Joey Orr | University of Kansas (original) (raw)

Papers by Joey Orr

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor

Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts, 2017

How might collections preserve and reflect what is on offer by way of social practice, which incl... more How might collections preserve and reflect what is on offer by way of social practice, which includes, among other things, interactive installations, architectural propositions, public actions, community organising, the preparation and serving of food, and even policy reform? Do we collect documentation meant to evoke a past instance of socially created meaning, or something symbolic meant to communicate a poetics of a former work around a particular issue? What is the "object," so to speak, of social engagement? What is the thing that is being collected, presented, or interpreted exactly? Things associated with social practice are entering major museum collections, at any rate, so how might these collection practices reflect this unwieldy field?

From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. ... more From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. This work addressed cultural perceptions of aging women and explored their representations in public opinion and the media. It was a conceptual and performative platform that encompassed events, classes, film screenings, a media campaign, and a leadership series, among many other activities meant to contribute to the aesthetics and politics of the work. It culminated on 10 May 1987 in the one-day performance, The Crystal Quilt, in which 430 women over the age of 60 discussed their views on ageing. This performance, a visual spectacle that activated a design by painter Miriam Schapiro and included collaboration with many other artists, was attended by over 3000 people. In 2012, the Tate (London, England) acquired the work in the form of video, documentary, quilt, photos, a sound piece by Susan Stone, and a time-lapse film. The title of the work collected by the Tate is The Crystal Quilt, the title of the one-hour public performance. Its dates, however, correspond to the two and a half year, socially embedded Whisper Minnesota Project (1985–87). When the title of the performance is associated with the dates of the social project, many nuances get washed over. This interview explores the challenges and contradictions that arise when social practice that is generated and deeply anchored in the public realm finds its way into major institutional collections.

This special issue seeks to examine the role of participation in visual methodologies. It is a co... more This special issue seeks to examine the role of participation in visual methodologies. It is a collection of essays from members of the Visual Scholarship Initiative at Emory University in which practitioners reflect upon their uses of photography, film, and video as a form of practice-based research. Though the use of visual methods and technologies are integral to all of the projects here, our focus is in the range of participation between photographer, filmmaker, or curator and subject or audience and how this impacts what we understand as scholarship. The photograph, film, or video, then, is a means by which we enter into the social and cultural negotiations of and reflections upon meaning making. In this introduction, we attempt to clarify what we mean by participatory research. Such practices often result in crossing disciplinary boundaries, as we discuss below. Further, morphing the use of visual media into a category of research method that generates scholarship with others ...

Journal for Artistic Research, 2018

IMAGES, 2018

This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the inter... more This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the intersection of the imaginative discourse of post-witness representation and the production of Jewish memorial space. By representing missing places and people, Alembik puts her drawings into an exchange with an Appalachian musical form to explore family trauma. These crime scenes are spaces that breathe life into an inaccessible past.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Sla... more In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. Th... more This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2014

The Campaign for Atlanta: an essay on queer migration was a public event presented by the John Q ... more The Campaign for Atlanta: an essay on queer migration was a public event presented by the John Q collective (Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr) on May 17 and 18, 2013 at the Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum. It was a performative essay form that investigated a palimpsest of civil war histories and fragments of regional and national queer migrations. This article begins to make explicit the issues explored in the performance: namely, the divergent ways in which the past is linked to place by various technologies of sight and their very different historical worldviews. Written for a special issue on activism, the article makes the case that activating archives in public situations allows scholarship to expand its purview, to include nontraditional configurations and interdisciplinary methods as a way of linking scholarly content to artistic form.

Southern Spaces, 2010

This piece for Southern Spaces interdisciplinary journal was written in advance of Memory Flash, ... more This piece for Southern Spaces interdisciplinary journal was written in advance of Memory Flash, John Q's first series of public interventions.

