don’t know if I’m answering your question, Rachel. I hope I am. Tomorrow is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Marc can speak to this with painful experiences, I’m sure, about the ways in which the legacy of the Holocaust, the legacy of Jewish trauma has been so thoroughly militarized and weaponized to justify the genocide of Palestinians. Douglas is offering us all these conceptual tools to bring to bear on our current moment.

RD

Could you define demilitarized mourning?

MB

Well, I grew up in the era of the hate crimes law, of Matthew Shephard’s murder being used to usher in a kind of state solution to anti-gay violence that is about the buildup of the carceral apparatus.

RD

So, de-instrumentalized, not turned into a weapon of the state?

MB

Yes, exactly. And in the case of Israel, it is not only about weaponizing mourning, but also militarizing it, with an actual military that claims to act on behalf of Jewish safety and Jewish grief. So I think I mean militarized not just as a metaphor, but literally as a military too.

JF

I wanted to respond quickly to what you were saying, Morgan, which I found really evocative and is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, which is what I would call the revolutionary character of Douglas’ writing, especially in “Mourning and Militancy” and “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic.” I think he’s doing something in those two essays, something that revolutionary, agitational, or propagandistic writing often does when it works—he had this kind of incredible talent for recognizing feelings that a given collective was having, but didn’t quite yet have the language to conceptualize. In conceptualizing those feelings that were not yet articulated, Douglas’s writing allowed those feelings to come into existence in a new and powerfully collective way. When reading “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic” and “Mourning and Militancy,” my feeling, and the feeling that I had with other people who were reading it, was, “Yes, he’s saying exactly the thing that I’m feeling and experiencing, and he’s provided a language for that.” This means that the writing is also very situated in its historical moment, right?

It’s about responding to the collective feelings at that moment, which I think is what political writing always is and must be. And so, in response to the question about what kind of critical writing we need now, I feel like this is exactly the kind of critical political writing that we need at the present moment—critical writing that is able to articulate the sort of nascent or not completely articulated  political feelings that are floating around in collectives that have yet to completely come together. I think that work of articulation can actually do the work of bringing collectives together.

The other thing I would say about re-reading “Mourning and Militancy” is this: I had just taught Claudia Rankine’s essay, “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning,” and many of us have also been thinking about Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wake, and I have also been thinking about the protests that have taken place since the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. I’ve been thinking about how much recent Black radical activism has also been theorizing and dwelling in the space of collective grief and mourning, and really confronting the question of, “How do you grieve and become militant?” So, this is just to say that I think Douglas’s essay really resonates still in the present moment quite powerfully, not only in relation to organizing around the ongoing genocide in Palestine, as Morgan noted, but also into the forms of premature death that define what racism is in the US.

JGP

One of your observations, Jonathan, reflected what I’ve been mulling over, which is the uncanny effects of now being able to look back on a text that was written in a kind of revolutionary, intellectual sort of vanguardist spirit, reaching out of its present to catalyze something, to put some words to what was then only an incipient structure of feeling. The writing was intended to have a galvanizing effect in its time, but it has now become historical, which actually isn’t to say that its political spirit has fossilized in a museological sense. I think what we’re circling around is how, on the contrary, something of that propulsive political energy remains instructive despite the fact that so much has changed since the words were originally written. Trying to take the measure of the passage of time is instructive because it lets us come back to the political refrain of what was then urgent and is obviously still unfinished. Still, it’s very difficult to make a past present into usable history in our present.

Morgan, what you said was really clarifying in that regard. How unthinkable, from the point of view of 1980 or 1989, is the vigorous, healthy homosexuality of homo-nationalism that props up the genocidal empire today. Both unthinkable in the sense that no one, not even Douglas, could have predicted the future, yet perhaps not so unthinkable as that when we go back into Douglas’ text. This comes back to your earlier question, Emmanuel, about the needs of the present: can we grasp the uneven wear and tear on collective conditions of life since the 1980s by thinking historically. The popular imaginary about AIDS, for instance, tends to discount that sort of historical thinking, no doubt because of its political implications. There is a refrain of finality, representing total loss, a severing of some sort that has wide appeal to cementing a claim to how the situation of queer people today is apparently quite different than four decades ago. It’s become nearly a joke on social media that young people think everyone from the generation first affected by AIDS is gone. And it takes a lot of patient work to meet that sentiment with the counterclaim that no, losing a large cohort of people to illness does not, mercifully, equate to their total loss; but more importantly, we are living on in continuity with the AIDS crisis. It has never concluded. To fantasize that everyone lost to AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s is gone in some final sense is so often a way to fantasize that AIDS is over, rather than ongoing. And if it is ongoing instead of over, then we are doing an outrageously lousy collective job of politicizing that.

