Aliza Shvarts

DP

What was your time like at Yale? Was there a specific experience or cluster of experiences that inspired Untitled [Senior Thesis] (2008)?

AS

Honestly, I had a really amazing time at Yale–up until the very last month when all hell broke loose. [Laughs.] I was always someone who was good at school. It was a refuge from my difficult family life, a place where I could claim a sense of agency. It was also a place of escape. Going to an Ivy League college had felt like a reward for all the work I’d put in, an opportunity to come intellectually alive.

Yale gave me a full scholarship, so early on I found myself negotiating unspoken relationships between myself, the institution, and my peers. Part of the scholarship money my very first semester came from Stephen Schwarzman, the guy who founded Blackstone Group. He invited me to lunch with him at the Four Seasons in New York–which was a total disaster for a number of reasons, including that we got into a debate about the existence of climate change. I was so ill-equipped for that moment as an eighteen year old. I had no idea what I was walking into. And in some ways, thank God. I can only imagine how different my college experience and really my whole life might have been if that lunch had gone well.

I went into college thinking I would be a pre-law major. Turns out Yale doesn’t actually have a pre-law major–or any “vocational” majors. [Laughs.] Most of my friends came from unfathomable wealth. Most were from New York. They modelled what it might mean to channel one’s intellectual ambitions into the arts–a signifier of power and privilege that I did not clock. But through those friendships, I became pretty convinced that it was creative work, not legal work, that had the greatest potential to bring new ideas into the world. So, that is how I ended up double-majoring in English and Art.

DP

What led you to create the work?

AS

Ironically my senior thesis came from being a nerd, not a rebel. It was an extension of the seriousness with which I took my studies and my belief in the professors I was working with–especially courses I’d taken on queer and feminist performance art, theories of representation, and power and subjection. It’s something I approached in a very methodical way. I had an advisor. I wrote about it for other classes, other seminars. I talked to a lot of my professors about it. What I didn’t perceive then, but what came into sharp relief later and has become something I often reflect on, is the distinction between faculty and administration.

DP

Can you elaborate?

AS

When you’re a student, your main relationship is with your professor. You assume that if you have their approval for something, you’re good. It turns out, however, that there are all kinds of administrative layers that are totally opaque to you. With my senior thesis, I went from being a really responsible student who asked for all the permission and worked closely with many professors to being not only punished for the project that I did, but also causing those professors to be punished by the administration. It was a pretty devastating learning experience, and one that has stuck with me. Especially now that I am an administrator myself.

DP

While queer and feminist scholarship was very important for my thinking when I was at Princeton, I didn’t encounter any of it until I was a senior. I wrote my thesis about identitarian politics in the 1990s. It was in large part historiographic, tracing the elaboration of the term “queer” as a political program and a set of academy-bound, intellectual endeavors. I mention this to emphasize my interest in the ways in which queer and feminist theory has been inherited by queers who came of age after the heady 1990s. What kind of feminism and queerness did you encounter as a student in the late aughts? Did anyone in particular press you to study queer and feminist theory?

AS

It feels like I came to queer and feminist theory almost by accident through my interest in the body. But maybe it was by necessity. I took a lot of English seminars on topics like Spenser, Bible as Literature, and Victorian Poetry with Leslie Brisman, who I really loved. And I was always the one in class pushing for the stranger interpretations, paying attention to what I called at the time “linguistic and non-linguistic figuration,” by which I meant the way meter and metaphor could invoke the body. I also thought a lot about bodies in film theory courses, especially ones I took with Brigette Peucker and Thomas Elseasser. Mass ornamentation, montage, non-diagetic sound, etc.–those are all ways of imagining how bodies are put together and pulled apart.

I first encountered what would become really important to me, namely, the canon of performance studies, around my junior year in seminars with Diana Paulin and Laura Wexler. They introduced me to the work of Karen Shimakawa, Diana Taylor, and Andre Lepecki–who I would go on to study with at NYU, along with Ann Pellegrini, Barbara Browning, Tavia Nyong’o, and Allen Weiss. I also took a hugely important class my junior year with a visiting professor, Tirza Latimer, called Queer/Feminist Performance/Art. That class is where I first encountered work by José Esteban Muñoz, who obviously became really important to me as my doctoral advisor and mentor at NYU.

