*CFP* "AFTER DOUGLAS CRIMP", ISSUE 33, INVISIBLE CULTURE: AN ELECTRONIC JOURNAL FOR VISUAL CULTURE

For its thirty-third issue, InVisible Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that engage with the legacy of Douglas Crimp (1944-2019). Douglas was foundational to InVisible Culture and its institutional home, the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. The first issue of InVisible Culture included his essay “Getting the Warhol We Deserve,” in which Douglas used Warhol’s gayness as an interpretative hinge while also advocating for the importance of cultural studies’ contributions to art criticism. Besides his profound influence on art scholarship, Douglas’s pedagogy reverberates through the work of those he taught and mentored in various academic and art institutions. We invite contributors to reflect on the myriad ways in which Douglas’s legacy impacts the pasts, presents, and futures of art history and cultural criticism.

Throughout his career, Douglas made crucial contributions to art theory, queer theory, and cultural studies. In 1977, Douglas curated the seminal exhibition Pictures at New York’s Artists Space, which established him as one of postmodern art’s major interlocutors. He continued to spur critical engagements with art institutions and postmodernism with his many essays in October and his 1993 book On the Museum’s Ruins. During the rise of the AIDS crisis, Douglas turned to what he called “cultural activism”; his writings later collected in Melancholia and Moralism (2002) helped galvanize a generation of queer activists.

Further, he wrote influentially on Warhol, the New York art scene of the 1970s, modern and contemporary dance, and film. Alongside his conceptual and critical acuity, one distinctive feature of Douglas’s work is the way he integrated the self and personal experience into his writing—a trait he most fully realized in his 2016 book Before Pictures.

As well as engaging with Douglas’s oeuvre, we invite contributors to engage with artist Louise Lawler’s question, “What would Douglas Crimp say?,” published in October earlier this year, by reflecting on how his scholarship and activism may help us make sense of the present historical conjuncture.

Contributions to this issue may address (but are by no means limited to) the following topics and themes:

• Art and activism 
• Public health crises 
• Queer social life and its histories 
• Modernism and postmodernism 
• Queer analyses of art and visual culture 
• Museums, institutional critique, and cultural decolonization 
• Appropriation strategies in artistic and cultural practices 
• Film and contemporary dance 
• The relationships among art history, cultural studies, and politics 
• Autobiography and memoir

 

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by February 15, 2021.

Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

 

Creative/Artistic Works

In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to the website or contact the same address.

 

Reviews

InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). For this issue we particularly encourage authors to submit reviews of games or other forms of interactive media. To submit a review proposal, go to the website or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

 

Dialogues

The journal also invites submissions to its Dialogues page, which accommodates more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please contact us at invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu with the subject heading “Dialogues submission.”

 

InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.