Histoire(s) de l’art: curating the cinema of Vincent Dieutre

Abstract

In 2011, a colloquium entitled ‘Let’s Queer Art History!’ was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.1 Organised by the art historian Patricia Falguières during a short curatorial residency, the event sought to redress a missed encounter between the teaching and curation of art history in France on the one hand, and queer theory on the other. In the final paper delivered at this event, art historian Adrian Rifkin invoked the lexicon of Jacques Rancière to articulate his call for art historical approaches that might prompt an alternative, willfully anachronistic ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rifkin 2011; Rancière 2004).⁠ Reading against the grain of art history’s categorizing impulses, which are so often predicated on a tacit, untroubled conception of the universal, his intervention resonated here with what we might broadly define as queer theory’s archival turn.⁠ Privileging affective engagement over an adherence to chronology, Rifkin spoke of an ethical necessity to elaborate, in the register of the first person, ‘histories of arts which are interwoven with our own experiences’ (2011).