 Greetings. It's my pleasure to introduce Elliot Krasnopolar, a PhD candidate in history of art at Burdmar, and currently a pre-doctoral and curatorial fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Coming to us with a BA in photography and an MA from Williams, Elliot has intertwined that training to produce a distinctive body of scholarly work, already publishing two essays on photography, one on the black and white photographs of Joseph Sudak, the other on the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins. Augured by aspects of his MA thesis on Robert Smithson's photographs of non-sides, or what Elliot termed his elsewhere places, his dissertation, which is entitled Timescapes, Geology and Placing Contemporary Art, expands the philosophical and material ambit of that earlier work. In a project that brings together the abstract paintings of Mark Bradford, the analog films of Tacita Dean, the archival installations of Ronnie Horne, and the antiquated photographs of Sally Mann, Elliot minds their respective use of medium and method to make visible all that has been sedimented, forgotten, obscured, or buried in the landscapes they take as their subjects. Today's paper, Sun, Sea Salt, Tacita Dean's JG, gives a glimpse of the methods and concerns that animate Elliot's dissertation. So please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thank you, Lisa. And thank you all for being here and Elliot for all your organizational work and the barns for hosting. Sun, Salt, Spiral, Tacita Dean's JG. About 20 years ago, the British filmmaker Tacita Dean wanted to make a film of JG Ballard's Voices of Time, a short science fiction story where time has become a physical and material presence in the world. The story follows the slow decline of Robert Powers, who builds a geometric concrete mandala in the bed of a dried up salt lake before running out of energy and time and eventually dying in his structure. It has been suggested that this story was the catalyst for Robert Smith's and Spiral Jetty, but more on that in a moment. When Dean asked for permission to use Ballard's story in a film, he informed Thor that he had already licensed his works to the BBC. The two were friends though, and so Ballard proposed a different prompt. He asked why a Spiral Jetty? What cargo might have birthed at a Spiral Jetty? Ballard even said to her, your film should solve the mystery that is the Spiral Jetty, and so Dean set off. In 2013, Dean presented her answer in the form of a 26-minute long film shot on 35-millimeter celluloid entitled JG. JG is the subject of this paper, and although I've seen it many times, I'm not sure this non-narrative film, with almost no dialogue, solves that mystery. But it does engage directly with the question. Normally, jetties are built for unloading and unloading ships, or as a breakwater to help slow shoreline erosion. A Spiral Jetty built on a shallow, untroversed salt lake might at first seem nonsensical, but its shape offers our first clue. Today, building from both Dean's Film and Smithson's Earthwork, I will tell a history of spirals at the Great Salt Lake. We begin with Smithson's Jetty, which is probably the most well-known spiral in Utah. This giant 1500-foot earthwork was built up from basalt and sand on the shoreline and into the shallow waters of the Great Salt Lake. Smithson's Earthwork was one of the first post-war pieces to move art out of the gallery and into the world, and remains an important touchstone for the history of art. Beyond the physical spiral located in Utah, Smithson also wrote an essay and created a 36-minute long film about the work's construction, logic, and history. These three elements together make up the Spiral Jetty, and Dean drew from all three for her film, Salt. It's hard to avoid salt when you're at the Great Salt Lake. It's in the air, on the ground, on the plants, everywhere. It also plays an important role in both Dean's Film and Smithson's work. As a terminal lake, and here I'm showing the different tributaries that feed into the Salt Lake. The Great Salt Lake is fed by freshwater sources, but it does not drain or flow anywhere. Those freshwater sources pick up salts, minerals, and even toxins, and deposit them into the lake where they live forever. Because Utah is a desert, hot, and dry, the lake is constantly evaporating. It sits in this delicate balance, with freshwater being added by streams and lost through evaporation, with the lake itself growing ever saltier over thousands of years. And I'll just pause to say, if in case it's not clear, the images are all from Tacita's film, unless I've noted otherwise. So in the next slide, you'll see none of these are from the film, but most of the images are drawn directly from J.G. Salt is the first spiral in this mystery. The microscopic and crystalline structure in every grain of salt is a spiral. Smithson highlighted this fact by reproducing a series of photographs in his essay on the earthwork. He explained, each cubic salt crystal echoes the spiral jetty in terms of the crystal's molecular lattice. Art historian Jennifer Roberts writes about this in her book, Mirror Travels, Robert Smithson in History, where she describes the many different scales of the earthwork from the molecular to the entire landscape. And this image of the electron microscope that I'm showing is drawn directly from Professor Roberts's book. She connects this scalar expansion to a temporal one, wherein the work's chronological range expands to include, in her words, the entire span of history itself. Dean's film, J.G. builds on Smithson's work through the strange interactions between salt, water, and land at this site. Salt is the most frequently represented object in the film. We see it in crystals, in water, as abstract planes, and in gigantic piles. Dean's film, much of J.G. at the Wendover Podash mine, a solar evaporation potassium mine just west of the lake. The mine uses the sun to evaporate water in order to collect minerals and salts and sell them on an industrial scale. In the film, though, this means that flowing water is so salinated that it actually deposits material as it flows rather than erodes it away. By revealing how salt reverses the eroding potential of water, while at the same time becoming more chemical laden, more salty, and more toxic, Dean questions our understanding of water and time through a logic of salt. The film examines salt through the landscape from the tumbleweed to the shore to the mine. Salt unites this place, and J.G. reveals its many manifestations as it spirals across the Great Salt Lake, bridging geological time and human industry. Structure. Although the film was meant to solve the mystery of the spiral jetty, J.G. never, not once, shows an image of Smithen's earthwork. Instead, Dean exposes the spiral shape through a series of precisely cut aperture masks that allow her to shield part of the film. From light, followed by a second aperture mask that does the opposite, revealing the part that was blocked. By exposing the film twice using these masks, Dean was able to layer different images and shapes onto each shot. This brings up some interesting questions about temporality and dexicality and photography as these shots take place over different moments in different places, and yet reveal this multiplicity on a single piece of traditionally exposed and processed film. I dive into these questions in my dissertation, but here I want to ask why Dean never shows the jetty, but instead only gives us spiral shapes via this superimposition. The absence of Smithen's earthwork prompts a new question. Which spiral does J.G. refer to? It turns out that the spiral jetty wasn't the first human-made spiral on the shores of this place. Although we can't know what the first spiral at the Great Salt Lake was, we know they've existed there for centuries in the form of petroglyphs carved on rock. These spirals were created by the Fremont culture, a neologism for an unknown number of pre-Columbian peoples who lived between AD1 and AD1300 in what is now Utah and Arizona. The Fremont peoples were named after the Fremont River, which was named after John C. Fremont, who is notorious for participating in Native American genocide during his lifetime as a military officer and explorer. I propose that Dean's superimposed, multi-temporal and materially diverse spirals in J.G. refer to to these other spirals on the landscape. Made of rock, located in rural, hard-to-access places, and themselves mysterious, the Fremont spirals relate to Smithsen's in several ways. Perhaps they too are earthworks. When Smithsen said he wanted the jetty to connect to history, he was writing about and filming dinosaurs. But Dean's work, precisely by not picturing the jetty directly, allows Smithsen's earthwork to expand temporally and physically into the near past and connect us to human histories, displacements, and disappearances. Nature. Smithsen based his jetty on a mathematical spiral described by Archimedes in 225 BC. Our comedian spirals can also be seen in coils of rope or reels of film. For millennia, humans have observed that spirals exist at nearly every scale in nature, from massive galaxies to the molecular structure of DNA and inorganic crystals. Today, scientists still debate why this form is so ubiquitous, what causes it, and what its purpose might be. Speculating, Ballard once wrote that the jetty's cargo