—Fernanda Eberstadt, Times Literary Supplement
Crimp’s is a memoir of looking and feeling self-conscious; seeing and being seen. Having chosen his experiences of cruising the crumbling New York of the 1970s as a structuring principle for his memoir, Crimp has written a book that is both partial in its approach and pleasurable to read.
—The Burlington Magazine
It starts like a classic bildungsroman from the mighty island-city: It’s 1967, and a young writer from a beautiful, bigoted town called Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, escapes to Manhattan to find himself. A decade later, he’s made his mark: It’s called “Pictures,” and it alters the course of art and its discourses.
What makes Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures so remarkable is not just its subject—the art historian and AIDS activist’s early years leading up to the epoch-defining 1977 exhibition at Artists Space and the pair of titular essays that were so critical to its historicization. It’s not just the casual meet-cutes at John Ashbery parties and the formative encounters with Agnes Martin and Ellsworth Kelly and Charles James and Daniel Buren; the early, incisive formalist writings whose frissons eventually inspired one of the great innovations in late-twentieth-century criticism: the recognition of a breach, which Crimp labels postmodernism, in modernist parables of art and theatricality. It’s how the story is told.
Before Pictures is a strange and shimmering chimera: Part memoir, part theory, it swerves and circles, often paragraph to paragraph, from anecdote to argument and back again, a graceful, unfussy waltz that sometimes seduces you into thinking that it’s “simply” autobiography. But the writing is also a performance of the necessary entanglement between serious thought and its “decor”—an entanglement that fascinates Crimp, and that makes him such an exceptional protagonist.
—David Velasco, Artforum
Crimp’s powerful insight is the backbone of his autobiographical book, Before Pictures, which blends conversational, gossipy storytelling with an encyclopedic personal history of cultural anecdotes. . . . Under the scope of Crimp’s vivid reflections, the crackling energy of the era feels fresh, as does his youthful negotiation of the queer culture and the progression of his professional career.
—Rebecca Rafferty, Afterimage
