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In the wake of Douglas Crimp's passing in July 2019, Johanna Burton reflects on her still-evolving intellectual and personal relationship with this figure so crucial to histories of art, activism, and critical writing. Briefly tracing the various areas of thinking with which Crimp was associated over his decades-long career, Burton argues that the sum of Crimp's trajectory of thought is much greater than any of its formidable parts. Crimp has perhaps been most often associated with the onset of a particular tenet of postmodernism, namely the formation of the “Pictures Generation,” (including artists like Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman). Yet Crimp, dissatisfied with the limits of this discourse, moved in the early 80s purposefully away from it toward other evolving dialogues: first around the AIDS crisis, and later into film, dance, memoir, and beyond. Ultimately, Crimp's legacy, Burton argues, is defined by his desire to unseat rather than produce or maintain established thinking. He models theoretical paradigms that anticipate their own eventual irrelevance in order to make space for others.

“The whale and the polar bear, it has been said, cannot wage war on each other, for since each is confined to his own element they cannot meet.”1 This metaphor was put on the table by Sigmund Freud in 1914, near the conclusion of his famous case study of the “Wolf Man.” Noting an unfortunate incommensurability when it came to conversations between psychoanalysts and psychologists (resistant to psychoanalytic postulates), Freud described the rift by calling up the image of two formidable beasts occupying proximal yet deeply divided terrain. While it would be unwise to mark too totalizing a resemblance between psychoanalysis and contemporary art history, nonetheless as a critic I find it tempting to borrow this delicious phrase for my own purposes.

We conceived this selection of papers in part because we both rely frequently and heavily on the artist interview in our own work, which is primarily on postwar American artists. The phenomenon of the artist interview—not quite document, not quite literature, not quite propaganda, not quite staged voyeurism, not quite entertainment, not quite verifiable fact—has become increasingly compelling within the context of so-called modern and postmodern production and theorization. It seems to embody a kind of supplementary economy, at once extending the purview of the autonomous art object and simultaneously revealing that any such notion of autonomy is always already a fiction. In addition, the artist interview seems clearly designed to bring the figure of the artist into direct consideration when looking at or thinking through the implications—formal and historical—of any artwork, an impulse very much in tension with prevailing suspicions that warn against linking art with its makers' intentions or biographies.