"Warhol was endlessly prolific"
[Douglas Crimp] The VCS program had been founded in 1988 by
a group of very important scholars here at the University.
I had been an aids activist and that had pushed me in the direction
of cultural studies away from our history.
Douglas was crucial in the formation of VCS as we know it today.
He was not one of the original founders of the program, but I would say
he was one of the architects and builders of the program.
Frankly, I love this program and I it's not duplicated anywhere else.
[Douglas Crimp] "And he made the kind of film that he was trying to push Warhol to make
all along which was more commercial films."
And I have to think to myself, "Do I really want to teach
classical art history?" And the answer is no, I don't. That isn't what I do.
I sort of can't imagine going to Harvard and teaching or Yale or something and teaching
a dance film class which is what I'm teaching this semester.
The types of classes that he teaches and the types of dissertations
that he directs and the type of work that he does
have but really been foundational to the growth and success I think
of VCS. Because there is this real rigor to the analysis, but there's also
a real beauty to the way that he uses language.
We are here to do something today that we don't get to do enough,
which is to celebrate both the writer and his writing
for what he and it do to us as individuals.
I put together this event
to mark Douglas's seventieth birthday.
"What seemed to be essential was a vastly expanded view of culture in relation to crisis."
I decided it should be a young generation of scholars
who would speak to the ways in which
reading Douglas had marked or transformed their lives.
What has been so meaningful to me is that Douglas and his work
and then his friendship has really taught me to be very thoughtful in everything that I do.
For me, listening, one of the interesting aspects
was of course to hear Douglas's writing voice spoken by others.
It demonstrates that what any of us sees depends on our individual histories.
Our differently constructed subjectivities.
But in general you know a lot of it had to do with the excitement of hearing
alums who had been his students who were
shy when they were here, or intimidated when they were here
and have now blossomed into fully self-possessed individuals
giving his voice and his words back to him the way he had given those words to them.
Eventually I suppose it's the case that, you know,
a generation of artists has a level of
references that I'm not going to fully comprehend.
But I don't think that time has really happened yet.
Maybe looking at art, you know, keeps me intellectually young.
He keeps sort of charting new terrain and writing new work and
it's as beautifully written and as rigorous
and as smart as his earliest stuff. So he's just he just keeps on going.
There are young, very young, people who are doing things that
interest me a lot in the world of dance, in the world of
the visual arts, so I'll continue to
to write about those things I think. And teach about them.
A production of the University of Rochester.
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