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Before Pictures
Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the “Pictures Generation”—the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp’s own formative experiences before “Pictures.”
Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim—where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max’s Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS.
Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.
Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp’s life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim—where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren’s Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max’s Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS.
Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp’s life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published October 5, 2016
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279 people want to read
About the author
Douglas Crimp
64 books19 followersDouglas Crimp (b. 1944) was an American writer, curator, and art historian. He was professor in art history at the University of Rochester.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
February 11, 2017
In my youth, I subscribed to the October journal. I feel my main attraction to the journal was due to its design. Which is, to this day, the exact same thing. I like a magazine or journal that doesn't change. Saying that I haven't read it for 20 years or so, even though, it's an excellent publication of writers writing about things I'm interested in. One of those writers is Douglas Crimp. If his name was attached to an essay I would read it.
"Before Pictures" is a book that I wouldn't expect from Crimp. It's very personal, and perhaps one of the best books from a gay perspective on New York City and its haunts. The book is centered on the fact that he curated a show called "Pictures" which was influential due it had Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others. He was a critic who was/is interested in how the arts merge into pop culture. What I like about this book is that it's a very focused memoir on the place, time, and the nature of one's sexuality and love of the arts can all meet on a specific landscape. When he writes about the disco era it's fascinating, maybe because I just think of him as an art critic and not a guy who actually had a public life in such a wonderful environment. Or his interest in the Ballet, which is quite deep, and of course, like everything else in this book, deals with a relationship. A superb memoir that touches on a lot of issues. His love (I think) for Manhattan and some other locations. The Fire Island part of the book was equally fascinating to me. Essential gay culture literature, and of course, a very insider's view of the arts during the 1970s through the 1980s. Wonderful.
"Before Pictures" is a book that I wouldn't expect from Crimp. It's very personal, and perhaps one of the best books from a gay perspective on New York City and its haunts. The book is centered on the fact that he curated a show called "Pictures" which was influential due it had Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, and others. He was a critic who was/is interested in how the arts merge into pop culture. What I like about this book is that it's a very focused memoir on the place, time, and the nature of one's sexuality and love of the arts can all meet on a specific landscape. When he writes about the disco era it's fascinating, maybe because I just think of him as an art critic and not a guy who actually had a public life in such a wonderful environment. Or his interest in the Ballet, which is quite deep, and of course, like everything else in this book, deals with a relationship. A superb memoir that touches on a lot of issues. His love (I think) for Manhattan and some other locations. The Fire Island part of the book was equally fascinating to me. Essential gay culture literature, and of course, a very insider's view of the arts during the 1970s through the 1980s. Wonderful.
June 21, 2020
Very brave of him to admit he traded disco for conceptual art, it's never easy to admit your mistakes.
April 20, 2022
Douglas Crimp writes about his extensive career as an art critic that started in New York City. "Before Pictures" is an introduction to his life before and after a seminal exhibit titled [Pictures] that started and circled around again with his writing about the exhibit later in his life, what he learned, and what he would have done different. The show [Pictures] became a legendary show in the art world featuring five artists: Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, and Philip Smith. It was one of the first touring exhibits
This memoir is built around a forward, "Front Room, Back Room," and five chapters that are his New York Addresses: Spanish Harlem, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Tribeca, and the Financial District (where he lived till he died in 2019).