PARSE Journal, 2021

In 2009, British artist Jeremy Deller’s work It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq entered t... more In 2009, British artist Jeremy Deller’s work It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq entered the permanent collections of three US museums. It is described by the collecting institutions as a “constructed situation and cotton banner.” Curatorial research intended to address questions about its future exhibition instead generated further questions about the banner’s condition and location, the status of the work’s material aspect, and the parameters of particular modes of dematerialized artwork more broadly. The analytical framework is based on notions of care and feminist contributions on the centrality of maintenance. This article posits that both material and immaterial aspects can remain at play in a work of social practice, and its operations exceed its exhibitionary phase.

BOMB Magazine, 2020

Going into this interview, Diana Thater thought that in one way or another the pandemic would imp... more Going into this interview, Diana Thater thought that in one way or another the pandemic would impact the work she was making. She was right. We had a nearly completed interview about an entirely different project when the logistics of traveling and shooting on location became too unsafe to manage. As it turned out, the time and space of isolation we are living through were in deep conversation with another, long-unrealized idea for a piece. And the challenges associated with shooting on location morphed into an emergent creative response, what she describes below as a kind of simultaneity of production and reception that is new in her work.

The last time I saw Thater was in 2016. We were walking through the Streeterville neighborhood in Chicago, and she pointed out some birds perched on the portico of a building, noting their species and what was interesting about their appearance given the time of year. I had not even noticed the birds, but she left me on the corner thinking about the animals with which I shared the city. Thater’s body of work prods us to imagine the lives of other species, making connections she sees as critical to all of our survival. Her new work, Yes, there will be singing, conjures an architectural encounter with whale song through live video streaming. For her, even our present moment of isolation is filled with interspecies relation.

Art Papers, 2020

I’ve been thinking about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos of empty theaters, drive-ins, and opera houses... more I’ve been thinking about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos of empty theaters, drive-ins, and opera houses since social distancing and self-quarantining began. They depict vast spaces for the presentation of art that are devoid of people. That body of work was famously prompted by Sugimoto asking what it would be like to capture the entirety of a movie in one frame. The answer to that question, of course, is a glowing white screen that is the result of using one exposure to capture a whole film.

At the time of this writing I have not been in the Spencer Museum of Art, where I work, in eight weeks. The emptiness of vacated spaces really underscores what I am missing in a time when politics are failing us, and museum and exhibition spaces are closed. As a curator, one of my most important jobs is to get artists’ voices into public discourse. It’s funny now to think about Sugimoto’s series while introducing this interview with Lilly McElroy, wherein she describes hiding in the light, claiming that light sometimes exposes “a bright abyss.”

In her series I Control the Sun, the image of the sun on the horizon is always held in the circle of her hand. It is poetic to imagine a personal control that she can never achieve. In one of her most recent series, Sanding Away a Year’s Worth of Sunsets, she begins to physically wear away the light she’s captured from the sun in a year’s worth of photographs. Her defiant will in futile battle with the sun seems almost belligerent amid this deft performance. She’ll never win, of course, and she counts on her viewers understanding that fact in order to get at what’s human about making art. Her ability to manipulate the perception of light in her work reveals her inability, finally, to control it. She exposes herself as a photo-based artist by trying to control, extinguish, or as a last resort play tricks on the light—the very thing that defines her medium. As she says herself, “Absurdity is a protest.” Her Pandemic Self Portraiture series continues to wrestle with light and absurdity in a world transformed by a global virus.

Art Papers, 2020

Who is making art when so many of us are stepping back from our usual ways of inhabiting the worl... more Who is making art when so many of us are stepping back from our usual ways of inhabiting the world? When museums and other exhibition venues are closed, where do we go to hear artistic contributions to such a polarized moment in public discourse, when the protection of our very lives is being instrumentalized for bad politics? In many ways, flipping through Instagram has been taking the place of studio visits in our time of social distancing. During my search for artists taking on the precariousness of this moment, I found Szu-Han Ho’s imagined series of personal protective equipment (PPE) that puts a delicate but incisive tone on the longing for closeness we all feel now.

