Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is an art historian and professor of Visual and Environmental Studies, and of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, with a focus on art from the 1960s to the present, and a special interest in performance in an expanded sense. Her 2008 book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s brought together aspects of her research on minimalism, dance, performance documentation, theories of spectatorship, and the American avant-garde’s 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 on recent art appears in journals such as Artforum and October, of which she is an editor. Lambert-Beatty has been especially concerned with the potential and limits of the idea of political art for contemporary practice, and has written on the topic in relation to 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 at work on a book for University of Chicago Press that will expand on her 2009 essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility” (October 129), exploring deception, confusion, and states of doubt in contemporary art and culture.

Photo by Tony Rinaldo