Always in pursuit of a meaningful reflection of who we are: our histories, our actions, and our creations, I navigate the intimately complex nature of our being through images. I’m constantly looking, searching, collecting, appropriating, and repurposing. As I move through the world, everywhere I'm provided with source material. If something I see resonates with me, it’s photographed, scanned, downloaded, or screen captured. Images are placed, erased, degraded, printed, and layered. There is constant movement, back and forth, between analog and digital: a compilation of self, image, time, place, and media.
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Tufted Mirrors
For years, I perceived my skin as a real, tangible boundary — a sturdy, enigmatic casing that protected my inner self, only cryptically revealing who I am. Over time, I’ve embraced the collapse of this boundary and sought ways for my inner self to emerge into the external world. Although my skin is an undeniable physical limit, it is also a symbolic veil, a stage for the theater of self, where stories of biology, mythology, and internal emotions play out. What I believed to be a barrier is a mirror in which my inner self is reflected.
This bold attempt to look, know, and see myself found expression in Tufted Mirrors. The work is driven by introspection and revelation, a deliberate confrontation with the self, moving beyond mere appearances to connect with the raw markings of a life lived. I reject the traditional dichotomy of inner and outer selves, bridging my rich and complex inner self with my veil of skin, uncovering that which has shaped my “self.”
In the studio, the command to look, know, and see was followed with an almost ritualistic dedication. My process itself mirrors the breaking down of boundaries. I treat the skin not as an impenetrable shield, but as a permeable membrane — a delicate surface through which my inner self surges into the outer world. In fractured and elusive mirror images I capture the complexity of self-reflection. Memories, dreams, fears and desires are summoned from below, allowed to puncture the surface.
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Being and Everythingness
I’m dreaming that I’m floating at some random point out in space at a distance from the earth that enables me to see all the signals, networks, grids, rays, pulses, flora and fauna that envelop the planet.
What a remarkable vibrant glow it is.
In my dream all of this is a single machine: an orb racing through the vacuum of space. The only boundary, if there truly is one, is the orb’s epidermal surface.
Conceptions of immersion and embeddedness are useless here, everything and everyone is intrinsic to the orb.
I think to myself how liberating it would if in this machine all the agonies we endure were merely code embedded in the background of our avatars. Our apparent self-awareness and connection to other beings merely processed data projected into a universe of networks and nodes.
Possible? Maybe.
Yet, I’m still tethered to my waking self and I can’t shake my sense of embodiment. There’s memory in my dreamy sleep state of the physicality of pleasure and pain and action that makes questioning my corporeal reality very difficult.
Suddenly I’m pushed to the ground, called a faggot, and beaten with a baseball bat. It really fuckin hurts. In that moment, the sense of a physical body seems more real, more visceral than computer code.
But trauma is a tricky beast. No matter how embodied I may feel in that terrifying moment, the orb quickly reunites my avatar and corporeal body and imbues that blended being with an extreme sense of urgency.
Perhaps this blended being is a more vital political agent than I initially imagined.
I’m a body that demands autonomy and empathy and wants to fight back; physicality compels me. At the same time, the orb’s vast interconnectivity, its singularity, allows me to explore and inhabit the lives of others and envision alternate subjectivities.
Our bodies and experiences are real and, at the same time, we are integral nodes of an expansive, unified, coded network.
If we are at once one and all, we have a responsibility to both.
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On Violence
Throughout history, violence has manifested in diverse forms: warfare, catastrophe, torture, genocide, and the intimate architecture of abuse. More complex than the acts themselves are the rationalizations we construct to justify violence. My studio practice has been driven by a central inquiry: How do we make sense of our capacity for harm? What framework accurately reflects the nature of our violent behavior and the objects we create in service of it? Violence is not an outlier of human experience; it is part of its enigma — a site where competing internal and external forces exist in constant battle.