The subject of the series is the one thing not represented in the work and precisely what cannot be realized in a time of self-quarantine: our touching bodies. Through sketches for protective gear for our new world, however, Ho addresses not only the immediate yearning for physical contact, but also how this need is symptomatic of something deeper that has become increasingly explicit. Our urgent need for acknowledging and acting on our shared and perilous fate has been compromised by institutions that have been failing us for some time. The vulnerable are made more vulnerable to the point of rupture, and our global interconnectedness is sacrificed again and again at the cost of our lives and the planet we inhabit. Emerging from simultaneous impulses toward despair and hope, Ho shares her thoughts about making, activism, immigration, and ecology.

antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 2020

British artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse; he find... more British artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse; he finds the nearest source of soil to where the incident occurred and generally without civic permission plants one unmarked pansy. The flower is then documented in its location, the image is entitled after the abuse. Titles like “Let’s kill the Bati-man!” and “Fucking Faggot!” reveal a frequent reality of LGBTQ+ experience, which often goes unreported to authorities. This simple action operates as a gesture of quiet resistance; some pansies flourish, others wilt in urban hedgerows.

Art & the Public Sphere, 2017

From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. ... more From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. This work addressed cultural perceptions of aging women and explored their representations in public opinion and the media. It was a conceptual and performative platform that encompassed events, classes, film screenings, a media campaign, and a leadership series, among many other activities meant to contribute to the aesthetics and politics of the work. It culminated on 10 May 1987 in the one-day performance, The Crystal Quilt, in which 430 women over the age of 60 discussed their views on ageing. This performance, a visual spectacle that activated a design by painter Miriam Schapiro and included collaboration with many other artists, was attended by over 3000 people. In 2012, the Tate (London, England) acquired the work in the form of video, documentary, quilt, photos, a sound piece by Susan Stone, and a time-lapse film. The title of the work collected by the Tate is The Crystal Quilt, the title of the one-hour public performance. Its dates, however, correspond to the two and a half year, socially embedded Whisper Minnesota Project (1985–87). When the title of the performance is associated with the dates of the social project, many nuances get washed over. This interview explores the challenges and contradictions that arise when social practice that is generated and deeply anchored in the public realm finds its way into major institutional collections.

Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2018

This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the inter... more This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the intersection of the imaginative discourse of post-witness representation and the production of Jewish memorial space. By representing missing places and people, Alembik puts her drawings into an exchange with an Appalachian musical form to explore family trauma. These crime scenes are spaces that breathe life into an inaccessible past.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Sla... more In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. ... more This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor

Rhetoric, Social Value and the Arts, 2017

How might collections preserve and reflect what is on offer by way of social practice, which incl... more How might collections preserve and reflect what is on offer by way of social practice, which includes, among other things, interactive installations, architectural propositions, public actions, community organising, the preparation and serving of food, and even policy reform? Do we collect documentation meant to evoke a past instance of socially created meaning, or something symbolic meant to communicate a poetics of a former work around a particular issue? What is the "object," so to speak, of social engagement? What is the thing that is being collected, presented, or interpreted exactly? Things associated with social practice are entering major museum collections, at any rate, so how might these collection practices reflect this unwieldy field?

From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. ... more From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. This work addressed cultural perceptions of aging women and explored their representations in public opinion and the media. It was a conceptual and performative platform that encompassed events, classes, film screenings, a media campaign, and a leadership series, among many other activities meant to contribute to the aesthetics and politics of the work. It culminated on 10 May 1987 in the one-day performance, The Crystal Quilt, in which 430 women over the age of 60 discussed their views on ageing. This performance, a visual spectacle that activated a design by painter Miriam Schapiro and included collaboration with many other artists, was attended by over 3000 people. In 2012, the Tate (London, England) acquired the work in the form of video, documentary, quilt, photos, a sound piece by Susan Stone, and a time-lapse film. The title of the work collected by the Tate is The Crystal Quilt, the title of the one-hour public performance. Its dates, however, correspond to the two and a half year, socially embedded Whisper Minnesota Project (1985–87). When the title of the performance is associated with the dates of the social project, many nuances get washed over. This interview explores the challenges and contradictions that arise when social practice that is generated and deeply anchored in the public realm finds its way into major institutional collections.

