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We Rode a Train to Write This Essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2018

JOHN Q
Affiliation:
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Email: joeyorr13@gmail.com.
ANDY DITZLER
Affiliation:
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Email: joeyorr13@gmail.com.
JOEY ORR
Affiliation:
Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Email: joeyorr13@gmail.com.

Abstract

This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

Type
Special Forum: Inhabiting Cultures
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

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References

1 Buren, Daniel, “The Function of the Museum” (1970). Reprinted in Hertz, Richard, ed., Theories of Contemporary Art (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 189–93Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 192.

3 Rorimer, Anne, New Art in the 60s and 70s: Redefining Reality (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 253Google Scholar.

4 Karp, Ivan, “Public Scholarship as a Vocation,” Museums and Identity, South African Museums Association Bulletin, 26, 2 (2001), 7682Google Scholar.

5 Irit Rogoff, “Taking Part,” keynote talk presented at the School of the Art Institute's 2008 George Roeder Graduate Symposium, Chicago, Illinois, 2 May 2008.

6 Ross, Kristin, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid., 20.

8 Higgins, Dick, “Intermedia,” Leonardo, 34, 1 (2001), 4954CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Morris, Catherine, “Six Years as a Curatorial Project,” in Morris, Catherin and Bonin, Vincent, eds., Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art (Cambridge, MA, London, and Brookyn, NY: The MIT Press and Brooklyn Museum, 2012), 4Google Scholar.

10 Ibid., 21.

11 We use the word “fun” advisedly, drawing in part on those 1970s and 1980s New York artists whose active pleasure in making art was a way to distinguish themselves from the previous generation of artists involved in minimalism and structural film. The artist James Nares stated, “To have fun making art was something that the generation before mine was not supposed to do. That the joy of making it should be apparent, I find it quite a redeeming quality.” Glenn O'Brien, “James Nares,” Interview, Sept. 2008, 237. The critic Gary Indiana emphasized fun as an essential component of artists’ film screenings at the New Cinema in the late 1970s. Gary Indiana, “James Nares: An Interview,” East Village Eye, Summer 1980, 38. A particularly explicit example is the opening of the Fun Gallery in New York in 1981. John Q collectively decided at the outset of our work together that when we stopped having fun, we would disband: “We hope that John Q is the life of the party. As soon as John Q becomes the dud who's only interested in serious talk about history and memory, we'll send him packing. Promise.” “‘Flash’ Back to Gay Past,” Georgia Voice, 18 March 2010, at https://thegavoice.com/flash-back-to-gay-past, accessed 21 May 2017.

12 Rogoff, Irit, “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture,” in Butt, Gavin, ed., After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Oxford and Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 117–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 118.

13 Butt, Gavin, “Introduction: The Paradoxes of Criticism,” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, ed. Butt, Gavin (Oxford, UK and Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 119CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 10, original emphasis.

14 We are reminded here of artist Robert Rauschenberg's 1959 statement: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Rauschenberg, Robert, “Untitled Statement,” reprinted in Stiles, Kristine and Selz, Peter, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), 321Google Scholar.

15 bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 243.

16 Veloso, Caetano, Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 102Google Scholar, italics added.

17 Foucault, Michel, History of Madness (London and New York: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar, xxxi.

18 Allan Sekula, interview by Sylvie Fortin and Joey Orr, The Voice of the Arts, 1690 WMLB AM, 29 Nov. 2011.

19 Paraphrasing Foucault: “We could write a history of limits – of those obscure gestures, necessarily forgotten as soon as they are accomplished, through which a culture rejects something for which it will be Exterior.” Foucault, xxix.

20 Chris Massie, “Rubio: It's No Coincidence That Syria Gas Attack Happened after ‘Concerning’ Tillerson Comments,” CNN, at www.cnn.com/2017/04/05/politics/kfile-rubio-tillerson-syria-attack/index.html, accessed 5 April 2017.

21 Stacy Hardy, “The Alternative Is at Hand: An Interview with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney,” Chimurenga Chronic, Aug. 2013, 18–21, 19.

22 By the time of this issue's publication, Scott's reenactment may have already taken place.

23 See Ngai, Sianne, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press), 2012Google Scholar.