Promiscuous knowledge

Douglas Crimp. Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 330 pp., 35 b/w ills. $32.95.

I like to think of queer theory, applied to the arts, as a kind of rescue mission. The unidentified queer or counterheteronormative impulse within representation is rescued from incomprehension by someone, really anyone, who has a schematic understanding of how objects may be queerly received, or perhaps more simply, of just how queer an audience can be. In a profound way, Douglas Crimp's Melancholia and Moralism, a new collection of "essays on AIDS and queer politics" chronicles a literal rescue mission, on the part of a prominent theorist, to decry the deadly consequences of not recognizing the AIDS epidemic as a crisis in and of representation. Which is not to say that AIDS is first a representation, but rather that anything we claim to know about AIDS is already wholly mediated; knowledge as representation. This is well-worn territory for academics: epistemologies and their attendant institutions thereby suffer productively under deconstructive scrutiny. For Crimp, this kind of self-reflexive criticality explicitly signaled the postmodern, and this was the subject of his 1993 collection of essays, On the Museum's Ruins (MIT Press).

The new collection of essays, the first half of them written concurrently with the final essays in the earlier collection, has quite a different tone, most assuredly because the stakes of the project are much higher. Rather than reviewing the museum or art-historical knowledge as representation, a theoretical move that his contemporaries in the art world would have been well equipped to countenance, here Crimp tackles the problem of AIDS as representation. This entails a delicate and psychically fraught project of communicating, to as wide an audience as will listen, that the idealistic, nostalgic depictions and homophobic, racist, and classist omissions of artistic, political, and scientific discourse around AIDS can have deadly ramifications. These essays struggle with the difficulties of how to get the vital deconstructive message of queerness out of the academy and into the streets, or further, into every Main Street, U.S.A. As Crimp puts it: "How do we make what we know knowable to legions?" (301)

To this end, consider how much more forceful an argument erupts against corporatized art institutions when Crimp argues that "A Day without Art" is complicit in allowing those institutions to ignore the AIDS crisis for 364 days a year. The annual fundraiser and corporate gesture of mourning is criticized by Crimp as too elegiac, privileging the lives and deaths of artists over others and failing to realize how this sort of idealization is itself a representation of who deserves to be mourned, who's worth the effort to save, and, perhaps most dangerous, that in the face of such a crisis, the most that artists can do is succumb to mourning, express loss, and struggle on for redemptive truth through art making. So these essays are activist political projects, but, consistently returning to the deconstructed site of the contemporary art museum, Crimp repeatedly insists that there is no outside to or uninflected terrain within the purview of the political representation: "Rather it is crucial that art institutions recognize that representation is not restricted to discrete symbolic gestures, events, or works, but rather that everything they do functions as representation. It is not a matter of occasionally allowing a political representation of the AIDS crisis; rather, institutions constantly make political representations, directly or indirectly, of the crisis" (166).

Crimp's thought is most probing as he searches out the implications of this fundamental contention: that as knowledge is subject to the logic of representation, there is no knowledge that does not conceal the motives of an individual or an institution. There is no disinterested, uncontestable, and uninvested knowledge anywhere; which is another way of saying that knowledge is as volatile and pervasive as thought, and there is no outside to the theoretical. Aside from the most obvious windmills that this tilts against, such as the objectivity of scientific knowledge or the neutral space of the museum, Crimp diligently calls to criticism all manner of ideological phantasms that might be thematized as an outside to representation or theory.

For the world of contemporary visual culture, this means, and it will come as no surprise, that Kant is out: the art object has no autonomy, it is inextricably bound to a fetishizing discourse and a highly commodified material context. Likewise there is no disinterested aesthetic judgment, no aura, no transcendental aspect to art that might divorce it from the diurnal. Art imparts no redemptive truth and has no universality, a notion that Crimp repeatedly lashes out against as it tenaciously reemerges in art-world and not-art-world contexts alike, the "Day without Art" being a salient example. Finally, most obviously, there is no art world versus non-art world. There is no real world in which to retreat to avoid the perils of representation, any more than there is an art world whose redemptive functions decouple it from political life.