was probably a time machine, but not the kind that lets you travel through time. Rather, Smithsen's earthwork, Ballard claimed, manipulates the time and space around it. Dean builds on this idea in Ballard's short story, writing, and this is Dean here describing the short story, quote, it literally sees time. The main character powers says of an experiment on a sunflower in the voices of time. So also does the spiral at the heart of all our biological, chemical, and cosmological structures. As she continues, the spiral underwrites nature, which underwrites life in all forms. According to Dean, through the spiral shape, time becomes visible, tangible, just like in Ballard's story. Whether or not he knew it, Ballard's choice of the sunflower was prescient. Like the jetty, the sunflower is full of spirals. The seeds on a sunflower follow a layered, logarithmic spiraling pattern, the same sort of shape that defines the structure of snail shells, pine cones, and hurricanes. Scientists have suggested, but not proven, that this spiral form is so ubiquitous in nature because it is efficient. Each segment of a logarithmic spiral is the same shape, just slightly larger. And perhaps this sameness saves the organism energy. This is easiest to see in a nautilus cross section, where each segment of the nautilus is the same shape, but as they grow in size, they form a spiral. When Dean writes that Smith's and spiral coiled beneath the surface of the lake to the origins of time in the core of the earth, she pushes the spiral form even further. Both J.G. and Ballard's story are peppered with bits of life, an armadillo, a beetle, and a lizard. And I think Dean views these creatures as spirals too. By including them, she refers to DNA, but also perhaps pays homage to the importance of the spiral in the history of life, from the ammonite to the fern to the sunflower, water. Two years after Smith's and finished the jetty, it disappeared under rising lake levels. And this image I'm showing is actually a tacitidine photograph from 1999 that she took when she went to look for the jetty, but couldn't find it. It stayed hidden, this is the jetty again, in the lake's algae-filled murky red water from 1972 until 2005, when it finally reemerged. Since then, lake levels have been steadily decreasing. As I mentioned earlier, the Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake fed by fresh water, mostly meltwater from snow. This same freshwater irrigates fields and provides municipal water for much of the state's population. As cities and towns in Utah grow, the draw on the region's water has similarly increased, decreasing what makes it to the lake. At the same time, global warming has sped evaporation on the lake, meaning it needs more water to replenish its historical levels. As the lake dries up, it kicks up microscopic dust that settles on snow in the mountains. The dust decreases the reflectivity of the snow, what's known as albedo, and increases snowmelt. More snowmelt means less snowpack, which leads to dried-up streams, increased drought, and ever more draws on a dwindling water supply. Bonnie Baxter, the director of the Great Salt Lake Institute, told me last summer that the lake's ecosystem might collapse as soon as this year. As the lake levels drop, they expose the lake stromatolites, odd rock structures created by photosynthetic cyanobacteria, which slowly precipitate dissolved solids into rock formations, a bit like coral. Interestingly, stromatolites are an ancient rock form and are credited with providing the first oxygen on earth some 1.2 billion years ago. At the Great Salt Lake, these shallow structures are the bedrock of the ecosystem. They provide food and shelter for brine shrimp, which then feed the 10 million migratory birds who stop over at the lake. When the stromatolites emerge above the water's surface, they will die, disrupting the ecosystem and possibly killing millions of birds at this critical stopover point. The destruction of life and ecosystems on the lake is also a spiral. As human-caused problems compound and reverberate, the effects and damage build on each other until there is no possibility of turning back time and putting things back the way they were. The future. During an interview, Smithson described how he imagined the jetty might live on into the future. Here's what he said. When you are dealing with a great mass, you want something that will, in a sense, interact with the climate and its changes. The main objective is to make something massive and physical enough so that it can interact with those things and go through all kinds of modifications. If the work has sufficient physicality, any kind of natural change would tend to enhance the work. Yet the changes I just described at Utah's largest lake aren't natural. Smithson didn't plan for climate change, of course, but his jetty nonetheless bears witness to it. Dean ruminates in one of the few bits of the dialogue on the film, and just to be clear, pausing again, this isn't in the film. I should have labeled things better, but I hope it's kind of clear at this point what images are on the film and what images aren't. Dean ruminates in one of the few bits of dialogue in the film. If only one could unwind this spiral, it would play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it's ever seen. Spiral jetty would play back a terrifyingly short story of a lake that at first rose and covered it up, and then, just as quickly, disappeared altogether. In a letter, Tacita said to me that she wanted to shoot at the Podash mine because it was a surreal kind of toxic landscape, even clarifying that she was specifically attracted to its toxic qualities. From an environmental standpoint, this solar evaporation mine is less toxic than many mining operations currently underway. Yet inadvertently, through her interest in this place, Dean visualized the future of the Great Salt Lake. Salt, evaporation, heavy metals turning to dust and polluting the entire region. Just as the film compresses time through its layered aperture masks, it also compresses it through its subjects, imaging the ingredients of the lake's imminent demise. Like the film itself, Smithson offers a way of thinking about time as nonlinear. Through its water cycles, climate changes, and shifting ecologies, time becomes layered, stratified, and cleaved at the jetty. When Smithson made the work, he imagined it would be a geological object, existing as a stable entity on a deep time scale. Setting aside the audacity of this desire, I instead want to ask, is it still a jetty if it sits on a dried up and dead lake bed? If the fleeting science fiction world Ballard described is becoming realized at the Great Salt Lake, what does that mean for Smithson's earthwork? And what does it mean for Dean's film? Although Dean and Ballard were friends when she began researching JD, he died before the project was completed in 2013. The film became a sort of elegy to the author as Dean grappled with their shared love of Smithson's work. But I would argue that in the years since then, JD has emerged as an elegy to the Great Salt Lake as well. Her film tried to capture through its materiality, process, and subjects the strange and alien landscapes of Utah that drew Smithson there some 40 years prior. Yet in doing so, Dean also captured a fragile ecology at the edge of a precipice. Melding industry with nature, the expanse with the detail, JD pictures many facets of the Great Salt Lake, revealing a complex and layered place where spirals of film, rock, and salt are held in suspension. Thank you. Francesca Bolfo has three MA degrees, which is a surprisingly germane index into her character. There is a perfectionism at work in Francesca that makes her at once inexhaustible and utterly exhausted. Some of you may relate, I certainly can. The net result is not just polished prose, but the ability to sidle up to her subject and walk with it for a while until their steps are in perfect sync at that point. And only at that point does she begin to write. By then, she's so familiar with her subject as you're about to hear that she can quickly discard the reigning orthodoxies and reimagine her subject as it were from the inside out. Francesca entered the University of Pennsylvania after earning an MA at the University of Chicago, which itself followed her BA at Swarthmore. Here at Penn, she's a beloved TA investing, as is her want, 100% of herself in her teaching. Paul Tech, her subject today, was a notoriously slippery figure as the wildly divergent accounts of his work underscore. But I think Francesca walks with him better than anyone I've read. Francesca. Thank you, Jonathan, for that wonderful opening. Thank you so much to the Barnes, particularly to Aliyah, who has been a lifesaver on more than one occasion. Everything is beautiful and everything is ugly simultaneously. Explicit, yet enigmatic, unembellished, yet epiphanic. This declaration by the American artist Paul Tech supplies a pithy encapsulation of the formal and conceptual practices of his early sculptural work. Throughout the 1960s, Tech produced a series of exquisitely crafted wax sculptures of hewn flesh encased in plexiglass containers, wherein warm and cold, organic and synthetic, and beautiful and ugly collide to generate an aesthetic intensity that is both deeply moving and difficult to define. Retrospectively deb the technological