Carrie Lambert-Beatty | Harvard University (original) (raw)

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Papers by Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary, ed. Helaine Posner (Milano: Charta/Neuberger Museum of Art, 2010)., 2010

The contemporary Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera is known for radical acts of "arte de co... more The contemporary Cuban performance artist Tania Bruguera is known for radical acts of "arte de conducta," or behavior art. With behavior as its medium, her political art is sometimes indistinguishable from political activity. Through close accounts of her work - including a parafictional intervention featuring 1960s radicals Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers -- this essay asks whether the artist furthest from traditional artistic activities might be art's most fervent supporter, and tests the tip of a double-edged sword: art's detachment and autonomy.

Published in Helaine Posner et al., Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary (Milano: Charta/Neuberger Museum of Art, 2010).

Visual Resources, 2000

... For if the essence of per-formance is its ephemerality, events like cabarets and fireworks we... more ... For if the essence of per-formance is its ephemerality, events like cabarets and fireworks were like-wise designed to exist for a brief ... maybe, there is a way to experi-ence Car Crash without having "been there." Intentionally or not, Kirby's text opens a door between performance ...

“Parafictional tendencies: Carrie Lambert-Beatty in conversation with Kostis Stafylakis,” in Anti... more “Parafictional tendencies: Carrie Lambert-Beatty in conversation with Kostis Stafylakis,” in Anti-, the catalog of the 6th Athens Bienniale, (Athens Biennale, 2018).

October Magazine, 2009

Using the term parafiction to name situations in which a fiction is temporarily experienced as fa... more Using the term parafiction to name situations in which a fiction is temporarily experienced as fact, this essay examines the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of contemporary art that puts viewers through such experiences. Why has this kind of art become so common? Works by Walid Raad, Michael Blum, the Yes Men and others. Sometimes funny, frequently moving, and arguably cruel, parafiction exemplifies art's culture-shifting power, pushing alternatives from the possible to the plausible. (N.B. I now start discussions of this geneaology in the early 1990s, finding in the work of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Andrea Fraser, Fred Wilson and others a model of epistemological critique).

This essay on the artist team Allora & Calzadilla looks at their brilliant "delegated performance... more This essay on the artist team Allora & Calzadilla looks at their brilliant "delegated performance" (Bishop), in which the artists ask practiced performers like dancers, gymnasts, musicians to rework the skills they've so throroughly mastered, often as way to think about the use and abuse of culture in times of war; it leads me to speculate on the neuroplasticity their procedures demand as model for the politics of aesthetics.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2008

On feminist art-activism (and paradoxes thereof) in support of abortion access, and in the contex... more On feminist art-activism (and paradoxes thereof) in support of abortion access, and in the context of capitalist globalization. Rebecca Gomperts, Women on Waves. Socially-engaged art, autonomy of art, and pirates.

Published in the exhibition catalog, _A minimal future? : art as object 1958-1968_, edited by cur... more Published in the exhibition catalog, _A minimal future? : art as object 1958-1968_, edited by curator Ann Goldstein in 2004, this essay considers the convergence of action-like objects and object-like actions in mid-1960s New York. "[Dances' dual difference from Minimalism,] their more than and not quite, allows the dances to open up aspects of Minimalism's temporality and visuality and reframe its internal complexity. In the end it is not the likeness of dance and visual art in the 1960s so much as the misfit between them that is the reason to find slots for dance artists in the Minimalist roster, to rebuild Minimalism with performance."

Sympathetic but frustrated review of Nancy Spector's landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim in ter... more Sympathetic but frustrated review of Nancy Spector's landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim in terms of a three-way tension between types of reflexivity: modernist self-reference, institutionally-critical self-examination, and the self-regard of a group of important mid-career artists (relational narcissism: when artists lock eyes with one another).

New Directions for Youth Development, 2010

This article is a review on billboard liberation and some other proj-ects that develop the idea o... more This article is a review on billboard liberation and some other proj-ects that develop the idea of talking back or over advertising in a playful and youthful way. In one of them, Ji Lee's Bubble Project, an artist places blank thought-bubble stickers on street advertisements and waits to see what people write on them, completing the work of art and transgression. In other initiative, blank pages with the word God were placed around the city in place of advertising, inviting people to complete the prayer/complaint and to participate in a Suggestion Box, a project that collected “suggestions” from people out in the street. A review of playful and youthful ways to “rebel” against the impositions of powers like media and advertising.

Appréhender les arts visuels comme un certain rapport à la danse et, réciproquement, la performan... more Appréhender les arts visuels comme un certain rapport à la danse et, réciproquement, la performance dansée en tant qu’image en mouvement, tel est l’objet de ce numéro. De l’Antiquité à nos jours, le sommaire décline une diversité de thèmes et d’approches méthodologiques, incluant des études traitant des danses comme autant de pratiques sociales genrées situées au confluent de l’artistique, du politique et du transcendant. La question de la médiation de la danse, qu’elle relève de la représentation graphique – incluant les différents systèmes de notation chorégraphique – ou de l’image (fixe ou mobile), y tient une place significative, puisqu’elle modèle non seulement notre manière de l’imaginer et de la décrire, mais également notre façon d’en faire l’expérience. Thématique privilégiée pour penser la porosité disciplinaire de laquelle procède l’histoire de l’art, la danse, à travers les notions d’empathie, de kinesthésie, comme de vie des images, vient déstabiliser notre rapport au t...