The dark side of history reveals a continuum, a performative cycle of human behavior enacted across generations. The record of human history, as well as our lived experience, lays bare our ceaseless domination of the planet and the domination of some bodies over others. Yet, the repercussions of this violence are often as elusive as they are unmistakable. While the physical toll — destruction, weaponry, and starvation — is visible, the psychological fallout of trauma and fear often remains submerged in the neural realm, only occasionally lashing out. This collective memory orients our modern psyche, whether we acknowledge it or not.
There is a comforting assumption that humanity has become kinder — that we are on a triumphant, linear march toward a peaceful future. This teleological view of history frames humanity as a steady climb toward enlightenment. It suggests we evolve from savages to civilized citizens. But this perception is often a byproduct of privilege and liberal idealism. We need not look beyond the daily news to question the legitimacy of this ethos.
There are no easy solutions to humanity’s dark side. The belief that the answer is out there leads to a resolute defense of singular doctrines. Yet, embracing a single framework ensures we miss the insight inherent in contradiction. All ideas born of the human mind are flawed, but most offer context. The true value, and perhaps wisdom, lies in the tension of conflicting ideas — a liminal space of uncertainty and ambiguity where easy binaries of good and bad dissolve. This discomforting terrain is precisely where a holistic understanding of human experience might emerge.
The most telling moments in my study of human violence are those where progress gives way to abject regression. Science, technology, and modern bureaucracy are necessary preconditions for genocide. The innovation of nuclear fission led directly to the atomic bomb. Two billion people starve while we waste unprecedented amounts of food. I prefer to grapple with the moments when enlightenment reverts to mythology, when innovation stumbles — when Prometheus gives us fire and gets punished for it. This is where I am called out as a member of a species caught in the tripwires of its own hubris.
Ultimately, the Enlightenment project appears to be a totalitarian impulse: standardizing, commanding, colonizing, and dictating a singular mode of being. This power is performed through an arsenal of finely crafted weapons. We see it in expanding surveillance, legislative attacks on the vilified, suppressed protests, and packed prisons. We are continually reminded of the need to normalize or eradicate "others." The paths of normalization are littered with an alarming trail of violent objects. The dark side of humanity might be measured in warfare, catastrophe, and abuse, but it begins with ideology, indoctrination, and the very innovation we celebrate. It is propelled by narratives of hero saviors and future perfect utopias.
Violence is not a glitch in the machinery of progress. History is not a force separate from ourselves; to believe so is hubris. Our violent nature is not a deviation from the human path, but a reflection of who we truly are. We are beings existing in a permanent squall of conflicting ideas, casting varying degrees of light and shadow upon the world. Does this mean we must bow to our innate hostility? No. If we are to endure, we must reject cynicism and instead cultivate a radical interest in one another and the planet. In the center of this chaos lies the only real strength we possess: the capacity to sacrifice and the will to be kind.
In my studio, I struggle with a specific kind of grandiosity — the belief that I can make sense of human behavior. Yet the realities of violence are too vast to be harnessed by a single creative practice. I am often confronted by my own limitations, forced to recognize the false messiah in my own story. It is an absurd position, yet a necessary one. If we refuse to acknowledge the dark side of our species, we ensure that the next catastrophe will be the darkest yet. My purpose is not to establish a baseline for some great human awakening. With intention I resist hope for our long-anticipated utopian future. I leave to the realm of fiction some sort of profound shift in consciousness and behavior or the arrival of hero saviors. As the agents, objects, and spheres of violence are always in a process of becoming… so are we tasked with becoming more mindful, more urgent, more resilient.
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Some thoughts on queerness
How are we referenced in all that surrounds us? Why are we drawn to this and rebuffed by that? What is meaningful, revelatory, seductive? How can complexity, ambiguity, or disruption evolve us - individually and as a species? Our interpretations are rarely accidental, they are dictated by our own necessities, psychology, fears, and desires. Unbound by subjective limits, interpretation is restrained only by our unique position. Our location, physically and culturally, determines our point of view and our paths of action.
