Carrie Lambert-Beatty
"How do you know? Contemporary art and the politics of knowledge"
 

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and Director of Graduate Studies for the Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies.
     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 is currently at work on a book for University of Chicago Press expanding on her 2009 October magazine essay “Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.” What happens, aesthetically and ethically, when artists deceive their audiences? Why has the presentation of fiction as fact—“parafiction,” in Lambert-Beatty’s term—become such a common way of working in contemporary art, and in culture more generally, since the early 1990s?
     In the past decade one of Lambert-Beatty’s chief research concerns has been the potential and limits of political art in contemporary practice, which she has explored through work 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 Biennial. Her 2008 book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (MIT Press) was a study of the art of a signal member of the American avant-garde. Treating aesthetic issues such as minimalism, dance, documentation, and the problem of politics in Rainer’s work, the book is also driven by the problem of how artists responded, often at unconscious levels, to the burgeoning media culture of the 1960s. Being Watched was awarded the 2008 de la Torre prize for dance studies.
     Lambert-Beatty’s writing has also appeared in collections such as the Blackwell-Wiley volume Contemporary Art 1989 to the Present, exhibition catalogs including Dance/Draw and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 and journals such as Artforum, Art Journal, and Signs , as well as October magazine, of which she is an editor.

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