reliquaries, these intensely somatic works betray a vested interest in corporeality that he followed through its life cycle and its logical conclusion, the tomb, a multi-part installation centered around a startlingly mimetic pink wax effigy of the artist entombed in a pyramidal structure. Today, I want to consider the singularity of Tech's practice in relation to the theory of Eros, a strain of post-war cultural radicalism that locates the potential for liberation and freedom from repression in an undifferentiated body at one with the world. The affinities between this radical social theory of universal embodiment and the distinct bodilyness of Tech's sculptures become all the more striking when assessed through the work of Normano Brown. Among the various radical Freudians, theorizing Eros, Brown alone propounded the centrality of death, the acceptance of which, he argued, enables us to fully realize our lived potential. Viewed within this Brownian framework, Tech's exploration of the physical realities of a profoundly corporeal death can be seen as a meditation on this finite body as both a defining feature and the universal dimension of human experience. Tech's is a biography rich for mythologizing, charismatic and devastatingly handsome. He achieved market success throughout the 60s only to abandon it for a parapetetic lifestyle in Europe where he spent nearly a decade making large-scale ephemeral installations that were successfully exhibited throughout the continent. Upon his return to New York in 1976, however, he struggled to regain his earlier claim and gradually slipped into obscurity, facing destitution and acute mental illness before his premature death of AIDS in 1988. Consequently, there exist many versions of Paul Tech in the literature, yet few acknowledge how profoundly his personal and artistic development was shaped by his relationship with a group of queer artists born of his time as a student in New York during the early 50s. Among them, the painter Joseph Raffaella, the set designer Peter Harvey, and the photographer Peter Hujar would figure most prominently in his life. Despite the rampant homophobia that impelled artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to conceal their sexuality, Tech and his cohort cultivated an open environment of artistic dialogue that was patently homosexual and erotically charged. Forming enclaves in New York and Miami, they engaged in the kind of intersubjective activity emblematic of Eros, what Jonathan Katz has described as a communal relation among people premised equally on physical pleasure and psychic connectedness. Now works by these artists poignantly illustrate Eros' Edenic potential, possible only within a space beyond the repressive reach of a capitalist heteronormative system. In particular, the delicate mapping of imbricated bodies and text drawings with their gentle contours palpably registering the hands' pressure testify to the unique convergence of sexual experimentation, artistic development, and creative exchange in his early life. Such an open and base embrace of the homoerotic is seemingly at odds with an artist whose work is rife with religious reference. Now Tech was in fact raised in a devoutly Catholic household and remained spiritually disposed throughout his life. And indeed, in designating these works technological reliquaries, he explicitly cites the Catholic veneration of saintly remains enshrined in precious containers, a practice that, along with the sacraments, conspicuously deviates from the dominant principles of spiritual transcendence by assigning grace to earthly matter. Even so, it would be specious to equate his spirituality with doctrinaire religiosity. Writing to Susan Sontag in 1966, he described himself with droll irreverence as a, quote, renegade Christian still looking for the transcendental experience, and further joking that he was a, quote, latter-day free spirit for whom promiscuity is a sacrament. Moreover, when speaking with Harold Zeman seven years later, he mused, I relate the collective unconscious with Christianity. We are all party of the body of Christ and the human spectrum. We all understand each other. Theology also animates the work of Normano Brown, himself a Protestant heretic in the tradition of Nietzsche. Like tech, he too observed how the transcendental ideals of Christian thought are often rooted in the utterly non-transcendent, that is, the vagaries of the flesh. Although little known today, Brown was one of the most widely discussed psychological theorists of his time, and his 1959 treatise, Life Against Death, gained almost biblical status within the counterculture. Significantly, one of his greatest advocates was Susan Sontag, the doyen of the literary avant-garde, and tech's aforementioned pen pal. Tech and Sontag's correspondences indicate that by at least 1965, the artist had begun to immerse himself in Brown's writing at her suggestion. In a letter dated from June of that year, he wrote, quote, the death schedule has begun here. Up at seven, work till 10, exercise till 11.30, beach and lunch till three, work till six, guitar till nine, dinner and bed, and Norman O. Brown till sleep. Reading Brown, however, merely served to refine his particularized conception of death, which had already taken shape after a transformative visit to the famed Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo during the summer of 1963. Cloistered below the city, thousands of mummified corpses, posed and still closed in their vestments, staged a singular, bodily encounter with death that would determine tech's subsequent practice. As to comment upon these technological reliquaries in a 1966 interview with curator Gene Swenson, he testified to the enduring impact of the experience, remarking, I hope the work has the innocence of those baroque crypts in Sicily. Their initial effect is so stunning, you fall back and for a moment and then it's exhilarating. There are 8,000 corpses, not skeletons, corpses, decorating the walls and the corridors and filled with windows coffins. I opened one up, I opened one and picked up what I thought was a piece of paper. It was a piece of dried thigh. I felt strangely relieved and free. It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room like flowers. We accept our thinness intellectually, but emotional acceptance of it can be a joy. Galvanized by this experience of bodily enlightenment, Tech abandoned his painting practice and began experimenting with the corporeal physicality of beeswax. He returned to New York at the end of 1963 and over the next four years produced several conceptually related yet formally distinct bodies of sculpture that would ultimately become the technological reliquaries. Apley dub meat pieces. The first consists of squarely portion pieces of wax meat, varyingly garnished with slabs of fat, animal fur and human hair. Butchered as such, their living origins remain uncertain yet so exceptional is Tech's craftsmanship that viewers instantly respond to these works as flesh. Aping a minimalist vernacular, he encased the meat in sleek glass containers overlaid with either ruled yellow lines or collegiate-style jersey numbers. As strategic visual obstructions, they temper the shocks of their contents. Yet they also lure the viewer in for a closer look, generating an effective relay of attraction and revulsion in the phenomenological encounter. In the farcically gruesome birthday cake, the work abruptly shifts from butcher to bakery, comprising four tiers of meat, frosted with fat, sprinkled with hair and impaled by 21 pink candles. Through only titular illusion and minimal formal adjustments, Tech transmutes this flesh from an abstract corporality into a decorative paradigm that, like the corpses in Palermo, insist upon the materiality of the body. If a birthday cake marks the anniversary of birth, then here, life is celebrated with death incarnate, a commemoration of existence that reminds us of our inexorable mortality. With its symbolic invocations of the eternal, the work's uniquely pyramidal container evokes Brown's particularized conception of eternity, what he describes as, quote, a way of envisaging mankind's liberation from the neurotic obsession with the past and future, a way of living in the present but also dying. For the historical subject gripped by such neuroses, such a prescription might appear bleak. Yet, by adorning his birthday cake with kitschy, childish pink candles, Tech introduces an undeniable campiness that not only attenuates the work's otherwise somber contents, but also signals the oceanic joy we might attain by accepting Brown's call. Around 1965, the meat pieces began to take shape, now enclosed in streamlined plexiglass containers. These pure corporeal fictions of anatomically ambiguous specimens nevertheless seemed terrifically lifelike. Through deft manipulation of an expanded technical repertoire, Tech was able to realize the union of incongruous forms without necessarily reconciling them. In the cylindrical 1965 meat piece shown here, the acid blue of the day glow paint intensifies the slimy gleam of the exterior melamine laminate skin, enhancing the optical and textural contrast with its matte, tenebrous interior. In works like the Whitney's 1966 untitled, the entire case is tinted yellow, casting its contents in a sickly synthetic light that literally illuminates the distruction between the organic and industrial. Eschewing strategies of negation and assimilation employed by his minimalist and pop contemporaries, Tech undertook and even embraced the differential, and yet at no point does the work undo itself. Rather, as Stefan Germer incisively puts it, Tech carries out dialectical sleights of hand that force the observer to consider the unity of the antagonistic. Perhaps the most pronounced of these formal contradictions is that between the flesh and its container. Simply put, one cannot look at the meat or the plexiglass without seeing the other. However disparate, the organic and inorganic are here inextricably bound within the perceptual field. Yet on a psychological level, they remain dissonant, simultaneously synergized and polarized. Here, divergent entities coexist relationally without one having to succumb to the other, instead generating a richer whole by virtue of their difference. Understood metaphorically, then, the work contests such socially constructed divisions as gender and sexuality by demonstrating the mutuality that can exist between distinct forms. It was not until the final group of technological reliquaries that the flesh became anthropomorphically embodied. 