Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe (born UK 1945, US resident since 1968) is a painter, art critic, theorist, and educator. His work is in the permanent collections of the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art, Buffalo, NY; The Getty Study Center, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles and Minneapolis; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and other public, corporate and private collections.
Art Criticism and Theory
Gilbert-Rolfe writes about art and related topics, including poetry, fiction, fashion, with particular regard to its interaction with photography, technology, and the general state of things in art and how the present situation seems to have emerged. His publications include two anthologies of his essays, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, and other essays and reviews.
Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime reformulates the traditional definition of the differential relationship between beauty and the sublime, in which beauty is a sign of the passive and feminine and the sublime of the active and male—heroic or terrifying depending on one’s perspective, or of course both. In Gilbert-Rolfe’s version Winckelmann’s masculine active becomes instead androgynous transitivity, while intransitivity replaces passivity as a still entirely feminine characteristic, the feminine as intransitivity being a sign or force that stands for, or embodies, power as a kind of powerlessness. As well as redefining the differential, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime’s argument also relocates the sublime from nature to technology, and with it subjectivity, from wherever it imagined itself to be to within techno-capitalism. Here and elsewhere Gilbert-Rolfe suggests that techno-capitalism and the subjectivity that accompanies it are largely made out of all that Heidegger warns against and denounces in his post-war essays on technology, for example the telephone's capacity to sever the mutual dependence of space and time. He has returned to some aspects of this argument in two essays in particular.
Starting out in Artforum, in 1973, he has written something at least once for most of the art magazines over the years, and more often for Critical Inquiry and Bomb. A founding editor of October, with Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson and Lucio Pozzi (who withdrew before the first issue was published,) Gilbert-Rolfe resigned from the journal after the third issue.