It was also in my junior year that I started thinking about what to do for my senior thesis for the Art major. My senior thesis for the English major was about failure in Victorian poetry. The discourse in the Art department at Yale at the time centered on very formal questions: Do you have a touch for clay? Do you have a particular bodily talent for wood or metal? Taking Queer/Feminist Performance/Art taught me that there’s a whole legacy of artists who have used their body as the medium–and that the very ways in which we evaluate “talents” of the body can be gendered and heterosexist. It blew my mind to learn that there is an almost century-long tradition of people using their bodies and the social restrictions around them as material for art. That class was really one of the major impetuses for Untitled [Senior Thesis].

DP

I want to pick up on the distinction you noted between university faculty and university administration. That distinction is something I really became aware of during the spring of 2024, when the difference between faculty and administration was seriously dilated by responses to the Gaza solidarity encampment. It’s hard to map accountability on an ever shifting landscape of power and control. How has your perception of that distinction changed, given that you’ve now held several university posts?

AS

Now that I am in administration directing an MFA program, that is something I think about a lot. How can I be the kind of support I wish I had when I was a student? After over a decade of teaching, I understand a lot better the various precarities that faculty navigate. I even have a better grasp of the kinds of precarities that institutions navigate and their structural limitations. What brings me to this work is something connected to my practice–my feminist understanding of social reproduction, which is the labor of maintaining oneself and others. But at the same time, administrative work is different from my work as an artist or theorist. I am not an author in this context, I am a facilitator. My role is advocating for my students and making the work they want to do possible, while at the same time making clear that the institution is not the world. What’s possible within its confines is just a sliver of the full scope of what you can do in actuality as an artist.

The limit of institutions was also one of the starting points for Untitled [Senior Thesis]–medical institutions specifically, though of course in the end that work became very much about educational institutions as well. I was reading a bunch of medical journals and I encountered this debate over what should happen to the biological products of what could either be construed as a very late term miscarriage or a very early term stillbirth. Doctors were debating the weeks or the days that should constitute that cutoff between miscarriage and stillbirth as a matter of hospital policy. If the lost pregnancy is deemed a miscarriage, then the biological material is treated like medical waste and disposed of accordingly. And that very same biological matter is treated very differently if it’s determined to be a stillbirth. The person actually going through the experience had very little say compared to the medical institution. At stake is the line between what counts and does not count as a mournable subject. It took those doctors so much back-and-forth to come to something that I thought was fairly obvious: the parents should be able to decide, not the hospital. Because not all people will choose the same thing. We all have differing relationships to our bodies and to the products of our bodies.

DP

How did those debates manifest in the work?

AS

Untitled [Senior Thesis] was centered on the question of how ontology maps onto epistemology: in other words, how our understanding of being maps onto our parameters of knowing. It was a very precise year-long performance piece–really kind of boring in some ways, though it became very sensationalized in the reporting. Around the time when I was ovulating, I would artificially inseminate myself with semen collected from people I termed “fabricators.” I never took a pregnancy test and never knew if I was pregnant or not. Then around the time when I was expecting my period, I would take an herbal abortifacient. Each time, I checked myself into a cheap Connecticut motel room, set up my camera, and would just wait. The result was  very long, boring footage of me waiting for something to happen. Ultimately, something does happen, but even then, it is not that interesting to see. There’s no moment and no real way for me to say–or for anyone else to say–what that biological matter represented on the screen is. A viewer has to decide what they are seeing.

I used the term “self-induced miscarriage” at the time because I was interested in what it meant to carry something “wrongly” on the body. I was influenced at the time by the way homophobic rhetoric would deem certain uses of certain body parts “right” or “wrong.” So I wanted to use the capacities of my body “wrongly” for the creation of art. If I were to make that piece today, I might use the term “self-managed abortion,” but that wasn’t available to me at the time. I like the way “management” emphasizes agency. That speaks to another influence on the work, which is the long history of people managing their reproductive lives without the intervention of a medical establishment. Ultimately, though, the two terms describe a similar process and a fairly widespread bodily experience. Miscarriage is incredibly common. There are estimates that as many as one in three conceptions end in miscarriage. A lot of people can miscarry and not even notice. It can just seem like a late period.

