Dance Dance Film Essays

Previously uncollected dance writings from the legendary art critic who defined the Pictures Generation, in a handsome clothbound edition

Pioneering AIDS activist, art critic, educator and curator Douglas Crimp is known for the fluidity and acuity of his writing on an array of passions. His book AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism (1987) deconstructed the art world’s complicated and mostly disheartening responses to the AIDS crisis; On the Museum’s Ruins (1993) explored postmodernist art practices in relation to the politics of institutions; and Before Pictures (2016), a brilliant combination of memoir and criticism, chronicled Crimp’s first decade in 1970s New York.

This new book collects the critic’s incisive pieces on dance (a lifelong interest) and dance on film, which, according to Artforum, “galvanized the field and synthesized histories of ballet, modern dance and postmodern performance.” Written from 2006 to 2010, these in-depth essays are devoted to choreographers and filmmakers such as Charles Atlas, Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Tacita Dean, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and Yvonne Rainer. Before his death in July 2019, Crimp penned a new essay specifically for this book that probes the idea and definition of the “dance film.”

This beautifully designed clothbound volume, which shows Crimp’s tireless investigation and experimentation with writing, includes an introduction by curator Lynne Cooke, who invited Crimp to collaborate with her on the landmark 2010 show Mixed Use, Manhattan at the Museo Reina Sofia.

Douglas Crimp (1944–2019) is famed for his scholarly contributions to the fields of postmodern theory and art, institutional critique, dance, film, queer theory and feminist theory. His writings are marked by his desire to merge the often disjunctive worlds of politics, art and academia. From 1977 to 1990, he was the managing editor of the journal October. Before his death, Crimp was Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History and Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.