1966, Tech set about trying to create a full cast of his body for what would later become the centerpiece of the tomb, and in the process began experimenting with the rejected limbs and appendages littering his studio. You can see them along that back wall by his head. The resulting series of severed body parts range from the realistic, like the armor cloud warrior's arm and warrior's leg, to the fantastical and kitschy, like the glittering arm of this untitled work. Now recognizable as human appendages, they possess a corporeal immediacy that both indexes the violence of somatic rupture and makes palpable the absence of the unknown mutilated persons from which they came. As molds of tech's body, however, they are also literally and metaphorically imbued with autobiographical reference. The simultaneous embodiment of both an individual and universal body is aptly illustrated by the embellished arm here. Adorned with psychedelic colors and glimmering accessories, it might appear to be a whimsical reimagining of the warrior's arm. Yet closer examination reveals that the plated armor is in fact fashioned out of imbricated butterfly wings. While throughout the 60s, the butterfly was often referenced as a visual code for homosexuality, here it is metamorphized into the ultimate heteronormative emblem of masculinity, the warrior. Rife with elusive polysomy, the work continues to signify even beyond the contested realm of sexuality. For as a literal representation, the exsanguitated severed arm becomes a political statement critiquing the escalating violence in Vietnam. As a contemporary relic, its gladiatorial adornments invoke the Christian martyrs in the Colosseum, thereby ennobling those fighting while still condemning the cause. And as a glimmering facsimile of the artist's own person, it boldly announces his sexuality while undermining the very patriarchal systems by which it is defined, gesturing to the fallacy of these constructions. Both the elegiac and playful body casts possess a dark theatricality that enlivens their materiality. Yet the tomb, the ultimate work of the period, elevates this theatricality to new levels. For its first showing at Eleanor Ward's stable gallery, tech transformed the space into a multi-sensory environment. Warm rosy lights shown through a haze of incense wafting around a large pink pyramid, inside which viewers could stand on an elevated parapet enclosed with yellow plexiglass to contemplate the artist's lifeless likeness painted entirely pink. If the earlier technological reliquaries engender a distinctly phenomenological encounter, the tomb represents tech's efforts to communicate affectively what he felt in the catacombs. As effects similarly of the artist, the effigy inherently enacts an ontological shift from a universal to profoundly individual death. Yet it also manifests how in death, that body no longer bears the individual. By extending the universal pink of the exhibition across the entire surface of the figure as well, tech not only tempers its unsettling realism but also equalizes and abstracts the form, heightening the tension between reality and fiction, nature and culture. It too bears noting that pink, a sissy color, carries overtly feminine connotations and, when associated with men, codes as homosexual. In deliberately selecting petal pink, then, tech undermines this arbitrary construction by employing it in the bravest of human endeavors, that which Brown claims is the key to appending culture's repression, facing his own death. Hair brushed back and eyes closed in death, the face would have appeared otherwise peaceful if not for the dark, sutured tongue hanging out of its mouth. Here, the tongue's connotations extend beyond the associated cultural overtones of conventional sexuality as the central organ of bodily expression that exists beyond speech. Its presence thus elicits a deeper relationality between sex and death, about a body that, because of its imminent materiality, should experience all of its erotogenic possibilities. Yet for all the figure's verisimilitude, its most significant feature is that which is missing. The fingers of its right hand, tech's working hand, were graphically severed, later placed in a small pouch hanging on the wall. A literal amputation of his most essential tools, it effectively amounts to artistic castration, to the figurative death of the artist. For if the hand spoke in his earlier works, the wax carrying with it the indexical traces of tech's manual labor, here it was silenced. Considered within the tradition of the dead Christ, it begins to signify what tech has sacrificed for his art. As though art has cost him, critic William Wilson poetically muses, not an arm and a leg, but a hand, as though the body consciousness, which is his theme, somehow absorbed his own hand in the work. Supremely manifested in and literally embodied by the tomb, the technological reliquaries do not simply refer to or invoke an embodied death, they materially perform it. At a time when the cool, austere and immortal forms of minimalism pervaded the American art world, tech was instead trafficking in the illicit realm, the expressive, the idiosyncratic and deathly immanence. The work's exquisite detail and tactile richness generates a polymorphously perverse visual field that makes embodiment manifest and as such are realizations of the thinness that tech described feeling in Sicily. Just as a piece of dried thigh appeared to him as a sheaf of paper, his 60 sculptures enact an eschatology of immanence wherein the materiality of flesh reconnects us to the materiality of our existence. Like tech himself, they occupy the interstices between oppositional concepts, engendering and activating a liminal space in which multiple subjectivities might locate a universal embodiment, embracing life by accepting death through the realization that, indeed, flesh is beautiful. Thank you. Greetings. I'm Bridget Daugherty and I want to offer my warm thanks to the Barnes Foundation, to my colleagues present and future gathered here today from all the institutions represented at this event, and to Alia Palumbo for her very gracious organizational efforts in making this gathering possible. What a delight to introduce Nathan Stowbaugh to you today. Nathan came to the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton following his master's studies in the Williams College graduate program in the history of art and his bachelor's studies in interdisciplinary humanities, German, and art history at Washington University. Before leaving St. Louis for Williamstown, Nathan spent two years as a research assistant at the St. Louis Art Museum where he contributed to exhibitions including post-war German art in the collection and to publications including Max Beckmann in the St. Louis Art Museum. At Princeton, Nathan has continued to pursue his interests in museum work and art critical writing alongside his interdisciplinary studies, co-curating an exhibition of the work of Hannah Darboven at the Princeton University Art Museum in 2018, publishing an article on Martin Kippenberger in October that same year, and in 20th, that's October the Journal, although it did come out in the fall, so it's a kind of meta-laptic October, I guess. That same year and in 2020, contributing an essay on the work of Jutta Kötter to an exhibition catalog for the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach. Nathan's talk today is drawn from his dissertation New Media, New Masses by the Exports Arts of Communication for which he conducted two years of research in Austria with the support of several coveted grants and fellowships including a Fulbright. New Media, New Masses is that rare kind of dissertation that both provides a comprehensive art historical account of the work of a pioneering and too little understood artist and wholly reconceives the terms in which that art demands to be understood. Nathan's brilliant interpretations of exports achievements in performance, expanded cinema, television, video, and installation show the artist's projects to have been concerned from the outset of her career in the 1960s, not only with the experimental, incisive, sophisticated, and witty feminist