Wrestling with the fantasy that AIDS is over, re-reading Douglas’ essays from the point of view of the present can be quite illuminating. I kept thinking about the place of the piers on the west side of Manhattan, which have become an object of fixation in recent years because of how they stand in for this larger dilemma about our political relationship to the past. There are several frames applied to the piers. Not just mourning, not just nostalgia, not just curiosity, not just anger and frustration. All of those at once and many more. One of the intertexts that has been on my mind re-reading Douglas was Kristen Lovell’s documentary, The Stroll (2023), which brings some of the Black trans women and sex workers from that same part of Manhattan back to what is now one of the gaudiest gentrified districts in Manhattan. Despite “gentrification” becoming a political shorthand of the left, it’s worth pausing on what we intend by that word in a neighborhood like the Meatpacking District. Does gentrification mean the subtraction of people like sex workers and trans women from this place to make room for development? Well, perhaps, but not quite. It’s so much more than displacement. The influx of capital and the creation of hotels and the highline go hand in hand with the elimination of the meat packing plants and the displacement of all of the gay and trans populations that lived and worked, or lived and died, there. There is a living relationship between displacement, erasure, and loss, on the one hand, and what has come to take up residence in the physical space of the neighborhood—not just people, but money and capital, on the other.

You know, part of what Douglas helps me appreciate is that the collective wear and tear of gentrification is encoded physically in the city, like a perverse mirror to the radical abandonment of the population by the state to the dictates of capital. It’s like the building up of the actual physical space in the city, its upscaling, is a conjoined sign of the complete hollowing out of the public, the total devastation wrought by decades of austerity. It’s the displacement of people without access to healthcare or resources or education who are over criminalized. They’re not canaries in the coal mine. They’re ground zero of the intentional destruction engineered by statecraft, by economic and political policy since the 1980s. It’s understandable, then, that we are drawn to the piers or the west side of Manhattan as a material record, as an archive of those transformations and displacement and that social and economic and political violence. They manifest what is otherwise incalculable and interdependently human.

Trying to measure the distance of history, then, is a way to move critically back to whatever the revolutionary energy of yesteryear was, the unfinished project at the onset of austerity’s unforgivable crimes. At a certain point the radical insufficiency of our contemporary conditions of life brings us back to this one neighborhood where all of those dynamics have congealed dramatically, a neighborhood that captivated Douglas before us.

EO

I’ve been wondering about the productivity of wrought criticism today. How are we supposed to inhabit the words and writings of contemporary critics when their observations don’t mirror the reality of the happenings on the ground? I was really taken with Douglas’ take on photography being a parody. I can’t remember exactly how he phrased it. The images that come to mind are Matta-Clark’s Days End, which trigger reading of images as a framework, discourse, and architecture. You can demystify or project on the images but you can’t project onto Douglas’ account of navigating the West Village and Tribeca by foot. The buildings he encounters and the physical characteristics that make up the world he is inhabiting and his writing is a form of cartography, like a mapping exercise. He’s activating this social anthropological sensibility by mapping his sexuality onto the city, where you can’t project onto his experience in the same way one could a photograph but you can embody the words that describe his lived worlds. The critic used to be a social anthropologist, and that really isn’t the case anymore. Now the critic is more like a mirror of the market of the moment instead of the self and one’s interiors.

GB

Once again, I want to note that I’m not disagreeing with anybody. But, there’s another flavor that I want to throw into the mix, which is that Douglas was an aesthete. The three essays we read for today demonstrate that. “On the Museum’s Ruins” inaugurated a specific kind of postmodernism amongst the people that Douglas was closest to at that time, one which I would argue had a very important political register. “Mourning and Militancy” is an example of Douglas’ deep engagement with ACT UP and his immersion in activism. By the early ’90s, many of us were so burnt out. Many of us had lost dozens, if not hundreds, of our friends. We were tired. None of us anticipated that there would be medications in 1996 that would keep us alive. Douglas wanted to turn back to art. “Action Around the Edges” is a record of Douglas reconciling his queer political commitments with his art world aesthetic commitments.

