Arts Writing

Citizenship, the body, and the ethics of exposure

Cultural Criticism, Essays

I. The ethics of exposure: our virgins and our whores

In May 2016, Chloe Sevigny shared an Instagram post of herself at the Met Breuer picking out a piece of cellophane-wrapped candy from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991), which is often understood as a representation of his lover’s body weight before his eventual death from AIDS-related illness. In all installments of this work, audience members are allowed to take a piece of candy diminishing the weight in the process. The post has 11,600 likes.

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Just Between Us – Dolly Parton and the good life

Cultural Criticism, Essays

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Dolly Parton Presentation for the VCS Symposium in May 2013

What I want to offer here is a cautionary tale to illustrate the hazards of expecting emotion to predictably determine action.

But first, much of my thesis research has taken me into the realm of what has been coined “affect theory.” Really, this designation means a lot of things, in a lot of different ways. Very generally it signals an interest in another realm of communication, that isn’t necessarily pre-linguistic or extra-linguistic, but aims to complicate concepts of how language functions, in some interesting ways.

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Allison Halter: Conflating Sissy Bounce with Minimalism

Interviews

Allison Halter: I come from a funny performative background — I was a synchronized swimmer as a child, and competed for about seven years. But in undergrad, I considered myself a photographer, and most of the work I made and was interested in was photographic. … It was still a sort of roundabout path: I was a radical cheerleader, I was in a band, I had several dance troupes, but all of those experiences really shaped the kind of performance artist I am today, and gave me a pretty awesome and specific skill set, most especially with regards to audience.

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Catherine Opie — 2012-13 Visiting Artist Program Lecture Series

Reviews

In her introduction for Catherine Opie, SAIC Dean Lisa Wainwright referred to the artist as “a documentarian and a romantic.” Wainwright’s comments – directed to the near-capacity crowd of students, scholars and admirers gathered at Rubloff Auditorium on September 10 – referred to Opie’s ability to capture and emphasize the beautiful in the commonplace, a quality that characterizes much of the photographer’s work from her nearly 25 year career.

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