His first trip to NYC he was worried about being drafted into the Vietnam war, he told them he was gay but back then they required proof and a letter from a psychiatrist. So he went to NY, he doesn't quite finish that loop, did he submit a letter? He went back to New Orleans to finish school then returned and got his first real job in NY. "I set out one day from my Spanish Harlem apartment to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I planned to apply for a job. As I walked down Fifth Avenue from Ninety-Eighth Street near Park Avenue, I came upon the Guggenheim and thought to myself, "Here's a museum, I might just as well try this one." I inquired of the first person I encountered in the lobby of what was then the administration wing about applying for a job. His immediate reply, to my surprise, was “Do you know anything about the pre-Columbian art?" "Yes," I answered, "I studied it extensively in college." And so after little further discussion, I was offered a job. Entirely fortuitously, just at that moment the Guggenheim was getting ready to install a large exhibition of pre-Columbian Peruvian art, but Thomas Messer, the Guggenheim's director at the time, had quarreled with the show's guest curator, Peruvian textile expert Alan Sawyer, and ordered him out of the museum. Whereupon some eight hundred art objects arrived from Lima, and no one on the Guggenheim staff—all of whom were trained as modernists—knew a Nazca pot from a Moche pot." After the exhibit he stayed on as a curatorial assistant in his other field of interest, modern art. A classic NYC story that I love as a Native New Yorker.
The book is populated with artists, designers, dancers and people whose names ar iconic: Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, John Waters, Andy Warhole, etc. He traveled to the desert to visit artist Agnes Martin. He traveled neighborhood to neighborhood in NYC in his lifetime, and each section gives the feeling of NYC for that time. His book has an Index, is footnoted, and is a strong historical document of a time and era that was a precursor of gay and sexual liberation, and rich creativity that has benefitted our world and lives.
What I liked about this memoir is his exploration as a gay man living in the art world during the rise of New York Disco scene; he includes writing about disco that he did not publish because it was not related to his art critic career. He mentions in the opening section that he is on experimental treatment for HIV, but he does not talk about his personal history with AIDS, he talks about it in a broader context, AIDS only has three pages listed in the index. His book led me to "The Anti-Aesthetic" a book on postmodern art with essays, including one by Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," which I found online and Crimp notes that Craig Owens died from AIDS.
Some quotes:
“It was a gay-liberation tenet to be open to new experiences, no matter how unusual or unappealing to your imagination. Through once was enough for many such adventures, I’ll be forever thankful for having abided by the ethos. It’s surprising how little you know about what turns you on until someone coaxes you to try it.” P. 122
“In truth, pleasure often comes from having to figure out your place certainly many of us eventually settle into habitual proclivities and roles, but during that brief moment of gay liberation in the 1970’s, experimentation reigned. We tried things on for size, discarded them if they didn’t fit, then maybe tried them on again with someone else or after we’d gained more experience. The goal was not to limit ourselves, never to say definitely, “I know what I like.”” P. 123-124
“Discotheques are nothing new. They came in during the 1960s, when people realized that good dance music was too dependent on studio effects to be reproduced by a live band. They were part of that very brief episode when London—King’s Road and Chelsea especially—was synonymous with hip. They had names like Annabelle’s and Arthur, and later the Electric Circus and Hippopotamus. They were private or at least exclusive. They were expensive. They were straight. And now those places belong to bygone days.”
“With disco at its best, dancing is both individual and collective. You might connect with the stranger dancing next to you at a given moment, but it’s not a couples thing; it’s biggie intimacy, which can be very intense and sexy, but it’s usually limited to dancing together for a while before you each dissolve back into the crowd or return to your “partner.”
In this respect, the innovations of disco mirrored the ethos of gay liberation regarding the expansion of affectional possibility. Coupling was newly seen not as a “happily-ever-after” compact but as in in-the-moment union for spring pleasure. Such pleasure sharing could, of course, lead to all kinds of longer-term relationships: now-and-again casual sex partners, regular fuck buddies, cruising comrade, bar and bathhouse companions, just plain friends, and combinations of any of these and many more. But it didn’t have to lead to anything at all. Pleasure was its own reward; it didn’t require redemption through love or commitment or even an exchange of phone numbers. Moreover two stopped being a magic number: coupling could easily multiply to become a three-way, a foursome, group sex. Bathhouses had “orgy rooms,” steam rooms, and saunas for those who wanted more than one partner at a time, a little voyeurism and/or exhibitionism in the mix, or the total anonymity of sex in the dark with bodies detached from personhood. The liberation ethos developed into a new sexual culture, and that culture fed into the new dance scene. It’s not surprising that one of the earliest gay dance parties in New York happened at a bathhouse: the Continental Baths introduced disco in 1970.” P. 196
This memoir is built around a forward, "Front Room, Back Room," and five chapters that are his New York Addresses: Spanish Harlem, Chelsea, Greenwich Village, Tribeca, and the Financial District (where he lived till he died in 2019).
