Description:

In this lecture Douglas Crimp, Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester, plays off the title of Cunningham’s 1994 essay “Four Events that Have Led to Large Discoveries.” Reflecting on his own encounters with Cunningham’s work from 1970 to the present, Crimp addresses the relations of dance, music, cinema, and design. What happens when Cunningham deprives us of the illusion of seeing totality?

Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of On the Museum’s Ruins, 1993; Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, 2002; “Our Kind of Movie”: The Films of Andy Warhol, 2012, and Before Pictures, 2016. He was the curator of the Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, New York, in 1977 and, from 1977 to 1990, an editor of the journal October, for which he edited the special issue AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism in 1987. With Lynne Cooke, he organized the exhibition Mixed Use, Manhattan for the Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2010, and he was on the curatorial team for the 2015 iteration of MoMA PS1’s quinquennial Greater New York.