The piece didn’t involve a particularly invasive or extraordinary bodily action. It simply frames ambivalences already embedded in biological matter. Whether a viewer understands the piece as involving acts of menstruation, self-induced miscarriage, self-induced abortion, etc. is ultimately an act of reading on their part. And the work was intentionally designed so that my reading is no more authoritative than anyone else’s. At its center is not knowing.

DP

How was it initially received?

AS

There was a senior thesis colloquium where all the Art majors presented their thesis projects over the course of the academic year. I asked if I could go last because I wanted to finish the bulk of the work before I spoke about it. I presented Untitled [Senior Thesis] in April and it became a Yale Daily News article the next day. It was on the Drudge Report the day after that, then there was a Fox News van parked outside my apartment for days. The online reaction got really intense. I received a lot of hate mail and death threats.

That kind of reaction is pretty typical now, but it wasn’t in 2008. I assumed there would be some kind of campus-wide debate about the exhibition once it was staged, but I didn’t think it would become a completely sensationalized international news item overnight. It went viral before virality was a thing. I wouldn’t say that the piece wasn’t sensational in some sense; of course it was. People lose their minds over anything to do with abortion. But the reporting entirely missed what the piece actually consisted of. They were reporting that I was aborting nine-month-old fetuses–the most incendiary thing possible. And then of course, because Yale released a statement denouncing the work as a “creative fiction,” the reporting changed to call the whole thing a hoax.

I had an installation planned. I was very into semiotics at the time–indexicality and iconicity–so in addition to taking the footage I also collected the blood itself. The plan was to make these custom screens with trace amounts of the blood, so that the image would be projected onto the material substrate it was visually representing, bringing together index and icon. I had been working on this with an advisor for months. But when the exhibition became a news item, I was suddenly called into these horrible meetings with the then-Dean of the Yale School of Art, who I had never met before. He spent the entire meeting screaming at me, saying unhinged things like I was “abusing the institution” and that he was going to “discipline me like a daughter.” Various deans, the president of the school, and administrators I never knew existed were all very angry at me. They banned the installation from being exhibited in the senior thesis exhibition. So no one ever actually saw the work.

My favorite reaction though was from my Soviet immigrant father. Yale called him and told him he had to fly out and talk sense into me. I remember opening the door of my apartment when he arrived, and him standing there looking stern and wagging his finger at me. Then he broke into a big smile and said “You–you’ve been murdering my grandchildren!” and cackled. Then he gave me a big hug. He never went to college and came from a totally different world than the one I was navigating then. I felt really lucky to have him there.

DP

What were you feeling?

AS

I felt extremely surprised. And I felt betrayed. I’d gotten so much permission to make this work–from my professors, the Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Art School, etc. Everyone knew about it. So I was surprised at the school’s surprise. I think I also felt guilty–guilty that I was the source of so much trouble, that I had done something to harm my teachers who were now being punished by the administration. Looking back, I think it was a kind of cognitive dissonance. Because none of those faculty were standing up for me, I felt like I wasn’t worth defending. There was one professor who did defend me, even though I never worked directly with him: Seth Kim-Cohen. He is actually now my colleague at SAIC. It meant so much to me at the time.

At first I thought–incorrectly–that it was simply a matter of understanding. That if the school, the donors, and the press simply understood what I actually did for the piece, some of the furor would die down–or at least the conversation could shift to something more meaningful. I wrote an article for the Yale Daily News to clarify that I wasn’t aborting nine-month-old fetuses. I described the process in detail, highlighting that the piece was intentionally designed so that I never knew if I was pregnant or not. However, the school took this to mean that I didn’t do anything at all. They released a statement saying that the entire piece was a “creative fiction”–which is a term I’ve unpacked at length in the years since. To be called a fiction is to be erased in a certain sense: and it’s an erasure people experience all the time in contexts much more consequential than art. That reaction was, in many ways, more difficult to navigate than the right-wing media’s interpretation of the piece as the murder of nine-month-old fetuses.