And then, of course, he goes on to write a book about Andy Warhol’s films, Our Kind of Movie. He writes about dance too, closer to the end of his life. Douglas taught me that Andy Warhol’s films aren’t boring, they’re actually about intense fascination and the enjoyment of looking. It’s not about endurance, it’s about the importance and pleasure of looking, and then looking again, and then looking again. So, this is all just to say that Douglas was a very complex person and was always trying to conjugate these various aspects of himself. I want to invite us to engage with Douglas the aesthete.

JAS

I think that's a really interesting point—it’s something to keep in mind along with the more polemical side of Douglas that we’ve been talking about. I think that between the essays about AIDS and the institutional critiques and so on and, for example, the writing on Warhol and the autobiography there is this… I don’t want to call it a turn to aesthetics, because that would be to simplify things, but perhaps a shift in attention from ideological critique to a very close observation of the intricacy of life, of bodies passing through the world. Earlier, Marc said that Douglas was very interested in people, and in how people think.

One of the things that I feel I learned from Douglas was his absolute fascination with singularity—individual singularities of character, of ways of doing things, of living one’s life. I think the Warhol book comes out of that, not only out of a fascination with looking, but also with a fascination for a completely unclassifiable social world—the world of the Factory—which is captured in those films. I was also thinking that it is part of this turn away from polemics that Rachel mentioned before. We could think of it as reparative writing and thinking, if you want to use Eve Sedgwick’s distinction between the paranoid and the reparative. This is reparative because it is more about highlighting life’s connectivity and productivity rather than about beating down an opponent dialectically. But this is not to say it’s apolitical. To me, this way of thinking is as politically engaged as his other writing. So, I think it’s a really interesting point that Gregg made about Douglas’s fascination with aesthetics. It’s a very political “aestheticism,” to call it something—as urgently political as anything raised by AIDS.

EO

I was thinking about the dichotomy between queerness and institutions, and the perception of the work that we do and the imagined audience. Marc, earlier you mentioned “the intellectual fag.” It made me  think about the necessity of hyper-specificity and naming who we are actually speaking to and intend to reach because we’re all reading these texts by Crimp differently. Generally, I think as we have this conversation it’s important to name the intended audience and provide as much context as possible.

MS

Oh, it’s often a struggle to say exactly what I mean. I have three things to say. Actually, the first letter I ever got from Douglas—it was actually like, a letter, sent by the mail—was to me and my then boyfriend, and it was addressed, “Hey, faggots.” [Laughs.] And I was like, “Oh my God, that’s so fantastic to be addressed as a faggot by Douglas Crimp.” Back then, that was really great.

The second thing is about the needs of the present. I want to say something about that before I get to the Warhol and aesthete thing. I feel that one of the needs of the present, which is maybe a historiographical need, is something I get from following David Kurnick, in a really beautiful essay he wrote called “A Few Little Lies” that came out two years ago. He’s a literary scholar, and he points out how significant AIDS and death were to the development of queer theory and queer studies, and how that seems to be something that he feels has dropped out of consideration. I don’t know what you all think about this, but I find that, for me, I came to queer theory through Douglas and through writing about AIDS. It was only later that I came to read Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. For me, it’s actually Douglas and AIDS and the writing around AIDS, be it Cindy Patton, Douglas, Simon Watney, Paula Treichler, or Cathy Cohen, who helped me understand what thinking queerly and writing queerly could mean. I feel that with Douglas in particular, it’s an interesting thing. I know Eric O. Clarke—dear, deceased Eric O. Clarke, who was a friend of Douglas’s as well—had told him after he’d read the initial manuscript of Melancholia and Moralism, the collection of AIDS essays, “Douglas, you are an interesting case where your work has been so definitive for many of the concerns in queer theory, but there isn’t necessarily a concept that one associates with your work where they could therefore say ‘performativity,’ or ‘epistemology of the closet,’ was his argument.” That has always rung true to me in some sense. I just wonder if that’s one of the reasons why perhaps Douglas’s work is not seen as a foundation for queer theory, even though it should be.

To the Warhol thing, I was just gonna say that as you were all talking, I was thinking about the introduction to the book On the Museum’s Ruins, where Douglas actually says that, basically, “This is my old work, and you can tell it’s my old work because it was interested in the objects of knowledge. But death has caused me”—meaning the massive death in the AIDS epidemic—“now to rethink my interest in the objects of knowledge. Now I’m interested in the subject of knowledge, that’s where I’m going.” His Warhol work is one place, but not the only place, where he’s really grappling with yes, form, but also, more importantly, how can he think about the relationality between the subjects of knowledge and the objects of knowledge in the context of analyses of the aesthetic experience of Warhol’s films?