This special issue seeks to examine the role of participation in visual methodologies. It is a co... more This special issue seeks to examine the role of participation in visual methodologies. It is a collection of essays from members of the Visual Scholarship Initiative at Emory University in which practitioners reflect upon their uses of photography, film, and video as a form of practice-based research. Though the use of visual methods and technologies are integral to all of the projects here, our focus is in the range of participation between photographer, filmmaker, or curator and subject or audience and how this impacts what we understand as scholarship. The photograph, film, or video, then, is a means by which we enter into the social and cultural negotiations of and reflections upon meaning making. In this introduction, we attempt to clarify what we mean by participatory research. Such practices often result in crossing disciplinary boundaries, as we discuss below. Further, morphing the use of visual media into a category of research method that generates scholarship with others ...

Journal for Artistic Research, 2018

IMAGES, 2018

This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the inter... more This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the intersection of the imaginative discourse of post-witness representation and the production of Jewish memorial space. By representing missing places and people, Alembik puts her drawings into an exchange with an Appalachian musical form to explore family trauma. These crime scenes are spaces that breathe life into an inaccessible past.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Sla... more In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. Th... more This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2014

The Campaign for Atlanta: an essay on queer migration was a public event presented by the John Q ... more The Campaign for Atlanta: an essay on queer migration was a public event presented by the John Q collective (Wesley Chenault, Andy Ditzler, and Joey Orr) on May 17 and 18, 2013 at the Atlanta Cyclorama and Civil War Museum. It was a performative essay form that investigated a palimpsest of civil war histories and fragments of regional and national queer migrations. This article begins to make explicit the issues explored in the performance: namely, the divergent ways in which the past is linked to place by various technologies of sight and their very different historical worldviews. Written for a special issue on activism, the article makes the case that activating archives in public situations allows scholarship to expand its purview, to include nontraditional configurations and interdisciplinary methods as a way of linking scholarly content to artistic form.

Southern Spaces, 2010

This piece for Southern Spaces interdisciplinary journal was written in advance of Memory Flash, ... more This piece for Southern Spaces interdisciplinary journal was written in advance of Memory Flash, John Q's first series of public interventions.

PARSE Journal, 2021

In 2009, British artist Jeremy Deller’s work It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq entered t... more In 2009, British artist Jeremy Deller’s work It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq entered the permanent collections of three US museums. It is described by the collecting institutions as a “constructed situation and cotton banner.” Curatorial research intended to address questions about its future exhibition instead generated further questions about the banner’s condition and location, the status of the work’s material aspect, and the parameters of particular modes of dematerialized artwork more broadly. The analytical framework is based on notions of care and feminist contributions on the centrality of maintenance. This article posits that both material and immaterial aspects can remain at play in a work of social practice, and its operations exceed its exhibitionary phase.

BOMB Magazine, 2020

Going into this interview, Diana Thater thought that in one way or another the pandemic would imp... more Going into this interview, Diana Thater thought that in one way or another the pandemic would impact the work she was making. She was right. We had a nearly completed interview about an entirely different project when the logistics of traveling and shooting on location became too unsafe to manage. As it turned out, the time and space of isolation we are living through were in deep conversation with another, long-unrealized idea for a piece. And the challenges associated with shooting on location morphed into an emergent creative response, what she describes below as a kind of simultaneity of production and reception that is new in her work.

The last time I saw Thater was in 2016. We were walking through the Streeterville neighborhood in Chicago, and she pointed out some birds perched on the portico of a building, noting their species and what was interesting about their appearance given the time of year. I had not even noticed the birds, but she left me on the corner thinking about the animals with which I shared the city. Thater’s body of work prods us to imagine the lives of other species, making connections she sees as critical to all of our survival. Her new work, Yes, there will be singing, conjures an architectural encounter with whale song through live video streaming. For her, even our present moment of isolation is filled with interspecies relation.