critique of the media of mass communications for which export is widely known but also with another order of engagement with queer sexuality at once trenchant and touching that Nathan discloses as foundational for her practice. And after you hear his paper it will seem like a kind of no-brainer but it's important to realize that this sort of turns everything on its head. Here without further ado is Nathan Stowbaugh to share with you his paper, Queerers' Identification and Disidentification in Valley Exports, Television, and Cinema. Thank you. Thank you so, oh wow, loud and sorry, thank you so much Bridget for the introduction. It's been great being in person with everyone and I will also join the loud chorus of praise and thanks for Alias' organizational efforts and for everyone at the Barnes today. In a meditation on muscle, manhood, and milk, published in his 1951 book The Mechanical Bride, Folklore of Industrial Man, Marshall McLuhan reproduces this image from a comic book advertisement for the National Dairy Products Corporation of America. We see a boy in an undershirt, his head tilted toward a poster displaying the massive massimo whose bodybuilding stance he attempts to copy. The ad urges the boy to consume milk, cheese, butter, and ice cream in order to approach the hulking proportions of Smodel. McLuhan discusses such emulation of muscle-bound ideal types alongside a citation from the mass psychology of fascism, written by Austrian sexologist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. He quotes Reich on the, quote, identification of the mass individual with a fewer. This tendency to identification, Reich contends, is the psychological basis of national narcissism, that is of a self-confidence based on identification with the greatness of a nation, end quote. McLuhan's juxtaposition of this quotidian ad and this theoretical passage suggests not only an unsettling line of continuity between national socialism and post-war consumer culture, but also enacts a call to consider mass communications media and the images they circulate as worthy of serious critical inquiry. The page you see here can be found in the edition of McLuhan's book in the personal collection of the Artist Valley Export. A wealth of holdings from the Artist Library and Archive is currently stewarded, and excellently, by the Valley Export Center in Linn's Austria, the city where exports spent her formative years. My observations today are animated by my time in this archive, which opened to the public in 2017. Export's practice, which has been committed from its inception to a feminist opposition to the oppression of women, has foregrounded the body as a locus for political action and resistance. My dissertation proposes that concerns with signification, broadly conceived, are equally central to the artist's work and fundamentally inform this emphasis on the gendered body. While export's art questions existing systems of signification that inscribe themselves on the body, her work also strives to open up new modes of communication as alternatives to those that perpetuate patriarchal domination. My research draws attention to her simultaneous critique and deployment of mass communication technologies, including television and cinema, in a practice that explores the relationship between artworks and these unfolding technologies. To gain some concrete sense of this unfolding, we might consider how the early 1960s saw a sharp increase in television ownership among Austria's population, from roughly 100,000 households in 1961 to over half a million private television sets tuning in by 1964. This was the time when the artist relocated from Linn's to the Austrian capital of Vienna, where she would, in 1967, take on her new self-chosen name as a feminist rejection of patronymics. That year also saw export begin to stage public performances she conceived as instances of expanded cinema. For example, this work titled Cutting. Part of this performance involved the artist painstakingly carving characters into a large sheet of paper, spelling out, quite literally, McLuhan's media theoretical texts while a running projector cast white light on her activities. In the following year, export debuted her tap-and-touch cinema, which the artist performed across several European cities in Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands between 1968 and 1970. The artist would later describe this work in print as the world's first street film and first real woman's film. Passers-by were encouraged to reach into the small styrofoam and later metallic theater surrounding the artist's torso to feel her breasts. This action has been understood as a challenge to the enjoyment of women's bodies and the cinema at the safe, sanitized distance of the voyeur. The dimorphic pairs of female artist and male audience members in these images documenting her performance have perhaps served to occlude one of the artist's stated intentions for tap-and-touch cinema, arguably her most widely known work. Addressing that aspect of her art will require an acknowledgement of the place of same-sex eros, what we might today call queer sexuality in her work more broadly. I'd like to suggest that recognizing these queer valences as not merely supplemental, but rather foundational features of her work offers an opportunity to better understand the inextricability of the very media of her art making and the sexual politics of her practice. Before revisiting tap-and-touch cinema, I'd like to turn to export's direct engagement three years after that performance with broadcast television. For roughly five minutes in 1971, Austrian television viewers turned on their sets to find that the TV was watching them. Export's work, Facing a Family, begins with close-ups lasting about two seconds each of a father, a mother, a son, and a daughter. The camera zooms out first showing the pair of adults displaying gleaming wedding bands and settling on a tableau of all four immediately recognizable as a typical nuclear family. Son and daughter drink their milk, preparing with every calorie to grow up and one day take their parents' place in other homes with their own spouses and their own children. We see the son get up at the urging of his elders to adjust the volume on a TV set, which now seems to occupy the same place as a real-life monitor screening this work. The image freezes, announcing the title of the work and its creator. During the broadcast can be heard an off-screen commercial for chocolate bonbons and a report on the pre-Olympic winter games being held in Sapporo, Japan. Export originally intended the public broadcast of her video to cut in during a live news program. A Stanley Cavell, as art suggested, the chatter of news anchors and other human voices presented through the television medium produces a sense of company for atomized or familial sets of viewers locked behind the doors of their respected homes. Export's gesture might then be understood as a sudden tear into the fabric of the medium's communitarian illusions, revealing television's propensity not to connect viewers. But this work registers not simply as an attempt at a break with the medium, but rather more as an elaboration and amplification of the medium's operations and effects, a one of the conceptual drawings Export made in relation to facing a family. A pair of collaged images appears, one showing a television set transmitting her video and a second presenting the family from the same still cut out and overlaid onto a picture of a living room. Underneath, Export includes a drawing that explicates her vision for the project. A lumpy blob labeled real family sits before a pair TV monitor and video camera. A loop whose circular flow is demarcated with arrows connects the family mask to its double in the TV screen. A careful inspection of the drawing reveals that the image appearing on the screen and the real family do not appear as if they would if this arrangement were actually set up. If a video camera were to display what it sees on the screen, the asymmetrical blob would be reversed. Export's drawing reverses this reversal, envisioning the scene explicitly as one of mirroring. By the mid-1970s, the medium of video recording found itself within critical crosshairs for precisely this mirroring effect. In her widely read 1976 polemic video, The Aesthetics of Narcissism, Rosalind Krauss suggests that the medium of video is narcissism. Video per Krauss involves, quote, the simultaneous repetition and projection of an image with the human psyche as a conduit. The body in turn becomes centered between two machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis, the two machines being the camera and the monitor, which reprojects the performer's image with the immediacy of a mirror. The same year that Krauss published her essay, saw export released her first feature film, Invisible Adversaries, a movie that centers on an artist named Anna, who begins to perceive a large-scale invasion by unseen alien beings. These entities are linked in export shooting scripts and preparatory writings with her collaborator on the screenplay, Peter Vival, to the influencing powers of mass communication technologies. As Anna becomes aware of these influences, succumbing to paranoia the export says in interviews is wholly justified, she finds that her own reflection has taken on a life of its own. I'd like to consider