I want to relate maybe a slight critique, which I’ll dare to express in this group of people who respect Douglas—a critique that I’ve had of the Warhol book that, for me, has left me somewhat uneasy. I feel like the old art historian is still so present there, namely in a certain kind of an insistence on Warhol-as-genius—the genius of the author, the genius of the great artist. I feel that in Douglas’ analysis there, to what Juan is saying, in what he opens up of the complexity and diversity of that world in The Factory, which, to me, is the world that was central to the creation of those films. Something of his art historical training leads him to elevate a figure of the artist there that is politically questionable and stands in contrast to the massively significant expansiveness of his queer readings of those works.

JF

Allow me to completely endorse everything that you just said, Marc. That’s totally great. I just have  two thoughts to follow up on things that people have been saying. First, Gregg, to your observation that Douglas was an aesthete: that is just obviously completely true. And as Juan also noted, his aestheticism was also a way of being together with other people. It was definitely a form of friendship and a way to be committed to a particular social formation.

But, in relation to his political commitments, I guess I would say that, when I talked about Douglas as a revolutionary writer, I think that the skill there—the capacity, as Gregg noted—to be immersed in the world of ACT UP and to be in tune with the sort of affects or structures of feeling that were circulating there, I see that as the same talent that’s involved with being an art critic. There, one must also be able to dive into and to inhabit the world of a particular artistic practice, which I think he did so effectively with the Warhol book.

I think that talent or capacity is continuous across the different projects. And it’s also just a way to think about not the politics of aesthetics, but the aesthetics of politics—the degree to which political activity requires a particular aesthetic sensibility and a capacity to understand how people are affected through their senses, to go back to some earlier sense of what the aesthetic was. So, that’s one thought—about the intersection of the aesthetic and the political in Douglas’s work and life.

The other thought concerns Douglas’ commitment to singularity. I think Juan is absolutely correct to emphasize this. But, I think that along with singularity, Douglas was also committed to collectivity. Here, I think of the phrase that he borrowed from Warhol that became the title of one of the chapters of the Warhol book: “misfitting together.” I really think of misfitting together as the model, or the phrase, that describes the model of collectivity that Douglas promoted and loved, which was people who came together not because they were the same, but because they shared an inability to fit into the given identity formations. I feel that not only in Douglas’ taste and the things he was attracted to aesthetically, but also in the way he formed and participated in his own collectivities.

On this sort of notion of collectivity, one thing about “Mourning and Militancy” and the opening critique of Lee Edelman—I agree it feels like a residue of the beginning of every essay by Rosalind Krauss, where she begins by attacking someone to show how she’s so much smarter than they are. Here, the difference is also political, because the thing he says about Lee is that Lee doesn’t have a sense of how the silence equals death sign is functioning for the movement, which is what Douglas was feeling very much at that moment. It occurred to me also, in rereading that, that Douglas’ courage came from his sense that he was speaking with other people, that he was giving voice to something that he shared with other people. It wasn’t just him making his own case. Along these lines, I also find myself remembering that the moment of politics is also a moment of choosing sides—“Which side are you on?,” as the famous song has it. Rereading it this time, the need to choose sides, the sense of already being on a side with friends and comrades, gave a different flavor to the polemical aspect of “Mourning and Militancy” for me.

EO

I read more as a way to aestheticize his pain and this desire to reach a larger audience by mapping his suffering on this monumental yet aloof figure that everyone was curious about and couldn’t read. I understood “On the Museum’s Ruins” as this exercise to talk about these social and structural problems that we’re all privy too by using the essay as a medium and Warhol as a vehicle. How do you want your suffering to be inhabited? Crimp’s writing reminds me of pop music in the sense that his writing here can be read as a sad song but yet here I am dancing. Rosalyn, do you want to speak?

RD

I'm confused by the description of Douglas as aestheticist and formalist. In what sense are people using those terms? I ask this because, certainly, in the years that he was theorizing postmodernism, those terms were precisely what he was against. Aesthetics differ from aestheticism, right? So, in what sense are people saying that Douglas was either an aestheticist or an aesthete—which is something different—and a formalist?

