91丝瓜视频

The Department of Art History and Communication Studies welcomes , Professor, University of California at Riverside, to speak at our annual lecture series (follow this link for a complete list of this year's speakers).

Title: "Critical Limits: On Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art"

Abstract: This talk imports the term "difficulty" from poetics to look at contemporary art often identified as controversial. This is new work from a forthcoming Duke University Press book which offers a critical model sensitive to the complexity of emotion as it unfolds around certain art works - it aims to shift conversation away from terms like "controversy" in order to open up space for arguing the meaning and importance of those artworks which challenge both audiences and the critical apparatus.

Biography: Jennifer Doyle teaches American literature, gender studies, and visual studies. In her book Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (Minnesota, 2006), Doyle shows how the declaration that a work of art is 鈥渁bout sex鈥� reveals surprisingly little about the work, the artist, or the spectator. Sex Objects moves readers beyond debates about pornography and censorship to show that sex in art is as diverse as sex in everyday life: exciting, ordinary, emotional, traumatic, embarrassing, funny, even profoundly boring. In chapters on the 鈥渂oring parts鈥� of Moby Dick, the scandals that dogged the painter Thomas Eakins, the role of women in Andy Warhol's Factory films, 鈥渂ad sex鈥� and Tracey Emin's crudely evocative line drawings, and L.A. artist Vaginal Davis's pornographic parodies of Vanessa Beecroft's performances, Doyle challenges simplistic readings of sexualized art and instead investigates what such works can tell us about the nature of desire. Sex Objects was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Writing on Art and Culture, and received honorable mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize.

Doyle is co-editor of a special issue of the feminist journal Signs (Spring 2006) on new feminist theories of visual culture, and is co-editor of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (Duke, 1996), the first book of its kind of consider the relationship between Warhol's sexuality and his work. Her article, "Jo March's Love Poems," on lesbian desire and reading in Little Women, appears in a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature (June 2006) on lesbian aesthetics.

She is currently at work on two book projects. 鈥淐ritical Difficulties鈥� explores the relationship between the cultural politics of emotion and the limits of art criticism. 鈥淯ncoupled鈥� explores forms of intimacy that take shape outside of, or in a critical relationship to the romantic couple and the domestic norm. Jennifer Doyle was awarded a 2007-2008 Leverhulme Visiting Fellowship in Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

This lecture has been co-sponsored with the English Department at 91丝瓜视频.