one scene in particular, before Anna's full descent into paranoia. The protagonist stands across from her own image, displayed on a video monitor in her studio. A second monitor situated near the center of the frame displays what she sees back to us, the viewing audience. Anna's virtual double progressively appears overlaid with a series of female figures taken from the history of art, Botticelli's Venus, a Madonna by Raphael, Eve picking the fruit of knowledge in a garden painted by Lucas Cronach. Awkwardly mimicking the postures of the women in these electronic reproductions, Anna sometimes calls on the help of assistants to tweak her pose into approximation with her Renaissance models. Examples of the kinds of artwork she is busy making appear on the walls of her studio. The Virgin Mary's divine child, in one instance, seems to have been replaced by a bottle of cleaning product, as if the devotional image had transformed into an ad for detergent. Anna's and export's deployment of new technologies stands within a long history of artwork serving as models for viewer's identification. Identification names the psychological process by which an individual assimilates aspects of a model that's constitutive of their own identity. Export's engagement with this concept spans her own close reading of numerous psychoanalytic thinkers, as well as a number of artworks the artist began to create in the 1970s. In this example, we see a photographic collage of a woman holding a vacuum cleaner. It's handled choked by a changled cord, superimposed over Botticelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate, the Virgin Mary serving historically as an object of identification and emulation for devout Christian women. Around the same moment that export filmed the scene of Anna in her studio while making these collages as part of her own practice, she also came to a new formulation of what had become one of her most widely known works. I'm showing an issue of the art magazine, Heute Kunst. On recent art aligned with the international feminist movement, the magazine poses the question Vossesmit den Frauenlos, or what's going on with women now. In this publication, export offered a description of her tap and touch cinema that made an important gesture beyond its status as a critique of the voyeuristic male gaze. In this publication, export insists that since anyone, no matter their gender, was invited to participate in the action, her performance also occasioned a, quote, transgression of the taboo against homosexuality, unquote. 1976 saw the appearance of a catalog essay written by export for an exhibition in Innsbruck, one of the earliest devoted to art by women, which was preceded by her own exhibition of work by women held in Vienna earlier that year. And there the artist considered the ways in which women are products of the cultures that shape them. She states provocatively, quote, I will repeat once again what I will never tire of repeating, that the so-called typical woman is an artificial product of society and that we do not know the nature of woman, which is to say that in certain circumstances, the lesbian woman is more natural than the normal woman. The potential for a public, erotic encounter between women formed something of a climax for export's second feature film, Mention Frauen, or Human Women, filmed in 1979. The movie centers around the lives of four women who are all romantically involved with the same philanderer, France. Near the movie's conclusion, two of France's lovers, Anna and Petra, discover that they are both pregnant. Rather than competing for France's paternal affections, the two women form a new emotional bond with each other. The pair visits a restaurant where they canoodle, while other patrons stare and mutter their disapproval as the camera dances around the eatery. In a carefully orchestrated edit, export follows a shot of Anna and Petra stroking each other's fingers with a close-up of another pair of hands. As the camera zooms out, these digits are revealed to belong to a heterosexual couple, who remark that Anna and Petra are behaving not like a man and a woman as the English subtitles here state, but rather like two men. The man in this pair of prying onlookers, who find themselves acting in the same way as the women who sit across from them, says to his mate immediately after this judgment of Anna and Petra as sexually deviant, quote, you remind me of a poem, River in love, how undisturbedly do you resemble me? His partner replies, who resembles whom? To which he responds, well, the river man and you me. The shot gradually shifts back to Anna, who declares, quote, the avant-garde of women belongs to the avant-garde of mankind. Followed by Petra's addendum, needed, and also damned by mankind, they kiss. And the other diners suddenly erupt with disapproval, demanding that the pair be ejected from the restaurant. When the male onlooker analogizes his female partner as a reflective surface for his own self-regard, we might glimpse the contradictory outlines of a culture that deems narcissism a particularly feminine or even a particularly queer problem while women are themselves relegated to serve as the disappeared material grounds for the perpetuation of patriarchy. The side of Anna and Petra figures as dangerous, not only due to their visible sexuality, but because their mirrored, pregnant bodies imply the possibility of parthenogenic creation, pretending the birth of something frighteningly new. Queer theorists such as Jose Esteban Munoz have more recently used the term disidentification to describe the ways in which disenfranchised minorities have reappropriated stereotyped identities, simultaneously criticizing and finding power, feeling at home and not at home in relation to images degraded by dominant, majoritarian culture. I'd like to propose a parallel operation in exports feminist engagement with modern media technologies, both critiquing and turning their capacities toward new ends. The same might be said for exports own identification with these media herself, even as she rails against the longstanding misogynist gendering of creative minds as male and the materials of art making as female. I'd like to turn one final time to exports facing a family, now filtered through the medium of print, specifically the short-lived but influential journal, Interfunktionen. I'm showing here a copy of this issue from the artist's own archive. Export remains unacknowledged in the issue. Facing a family is incorrectly attributed to her frequent male collaborator, Peter Weibull, who does not share our authorship for this work. Export's personal emblem, displaying the capitalized letters of her name inscribed by an oval, can be seen stamped on her copy of the journal. The stamp often served across the artist's body of work, either as a signature or a mark of ownership for items in her own personal collection. In this case, it verges on both these functions. The stamp seems almost pointedly pressed over the table of contents. The page of the periodical presenting Facing a Family presents a number of television monitors framing stills from the video, with a version of Export's conceptual drawing appearing on both sides of the page. This paired drawing and text appears exactly duplicated, or almost so. Faintly, this time not stamped, but rather printed, in the ink of this journal, which is not otherwise bare her name, her emblem appears. If we look closely enough, this fold of like on like, this reflective doubling of her video's heteronormative scene, appears pregnant with possibility. How quiet this emergence, and how queer. Thank you. I now invite the other speakers to the stage, so we can have our little discussion. This is a very wonderfully resonant set of chats. I guess my duty is to ask some intro questions, so I guess I can see if I do this. So my fall start off with Elliot, and your, which beautiful talk, of course. Your main sections were structure, nature, water, the future. And in the future, we come to a kind of, or no, what would be it, it'd be a sixth category that I was thinking along, which is technology. So obviously infamously, the spiral of Jetty is created with all this major bulldozing land equipment. I was intrigued, as you say, at the end about the surrealness of the pot-ash pressing plant. So I'm wondering also, what's the role of technology in the original Ballard book? Do we have, I mean, science fiction is infamous for obsessing, praising, imagining utopian, or not, technology. So I'm wondering, perhaps there's a thread of technology that's not merely at the end of your project, that sort of runs through the entire thing. Versus my reading was it was a very nature-focused story until the very end. So if you want to talk of, so there's some prompts. That's a great, that's a great point. There is, I mean, it's a, it's a sort of traditional science fiction story. So technology runs throughout the Ballard short story. And the way it's running is like, so Robert Powers is actually a lab, like a scientist in a lab doing studies and trying to sort of prevent his own like death and decay while trying to figure out why time is becoming like physical and material and like changing through all these different life forms. And then as he sort of fails at that, he builds this big concrete mandala and it's a completely different technology. So like there's this science