His first trip to NYC he was worried about being drafted into the Vietnam war, he told them he was gay but back then they required proof and a letter from a psychiatrist. So he went to NY, he doesn't quite finish that loop, did he submit a letter? He went back to New Orleans to finish school then returned and got his first real job in NY. "I set out one day from my Spanish Harlem apartment to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I planned to apply for a job. As I walked down Fifth Avenue from Ninety-Eighth Street near Park Avenue, I came upon the Guggenheim and thought to myself, "Here's a museum, I might just as well try this one." I inquired of the first person I encountered in the lobby of what was then the administration wing about applying for a job. His immediate reply, to my surprise, was “Do you know anything about the pre-Columbian art?" "Yes," I answered, "I studied it extensively in college." And so after little further discussion, I was offered a job. Entirely fortuitously, just at that moment the Guggenheim was getting ready to install a large exhibition of pre-Columbian Peruvian art, but Thomas Messer, the Guggenheim's director at the time, had quarreled with the show's guest curator, Peruvian textile expert Alan Sawyer, and ordered him out of the museum. Whereupon some eight hundred art objects arrived from Lima, and no one on the Guggenheim staff—all of whom were trained as modernists—knew a Nazca pot from a Moche pot." After the exhibit he stayed on as a curatorial assistant in his other field of interest, modern art. A classic NYC story that I love as a Native New Yorker.
The book is populated with artists, designers, dancers and people whose names ar iconic: Jackson Pollock, Cindy Sherman, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, John Waters, Andy Warhole, etc. He traveled to the desert to visit artist Agnes Martin. He traveled neighborhood to neighborhood in NYC in his lifetime, and each section gives the feeling of NYC for that time. His book has an Index, is footnoted, and is a strong historical document of a time and era that was a precursor of gay and sexual liberation, and rich creativity that has benefitted our world and lives.
What I liked about this memoir is his exploration as a gay man living in the art world during the rise of New York Disco scene; he includes writing about disco that he did not publish because it was not related to his art critic career. He mentions in the opening section that he is on experimental treatment for HIV, but he does not talk about his personal history with AIDS, he talks about it in a broader context, AIDS only has three pages listed in the index. His book led me to "The Anti-Aesthetic" a book on postmodern art with essays, including one by Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," which I found online and Crimp notes that Craig Owens died from AIDS.
Some quotes:
“It was a gay-liberation tenet to be open to new experiences, no matter how unusual or unappealing to your imagination. Through once was enough for many such adventures, I’ll be forever thankful for having abided by the ethos. It’s surprising how little you know about what turns you on until someone coaxes you to try it.” P. 122
“In truth, pleasure often comes from having to figure out your place certainly many of us eventually settle into habitual proclivities and roles, but during that brief moment of gay liberation in the 1970’s, experimentation reigned. We tried things on for size, discarded them if they didn’t fit, then maybe tried them on again with someone else or after we’d gained more experience. The goal was not to limit ourselves, never to say definitely, “I know what I like.”” P. 123-124
“Discotheques are nothing new. They came in during the 1960s, when people realized that good dance music was too dependent on studio effects to be reproduced by a live band. They were part of that very brief episode when London—King’s Road and Chelsea especially—was synonymous with hip. They had names like Annabelle’s and Arthur, and later the Electric Circus and Hippopotamus. They were private or at least exclusive. They were expensive. They were straight. And now those places belong to bygone days.”
