The Drive to Describe: An Interview with Catherine Opie

Reilly, Maura

doi:10.1080/00043249.2001.10792066

Cited by 18 publications

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“…Queer approaches were less boundary conscious and less essentialist in their conclusions about the consequences of identity. Artists such as Catherine Opie and Ron Athey took a cue from Mapplethorpe's X-Portfolio and developed artistic methods for exploring SIM sexuality-methods that emphasized sexual inquiry over formalist presentation (Rosenfeld 2000;Reilly 2001). Glenn Ligon used art to pursue the questions of race that had been raised by Kobena Mercer (Firstenberg 2001 ).…”

Section: Speaking Of Man In Polyester Suit Mercer Saysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Art in the Public Square: Democracy and the Associational Life of Culture in America

Kidd¹

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This dissertation examines government funding for the arts through the lens of democratic political philosophy. Recent scholarship has established an important relationship between participation in civic associations and the success of democratic political institutions. I use democratic theory to argue that artistic practices are an overlooked form of associational life that can make unique contributions to democratic effects at the levels of the individual, political institutions, and the public sphere.Specifically, I identify the positive democratic benefits of community arts and counterhegemonic arts, in contrast to the anti-democratic effects of the elite arts. I then make use of the theory through an examination of the controversies that affected the American art world-especially the National Endowment for the Arts-in the late 1980s and early 1990s, finding that the points of controversy actually stem from the most democratic artistic practices. The theoretical approach used here stands as a counter-point to the work of Bourdieu and others who have focused their study of the arts solely on the elite ' arts and the role of the arts as mechanisms of hegemonic social reproduction. I provide a framework for recognizing the ways that art can actually function for anti-elite purposes and serve as a means of challenging hegemony. Performance (2000, 124) 4 Acknowledgements I thank first and foremost my advisor and dissertation chair, Sarah Corse. Sarah was stem when I needed it, gracious when I did not deserve it, and always encouraging.Sharon Hays and Bethany Bryson were heavily involved in this project from the beginning and their corrective guidance was under-appreciated along the way. I give them my overdue gratitude. Howard Singerman joined this committee late in the game, very kindly, and has given me useful feedback and pointed me in new directions. IntroductionWhen an artist creates a work of art, he not only makes a product that exists within the world, he makes a world its~lf. Within the space of the canvas (or the covers of a book, or the opening and closing of the theater curtain) lies a new universe, more or less complete. In some cases, this universe is very like our own. In other cases, it may seem fantastical, and pure invention. It has its own rules-psychologies, biologies, sociologies, physics, aesthetics-its own population (characters/subjects) and its own trajectory (plot, or the absence of plot). 7Toni Morrison says that she writes to figure out what a particular experience is like. She heard once of a woman who killed her child rather than see her taken back into slavery. Morrison wanted to know what that experience was like-how did the woman arrive at such a position with such conclusions, and how did the killing affect her life afterwards?-and so she wrote Beloved. The book can be seen then as an experiment in psychology, sociology, and history that maps out a sliver of the difficult terrain of family, memory, and identity.The author Dan Brown pulls together pieces of art his...

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Section: Speaking Of Man In Polyester Suit Mercer Saysmentioning

confidence: 99%