The Logic of the Lure

The attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot - such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial or meaningless. With "The Logic of the Lure", John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics - one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising. Shifting our attention from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to taking place, Ricco considers a variety of issues, including the work of contemporary artists such as Dough Ischar, Tom Burr, and Derek Jarman, and the minor architecture of sex clubs, public restrooms and alleyways. For instance, he shows how spaces like a deserted corridor or a back room only become meaningful by virtue of what happens (or doesn't happen) there, and how art in the era of AIDS has moved beyond representation and historicization to become a raw encounter with finitude - an astonishment at the simple fact of not being dead.