There were a lot of meetings with the school president and the PR person. I remember them saying that they were getting a lot of death threats against me as well as pressure from donors to condemn the work. Even though I’d already had that terrible lunch with Stephen Schwarzman, that was the first time I really became aware of this hidden system of donors and how their power can impact institutional policy. The University took a number of steps  to see if they could expel me. I learned from a pro bono lawyer who was helping me at the time that the administration went through my medical records to see if I’d ever gone to any counseling with the school, in which case they would have forced me to take a medical leave. I hadn’t, so they couldn’t, but that was a really chilling thing to discover. The school also searched my studio and tried to find traces of blood in there, because that wouldn’t have been allowed. But I didn’t have the blood in my studio. I had it in my apartment in a fridge. Despite their best efforts, I graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, but I didn’t attend my graduation ceremony because they told me that they could not ensure my safety, which was another chilling thing to hear.

DP

What did you take away from all of it?

AS

I learned–though not necessarily for the first time—that I could do something with my real body and testify to that experience and have it not matter, that my voice can be overwritten by voices much more powerful than mine. But again, I should note: people are forced to learn that lesson in situations with much higher stakes than an artwork could ever have. The administration wanted me to sign a statement saying that I never actually did what I did. I didn’t sign it because 1. I didn’t want to  lie and, 2. fuck them. As a result, the work that I’d planned was banned from exhibition. The dean of the art school apparently told the faculty they could not offer me a critique of the work because to do so would be to acknowledge it as art–which he was adamant it was not. So, I ended up having a very awkward final critique of other work I happened to be making in my studio that semester, for which I received a B+—which really wounded me. [Laughs.]

They say you shouldn’t keep talking about work you did when you were a student, but I think I have to. It’s the provocation for everything I’ve done since. In 2008, I felt so overexposed. The press was hounding me. People would recognize me on the street. People who I hadn’t heard from in forever were coming out of the woodwork. I was living this riddle: What does it mean to be a visual artist known for something that no one has seen, but everyone has heard about? That question began my decades long interest in the circulation of speech and the performativity of language.

DP

What happened next?

AS

After graduation, I didn’t really know what to do with myself so quickly applied to graduate schools. I applied to MFA programs. I applied to PhD programs. I applied to Master’s programs. In retrospect, it was a weird choice to go straight back to the bosom of an institution. And they were skeptical of me. I had a bizarre interview with Cal Arts where some administrator asked me if I was “sorry for what I did to Yale.” And I found out many years later from Mary Kelly that she had wanted to work with me at UCLA, but the administration would not let her admit me. Ultimately, José Muñoz in the Performance Studies department at NYU called me and was like, “We really want you.” That’s how I came to Performance Studies, and I had a really amazing experience there. Barbara Browning, who took over as my dissertation advisor after José passed away, describes the program as the island of misfit toys, which it totally is.

DP

What was it like to work with José?

AS

Transformative. He was not only such a beautiful thinker, but he also had this quality of making everyone feel like they were his best friend–whether it was true or not. He was someone for whom theory was part of a life practice, something we did not just in the seminar room but also over drinks, at a Vaginal Davis performance, walking the dog (I used to dog sit for him), etc. One of my best memories of him is coming over to his apartment to play with his new puppy, Lydia. She was a tiny white French bull dog and he had bought her all baby pink accessories. We were both sitting in her play pen rolling a ball back and forth for her to chase while he pushed me on my dissertation proposal. Losing him was horrible for everyone. It was a huge trauma for the department. Really sudden. He had been teaching the week before. He was only 46.

José dying probably also really changed my professional trajectory. I had just finished my exams, had my dissertation proposal accepted, and gotten into the Whitney Independent Study Program, and I started the ISP a few weeks later. That space was also a kind of refuge, and I became totally immersed. I then got a teaching fellowship at the Whitney which I did for a couple of years, and basically just fucked off with my PhD work. I was mourning José alongside the other graduate students and the rest of the faculty. There was a lot of scrambling to figure out how the department would absorb the loss, and I was leaning back into art as a way to avoid it. Which is kind of funny, because doing a PhD was maybe a way to avoid art.

I actually probably owe the fact that I have a PhD to Noel Rodriguez, who was the Administrative Director for the Performance Studies department at the time. He called me up to say that the ten year clock I had to finish the PhD was running out, so I needed to decide what I wanted to do. That brought me back to reality. I came back and wrote my dissertation with Barbara Browning. Barbara, Ann Pellegrini, and Karen Shimakawa were my core readers. Fred Moten, Andre Lepecki, and Jennifer Doyle were my outside readers. The dissertation received honors and several awards, which was very affirming.