Art Papers, 2020

I’ve been thinking about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos of empty theaters, drive-ins, and opera houses... more I’ve been thinking about Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos of empty theaters, drive-ins, and opera houses since social distancing and self-quarantining began. They depict vast spaces for the presentation of art that are devoid of people. That body of work was famously prompted by Sugimoto asking what it would be like to capture the entirety of a movie in one frame. The answer to that question, of course, is a glowing white screen that is the result of using one exposure to capture a whole film.

At the time of this writing I have not been in the Spencer Museum of Art, where I work, in eight weeks. The emptiness of vacated spaces really underscores what I am missing in a time when politics are failing us, and museum and exhibition spaces are closed. As a curator, one of my most important jobs is to get artists’ voices into public discourse. It’s funny now to think about Sugimoto’s series while introducing this interview with Lilly McElroy, wherein she describes hiding in the light, claiming that light sometimes exposes “a bright abyss.”

In her series I Control the Sun, the image of the sun on the horizon is always held in the circle of her hand. It is poetic to imagine a personal control that she can never achieve. In one of her most recent series, Sanding Away a Year’s Worth of Sunsets, she begins to physically wear away the light she’s captured from the sun in a year’s worth of photographs. Her defiant will in futile battle with the sun seems almost belligerent amid this deft performance. She’ll never win, of course, and she counts on her viewers understanding that fact in order to get at what’s human about making art. Her ability to manipulate the perception of light in her work reveals her inability, finally, to control it. She exposes herself as a photo-based artist by trying to control, extinguish, or as a last resort play tricks on the light—the very thing that defines her medium. As she says herself, “Absurdity is a protest.” Her Pandemic Self Portraiture series continues to wrestle with light and absurdity in a world transformed by a global virus.

Art Papers, 2020

Who is making art when so many of us are stepping back from our usual ways of inhabiting the worl... more Who is making art when so many of us are stepping back from our usual ways of inhabiting the world? When museums and other exhibition venues are closed, where do we go to hear artistic contributions to such a polarized moment in public discourse, when the protection of our very lives is being instrumentalized for bad politics? In many ways, flipping through Instagram has been taking the place of studio visits in our time of social distancing. During my search for artists taking on the precariousness of this moment, I found Szu-Han Ho’s imagined series of personal protective equipment (PPE) that puts a delicate but incisive tone on the longing for closeness we all feel now.

The subject of the series is the one thing not represented in the work and precisely what cannot be realized in a time of self-quarantine: our touching bodies. Through sketches for protective gear for our new world, however, Ho addresses not only the immediate yearning for physical contact, but also how this need is symptomatic of something deeper that has become increasingly explicit. Our urgent need for acknowledging and acting on our shared and perilous fate has been compromised by institutions that have been failing us for some time. The vulnerable are made more vulnerable to the point of rupture, and our global interconnectedness is sacrificed again and again at the cost of our lives and the planet we inhabit. Emerging from simultaneous impulses toward despair and hope, Ho shares her thoughts about making, activism, immigration, and ecology.

antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, 2020

British artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse; he find... more British artist Paul Harfleet plants pansies at sites of homophobic and transphobic abuse; he finds the nearest source of soil to where the incident occurred and generally without civic permission plants one unmarked pansy. The flower is then documented in its location, the image is entitled after the abuse. Titles like “Let’s kill the Bati-man!” and “Fucking Faggot!” reveal a frequent reality of LGBTQ+ experience, which often goes unreported to authorities. This simple action operates as a gesture of quiet resistance; some pansies flourish, others wilt in urban hedgerows.

