Publications
Book chapters
A Post-Naturalist Field Kit: tools for the embodied exploration of social ecologies, forthcoming in Mapping Environmental Issues in the City, Heidelberg: Springer, 2011
For nearly two hundred years, the figure of the naturalist—the enthusiastic observer of birds, soils, insects, plants, and animals—set the bar for dedicated, semi-professional scholarship of the non-human world. With his sketchbook, butterfly net, binoculars, and field guides, the naturalist went “into the field” to learn nature’s secrets through patient observation. But recent scholarship in the sciences and humanities has revealed that “the field” cannot be considered apart from the human world that shapes and imagines it. Taking its cue from the study of social nature, A Post Naturalist Field Kit is an art project that updates the figure of the naturalist for the exploration of post-natural urban landscapes. The project includes artifacts for exploring environmental issues in the city—from specimen jars to do-it-yourself air quality monitors and lead contamination tests—along with activity cards that refuse to draw lines between social, economic, and environmental issues. Drawing on Fluxus game kits, community based art, and creative pedagogy, A Post-Naturalist Field Kit offers tools for the embodied exploration of urban social ecologies. This article describes and contextualizes the project in light of relevant areas of creative practice and geographical thought.
Installation Art, in John Downing, ed., The Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, London: Sage, 2010
Installation art describes artworks that the audience physically enters or that take into account the physical and conceptual relationships among objects, the space in which they are arranged, and the body of the viewer. This admittedly broad definition suggests the sheer diversity of artworks grouped under this category. Thus, it is impossible to speak in broad strokes about installation art. The term itself was not even settled until the late 1980s, when major museums began to commission artists to produce original works, often with very high production costs, for their galleries. Today, installation art often calls to mind large-scale, museum-based, and highly capi- talized projects that require small armies of technical advisers, production assistants, and professional fabricators. However, installation art has a much longer history, beginning with some of the politicized cultural movements of the early 20th century, continuing through the unmarketable, ephemeral “environments” of experimental artists of the 1950s and 1960s, and coming into its own in the 1970s and 1980s alongside artistic engagement in feminist, gay rights, and antiwar movements.
Critical Essays on Contemporary Art
Take it to the air: radio as public art, Art Journal, Vol. 69, Issue 3 (2011)
The radio spectrum, regulated in the US since 1927 for the “public interest, convenience, and necessity,” has long been viewed by artists as an unrealized, utopian public space. Today, many artists use FM radio, wireless, and the electromagnetic spectrum to make work usually described as electronic or new media art. However, there is often a public and politicized quality to this work: artistic (mis)use of the radio spectrum may activate a public around secret listening, detourne and rebroadcast the normal content of the airwaves, or “drown out” corporate broadcasts in a highly local area. This paper discusses several recent projects to argue that artwork in the “electomagnetic commons” complements field of public art in important ways
Tactical Irrelevance: Art and Politics at Play, Democratic Communique, Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2007)
This essay considers artistic irrelevance
as a strategic opportunity for more precisely and usefully considering
the relation of aesthetics and politics. I will use Jacques Ranciere’s
provocative work on the politics of aesthetics to consider two relatively
recent artistic projects, emphasizing how they reframed the space of the
political and produced new forms of identification and solidarity for artists
and audience alike. Lastly,
I hope to sufficiently complicate questions about the relationship of aesthetic
and political activity to encourage us all—artists and scholars,
citizens and subjects—to know more clearly what we’re asking
for when we ask for artists to “be political.” Download (pdf)
Cooing Over the Golden Phallus, Journal
of Aesthetics and Protest, Vol. 1 Issue 4 (2005)
A increasing number of popular documentary films are employing prankster
tactics for political effect. This paper considers and critiques these films,
including Fahrenheit 911, The Yes Men, and Supersize Me, in light of the
politics of the spectacle they engage. Specifically, what types of political
activity--individualist or collective, transcendent or engaged, patriarchal
or feminist--are suggested by the prankster-activist? Download (pdf)
Touring the Archive, Archiving the Tour, Art
Journal, Vol. 64 No. 2 (2005)
Based in Los Angeles, the Center for Land Use Interpretation describes itself
as an independent, non-profit, educational organization “dedicated
to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation's lands
are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.” Through exhibits, publications,
bus tours, an online database, and an artists' residency program, CLUI
has crafted a visually coherent and unaffected set of presentation and interpretive
strategies drawn from the places where tourism, the archive, museum educational
displays, and conceptual art intersect. While the organization refuses to
state a clear position for or against particular ways land has been used,
its body of work resists the notion that certain landscapes, especially ugly
or utilitarian ones, are either unremarkable or inevitable. Download (pdf)
Critical Reflections on My Own Practice
What the Market Bares, with Dara Greenwald, Critical Planning 18 (2011)
A description and reflection on a collaborative video installation in rural Serbia.