Now I direct the Low-Res MFA program at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which was founded by Gregg Bordowitz, who I had first met at the ISP–I almost feel as though I’ve come full circle. At the ISP, Gregg gave a beautiful seminar centered on the idea of queer affect. I asked him a question about it. I don’t remember the question, but he said something to me like, “I hear José in that question.” And then I cried. And he cried. It was just this kind of amazing moment.

DP

I want to press the relationship between negativity and pedagogy. We’ve published an interview with Lee Edelman in the past, and I learned a lot from his work during undergrad. I want to bring this up now as Edelman and Muñoz’s work is often construed as at odds with one another, with the former considered skeptical of the latter’s optimistic conception of queerness.

AS

Edelman’s No Future was super influential for me. I remember reading it and thinking, “Wow, this is an amazing thesis.” [Laughs.] Sometime later, I think when I was a master’s student, I took a seminar on queer kinship with José. I remember cornering him in his office being like, “I do not understand what you mean be queer kinship. If queerness is a space for failure, for anti-relationality, for all these negative affects that seem so important to name, isn’t it regressive and normalizing to talk about kinship?”

He was like, “Aliza, the greatest theorists of community are weirdos dreaming of that potential alone in their rooms.” And I see that claim as the connecting thread between the anti-relational work Edelman does and José’s work on utopia. For José, queerness is a utopianism precisely because it is “not yet here.” Queerness is something that animates a horizon that we don’t yet inhabit. There is a kind of negativity to that, not in an affective sense, but more in a spatial sense. It’s something just out of reach. Queerness, in other words, is an animating politics and premise, not something that we have.

It’s that part José’s work that inspired my own dissertation, which was about doom. To be doomed is to be bound to a future–even if that future is no future at all. It is a term that names reproductive labor on one hand, the drudgery of maintaining oneself and others socially and biologically. Eve, after all, is doomed to labor in childbirth and the fields. But it is a way of thinking about the power of speech action, the capacity for a word to act–however imperceptibly–over incredibly long periods of time. Speech acts like promises or curses, which bind us to consequence over long periods of time, sometimes intergenerationally. Such durational action offers a way of thinking about reproduction and performance together. It’s also a way, following José, that we can think about queer politics—as a horizon, something that’s active and engages us in an extended time period, which is futurity.

You could say my work is invested in synthesizing queer theoretical polemics that, on the one hand, perceive the radical potentials of negativity and anti-relationality and, on the other, engage us in something we might call queer kinship. Kinship is a mode of relationality that can be simultaneously non-normative and an animating force between us.

DP

That’s awesome.

AS

An ah-ha moment for me was understanding the relationship between José’s work and Eve Sedgwick’s work, especially her influential formulation of the reparative. Eve Sedgwick was his dissertation advisor and mentor at Duke. She died the year I started grad school, and one of the first things José ever hired me to do was to work at her memorial service. He also told me a cute story once about how he got the job at NYU when he was still in grad school and not yet finished with his dissertation, so he had to all of a sudden get it done. And he was really, really stressed out. So she sent him to acupuncture to calm him down enough so he could write.

For Sedgwick, the reparative is a temporary position, an assemblage of parts into something that need not resemble a preexisting whole. To me, that actually makes a lot of sense as a rubric for queer kinship or queer futures. They need not involve forms of collectivity or community or kinship normatively conceived. They contain those structures within themselves as negative resonances. Those rejections are so fundamental, both on the part of the queer subject and also of the queer subject by normative structures. They don’t ask us to let any of that go. Rather, they just ask, “What’s next?” That’s Sedgwick’s move.

She has this amazing beginning to her essay on reparative reading where she’s talking to activist and scholar Cindy Patton. It’s the early days of AIDS and Sedgwick is throwing out all these conspiracy theories that were circling at the time. Patton stops her and says something like, “Well, it's all true, right? Say AIDS is a virus engineered to kill queer people. Say all those conspiracy theories are true. What would we know now that we don’t already know? We already know that the government doesn’t care about queer people. We already know that there’s a lack of attention to the health of queer black and brown people. We already know these things.” Paranoia doesn’t produce any new information. That’s her starting-off point to move from the paranoid to the reparative. After we understand all of these dynamics, what do we do? To me, that is where José’s work picks up and where I try to situate my practice.

