About

Carrie Lambert-Beatty is a contemporary art historian and a professor at Harvard University, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and the Department of History of Art and Architecture. She is the author of the award-winning book Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s, published by MIT Press in 2008, and has written essays including 'Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility.' Her current research focuses on thirty years of fiction presented as fact—parafiction—in contemporary art, exploring what happens when art works deceive their audiences and what these acts of deception reveal about contemporary ways of knowing. Her work investigates how contemporary art can contribute to developing a progressive epistemic set capable of countering the culture of post-truth and resisting an epistemic 'return to order.' Lambert-Beatty teaches courses on political art from the 1960s to the present, the aesthetics of deception, and the evolving meaning of 'contemporary art.' Her teaching emphasizes attention to the modes of spectatorship invited by artists' formal and technical choices, and how these forms of experience relate to new media ecologies, social effects of neoliberalism, ongoing post-colonial reckonings, and the structural politics of gender and race.

Research topics

• Humanities
• Political Science
• Art

Selected publications

• Kinesthésie plurielle : danse, esthétique et agentivité

  Perspective · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Humanities
  • Humanities
  • Art

  Sonder la spécificité de la danse en regard de l’art pictural invite à se pencher sur la kinesthésie, la faculté proprioceptive engagée dans l’exercice du mouvement dansant et dans l’appréciation du spectacle dansé. La pratique comme la perception du danser mobilisent un sensorium tactilo-moteur que la psycho-physiologie européenne identifie, de façon chirurgicale et anatomique, au cours de la seconde moitié du xixe siècle. Attentive à la psychologie expérimentale qui en résulte au tournant d...

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• In Formation: On Terry Fox’s Children’s Tapes

  2017-07-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Against Performance Art

  Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) (Harvard University) · 2016-11-22 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Gloria : Allora & Calzadilla

  Medical Entomology and Zoology · 2011-01-01

  book

  The artistic collaborative of Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's exhibition at the Venice Biennale, titled Gloria, comprises six new works developed partly in response to the U.S. Pavilion site. Combining performance, sculpture, video, and sound elements, the works use poetic shock and unexpected juxtaposition to reflect upon competitive enterprises such as the Olympic Games, international commerce, the military industrial complex and even the Biennale itself. The result is a series of artistic experiments that explore the nature of physical, visual, and audible experience. This publication documents Allora & Calzadilla's exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion, including a plates section displaying images of the works as they are installed in Venice as well as documentation of performances by professional athletes affiliated with U.S.A. Gymnastics and U.S.A. Track and Field. Essays by exhibition curator, U.S. Commissioner Lisa Freiman, and art historians Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Yates McKee explore the themes addressed in Gloria and place Allora & Calzadilla's works within a larger art historical and social context.

  Publisher

• Tania Bruguera: On the Political Imaginary

  Medical Entomology and Zoology · 2010-02-28 · 3 citations

  bookSenior author

  This is the first comprehensive survey of the work of award-winning interdisciplinary artist Tania Bruguera. Tania Bruguera's work examines fundamental questions of power and vulnerability in relation to the personal, political, and collective body. An interdisciplinary artist working in the ephemeral, experiential forms of performance and installation, she creates a space where art, politics, and life converge. Bruguera was born, raised, and educated in Cuba where she began her career as an artist before relocating to the United States in the late 1990s. The broad social and historic perspective she brings to her work is rooted in personal experience and forms the basis of her art, which explores urgent issues such as exile, displacement, and instability; and individual and collective responses to them, from submission, fear, and endurance to the hope for survival and the possibility of self-expression.

  Publisher

• To Make an Inner Time: A Conversation with Gabriel Orozco

  October · 2009-10-01 · 2 citations

  article

  October 01 2009 To Make an Inner Time: A Conversation with Gabriel Orozco Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Carrie Lambert-Beatty Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Megan Sullivan Megan Sullivan Megan Sullivan is a doctoral candidate in the department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She is currently working on a dissertation that examines the origins and development of geometric abstraction in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Carrie Lambert-Beatty Megan Sullivan Megan Sullivan is a doctoral candidate in the department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She is currently working on a dissertation that examines the origins and development of geometric abstraction in Latin America during the 1940s and 1950s. Online Issn: 1536-013X Print Issn: 0162-2870 © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 October (2009) (130): 177–196. https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.130.1.177 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Megan Sullivan; To Make an Inner Time: A Conversation with Gabriel Orozco. October 2009; (130): 177–196. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/octo.2009.130.1.177 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsOctober Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Roundtable: Paula Trope and the Meninos

  2009-01-01

  article
  Publisher

• Make-Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility

  October · 2009-08-01 · 145 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Questionnaire: Lambert-Beatty

  October · 2008-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Live Art on Camera : Performance and Photography

  John Hansard Gallery eBooks · 2007-01-01 · 5 citations

  book

  exhibition Live Art on Camera has evolved from a series of discussions on the subject of performance documentation. These conversations have taken place in artists', photographers' and filmmakers' studios and archives. The impetus was to learn more about the ways in which our reading of seminal performances, through performance documentation, has potentially been influenced through the intentions, ideas, and esthetics of those who recorded the events -- p. 1.

  Publisher

Frequent coauthors

• Babette Mangolte

  2 shared

• Barbara Clausen

  2 shared

• Jennifer Allora

  1 shared

• Sarah Burkhalter

  1 shared

• Stephen Foster

  International Water Association Publishing

  1 shared

• Antonio Lauer

  1 shared

• Lisa Kahane

  1 shared

• Gerardo Mosquera

  Universidad Nacional de La Plata

  1 shared