RH

I wanted to talk about that too. [Laughs.]

GB

I’ll just clarify that when I called Douglas an aesthete, I was really thinking in terms of my own personal experience with him. I was thinking about how we used to go to the ballet and the opera together. Douglas, in many ways, taught me about people like Balanchine, and taught me about opera. We saw Jessye Norman sing “The Four Last Songs” together, and I remember him crying as we sat there together listening. Douglas loved art—I don’t know if that makes him an aesthete or not, but he really loved it. We all know how much he cared about art. His love for art was certainly not the same thing as the type of aestheticism that he opposed, which was the aestheticism of taste propped up by the more conservative critics of the late ’70s

RD

Which is an aestheticism that attempted to isolate art from social, historical, and political context.

GB

Exactly. He also loved the work of Visconti, for instance.

RD

Oh, he loved art.

GB

Yes. He loved it.

RD

There’s no doubt. That's unquestionable. Was it Marc who mentioned that Douglas kind of sanctified Warhol? Marc, is that what you meant?

MS

Yeah.

RD

I’ve often thought that one of the reasons Douglas became so attached to Warhol was that Warhol was not judgmental. That was big for Douglas because, I think, it was tied to a change that he wanted to affect in himself; he wanted to be less judgmental. He was trying to transform, which he did. So his sanctification of Warhol may have been related to what he wanted for himself.

RH

I mean, I loved it when you said that. And I also really love your emendation, Ros. I think a lot about what Douglas got from going to see art. Not only because we did it so much, together, but because, yeah, it had such a compulsory quality to it, like, you have to go. And Morgan talked about how we all brought him to their performances and how... In fact, at one point, I think Gregg even had a slip and said, “The end of his death.” I think of that time in which he was still holding on to the way that art can dilate experience and selfhood as a time when he was also really thinking about what death would mean and how to live that experience of dying fully in every way possible through his friendships, through eating, through seeing performance. So, anyway, I love what you say, Ros, about almost a kind of an attempt to slip out of himself, or to move past himself through this identification with Warhol, but that may come across in the text as a kind of a conventional adulation, as you said, Marc. But I also wanted to just stay for a minute on the way that aesthetic experience, I think, could be both a real technology of the self for him, and, as everybody has also said, a relational act.

RD

Could you repeat the question you’re posing?

RH

I think the question just kind of goes back to what you just said, Ros. Is one way we can think about an art or an artist functioning for Douglas as a way of getting outside of himself? To push past, not to correct. Because I feel like Douglas was outside of such a teleological mode of, “I just want to be better.” I feel like we’ve even talked about this a little already, with the question of whether he likes Lee Edelman or doesn’t. It’s like, he has to live with the remorse of having said something in text that he wishes he could take back. So, I feel like he lived with this aggregate. I said earlier he was like a model of successive selves, but also, he was the aggregate of those selves. He had to also be the person he was when he wrote that, later, and I guess those are really two things for me. Maybe he occupied that aggregate quality of being different, and lived it in relation to art differently. How can an artist or art take you outside of yourself? How do we use that as a way of dealing with the real, as that aggregative quality of experience, and of history?

EO

Yeah, I was hesitant to bring this idea of nostalgia to the fore but it’s the elephant in the room. [Laughs.] But Marc’s point about the subject of knowledge and the objects of knowledge is applicable because the texts anyone writes become an extension of who you are in that moment and are timely representations of how you’re communicating yourself in that moment doesn’t account for who you’ll be and how you’ll feel in the future.

RD

Douglas was concerned with subjectivity very early, beginning with his work on representation, or, more precisely, subjectivity in representation. “Pictures” introduces the idea of desire in looking at visual representation, not specifically sexual desire but a more generalized notion of desire for certainty or solidity of meaning. In terms of a picture or in an object, his concept of subjectivity became more complex, particularly because of his later interest in psychoanalysis, when he approaches the subject as a being with an unconscious.

EO

What specifically are you naming when you say that he was interested in the subjectivity of representation?

RD

Representation is both the product of a human subject and also forms the human subject; it implies a human subject and vice versa.