fiction technology at the beginning where he's like a lab technician using the like most modernist tools. But then eventually it fails and he just uses his hands and boards and stolen concrete to build this structure that he doesn't know why he's building before he dies. And okay, let's see if I can then take that and relate it to the rest of the talk. So I kind of, so Dean is also really interested in technology. The aperture masks I talk about, she patented and invented them for this film. And so there's like a sort of technology there and I kind of, I mean, in my longer writing, I spent a lot more time talking about the weirdness of those aperture masks, but just because they're sort of so complicated and so hard to work with. But I will say like one thing about the technology, which is kind of connects all three, right? As in all three it fails. So for Dean, the masks, it's imperfect. She doesn't know what she's getting until she actually exposes and processes and looks at the film. So she's running it through up to nine times blindly, hoping it doesn't get a light leak or an exposure. And so when she finally comes home from like 13 days of shooting in the desert, she can't go back and shoot again. It was a whole crew and a whole system and she just has to like hope what she got. And I remember like when I like asked her this question, she explained, oh yeah, I lost so much film. Like much like, and I just had to work with what was left. And of course, Smithson is also dealing with this problem. He's trying to find the right person to like do the bulldozer and trying to find the right lease on the land and then having to negotiate the fee and then how much rock to work with. And so each of these characters in the story, in a sense, are sort of fighting with technology as they sort of build their structures. And then in the end, like as I sort of end in the future, like technology is actually slowly destroying the thing and there isn't really great resolution. Wonderful. So I'm intrigued that she patented the frames. That's how I wonder if, have you seen the patterns? Do they have diagrams? So I've seen- The patent application could be a very interesting object in itself, right? It's true. It's a good document. I have not looked at it. It's reproduced in one of her books. And so I've seen the reproduction like in like a publication, but I haven't actually like figured out where she, like did she patent it in America or in Europe or like, and because she's also based in Berlin. And that I don't know. That was a good thing to look into. Thank you. I need to move on, I think, so I don't spend the entire time asking my own selfless questions. Francesca, yes? Yes, Francesca. So I was intrigued visually that throughout one of your key documentary sources are these amazing photos by Peter Hujar. And he started off, so I'm wondering, yeah, so tell us about that. Because in some ways it's a dual artist. It's not just about your tech, am I getting this right? But in some ways, what we're showing on the screen is a dual art history of two artists working at once. You mentioned, I think, that they were students together in New York in the 50s and shared part of this queer utopianism. So I'm wondering actually if the fact that you're- Both artists are involved in narrating the story. Does this connect to the famous Jonathan Katz's gloss on arrows as physical pleasures like a commitment is? I'm just wondering about that stereo view of these two artists. If that connects to your bigger project or not, or what are your thoughts on how you're using his images as an artist, but as documentary? Yeah, I think the relationship between tech and Hujar is a really fascinating and very special one. As I mentioned, this is a time when- As Jonathan has sort of very eloquently put, the 50s were a period that were arguably the most homophobic in America. So at the outset of the 1960s, we have these two men in addition to several others living together in Miami and New York. And what's so lovely about the Hujar Archives is the degree to which they manifest that artistic exchange, that it wasn't simply an erotic one. It wasn't simply an interpersonal one. It was one that was this deep, sort of inextricable connection between their art and their lives and their sexuality, and how that art ultimately manifests some of that, those qualities of arrows. And so because they were so close in their early life, Hujar ends up traveling to Italy to meet tech and goes with him to Palermo to visit the catacombs when he captured those really unbelievable images. It was actually, I believe, his first major publication was based on, I think it's called Images in Life and Death. I believe Susan Sontag wrote the introduction to that. So they were really this very tight coterie exchanging intellectual sort of ideas, as well as artistic and physical ones. I was just saying, super interesting, so not very worthy of a broadcast. And I'll just then for Nathan. So I was wondering, does she keep reading McLuhan throughout her career? Do we have, I mean, I kept thinking of McLuhan's arguments and understanding media about how weird degraded television is at this moment. And he says, he talks about a television, is it film? I always, when I teach that to my students, I say, you have to realize that the 50s broadcast are bad, that these black and white TVs were, with our high definition TVs, were used to thinking about TVs, something very different. And I mean, he actually says something like, TV with perfect sound and perfect images wouldn't be television anymore. So I'm wondering, so that reminded me of McLuhan, and then also McLuhan's arguments about certain media ideally extending a single sense, like the weirdness of the TV project, the film. What was the film box of, it's all, you know, it's film, but it's really about extending the touch. So I'm wondering what we know about from her games with McLuhan, because I'm obsessed with McLuhan, so that's why I'm asking. Yeah, no, it's a great question. And working with her archive and her library has been great, because I can sometimes, I pretty accurately date when she was coming into contact with certain texts. The work cutting is taken from understanding media, and she, like, I think she has a 1966 copy and it's data that she was reading it then. The issue of the mechanical bride is a little bit later. That's from 1969, and I'm not, you can't be certain every time when she's reading things, but she has issues of McLuhan throughout the 70s. But yeah, I think I want to just start with the mechanical bride partially, because McLuhan in that text is really trying to find a way to develop a critical relationship to mass media that's not just dismissive. He actually, he talks about an Edgar Allen post story of like, there's like a whirlpool in the ocean and the sailor only figures out how to get out of it by working with the whirlpool. It's not, he can't like just completely get out of it and he's saying we're all in this whirlpool of mass media and just dismissing it and thinking we're above the phrase the wrong approach. And I kind of think export's very much on that wavelength. So that's kind of why I began there. All right, I'm sure there are questions from the audience, and I think I'm not, I think, yeah, so I think I now hand over control for the person who's calling. Hi everyone, thank you so much for the beautiful talks. Francesca, Aleida, Nathan. I wanted to ask a question that maybe I hope might sort of bring together, or you can speak sort of across your texts. I was really struck by some of the sort of the ways in which the themes of your talks really related to each other in really interesting ways. One thing I was really interested in is this relationship between sort of what might be kind of considered the materials and methods of distancing and its relationship to a kind of phenomenological or proximity, intimacy. Francesca, I was really struck by tech's use of the casework as a way of sort of filtering this very visceral experience of the catacombs. And Aleida, I think the aperture masking is another sort of distancing to Smithson's project. And I think in many ways, film, cinema, the screen itself becomes a mode of putting a distance. But these are all projects that are about an incredible, you know, visceral experience. And I wondered if you might speak each of you maybe a little bit across your projects about how that might be resonating. Sure. The cases in tech's work are so fascinating. It's often reduced to a broader critique of his of the dominant minimalist forms that were sort of rampant at the time. I believe in an 81 interview with Richard Flood, he said, you know, the world was a mess, the block was a wreck, I was a wreck. And I walked into fancy galleries and saw a lot of fancy people looking at things that said nothing about anything. And I felt like it was my responsibility to say something. So it's almost like a literal flushing or reflushing of these forms, sort of absent of any sort of human contents. But if actually if you go to the image of either the slimy green one or the Whitney, yeah, there are certain works in which components will pierce through the containers or come out from the work the other way. And I think that idea of each encroaching on the other of the fundamental inability for the cases to hold in the meat or hold the viewer out sort of speaks to a far more complex