Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art

by Jennifer Doyle

In Hold It Against Me , Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist's medium. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist's feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art. Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.

Genres: Art, Art History, Theory, Nonfiction, American, Womens, Academic

232 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Klley · Rating 5 out of 5]

IT is worth taking a moment to analyze how commonly assumed models for emotion limit our conversations about how they work in art. People generally operate with what the philosopher Rei Terada describes as "expressive" model for emotion, one in which feelings are assumed to originate inside the body and to find expression on or outside the body. This "ideology of emotion," she writes, "diagrams emotion as something lifted from a depth to a surface." It leads us to measure representations of emotion according to how well we are convinced that those feelings correspond to the interior lives of the audience. This model shapes even the most sophisticated criticism.

...
"Jacques Derrida found that a novel could be moving exactly because the ownership of emotion is troubled and displaced from the reader onto someone else. The reader doesn't always experience her reactions to novels as proper to her; those feelings seem to live within and around the novel, belonging to the author, to characters, to scenes, situations, and other readers. This perspective considers the mediatedness and the sociality of emotion.

In this model, emotion is not communicated so much as it is circulated, transferred, modulated, and amplified. An expression does not represent an already existing feeling; it is the very thing that makes emotion happen, or, more nearly, it is the thing that sets emotion into motion. Tears migrate."

"Emotions are profoundly intersubjective. They do not happen inside the individual but in relation to others. As Sarah Ahmed explains, most of our models for thinking about emotion treat it as something we have, as something that rises up from the inside (the expressive model cited by Terada) or as something that 'sinks in' from the outside- as the outside world makes us 'feel bad.' "Emotion," she argues, however, "is not something 'I' or 'we' have. Rather it is through emotions , or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces and boundaries are made." For Ahmed, it is important to understand that emotions are not in either the individual or the social, but produce the very surfaces and boundaries that allow the individual and the social to be delineated as if they were objects. Emotion actually does more than mark the boundary between the self and the other. Emotion brings those boundaries into being, and artists frequently explore the poetics of this fact in their work."

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grapples with the affective and political complexities of Ron Athey, David Wojnarowicz, James Luna, Nao Bustamante, Aliza Shvarz's abortion art, among others -- in doing so taking to task critics who wilfully reduce and dismiss their work, refusing to grant it complexity. Accessible and fascinating; a happy side effect is the titular Britney Spears song that may run through your mind every time you pick it up.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The artists I work with turn to emotion because this is where ideology does its most devastating work."

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Doyle does a remarkable job at clearly conveying difficult emotion's difficulty to comprehend in contemporary art. Doyle argues that part of the reason critics and viewers have a hard time enduring, writing, explaining. and attending art that deals with emotion is based in the historical, and I would add institutionalized, way in which emotion has been viewed and discussed as an intimate endeavor that is removed from critical thought and only presents a closed dialectical engagement with the piece. Throughout the book she alludes to the fact that this "apolitical removed discourse" is connected with the perceived absoluteness of whiteness in society. This unfortunate perception has thus affected the way in which we engaged with art, any art piece that is not seemingly "objective" connotes the hysteria of identity politics and is can thus only be viewed in relation to its relation to identity. Which is to state, more bluntly, that art that actively explores the intersubjective relations of identity in society is frequently gendered and racialized in society and is deemed subpar to art that actively ignores such relations, which subsequently bears the marker of whiteness. Doyle's book opens up the dialectical engagement concerning contemporary art and emotion through a layered and concise argument.

[Madeleine · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am in awe of this book.
this book builds its own immersive world that is fun and affronting in turns in a way you can never expect for this ~genre. really lovely companion to what i'm interested in in terms of affect theory and "body vulnerability" and it introduced me to politically and emotionally transformational art. this is the kind of book i would want to write and so i'm grateful it is here and real!!!

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some disturbing and emotionally moving photographs

[Katrina McCollough · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've finally been able to open my eyes a little to contemporary art and look into the meanings behind people's work as opposed to the obvious shock value.

[Rebecca Arp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sped through this in a day because I had to return it but even while skimming it brought up really poignant and novel ideas about the art world's critique (or lack of critique) on emotional works. Interestingly enough Doyle dedicates much of the writing to artists active in the AIDS crisis and I enjoyed learning more about that moment in history and how it greatly affects contemporary art to this day.

[Georgia Gardner · Rating 5 out of 5]

read for research, but would recommend for leisure reading also

[Siri Hsu]

Affect and art. Art and politics.

[abby comisky · Rating 3 out of 5]

traumatized