JAS

I was struck by the idea of using art, or the fascination with Warhol, to move past himself in a way, to experiment with his own subjectivity. I think that, at the same time, there was a great deal of interest in history there—in a history that he partly overlapped with in his early years in New York, when he moved there after college and got to know some of the people who had been involved in the Factory, even though by that time it was a very different Factory. I think in some ways, in his last two books—the Warhol book and the autobiography—Douglas was doing an archaeology of the self, not in a subjective sort of individualistic, narcissistic way, but in a way that is relational and goes beyond the self, to pick up on Rachel’s and Jonathan’s views earlier. He dug into a social world that left a deep imprint on him and that helped to map something like an intellectual autobiography. He  revisits moments that are telescoped into his life and sensibility and that explain his place in history. But they also compose a cartography of taste, of social life in the art world, and even a cartography of urban change to a certain extent, as Jules also mentioned before. So, I think these historical interests are both personal and individual, but also very collective. To me they are about his own singularity, but placed in collectivity and in dialogue with other singularities.

MB

I just wanted to throw in one line from “Action Around the Edges” that so typified so much of what I love about Douglas’ writing and his powers of description and seeing that I think go across all these domains of art and politics and everyday life. When he writes, “I loved buying prosciutto and fresh mozzarella at the local markets, but the framed photographs of Mussolini in many of the shop windows certainly gave me a pause.” And I was like, “What a beautiful faggot move!” You know what I mean? His ability to weave in his own pleasures in everyday life with political critique and humor and contradiction and all of it, that’s how we move through the world.

JGP

Exactly. The fag’s talent for sharp observation. I was just thinking, I don’t have an elaborate relationship to Freud as a scholar, but in reading “Mourning and Militancy” in graduate school, Douglas convinced me that there was something psychoanalytic worth thinking about, if only in the sense of having an intercessor through which to take a critical position on venerated patterns of human behavior. I’m referring to the part of the essay in which Douglas underlines that in the mechanics of melancholia, the problem is a moral opprobrium that the self turns upon itself. I extracted from that at a young age, a kind of appreciation of the real difficulty of withdrawing from moralisms, even to defend against an unjust moralism. Like an unjust sexual moralism bearing down on you.

One of the ways that it is difficult has to do with what is left unsaid in psychoanalysis. In letting Douglas’ work refresh me on Freud, I kept thinking, yes, of course, the essay concerns this bourgeois Viennese mourning, a concept derived from the social class of the people Freud was working with: those who mourn in the private sphere of the family. No wonder that kind of mourning, as handed down to bourgeois US culture, isn't very political. It's a retreat from the commons. It manufactured the problem of its own apolitical character that was lived out, for example, in the advent of HIV/AIDS as a fundamental resistance of middle class people to seeing illness and death as a consequence of political decision-making. In that sense, “Mourning and Militancy” is an account of a technology for escaping the self, a technology of socializing oneself through feelings of loss that bind you to other people instead of isolating yourself further as a bourgeois subject of psychoanalysis. The militancy that could flow from mourning is a release from the private suffering of the individual into a political body that demands the transformation of the material world to end unjust loss.

One way to respond to that frustration, to the fact that we have been coerced to privately mourn what are social-, political-, if not world-historical catastrophes that concern the collective, is to name it as a devastating outcome of Euro-American middle class culture. There's something interesting about the constant need to learn to move outward, beyond the anti-social self prescribed by austerity and middle-class cultures of the self. To be brave enough, to be curious enough to risk intimacy or to invite it, right? That seems to me one of the places where a kind of pre-Stonewall era gay sexual sensibility remains compelling.

It feels to me like we, in this conversation, are improvising our way through this very practice of socializing something that started minimally as each of us reading texts on our own, or mourning Douglas’ passing privately, something that already constituted a kind of intimacy that we're now hashing out. I find that beautiful because I don't really know how else to render it but aesthetically. It's a sensation I feel on the cusp of with all of you.

MS

I think how I was kind of understanding what Douglas describes in the introduction to On The Museum's Ruins as a shift from an interest in the objects of knowledge to the subjects of knowledge is maybe linked to what  Jonathan was saying about what he was criticizing Lee Edelman for in “Mourning and Militancy.” Douglas became more interested in something like the function, the circulation, the reception, the differentiated point of address of artworks, rather than any kind of internal workings of the art or internal references to histories of aesthetic innovation. And I somehow feel that even with that essay, or in looking at an essay like “Appropriating Appropriations,” where he was reflecting on Sherrie Levine and. . . who’s that guy who did the photo of his son, who Sherrie Levine appropriated? I forget.

RD

Edward Weston.