understanding of the phenomenological encounter sort of in the way that we think of it through Merleau-Ponty of the handshake being reversible, right, of that inter-corporality that even if it may look like a ultimately unpenetrable entity that it's really, that's simply a fiction. I was really happy to go after your talk on Paul Tech for the reason that I've had a hunch and this is really nothing I've been able to substantiate in any serious way that sort of the tap and touch cinema performance where she has a box of small theater on her torso. I think there are certain resonances with that idea of containment and flesh inside and also perhaps some kind of conversation with minimal sculpture on the part of export, maybe far less explicit than in the case of Tech, but there are definitely resonances there. And Nina, with your question about distance, I mean, there is just to stay on that work, it does seem to be this idea of immediate encounter between a viewer and a worker or a maker. It's like kind of a collapse of all of those terms in the moment of, but it's interesting that even though it seems like immediacy would be what the goal is, the disappearance of a medium, at the same time she's calling it cinema and almost what I'm trying to argue, she's identifying with the medium of cinema in that moment. So it's a strange sort of equation going on there, but I'll leave it at that if you want to say something. Yeah, I think distance operates kind of in a funny way for Dean because she approaches most of her film works and I only talk about one in this paper, but from a pretty oblique standpoint and the way that she sort of approaches topics is often not literally abstractly, but without a lot of didacticism. And I think she's approaching some of the same questions here and so there's like little instances like the Armadillo in the story, there's a discussion of like a horned toad or something. And so she's sort of building on resonances, but everything is also sort of out of remove and you have to kind of figure out how you want to make those connections. And I tried to use, so she puts her work at a distance from her different sources, like it's always a constant, it's often a constellation of sources, but never so direct. And then in the paper, I tried to essentially take the distance that she gives me and fill in like creatively or like speculatively where I was interested in. Yeah, I hope that kind of answers, but it's operating a little differently than the phenomenology that's definitely present in the other two. Elliott, I wanted to ask you about the ramifying resonances of the aperture masks, because it seems to me that given what we know of Smithson's sort of early experiments with gay pornography, that the idea of a aperture mask, which is of course an imposition onto nature through which nature is viewed, is of course allegorically extremely rich. And I'm wondering if you feel that Dean in any way sort of frame this as a kind of formal, in the Greenbergian sense, outing of Smithson's project. I have a short answer for you, which is I'm pretty sure no, because I'm pretty sure no, because she just doesn't talk about anything except spiral jetty, and she mostly talks to Ballard about it. And she doesn't seem, this is her first work on an American artist, and it's her first, like one of her first works she ever shot, like in America at all. And it wasn't, like I know almost certainly that she didn't do like a big research project before shooting it. It was like she worked with a sight person to find the potash mine and Wendiver and like different things like that. But I think it was more of a kind of long standing interest in this unresolved search for spiral jetty in 1999 when she went to look for it but couldn't find it. But it's an interesting idea that I just didn't know about or think about. Like I don't know about those early works of Smithson myself because I mostly have studied his works from like 69 to 72, and didn't do a lot of research except sort of the most basic reading on the earlier ones. But I will ask you after like what to look at and I will look at it. Thank you. Hi, thank you all for really exciting talks. And this is a question that I have for sort of anyone who wishes to answer. This is a thread that I was picking up throughout all of your talks. So I was wondering if you could talk about the distinction between high and low art that there were a lot of parallels that I was seeing with sort of low art from, I mean, I was thinking that like the mirror, I mean there's Mary Poppins with that mirror thing that happens later or even like the Saw movies which I actually haven't seen but that's sort of what I think the Saw movies are like that there are these very low brow for lack of a better word parallels that I'm seeing and I'm wondering if you have anything to say or if any of the artists that you were working with had anything to say about that connection. Thank you. I guess I could start. But yeah, one of the movies I was thinking about in this talk, Invisible Adversaries was described by critics as being an avant-garde invasion of the body snatchers. So there is kind of a definite dialogue and actually in the film, Export incorporates a scene where two boys are looking through a shop window at a movie playing the Poseidon adventure. So these kind of like big budget like kind of the Hollywood movies are definitely running throughout. Also the TV work Facing a Family was part of a youth sort of television program called Contact. Originally she wanted it to cut in during a live news broadcast but what actually happens is that there's kind of a broadcast of a rock band playing kind of psychedelia and then it moves on to the export work which starts like I showed and then announces itself as an artwork. So there is definitely an interchange between high and low happening and definitely something I'm thinking about. I think as far as text work goes from this period wax was by and large not a particularly popular medium. I think the last artist to sculpt in the round in wax was Medardo Rosso in the 1850s. He admits that his work is definitely informed by seeing Jasper Johns's work in Encaustic but that said that sort of shift towards low brown materials definitely manifests once he gets to Europe. He starts making these large scale ephemeral installations out of newspaper and sand and onion bulbs that sprout throughout the process of the of the exhibition and he works on them every day and they shift and then everything gets thrown out afterwards and he's moreover working with an artist's co-op so his own name is no longer affiliated with it specifically. So I think in that regard the work becomes almost a meditation on the conception of artistic identity in itself which is very much interrelated with the hierarchical ordering of materials. Thank you for these great papers. I have a question for Francesca. I was really struck by this anecdote of Paul Tech being in the crypts of Palermo and thinking that he finds a piece of paper and then being kind of like a having like some weird aversion to it but then realizing its flesh and being relieved. And I mean in some ways like I mean the fact that he's like relieved when he notices that its flesh is a very sort of like really interesting inversion of what I think like psychoanalysis traditionally sort of you know thinks about it when you relate to the sort of materiality of a corpse realizing that you know you are yourself it's something that you can't really assimilate and I'm just thinking that you know then language ends up becoming the sort of recourse that we have in order to be able to assimilate you know like the real which we like otherwise kind of can't contend with but what is and so in some ways I think like your talk answers why it's a relief to discover that it's flesh but I'm really curious if you have any reflections about like why he would be worried that it was paper. I don't know it was or maybe I'm also sort of like over overstating what you were the way you were describing it in your talk but I'm just very curious if you have any any thoughts on that. No I mean I don't think he necessarily was weirded out by the paper and then subsequently relieved but like I'm I'm a weirdo and I think that this is amazing I read this and was like oh my god this man but I think how do I say this you know I what I find really fascinating about this statement is the emphasis that they are corpses and not skeletons you know that this idea that the skeleton effectively constitutes an abstraction of the body and the corpse is quite literally the most manifest form of death that we can look at in the face and if you ever get a chance to I would love to go to these catacombs but yeah I mean some of the faces these less so but some of them are remarkably well preserved and to that point I think it's a bit about the under that sort of ultimate understanding that flesh can be used as a decorative element that this emphasis that's placed on the dead body and it's you know sort of fallacious implications that the that the person is still associated with that body that comes very much out of the Christian tradition is holding us back is sort of related to Brown's conception of cultural repression and that the embrace of that death and that materiality allows for access to arrows and freedom I don't know if that answered your question thank you