Hold It Against Me
Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
In Hold It Against Me, Jennifer Doyle explores the relationship between difficulty and emotion in contemporary art, treating emotion as an artist’s medium. She encourages readers to examine the ways in which works of art challenge how we experience not only the artist’s feelings, but our own. Discussing performance art, painting, and photography, Doyle provides new perspectives on artists including Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Thomas Eakins, James Luna, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. Confronting the challenge of writing about difficult works of art, she shows how these artists work with feelings as a means to question our assumptions about identity, intimacy, and expression. They deploy the complexity of emotion to measure the weight of history, and to deepen our sense of where and how politics happens in contemporary art.Doyle explores ideologies of emotion and how emotion circulates in and around art. Throughout, she gives readers welcoming points of entry into artworks that they may at first find off-putting or confrontational. Doyle offers new insight into how the discourse of controversy serves to shut down discussion about this side of contemporary art practice, and counters with a critical language that allows the reader to accept emotional intensity in order to learn from it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writing for "the non-academic reader interested in contemporary art," Doyle examines the "difficult" work of artists on the fringe of the art world mainly performance and photography by artists such as Ron Athey, Aliza Shvarts, Carrie Mae Weems, and David Wojnarowicz. These works, which tend to make audiences uncomfortable, address controversial issues of sexuality, race, disease, and death, and are often ignored or misunderstood by critics. Doyle (Sex Objects) defines these works as difficult on multiple levels because they complicate the "distinction between the figurative and the literal" and have a complex relationship to emotion. This includes not only representing the emotions of the artist (or lack thereof) and producing an emotional reaction within the audience, but also exploring the very nature of emotion and the relationship between artist and audience. Doyle blends scholarly critique with personal experience, producing a deep and broad analysis which is as much a critique of contemporary art criticism as contemporary art. Those not already well-versed in art criticism can still digest Doyle's analyses and reach their own conclusions, even though the works she discusses tend to slip away from hard and fast conclusions, which contributes to their inherent difficulty, but nevertheless makes the endeavor worthwhile.
