Carrie Lambert-Beatty is an art historian with a focus on art from the 1960s to the present and a special interest in performance in an expanded sense. She teaches art history and visual studies at Harvard University. Her 2008 book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s is a critical history of the art of a signal member of the American avant-garde, exploring minimalism, dance, performance documentation, and the artistic response, often at the level of the political unconscious, to the period’s burgeoning media culture. Published by MIT Press, Being Watched was awarded the de la Torre prize for dance studies. Lambert-Beatty’s writing has appeared in journals such as Artforum and October, of which she is an editor. In recent years, Lambert-Beatty has been concerned with the potential and limits of political art in contemporary practice and has written on hybrids of art and activism such as Women on Waves and The Yes Men. Her essay on recuperation–both neurological and ideological–in the work of the art team Allora + Calzadilla accompanied their representation of the United States at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Lambert-Beatty is currently at work on a book for University of Chicago Press expanding on her 2009 essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” (October 129), exploring the delights and dangers of deception, fabulation, and states of doubt in contemporary art and culture.
Press
The Harvard Crimson: Tempered Times
Read about the other CAST Symposium Participants