Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art by Jennifer Doyle (review)

Jennifer Doyle’s Hold it Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art is startlingly affective. Naturally, one would expect it to be, as its title suggests it to be a contribution to the conversation about emotion and feeling, and how such affect is represented in literature and art, but this book seriously penetrates. In the introduction, Doyle reveals that the project of the book is about discovering the process of writing about what she calls “difficult art,” and how she had to make a shift in the vision of the project to acknowledge that her role as critic was impacted by the works she was attempting to write about. She just couldn’t write about them until she realized her task was not to resolve the difficulty of the works she explores, but rather, to reside in the difficulty.

Regarding her terms, Doyle writes, “This book uses the terms difficulty and emotion in order to take up the questions of who is being dispossessed of what, who is being unraveled, how and why” (xiv). Because difficult works of art are often cloaked in the controversies they spark, the nerves they touch, the subjects they offend, Doyle suggests they are often not seen and experienced as they simply are. Part of her process of discovering in this book is to consider how controversy informs previous readings of the works and to shift the discourse to make space for a new way of discussing the impact, however large or slight, of the works themselves. Doyle also asserts that much difficult contemporary art is so because it is imbricated with identity and politics, but the artists in whom she is most interested throughout the study—Ron Athey, Carrie Mae Weems, David Wojnarowicz—seem to “reject the basic geometries of identity and politics that normally ground discussions” of such work (xi). These artists’ works compel the viewer to witness and participate in ways that make one feel uncomfortable (xvii).

Doyle’s writing is pedagogical and sincere. The structure familiar to highly theoretical, jargon-laced academic books is not present. Footnotes show intellectual rigor and exploration, offering the reader plenty of wonderful rabbit holes, but the chapters themselves shift in and out of deeply personal reflections about her own emotional investments in both the artists and their art. The first chapter, “Introducing Difficulty,” begins with an anecdote about failing to participate. The author had an appointment with performance artist Adrian Howells to be held in his piece Held (2006). Failing to show up on time for the appointment becomes the catalyst to understanding why it matters for Doyle to find the language to talk about the experience of difficult art. Her open, vulnerable, and honest discussion of how she came to terms with her own limitations opens up an empathetic space for the reader to begin to feel along with her.

Chapter two presents case studies. The first, on Aliza Shvarts, a Yale University fine arts student whose thesis project was a “yearlong performance of repeated self-induced miscarriages” (29), work that was so steeped in controversy that despite the terms Doyle has so carefully established, it is hard to see value past the offensive and shocking “performance” at all. Nonetheless, the debate engenders fascinating questions and is worth the read. The final study in this chapter, a reading of Ron Athey’s Incorruptible Flesh: Dissociative Sparkle (2006) is much more powerfully supportive of Doyle’s overall project as it presses on the question of what audience members risk by attending a performance in which the artist puts himself into a situation of prolonged discomfort, even pain. Within this discussion, the author is able to beautifully articulate the phobias around queer and feminist art, especially that which speaks to the AIDS crisis. The third chapter flows nicely from the second and examines performance pieces by artist such as Franko B and Nao Bustamante.

In some ways, Doyle’s shift from deeply embodied performance...