MS

Yeah, exactly, Weston. Douglas then revisits that essay in his short piece called “Boys in the Bedroom.” That, for me, is an example of where he does acknowledge, let's say, a subjectivity of desire in his earlier essay “Appropriating Appropriations,” the way he talks about differences between appropriating style and appropriating material. But then when he goes back to it in “Boys in the Bedroom,” he's reflecting on how does the function of this artwork, which is a photograph of a young boy, and how does the context in which that artwork is viewed, namely with guys I'm having sex with in my bedroom who are not necessarily art scholars or art viewers, how does that experience change one's understanding of art, or of photography? Also, how do the political attacks on Robert Mapplethorpe at the time possibly force one to rethink  representation and its effects, its many meanings and possibilities? Those sexual and political experiences led Douglas himself to question his earlier theories of appropriation. And that, to me, is a fascinating move. That's sort of how I understand this shift from an interest in objects of knowledge to subjects, mainly to him and his lovers as subjects of knowledge.

I just wanted to add that also I think—I can't remember, but I think—I may have read “Mourning and Militancy” for the first time in what was for me at that time a Bible, which was the collection Out There, Marginalizations and Contemporary Culture, co-edited by Trinh Minh-ha. The fact that she co-edited that collection was one of the reasons why I wanted to go back to school to study with Trinh Minh-ha, which I fortunately got to do. I read Douglas’ “Mourning and Militancy” in relation to Edward Said's “Reflection on Exile” and Toni Morrison’s “The Site of Memory.” So, his work was, for me, already situated in relation to thinkers, reflecting on the forced exile of Palestinians and, say, the premature death of Black Americans and some of these different questions. And so, I was able to... I was able to... I don't know what I was able to do. But, it did force me to think AIDS and queer theory in relation to, let's say, a postmodernism of difference rather than, let's say, the postmodernism of The Anti-Aesthetic, which for me was not a postmodernism of difference, even though Edward Said is in there, but not with the same text.

RD

Well, Craig's “The Discourse of Others” is in The Anti-Aesthetic.

MS

Oh right, of course.

RD

Which is specifically about the voices of others and difference politics.

MS

Totally. No, you’re right. I’m not an art historian. I always feel like a poser in these circles, just because I became good friends with Douglas. [Laughs.]

RH

Marc, Douglas always said that he was not an art historian—you’re in good company. [Laughs.]

MS

Yeah, it’s true.

RH

He rejected that label totally.

MS

He also resisted calling himself an art theorist. He considered himself a critic, I think.

RD

I was grateful that Morgan brought up the situation in Gaza at the very beginning of this conversation. Since October 7th, I’ve thought about what Douglas would be thinking and feeling about Gaza, as I’m sure you all have. In some ways, I’ve been glad for him that he doesn’t have to be living with it.  As I said much earlier, Douglas was the best person to complain with. Several of you nodded in agreement. I said it lightly, but what I meant was more serious; with him I was able to deplore the world’s unbearable cruelties. His indignation was superb.

MS

Can I add something to that, Rosalyn? I so agree with that. And particularly for me, living in Germany, where I’ve been for the past 25 years, and dealing with this intense anti-Palestinian sentiment that gets called “memory culture” here. I’ve thought so much about how much I miss having the possibility of talking to Douglas, because he of course would say “ceasefire now.” And I’ve had these discussions with Douglas years ago about mutual friends of ours in Germany, non-Jewish friends, with whom I’ve had arguments, and who seem unable to get beyond what Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem calls “cheap sentimentality.” She’s criticizing the youth of the ’60s, who feel guilty about things they haven’t done, namely things that their Nazi parents did. Their parents don’t feel guilty, but the youth do, instead. So, their guilt leads them to fall into a cheap sentimentality that does not allow them to acknowledge the problems of the present. I feel that this idea of cheap sentimentality is so accurate for describing the inability of German memory culture to move beyond or to, let’s say, achieve what they almost achieved in the ’80s, which was being self-critical. And, as Michael Rothberg has nicely put it, now they’ve become self-righteous. Self-righteous, I would add, out of a kind of sentimental relationship to the Holocaust and an inability to see Israel as a state, rather than only as the product of the Holocaust. They continually throw Israel back to the Holocaust as a way of not acknowledging the political, genocidal actions of a state. I’ve had so many interactions and conflicts, and they continue, with dear brilliant German, non-Jewish friends, who would lecture me on the fact that I don’t understand antisemitism.

