Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art

Description

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. Jennifer Doyle is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire and co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol, also published by Duke University Press. Contents......Page 7 Preface......Page 10 Acknowledgments......Page 22 1. Introducing Difficulty......Page 26 Hard Feelings......Page 30 Patrolling the Border between Art and Politics......Page 34 Vocabulary Shift: From Controversy to Difficulty......Page 40 Difficulty’s Audience......Page 46 A Blank: Aliza Shvarts, Untitled (2008)......Page 53 Theater of Cruelty: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875)......Page 64 Touchy Subject: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006)......Page 74 What Happened to Feeling?......Page 94 The Difficulty of Sentimentality: Franko B’s I Miss You! (2003)......Page 98 The Strange Theatricality of Tears: Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan (2009)......Page 108 Relational Aesthetics and Affective Labor......Page 114 The Difficulty of Identity......Page 119 James Luna’s The History of the Luiseño People (Christmas, La Jolla Reservation 1990) (1990 – 1996, 2009)......Page 123 Difficulty and Ideologies of Emotion......Page 131 Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995 – 1996)......Page 137 David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Hujar Dead) (1988 – 1989)......Page 151 Notes......Page 172 Bibliography......Page 208 Index......Page 218