Art & the Public Sphere, 2017

From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. ... more From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. This work addressed cultural perceptions of aging women and explored their representations in public opinion and the media. It was a conceptual and performative platform that encompassed events, classes, film screenings, a media campaign, and a leadership series, among many other activities meant to contribute to the aesthetics and politics of the work. It culminated on 10 May 1987 in the one-day performance, The Crystal Quilt, in which 430 women over the age of 60 discussed their views on ageing. This performance, a visual spectacle that activated a design by painter Miriam Schapiro and included collaboration with many other artists, was attended by over 3000 people. In 2012, the Tate (London, England) acquired the work in the form of video, documentary, quilt, photos, a sound piece by Susan Stone, and a time-lapse film. The title of the work collected by the Tate is The Crystal Quilt, the title of the one-hour public performance. Its dates, however, correspond to the two and a half year, socially embedded Whisper Minnesota Project (1985–87). When the title of the performance is associated with the dates of the social project, many nuances get washed over. This interview explores the challenges and contradictions that arise when social practice that is generated and deeply anchored in the public realm finds its way into major institutional collections.

Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2018

This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the inter... more This essay discusses artist Lisa Alembik’s drawing series, Murder Ballads, as occupying the intersection of the imaginative discourse of post-witness representation and the production of Jewish memorial space. By representing missing places and people, Alembik puts her drawings into an exchange with an Appalachian musical form to explore family trauma. These crime scenes are spaces that breathe life into an inaccessible past.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Sla... more In 2019, US-based African American artist Dread Scott will present his new performative work, Slave Rebellion Reenactment, just outside the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. It will be a re-performance of the German Coast uprising of 1811, one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in US history. It is the most recent installment in a slowly growing historical body of knowledge about this little-known history. The story is about a radical idea of freedom that Scott seeks to enliven through recruiting the performers. The potential for organizing and future networks is at the heart of this effort. This text is based upon Joey Orr's interview with Dread Scott on Thursday 12 May 2016, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Journal of American Studies, 2018

This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. ... more This essay introduces Inhabiting Cultures, a special issue of the Journal of American Studies. The guest editors, idea collective John Q, examine the relationship between method and academic writing by riding a train as a public editorial act and a way of practicing empathy in public scholarship. Contributors to this issue produce the very kinds of culture they critique. John Q tracks these activities as the careful handling of particular kinds of cultural production with a critical and ethical aim.

Routledge , 2022

A Sourcebook of Performance Labor presents the views and experiences of collaborators in other ar... more A Sourcebook of Performance Labor presents the views and experiences of collaborators in other artists’ works.

This book reorients well-known works of contemporary performance and social practice around the workers who have shaped, enacted, and supported them. It emerges from perspectives on maintenance, care, affective labor, and the knowledges created and preserved through gesture and intersubjectivity. This compilation of interviews is filled with the voices of collaborators in notable works attributed to established contemporary artists, including Francis Alÿs, Tania Bruguera, Suzanne Lacy, Ernesto Pujol, Asad Raza, Dread Scott, and Tino Sehgal. In the spirit of the artworks under discussion, this book reinvests in the possibilities for art as a collective effort to explore new ways of finding ourselves in others and others in ourselves. This collection is a contribution for further theorizing a largely unaddressed perspective in contemporary art.

Art & the Public Sphere, 2017

From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. ... more From 1985 to 1987, California-based artist Suzanne Lacy initiated The Whisper Minnesota Project. This work addressed cultural perceptions of aging women and explored their representations in public opinion and the media. It was a conceptual and performative platform that encompassed events, classes, film screenings, a media campaign, and a leadership series, among many other activities meant to contribute to the aesthetics and politics of the work. It culminated on 10 May 1987 in the one-day performance, The Crystal Quilt, in which 430 women over the age of 60 discussed their views on ageing. This performance, a visual spectacle that activated a design by painter Miriam Schapiro and included collaboration with many other artists, was attended by over 3000 people. In 2012, the Tate (London, England) acquired the work in the form of video, documentary, quilt, photos, a sound piece by Susan Stone, and a time-lapse film. The title of the work collected by the Tate is The Crystal Quilt, the title of the one-hour public performance. Its dates, however, correspond to the two and a half year, socially embedded Whisper Minnesota Project (1985–87). When the title of the performance is associated with the dates of the social project, many nuances get washed over. This interview explores the challenges and contradictions that arise when social practice that is generated and deeply anchored in the public realm finds its way into major institutional collections.