Published Essays
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. (pdf)
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.” (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? (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. (pdf)
Conference Papers
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. (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. (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. (pdf)
Other Writing:
“My 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)