Full 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.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxi
I. Introducing Difficulty 1
Hard Feelings 5
Patrolling the Border between Art and Politics 9
Vocabulary Shift: From Controversy to Difficulty 15
Difficulty's Audience 21
2. Three Case Studies in Difficulty and the Problem of Affect 28
A Blank: Aliza Shvarts, Untitled (2008) 28
Theater of Cruelty: Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic (1875) 39
Touchy Subjects: Ron Athey, Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006) 49
3. Thinking Feeling: Criticism and Emotion 69
What Happened to Feeling? 69
The Difficulty of Sentimentality: Franko B's I Miss You! (2003) 73
The Strange Theatricality of Tears: Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan (2009) 83
Relational Aesthetics and Affective Labor 89
4. Feeling Overdetermined: Identity, Emotion, and History 94
The Difficulty of Identity 94
James Luna's The History of the Luiseño People (Christmas, La Jolla Reservation 1990) (1990-1996, 2009) 98
Difficulty and Ideologies of Emotion 106
Carrie Mae Weems's From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-1996) 112
Conclusion 126
David Wojnarowicz's Untitled (Hujar Dead) (1988-1989) 126
Notes 147
Bibliography 183
Index 193