RD

Oh, boy. Yeah.

MS

It’s just incredible. And Douglas was shocked to hear that these people that he also loves and respects would somehow not understand this. Anyway, it’s just on my mind. It’s not so explicitly about Douglas’ work. But, it’s one reason that I miss him so intensely right now, because his solidarity and his politics, I think, were just so right on and so needed.

RD

And they’re not separate from his work.

MS

Yeah.

JAS

Going back a little in the conversation, to when Marc and Ros said that Douglas did not see himself as a historian or a theorist, I remembered that when he was writing the memoir and was giving parts of it as lectures, he once told me that people invited him expecting big theory with a capital T and he said, “But I don’t do that. I do theory with a very small ‘t’.”

I go back to the seriousness of complaining and what is, really, a critical acuity about the present that I think is one of the things that I most admired about Douglas and Douglas’s work—his ability to position himself in relation to the now. That is perhaps clearest in his AIDS work, but also in most of his other writing. But I’m also thinking, as many of you have been mentioning, of everyday conversations—friends talking about life, about politics. I often miss not having him around to contrast opinions, to be able to listen to what he would have said about so much that has happened since he left us—lockdown, the drift of US politics, AI, the present situation in Gaza. And I do wonder what he would have said about a lot of this—I have this little mantra sometimes: What would Douglas say? Like all of you, I miss the chance to “deplore” much of what is happening together with him. But I also miss his great sense of humor, which was often quite biting, his excitement about new discoveries that he made all the time to the very end of his life, of a new artist, a dance, a new performer—I remember how enthusiastic he was after first seeing Morgan’s work, for example. He was great to complain with, but also to laugh with and to enjoy things with.

JF

I wanted also to go back to what both Ros and Marc were saying about how Douglas was just great to talk to about how fucked up everything was. He really was. If you were really upset about the latest outrage, you could just know that Douglas would be there with you in that space. But, thinking about this capacity for understanding being upset and outraged by the world reminded me of the question that Rachel asked about the value of art for Douglas. These are obvious things to say, but I feel like his commitment to aesthetic experience has a lot to do with his queer childhood. As we know, for queer kids through the twentieth century, aesthetic experience has been a key survival tactic—something, incidentally, that Warhol often spoke about. I think it’s one that persisted through Douglas’s life. Dance, opera and films—Douglas loved going to the movies—all these different kinds of aesthetic experiences were ways of occupying another space, of not being in the deplorability of the present. They provided multiple lines of flight, ways of being otherwise. For Douglas, to a certain extent, it was like a daily necessity to have an aesthetic experience of some kind.

I feel like that was also something I learned from him, as a way to just deal with suffering, to deal with one’s depression about the state of the world, not as a compensatory escape from that world, but as a way to re-arm oneself or to strengthen oneself to be able to go back into it the next day. That was something that I appreciated in him and learned from him.

RD

That’s very illuminating, Jonathan. Art was a resource of resilience for him, something we all need in order to stay with the trouble.

RH

I was just gonna say that maybe my strongest recollections of a crisis that we lived through together was actually Hurricane Katrina, which of course we lived through in Rochester, not at all in New Orleans. But he’d been a student, of course, at Tulane. So, he lived the daily news about Katrina in a way that I think really did teach me also how to live through the news, how to take it in, how to incorporate it and use it. It would be interesting to talk more about this. You talked, Morgan, about deeply observational, free thinking qualities. I think that was his aesthetic. If you got to live his incorporation of Katrina, you got to live his observational free thinking. That is unusual, and, I think, a gift. We talk about friendship, but this aesthetic is a little beyond that, it’s a form of intimacy that I know I’ve thought about and written about: how to think about these processes and take them into one’s writing or one’s own relationality.

EO

I have one last request. Ros, I want you to close it out if you have any culminating thoughts. Because you started the conversation I think you should be the one to end it.

RD

At the beginning of this conversation, I felt much more emotional than I had expected to, almost tongue-tied. I understand exactly what Gregg meant when he said he was talking in a certain way to hold back tears. But as the conversation developed, I had some of the same feelings as when we were caring for Douglas during the final months of his life. Those months were extraordinary in terms of the transformations in Douglas we’ve mentioned. I saw many transformations, but the biggest was when he knew he was going to die and became involved with spirituality. Buddhism, meditation, poetry—things he had hardened himself against throughout his life. He softened. It’s been a joy to gather again.