Transmissions Between Memory and Amnesia, Leonardo Journal of Arts, Sciences, and Technology, Vol. 44, Issue 3 (2011)
In light of constantly exploding bandwidth and nearly limitless digital storage, FM radio may appear an anachronistic means of communication. However, many new media artists are using this most ephemeral, unindexable, "old" medium instead of or in addition to digital technologies. In this paper, artist Sarah Kanouse discusses three of her own projects that use radio transmission as a unique public material to create ephemeral monuments to difficult moments in American history. By using an analog and dissipating material, these pieces suggest that the struggle to remember is more meaningful than the total recall promised by the digital archive
Performing Haymarket, Acme, Vol. 7, Issue 2 (2008)
After over a century of official silence, the City of Chicago dedicated a new monument to the Haymarket Affair, one of the central events in the history of labor activism and radical politics worldwide, in 2004. The monument signaled a profound change in how divergent views on Haymarket are managed, and the monument’s iconography and inscription, as well as the media coverage surrounding it, emphasized themes of consensus and closure. Yet the new monument is not the only memorial to have been placed on the site, and in the past century a range of much more explicitly partisan commemorations have taken place there. This paper critically considers performative memorials inspired by anarchist observances but coming out of arts practice, with special attention given to the poetics and politics implied by this work. The author’s own memorial performance is discussed in detail; also addressed are works by Brian Dortmund, Kehben Grifter, and Michael Piazza. Download (pdf)
Conference Papers
Can Tourism Be Critical?, conference paper, CAA (2012)
In recent years a number of artists have produced works that are tours or ask the viewer to become a tourist. This paper explores how touristic forms might be deployed in an oppositional, self-reflexive way that is responsive to how the experience of tourism is mediated by politics, economics, and cultural frameworks. Download (pdf)
Marking and Missing: Memory-Performance in the Radical Present, conference paper, AAG (2007)
The widespread impulse toward delimiting memorial space is often expressed through visible gestures of spatial marking: naming a street, building a monument, erecting a plaque. These practices frequently seek to “make the past present” by making visible some referent to a historic event. However, the performance of memory—understood both as vernacular practices and self-consciously artistic gestures—foregrounds the act of spatial marking in ways that rupture common Western assumptions about the linearity of time and contiguity of space. Download (pdf)
Transmissions Between Memory and Amnesia, conference
paper, Technologies of Memory in the Arts (2006)
In light of constantly expanding digital storage capacities, improved delivery
of customized multimedia content, and the possibility of digitally indexing
almost all of the world’s data, radio at first glance appears a glaring
anachronism. However, an increasing number of “new media” artists
are using this most ephemeral, un-index-able and “old” medium
instead of or in addition to digital technologies. Through their deliberate
use of an analog, aural, and dissipating material, these artists suggest
that the struggle to listen, communicate, and remember is more meaningful
than the total recall (chimerically) promised by digital technologies. Download (pdf)
When Our Silence Will Be More Powerful, conference
paper, Contesting Public Memories (2005)
In 2004, the city of Chicago finally dedicated an official monument to the
Haymarket Affair, over 118 years after it occurred. This paper contrasts
the monument with the rich performative, embodied memorial practices of
leftists, artists and activists that had developed over the many years in
which the space was unmarked. Performative memorials are considered as social
sculpture or dialogic art forms and analyzed in light of the spatial politics
they engage. Specific projects discussed include works by Michael Piazza,
Brian Dortmund, and the author. Revised into "Performing Haymarket."
Other Writing
Urban/Rural/Wild, in AREA No. 1My Internationale, in Open Source, Open Ear (pdf)
Formal Charges: Mass Mobilization and the Politics of Form on Interactivist Info Exchange (pdf)
Notes from 100 Centre Street in The Public I, October 2004 (pdf)
Ungrounded Opposition: Cultural Resistance as Virus, MFA Thesis Paper (pdf)