productive quotes from Doyle's Believer magazine interview:
"I think I mention this somewhere in the introduction or in a note, but when I first started working on this project, people thought I was writing a project on Minimalism. They hear that word “difficulty,” and that’s what they think about. There is an emotional landscape around Minimalist sculpture, and I’m not going to say it’s easy to write about that. You have to work at appreciating it, and being able to appreciate it is a mark of a certain kind of sophistication. It’s Spartan. As critics we understand that economy of restraint and withholding - we are taught to appreciate Minimalism’s difficulty. Its difficulty has a cultural value. But in this book, I am writing about other forms of difficulty."
"With a live performance, in which you’re keeping company with a body that you imagine is uncomfortable if not in some kind of pain, or exposed or vulnerable, you don’t sit in that startled response, you actually get used to it. That’s actually what the work is about: the way in which we keep company with something, and even maintain and nurse it. That is what his [Ron Athey's] audience is drawn to - that is, in fact, what can render that audience ecstatic."
"One of the best comments I got about this project was from Lauren Berlant. She pointed out that implicit in my writing was that people take pleasure from this work. She asked that I make that more explicit."
On Sedgwick's model of reparative reading:
"It’s a reparative gesture made as a refusal of the universal or transhistorical claim. Some of what I discuss – work by James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems and David Wojnarowicz, for example – makes a strong critique of universalizing discourse, and of certain ways of practicing criticism and art history. But that is not where their work starts or stops. Sedgwick describes the practice of a “weak theory,” in contrast with “strong theory,” as smaller in scale and intimate, local. The performances and the works that I write about – their most interesting dimension to me tends to be a quite small, local turn that’s very sensitive and profound."
"I would like to write in a way that lets readers feel like there’s room for them in the text."
On wanting to write like Witting, Adorno, Barthes and Lorde:
"They all have in common a capacity to make you feel them thinking in their writing. That’s a high art."
so productive for my review, cool.
full interview can be found here: http://logger.believermag.com/post/52636635649/interview-with-art-historian-jennifer-doyle