I was actually speaking to Jennifer Doyle about the reparative recently, when I invited her to speak at the Low-Res MFA as part of our Visiting Artist & Lecture Series. Jennifer studied with Sedgwick at the same time as José and wrote about my work right after I graduated from Yale. She actually wrote my recommendation letter to get into Performance Studies. She was saying that people often really misunderstand the reparative. By her account, it is not meant to be a feel-good thing. It’s an incredibly hard thing. It’s similar to the way that people often subsume self-care into the normative structures of individualism, consumerism, and capitalism, although it’s originally a radical black feminist principle. Fundamentally, if you really look at the origins of the reparative or self-care, they are resistant to that kind of appropriation. That is, in fact, their work.

DP

I read a lot of Sedgwick in undergrad. I was interested in the relationship between formalism and the reparative as sketched in her essay “Queer and Now.” Like, what does formalism look like for a person like me who doesn’t need to “struggle” to find meaningful representations of queerness?

AS

It’s a great question. What I love about the way Sedgwick discusses formalism in that essay is that it is a method for perverse reading. It’s a rejection of the idea that formalism should be dispassionate, arguing that we can take seriously a text or object through our passions. What she opens up is the possibility that even if we don’t struggle to find meaningful representations of queerness anymore, we are still authorized a perverse pleasure in our study of them: a pleasure and a politics that is situated in their formal details, and one that perhaps allows us to apprehend even more through that which is often thought in excess of formalism, such as intuition, desire, or necessity.

DP

How do formalism and the reparative operate in your practice?

AS

I’m sure in many different ways. One way is maybe in how I navigated affect in my senior thesis. In her book Hold it Against Me, Jennifer Doyle writes about how in that piece, one of the things that was perhaps most scandalous was my withholding of any kind of feeling. There was no narrative of justice, or trauma, of regret, or any of the other feelings we have come to expect in abortion stories. There was just the act, with its formal precision that nobody seemed to care about but was important to me. I think there is something reparative also in not having to perform the feelings people expect–in the insistence that this bodily action did not need to conform to those narratives we already know, but could instead be something else. Namely art. And I think that does something for art too, to insist that it can look like something we do not usually recognize as art.

Maybe another way is how I cite precedent in my practice, which is something I usually speak about in terms of a queer feminist citationality. It’s an approach also pretty well encapsulated in something José used to say: that the closest thing he did to a “sport” was “pick over the bones of old dead white men.” I love the idea that citation can be aggressive, voracious even. Through a close, meticulous reading, I can claim for my own flourishing the thinking of those who would be horrified by the very fact of my existence. [Laughs.] It’s crucial to recognize that we don’t come up with ideas as islands unto ourselves. We’re participating in a discourse built on shared conversations, vocabularies, and practices. This is a precondition to any kind of reparative work. One cannot be reparative alone. Like, if you dig into the [Melanie] Klein, the idea that there is even a singular subject becomes fundamentally undone. The reparative is, after all, an activity that involves assembling heterogeneous parts that exceed the self.

DP

Can you speak more about citation?

AS

When writing a peer-reviewed article, citations are a way of naming a lineage. But in art practice, there isn’t really the ability to situate ourselves in a lineage in the same way— explicitly, that is. Instead, we usually talk about it through ideas of influence. There was a brief moment when I got super interested in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. It’s so gay. There are no women in it at all. There’s not even the recognition of the possibility of women. There is, however, a beautiful discussion of the Latin root influere, “to flow into,” and how influence is a “celestial fluid” passed between men. Yet even in this book, which is situated in the deep normative heart of canonicity, there’s thinking about the porousness of the self. You could read it as a book about the necessity of intergenerational thought, the inevitability of influence, and the fact that we become ourselves in relation to others. Though Bloom would probably hate to acknowledge it, these are all things we name overtly in queer and feminist practice.