For the queer subject, inscribed, intended, or normative meanings are not fixed. This unlocks the potential to shift our point of view, sensitize our bodies, and interrogate authority. Here lies the foundation and meaning of queer: the ability to orient, reorient, and disorient people and spaces, images, and objects. By embracing alternate positions, we gain the criticality necessary to subvert dominant networks and restructure the world. Queer is more than an identity — it is a phenomenological tool for transformation. In this pursuit, art and technology are vital instruments. They leverage the inherent dexterity of our interpretation, positioning us both within and against the dominant discourse.
From its inception, queer theory recognized that reclaiming queer as a badge of empowerment is not merely an exercise in self-esteem or the validation of specific lifestyles. Instead, it functions as a rigorous destabilization of normativity. Queer is simultaneously political, epistemological, phenomenological, social, aesthetic, and textual — a multifaceted lens that refuses the comfort of fixed categories. It serves as a defiant site of resistance from which we must rethink how bodies inhabit space, how desire is choreographed, and how we read, speak, learn, and perceive. By defying the rigidity of social structures, queerness demands an interrogation of how normativity dictates the boundaries of human experience.
Whereas much of the ideology expressed in mass media is contrived to direct people onto an established normative path, art and technology can be used in provocative and disruptive ways: new paths may be constructed, new relationships established, and alternative criticalities articulated. The ways in which these actions operate are decidedly queer: queer in their ability to reshape signs, signification, and communication, queer in that they construct quasi-identities and irreconcilable discrepancies, queer in their defiance of authorship and notions of truth. Art and technology together comprise an evolving techno-aesthetic-queerness. They offer up a lens of criticality that reveals the inherent mutability of the world around us.
Normativity demands separateness, distinction, and clarity: clear role representations, clear politics, clear religious beliefs, clear displays of patriotism. Clarity is used to suture some people into and exclude others from the normative narrative. Queerness operates in direct opposition to this; it questions and mistrusts clarity, recognizing it as an insidious form of discipline. Thus, queerness is a challenge to look intently, feel deeply, and question aggressively. Crucially, neither art, nor technology, nor queerness represents a static truth. Instead, they are dynamic positions and points of view. The paths extending from these positions are not mandates; they are possibilities that can be traveled or bypassed, rendered readable or kept encoded. This is where the transformative potential of art and technology is laid bare: not dictating a singular mode of being but, rather, pointing us toward alternate knowledges in a world where meaning is always in flux. After all, images, objects, and texts, in and of themselves, mean nothing in particular. It is only the action of appropriating, juxtaposing, and making them illegible that imbues them with agency. While interpreting, relating, and questioning make them meaningful. Art and technology provide us with the tools to identify and rebuke normative frameworks operating forcefully to shape us. They position us to become (re)(dis)oriented.
Our power resides in our agency as queer subjects, makers, viewers, and readers; it is revealed in the way we process the world and how we access, re-contextualize, and re-imagine all that we encounter. This power is rooted in our perceptions and interpretations, our desires and interactions, the stories we tell, the secrets we keep, and the worlds we imagine. Art and technology enable us to transform this perception into an act of resistance, claiming our histories and building futures. Unbound by subjective limits, interpretation testifies to the fact that meaning is never fixed — an understanding that dissolves simplistic binaries of normative and alternative, self and other, force and power. Ultimately, alterity highlights the malleability of perception and identity; within the complexity and ambiguity of art, technology, and queerness, the normative ethos is rendered unsound. This shift possesses the radical potential to disrupt public space, subvert the norm, and construct new subjectivities.