“With disco at its best, dancing is both individual and collective. You might connect with the stranger dancing next to you at a given moment, but it’s not a couples thing; it’s biggie intimacy, which can be very intense and sexy, but it’s usually limited to dancing together for a while before you each dissolve back into the crowd or return to your “partner.”
In this respect, the innovations of disco mirrored the ethos of gay liberation regarding the expansion of affectional possibility. Coupling was newly seen not as a “happily-ever-after” compact but as in in-the-moment union for spring pleasure. Such pleasure sharing could, of course, lead to all kinds of longer-term relationships: now-and-again casual sex partners, regular fuck buddies, cruising comrade, bar and bathhouse companions, just plain friends, and combinations of any of these and many more. But it didn’t have to lead to anything at all. Pleasure was its own reward; it didn’t require redemption through love or commitment or even an exchange of phone numbers. Moreover two stopped being a magic number: coupling could easily multiply to become a three-way, a foursome, group sex. Bathhouses had “orgy rooms,” steam rooms, and saunas for those who wanted more than one partner at a time, a little voyeurism and/or exhibitionism in the mix, or the total anonymity of sex in the dark with bodies detached from personhood. The liberation ethos developed into a new sexual culture, and that culture fed into the new dance scene. It’s not surprising that one of the earliest gay dance parties in New York happened at a bathhouse: the Continental Baths introduced disco in 1970.” P. 196
May 19, 2017
This book was an enjoyable read after some of the more heavy theoretical reading I've been doing lately. Although ostensibly a memoir of Crimp's life in New York City between 1967 and 1977, it contained a fair amount of art criticism/theory as well. Rather than inserting himself into his criticism, Crimp has inserted criticism into his biography.
April 23, 2018
This book is for art critics and artists, in that order. Crimp cut his teeth as an adjunct, museum curator, and journalist in 1970s Manhattan. Fleeing his conservative Idaho childhood, Crimp devoured all kinds of art, first focusing on modernism, but gradually pivoting toward critical theory and the deconstructive, performative, mashed-up, campy, and self-consciously manufactured artwork that figures like Cindy Sherman produced. Crimp was an active member of LGBT social scenes in Lower Manhattan and Fire Island. His vivid recollections of drug-fueled discos, abandoned piers that gave cruisers shelter, and industrial lofts turned into performance-art venues are worth the price of admission. Crimp's major themes are his resistance to imitation (or "clones," as he calls those who embrace the latest fashion), his ambivalence about the disco scene, the way that figures like George Balanchine bridged modernist and postmodernist art, and the youthful belief that one can grasp the totality of a field, only to be disappointed later. Crimp name-drops art critics and photographers right and left, and he makes no attempt to explain art terms like formalist, minimalist, conceptual, etc. A memoir written for general readers would likely walk readers through this jargon, or minimize it, and explain how Crimp learned about art. Crimp's having none of that. This book expects you to know about contemporary art. If you don't, then his anecdotes and reflections on a bankrupt, swinging New York may not be enough to sustain your interest.
May 30, 2017
I feel like I'm the ideal reader for this book, as a gay white cis male from a middle class background with an education in design and art, familiarity with modern dance and early performance art... So, I loved it, but maybe I'm biased.
Crimp's book is situated firmly at the intersection of all these things, touching on fashion history (via his early experiences in NYC working with designer Charles James), gay culture (the rise of disco clubs, Fire Island, and cruising/gay sex in pre-AIDS NYC), and of course his own path to finding a voice as an art critic known for theorizing postmodernism. The book is organized roughly chronologically and spatially around Crimp's migrations to various living spaces in NYC throughout the 60s-70s. He attempts to reconcile what was of interest to him as a critic with what was going on/of interest in his personal life throughout this period, with a lot of insightful connections and self-deprecating assessments of his own work throughout. He touches on Agnes Martin, Balanchine, postmodernism and ballet, Minimalist sculpture, color field painting, conceptual art, Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Charles James, Daniel Buren, Ellsworth Kelly, Yvonne Rainer, Cindy Sherman, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, the Watergate scandal, and October magazine, among many other subjects - highly recommended if you have any interest in these areas. Fascinating cultural study-meets-memoir.
