WHY DANCE
In the past decade, the art world has embraced dance as never before, with myriad exhibitions, film screenings, performances, residencies, even acquisitions. Many are asking why—Why dance? Why now? Conferences are convened to answer the question; articles are written; books are in the works. My approach to the question is personal, a self-interrogation. As someone who loved to dance (as a social dancer) and loved dance (as a spectator), I hadn’t thought of it as a question. But now that it is being so insistently posed as a question, and now that I have begun to write about dance, I too want to answer it.
About the presenter:
Douglas Crimp is Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of "On the Museum’s Ruins, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics," and “Our Kind of Movie: The Films of Andy Warhol." 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." His new book, "Before Pictures", is co-published by Dancing Foxes Press and the University of Chicago Press.
“Till Now: Contemporary Art in Context” is a year-long speaker series hosted by the University of Houston School of Art and the Blaffer Art Museum that brings together leading voices in the field of contemporary art. Through public talks and intimate seminars and studio visits with UH students, internationally recognized scholars, curators, artists, and critics will investigate the idea of the contemporary as both a temporal and aesthetic framework to broaden critical understanding about how we situate current artistic practices.
Douglas Crimp’s lecture is presented with additional support from the UH Department of English and Creative Writing Program, in collaboration with the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and with promotional support from DiverseWorksWhy
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