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Queerness and Electronic Literature
Historically, many literary movements have explored alternative types of texts. The works of Apollinaire, the Dadaists, Concrete poetry, Oulipo, and Fluxus all investigated new forms of writing and, thus, new forms of reading. While redefining the role of the reader, these movements pointed us toward new ways to conceive of, present, and experience the world. Similarly, the very nature of texts in the digital realm creates a dynamic relationship between writer and reader. It is not merely our ability to read texts on a computer monitor or a device that marks the difference, even though this is an undeniable shift in materiality, the key is in a newfound interaction. In electronic literature the fixity and boundaries characteristic of the traditional printed book are broken down in favor of interactivity, appropriation, manipulation, readability, kinetic movement, and visual form. Additionally, whether an emergent text is performed by code, reader interaction, or a combination thereof, there is a phenomenological experience that is simply not possible with printed texts. As digital texts are freed from the delimited surface of the printed page, so is queerness freed from the delimited boundaries of normativity. Lacking a determined location, generating difference, and open to multiple readings, digital texts and queerness disrupt the dominant discourse. Both instances of liberation are opportunities to become (re)(dis)oriented.
If we consider the rules and expectations of normativity as being authored by hegemonic forces, it follows that the defiance of authorship is a defiance of normativity. As technology makes possible active participation on the part of the reader through interaction and post-production, electronic literature moves us beyond the passive reading of a printed page. This disruption to our common notion of authorship exposes opportunities to challenge the normative narrative and guides us toward opportunities to challenge the dictatorial preciousness and pervasiveness of authorship. Technology has always had the power to position us within and around the dominant discourse. However, in the case of electronic literature we not only have the potential to recognize the ways in which we are constrained by authority and authorship but also the ways in which we can extract from, intervene in, piece together, and write our own narratives. Electronic literature - like queerness - shows us that inscribed, intended, or normative meanings are not fixed.
Our engagement with text positions or orients our bodies and behaviors. If, in fact, new technology intervenes in how texts are made and consumed causing them to disrupt traditional assumptions of authorship then, through these disruptions, we are likely to find ourselves reoriented or disoriented. This act of (re)(dis)orientation points us toward alternative world views. Thus, the connection between queerness and electronic literature is not that the technology is a prosthesis or an appendage of the queer body. It’s not that electronic literature is simply a tool or a mechanism through which queerness is further enabled. Rather, electronic literature and queerness illustrate, inform, and empower each other creating a combined force with the capacity to map strategies to disrupt hegemony and manifest real action - individually and collectively. And, when our perspective, behavior, and desires are dictated by our unique circumstances, rather than normative forces, we are freed from many illogical societal constraints. Our location, literally and symbolically, determines our point of view and our paths of action.
The interaction and post-production in electronic literature is indicative of process and becoming. Likewise, as seen in electronic literature, technology continually presents new opportunities to imagine and experience the world. The fast-paced development of what technology is able to do seems always to be eclipsed by what technology will surely make possible. When technology supports queer looking, queer reading, and queer action it adds to the building blocks of queer futurity. Whereas much of the ideology expressed in mass media is contrived to direct people onto an established normative path, technology can intervene as a potent provocateur: new paths may be constructed, new relationships established, and alternative criticalities articulated. The ways in which these actions operate are decidedly queer in their ability to reshape signs, signification, and communication; queer in that they construct quasi-identities and irreconcilable discrepancies; queer in their defiance of authorship. Altogether, this new lens of criticality reveals the mutability of bodies, realities, and futures.
Another uniquely shared trait of electronic literature and queerness is found in their hybrid, unresolved, dislocated, and rearranged nature. Both celebrate a lack of site specificity and fixity. Texts experienced through technology are transitory and multiple; parts are (re)assembled, (re)constructed, (re)arranged, and (re)read. They are also encoded, processed, uploaded, retrieved, rewritten, saved, and deleted. Unlike printed texts, electronic literature incorporates kinetic and performative aspects that evolve from and subsequently disrupt well-established literary norms. Similarly, queerness stands in defiance of established societal norms by pioneering alternative bodies, alliances, and perceptions. It’s a shared quality of malleability. Queers are, often out of necessity, adept at playing a multiplicity of roles: family persona, work persona, school persona, community persona, private persona. Where clarity of one’s beliefs, gender, political affiliations, desires, etc. is demanded by the normative narrative, malleability is a necessity in the lives of queers. Camouflaged, fractured, often invisible, always malleable - these traits exemplify the tension between what we see and what is actually being shown. Electronic literature and queerness are less about what we see and more about how we see: physically and culturally.