Crimp's book is situated firmly at the intersection of all these things, touching on fashion history (via his early experiences in NYC working with designer Charles James), gay culture (the rise of disco clubs, Fire Island, and cruising/gay sex in pre-AIDS NYC), and of course his own path to finding a voice as an art critic known for theorizing postmodernism. The book is organized roughly chronologically and spatially around Crimp's migrations to various living spaces in NYC throughout the 60s-70s. He attempts to reconcile what was of interest to him as a critic with what was going on/of interest in his personal life throughout this period, with a lot of insightful connections and self-deprecating assessments of his own work throughout. He touches on Agnes Martin, Balanchine, postmodernism and ballet, Minimalist sculpture, color field painting, conceptual art, Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Charles James, Daniel Buren, Ellsworth Kelly, Yvonne Rainer, Cindy Sherman, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark, the Watergate scandal, and October magazine, among many other subjects - highly recommended if you have any interest in these areas. Fascinating cultural study-meets-memoir.
June 26, 2024
I have never read quite a memoir like this, it is an electric and dazzling blend of art criticism, meditations on dance, film, pop culture, politics and activism, as well as personal reflections on the becoming of oneself through relational, personal and sexual discoveries.
I appreciated Crimp's willingness to confront the instability of memory, as well as his admissions about changing his mind about art, life and politics. A rare critic and thinker whose openness and curiosity, as well as his sparkling wit and way of conveying knowledge in a conversational tone, makes him one of the great writers of the past century.
You can really hear his voice in this memoir, and he writes about everything like it all matters, from a vacation with a lover to changing the course of art history, and I liked that.
I appreciated Crimp's willingness to confront the instability of memory, as well as his admissions about changing his mind about art, life and politics. A rare critic and thinker whose openness and curiosity, as well as his sparkling wit and way of conveying knowledge in a conversational tone, makes him one of the great writers of the past century.
You can really hear his voice in this memoir, and he writes about everything like it all matters, from a vacation with a lover to changing the course of art history, and I liked that.
May 15, 2019
Enjoyable to learn more about the personal life of this hugely important critic. Fascinating how he interweaves criticism in and out of personal anecdotes and history, in general. Sometimes you wonder where he is going, but he is such a good writer, you trust him to lead you through the journey. This is a wonderful, intimate recollection of the New York art scene from the late 1960s to late 1970s from a key player.
January 19, 2025
A digressive biographical perambulation through the vanished spaces of the downtown NYC art scene in the 1970s and 1980s in which indiscreet apercus (viz. Ellsworth Kelly's favorite kink was shrimping, or sucking toes) and academic disquisitions on works by Agnes Martin, Buren, and Sherman are stops on the same leisurely itinerary. Preferred the apercus, as the scholarly portion of the text focuses on Crimp's disillusionment with painting and increasing preoccupation with performance art and postmodern French theory: not my interests, generally. The chapter on the underground disco scene of the early/mid 1970s and its hedonistic pursuit of the far frontiers of bodily pleasure is a gem, though, well worth accompanying DC on this traipse down memory lane for.
August 1, 2018
An exciting romp through 1970s NYC. Crimp is (mostly) a wonderful storyteller, painting pictures of disco clubs and exhibitions, connecting seemingly unrelated artists. Light on October theory but much more stimulating than a typical memoir.
April 27, 2020
Errata: the photograph of Balanchine’s Apollo on p 230 is captioned as including dancers Sterling Hyltin and Robert Fairchild. Aside from the fact that there are three female dancers in this photo, the one whose face is visible is Maria Kowroski, not Hyltin.
October 17, 2017
Divine.
November 9, 2018
What a fascinating book! A great piece to read before my trip to NYC tomorrow. Will write more about the book upon my return.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews