My critical work ranges from writing on art and social practice to queer culture and experimental writing. The through-line in these varied texts is an interest in social bodies — gendered, immanent, or immaterial — and the built environment: the heterogenous spaces we inhabit and the technologies that form or alter them. I feel an urgency around our accelerating world and the centripetal forces of late capitalism and its ever-more-interconnected information systems. This dynamic simultaneously compresses us and pulls us apart. The following are some of my writings from the last decade. ———
“Speculative Futures: Social Practice, Cognitive Capitalism and/or the Triumph of Capital,” in Informal Market Worlds: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, nai010 publishers, 2015. This new essay critiques social practice and the art world’s complicities with capitalism.
“Protective Forgetting,” an essay on Tony Greene in the catalogue for the Hammer Museum’s biennial, Made In L.A. 2014, curated by Connie Butler and Michael Ned Holte, 2014.
“Poetry and Pornography,” a conversation with Dodie Bellamy on her new book of pornographic poems, Cunt Norton. In Los Angeles Review of Books, (LARB), 2014.
“Séance, n/Oulipo, Impunities, Feminaissance, & Untitled,” written with Christine Wertheim for Jacket 2. This outlines a set of conferences we created around the expanded topics in “experimental” writing. 2014.
“Public Fruit Jam,” Emergency Index II, Ugly Duckling Press, Brooklyn, NY 2013.
“The Floating World of Dubai,” in Connie Samaras: Tales of Tomorrow, The Armory Center for the Arts, 2013.
“Sweetness in Public Space,” in Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice, eds. Andrea Phlllips & Fulya Erdemci, Sternberg Press, Berlin 2012.
“How to Have A Public Fruit Jam,” A Guidebook Of Alternative Nows, ed. Amber Hickey, The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, Los Angeles 2012.
“The Fruit You Want to See,” on fruit in public space, in Hands-on Urbanism, ed. Elke Krasny, Turia+Kant Verlag, Vienna & Berlin, 2012. Bilingual edition.
“From the Voice of the People to the People of the Voice” on artist’s use of the voice and hearing in the Occupy movement, ART:21, 2012.
“Christian Marclay: The Clock,” on Christian Marclay, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Summer 2011.
“Occupy LA: Artists in Solidarity—Matias Viegener,” Social Practice: Writings About the Social in Contemporary Art, ed. Sue Bell Yank, 2011.
“You and Me, Or the Art of Give and Take,” on Allen Ruppersberg, ” in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Spring 2010.
“Dancer from the Dance,” in 50 Gay & Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read, Alyson Books, Boston,2009.
“Castles in the Air,” The Sundown Salons, ed. Fritz Haeg, MIT Press, Boston, 2009.
“The Art of Two Germanys/ Cold War Cultures” in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Fall 2009.
“The Day The Earth, on Susan Silton, ” X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, 2008
“Philosophy in the Bedroom: Pornography and Philosophy in Dennis Cooper’s Writing,” in Writing at the Edge: The Work of Dennis Cooper, eds. Danny Kennedy and Paul Heggarty, Sussex University Press, London, 2008.
“The Region of Unlikeness,” on portraiture and its other, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Vol 10, Number 3, Winter 2008.
“Connie Samaras’s V.A.L.I.S.,” in Art US, Jan 2008.
“Impunities, a two day experiment in writing and community,” in The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, issue #5, 2007.
“She, Hers, I, and Mine,” on Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman and Suzy Lake, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Fall 2007.
“Take Back the Fruit: Public Space and Community Activism,” In Food, ed. John Knechtel, Alphabet City, MIT Press, Boston, 2007.
“Together Apart,” on Christopher Russell, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Summer 2007.
“Experimental Writing: Negation or Potentiality?” in The nOulipian Analects, edited by Matias Viegener & Christine Wertheim, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, 2007.
“Potentiality: The Poetics of Play,” in The nOulipian Analects, edited by Matias Viegener & Christine Wertheim, Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, 2007.
“All You Need Is Love,” on Mary Kelly, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Spring 2007.
“Fallen Fruit,” on the question of trees, their fruit, ownership and public property in Cabinet, Fall 2006. The first of a series of texts theorizing the practice of Fallen Fruit.
“In And Around Whose Home?,” on Cathy Opie, in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Winter 2006.
“Angelic States-Event Sequence,” on Connie Samaras, in Radical History Review, Fall 2005.
“The Mix Tape As a form of American Folk Art,” in Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture, ed. Thurston Moore, Universe: New York, 2005. Review in salon.com.
“The Vanities of Kaucyila Brooke,” in X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Vol 1, No 2, 1997.