The ways humans interact, and the repercussions of those interactions are played out over and over in endless pages of literature. And, when these narratives reflect normative values, it is from them that we are constrained and measured. As electronic literature performs queerness it both interrogates authorship and reveals new potential. In rethinking authorship, whether that of texts or that of behaviors, we have the potential to be released from normativity. As we become conscious of how we are referenced in the things that surround us, we question why we are drawn to this and rebuked by that. We begin to understand how complexity, ambiguity, or disruption evolves us. When challenged, our assumptions can begin to break down exposing alternative ways to see, read, make, and act. This sharpens our awareness and sensitizes our bodies. What I describe here is, for me, the foundation and meaning of queer: the ability to orient, reorient, and disorient, the potential to empower and transform, the criticality to question and subvert dominant networks.
As our understandings of queer/text evolves, so does society. We find this in the way queer ideas, actions, spaces, and bodies become more visible in and through technology. As a broadly defined and empowered identity, queerness moves further out of the private realm and into the public; queerness expands beyond a specificity of personal or sexual desire to a realm of world-making. Together, queerness and electronic literature extend interpretation and the discontinuity is profoundly impactful: personally, politically, socially, and psychologically.
For me, both queerness and electronic literature ably reposition narratives and bodies. Queerness and electronic literature unveil multiple paths, peripheries, and gravitational pulls. They mobilize our bodies and minds to question authority and normativity. Queerness and electronic literature strip texts and bodies of their specificity and, in doing so, expose how signification, identity, and authorship are multiple, personal, and malleable. Our power as queer subjects, queer makers, and queer readers is evidenced in how we process information: how we access it, re-contextualize it, re-propose it, re-imagine it, re-format it. Queerness and electronic literature free us to be (re)(dis)oriented.
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Jena Osman's Public Figures
Point of view, interpretation, and the circumscribed space of collage are at the forefront of my thoughts these days. Inscribed, intended, or normative meanings are never fixed and, when we find our point of view shifted, our notions of the world around us may begin to break down. In Public Figures, author Jena Osman uses the gaze of monuments to construct a network of observations that possess the power of transformation. In a mix of writing styles and images, she restages history, redefines violence, repositions the reader, and reveals the complexity of and our complicity in the gaze. Structurally the book weaves together art, journalism, photography, mapping, politics, and poetry. But - truth, hypocrisy, ideology, morality, and memory - are the revelation of Osman’s odyssey.
Compelled by the idea of seeing the world through other’s eyes, Osman formulates her research project: to photograph the gaze of monuments in her hometown of Philadelphia. She rigs a mop handle with a disposable camera at one end so that she can access the often out of reach eyes of the monument’s protagonist. We see photos of the monuments, mostly military statues, juxtaposed to images of what they see. The accompanying text is at first very matter of fact; Osman briefly describes the monument and presents a few details of relevant history. In several instances she makes a specific connection between the gaze and the historical back story. Her first entry – Major John Fulton Reynolds – is gazing at trees. According to Osman’s research, although Reynolds was a respected military figure, he fell asleep under a tree and was taken prisoner by the enemy, an embarrassment for Reynolds and the army in which he served. It may be purely coincidental, but nonetheless it’s poetic that this war hero is positioned to spend his time looking at the object of his humiliation.
Not long into the book, Osman begins to consider specific details: uniform, weapon, bible, inscription, pose. Every detail suddenly seems calculated to support a certain narrative, a particular ideology. This is reflective of not only how the institutional gaze is positioned but also how the public’s gaze is positioned by the institution. Our perception of history is shrewdly constrained. Osman admits that the details, and what they signify, are coming into focus only as her project evolves; it’s not far-fetched to assume that the public has little regard for the monuments encountered in their daily comings and goings. The text beneath a photo of the author photographing, notes the impact of her actions on passersby as they catch on to what she’s up to, “They gasp and laugh.” Osman’s simple gesture, regardless of the back story or the details, is enough to incite some sense of raised consciousness. Observing Osman paying attention, the public is provoked to pay attention too.
Osman’s collage includes a more cryptic text that runs along the bottom of many of the pages. It’s not initially clear whose voice is being transcribed in the collections of phrases, printed in a different font. Constantly referring to a “target” and using words like “roger wilco,” “weapon,” “impact,” and “bombs” one is quick to recognize the military lingo. In actuality the military text is excerpts of drone pilot’s narration that Osman has appropriated from YouTube videos. Here we see through yet another set of eyes. The language is unemotional and exacting. The voice seems far removed from the destruction and loss of life to which it is inextricably connected. The relevance of the drone pilot’s text suddenly becomes clear: the disconnect of the monuments from the real-world consequences they represent, let alone from the truth, parallels the disconnect of the drone pilots from their targets. The action of the drone appears on a screen like a television show, a video game, or a movie. How easy it is to write history from a distance.
As the book progresses, we are primed to ask questions, to read between the lines. This acquired position feels enlightened, privileged even. Amplifying the complexity of her story and our experience, Osman interweaves photographs of actual soldiers engaged in military maneuvers as well as diagrams of the monument’s locations in relationship to each other. At a couple of intervals, the photographs are omitted and replaced by text. Osman sets up the “story,” writes the photographic “image,” and provides the “caption.” We are, at this point, primed to insert the image using our imagination: engrossed in Osman’s storytelling it’s a task we happily take on. From text to pictures to maps, there is constant movement. The patinated bronze and solid stone fluctuates between past and present; the public navigates its way around the monuments and through history; the drones stealthily fly, look and act; the soldiers invade, rescue, carry out, and execute; the reader travels from Philadelphia to Venezuela to Ancient Greece to Vietnam to Europe to Iraq. Osman’s concise book is unfathomably expansive.
Public Figures wraps up with several pages of transcribed drone pilot narration that subtly, beautifully, transform into poetry. We are left with the final thought:
everything relies on visual confirmation, action no longer
Ultimately Osman’s photography project, compelling in and of itself, becomes a catalyst for something much deeper, far more complex. We are objects in a constructed, collaged space that encompasses time and place, fact and fiction, ambivalence and action, sight and gaze. Yet, we don’t have to exist as romanticized markers in fixed locations. We have the ability to observe, self-reflect, and verify. We are poised to take action and, more importantly, to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions.
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Michael Fried, Minimalism, and a Trip to Dia:Beacon
Prior to a recent trip to Dia:Beacon I re-read Michael Fried’s famous essay Art and Objecthood. Fried makes a passionate case for art and against objecthood, “There is a war going on between theatre and modernist painting, between the theatrical and the pictorial—a war that, despite the literalists' [minimalists] explicit rejection of modernist painting and sculpture, is not basically a matter of program and ideology but of experience, conviction, sensibility.” It sounds to me like Mr. Fried was not coping well with the art revolutions of the 1960s. But he’s a smart guy and more than capable of presenting his case. First, he distinguishes modernist works of art – composed of different elements, autonomous, independent from their location - from minimalist works which are whole, free of individual parts, relying solely on shape and presence to occupy a specific location in the world. This matter-of-fact distinction is vital to Fried’s argument as it establishes his own grounds for considering the meaningfulness, or lack thereof, of art and objecthood. Art, I was reminded by the critic, is meaningful based on the very nature of the relationships of the elements. The essential nature of objecthood finds meaning only in relation to the space it occupies, including the space of the viewer. He is proposing here that bjecthood requires the viewer to be an integral part of the experience without whom the object has no meaning. According to Fried – and this is the crux of his position - the requirement of an audience in order for a work to have meaning is theater. “What is it about objecthood,” he asks us, “as projected and hypostatized by the literalists that makes it antithetical to art?” His answer is a scathing reduction of minimalism to nothing more than “a new genre of theater”… non-art.
This is what was on my mind as I began my journey to Dia:Beacon. The train made its way up river, the urban density thinned, the season became more identifiable and the river, flowing aggressively against the direction of the train, was an apt metaphor for my entering into what might prove to be treacherous waters. Leaving behind the distractions and noise of life in the great city of New York for the quickly quieting landscape seemed to heighten my senses. To a city boy like me Beacon feels like the wilderness. The old factory space that has become the museum is an all too perfect fortress for the art: solid, spacious, industrial, crispy-clean, light-filled. I thought about how much time has passed since this work was made, all the ‘posts’ and ‘isms’ that have staked their claim. Art movements endlessly evolve, respond and react to both art history and art potential, to cultural changes and economic realities. Tasmil Raymond, curator at Dia Art Foundation writes, “…the artist works within a historical development, providentially decodes and proposes a reading of present conditions, and ultimately shifts art into a realm of experience.” Bingo! This may be the Achilles heel of Fried’s argument. It strikes me that he is unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge the appropriateness of time and place in regard to minimalism.
However, looking closely at the all-star cast of minimalist artists' work I realized that Michael Fried is also right – sort of. The works, especially those by Andre, Judd, Heizer, and Serra are not autonomous, nor moveable, nor contained within a frame, they are definitely not tableau. The work is for and about the viewer, it engages the architecture, it is meant to be experienced, seen, walked on, walked through, and peered into. It is, in this sense, theatrical and performative. However – and this is where Fried and I truly part company – I find these attributes provocative, critical, and revealing. They are revolutionary to me, even today; they are still capable of asking the questions: What is art? How is art made? Where can art exist? This work is demanding of both viewer and critic. And, even though these once controversial minimalist works are commodified and monetized, residing comfortably in museums and corporate lobbies, there was a profound sense of joy knowing that, at one time, the work’s non-artness threw into turmoil the institutional idea of an artwork’s value, validity, and authenticity.
Of course, some works are more challenging than others. Perhaps this is most notable in the nearly invisible and deceivingly simple works by Fred Sandback. He was a master of creating objects with essentially no mass, non-objects that somehow confidently delineate and fill space. Sol Lewitt as well whose nearly imperceptible and ephemeral wall drawings fill several galleries. I can’t just pass these by, curiosity gets the better of me; I’m compelled to know, to look deeper, to question, to converse. And, for anyone who thinks Lewitt, Judd, and Serra embody minimalism, what of the diversity seen in works by Joseph Beuys, John Chamberlain, Robert Smithson, or Louise Bourgeois. Altogether Dia is adept at clearly displaying the complexity of the movement. Minimalism, like all art movements, has no singularity. No doubt, I find some works more compelling or successful than others, a privilege I’m willing to extend unconditionally to Michael Fried. Yet I cannot help feeling that Fried’s short shrift of minimalism is a great disservice to art history and himself. Despite Michael Fried’s essay, Dia reminded me of the incredible breadth of art making: its objects, its ideas, its functions, its appearances, its timeliness. I rediscovered for myself that the expansive realm of art is, in its entirety, how and where meaningfulness is made manifest.
My journey to Dia:Beacon was transformative and enlightening. Carl Andre wrote, “Art is not only the investment of creative energy, but the sharpening of the critical faculties… Things have qualities. Perceive the qualities.” Words to live by. And, as much as Fried may have been challenged and even threatened by minimalism, in Art and Objecthood he makes no effort to consider minimalism’s historical poignancy or relevance. He is desperately clinging on to not only modernism as it trips and stumbles but also to ideas of 18th century France, Diderot, and the tableau. I believe there is much to learn from ideas and artifacts of the past. But let’s not forget that past and present are deeply interwoven in a continuum that constantly feeds on and devours itself. Perspectives change, attitudes morph, new interests emerge, technology advances, and meaningfulness shifts. What is radical today will likely be ubiquitous tomorrow. It’s all meaningful. As the art world of the 1960s was quickly evolving, apparently Michael Fried was not.
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