Something that has also really shaped my thinking on citation is an early essay José wrote called “Ephemera as Evidence.” That essay stems from the question, how do we find queerness? José argues that both queerness and performance are present in traces they leave behind–traces that continue to act. It’s both a theory of queer collectivity and a theory of performative materiality. The essay offers a rubric for valuing the everyday materialities that emerge in practice–an image degraded by its dissemination, the circulation of a certain phrase or a word. Or the resonant materiality of deeply boring bureaucratic objects that nonetheless have an incredibly traumatized origin and function–such as the rape kits I have been working with for several years. These are all materials that continue to act or have a certain energy or liveliness to them.

DP

Most of the classes I took didn’t directly deal with the object of my deepest interest, namely: the canon of queer studies. I was introduced to a lot of work that moved me outside of the classroom through conversations with friends. Do you relate at all? Did you have a strong community of peers at school? Where does your learning happen?

AS

That’s such an important idea you’re naming. Theory doesn’t come alive in the absence of a community of practice. To me, that was such a huge part of coming to Performance Studies. José would throw these great parties in his NYU apartment that were some of the biggest learning spaces for me. That’s how I met Carmelita Tropicana and her sister Ela Troyano, who adopted me and became my art mothers after José died. The friendships I formed through the ISP have also been a major source of learning–largely because we were all trying to navigate how hard it is to survive as artists when you’re committed to a certain set of ideals. And honestly, I think a lot of my learning happens through teaching. There’s something about thinking out loud together with students that pushes what it is I think I know. Of course, community is also always disappointing. Lauren Berlant has this great phrase that I think sums it up, “loose holdings.” The freedom and beauty of friendships is that there are no hard binds that constrict you. But the very thing that makes it capacious also makes it precarious–people are always falling in and out, it’s always in flux.

DP

Totally. What was your adolescence like?

AS

My parents are both fairly eccentric figures. My mom struggles with addiction and kicked me out of her house when I was in high school. By the time I was starting college she was going through a felony conviction. I had to fly back during finals week my first semester to testify at her sentencing. Obviously that was hard. But looking back on my adolescence I think I was lucky and unlucky in the sense that I had a lot of freedom. I never had a curfew. No one asked where I was spending the night. I didn’t really have any parental voice in my life telling me to think about a job or how I’ll support myself. I had gotten the idea I wanted to be pre-law because I was a dork really into debate club and mock trial. [Laughs.]

I think most scholarship kids feel a lot of pressure to hyperfocus on those practical questions in a way that I didn’t. And that was really freeing. I didn’t really comprehend the enormous chasm between me and my friends in terms of wealth and privilege, and what that meant for a life in the arts. When I was 18, 19, 20, I just simply believed–in the same way that all my friends did–that I could be anything and that I could intervene in culture in ways that I thought mattered. I don’t know if I would’ve been able to think that way if I wasn’t surrounded by such privilege or if I was really made to understand by my parents or anyone else the very different futures that faced us. So, for that, I’m actually really grateful.

DP

To circle back a bit, in “Toward a Reparative Pedagogy,” you note that you’ve used the reparative as a segue toward questions regarding the embeddedness of the language of the “critique” and “criticality” in arts pedagogy. “What would we do together, sitting in a room, if not critique the work presented to us? What other word besides ‘crit’ might we use for such a group activity? An ‘appreciation’? Why is it that terms not rooted in criticality sound so jarring, unrigorous, or even silly?”

I recently spoke to my senior thesis advisor, Irene V. Small. She mentioned that, for her, a generative alternative to critique has been description: “I think description can be a truly affirmative act. I don’t mean that in terms of a politics of representation. No, to describe and redescribe the capacities of an object or utterance (or the absence of one) is to bring a whole set of possibilities into view.” This really stuck with me. Is there a way to participate in the co-production of knowledge sans criticality?

AS

I completely agree with Irene about the power of description. One thing I often insist on as part of the critique method for any studio class I teach is that we dedicate the first part to describing what we are actually seeing–because not only do we miss things, but we often aren’t even all in agreement on what there is to see.

We often assume in art school that critique is at the center of what we do. It is–but what we mean by that is never really defined. The word “crit” can actually mean wildly different things. Like, there’s Michael Asher’s durational, post-studio critiques that could last upwards of seven hours where the artist was not allowed to speak, which is super different from Mary Kelly’s very regimented movement through the phenomenological, the semiotic, the psychoanalytic, and the institutional as frameworks of reading, which is super different than Andrea Fraser’s methodology that is rooted in group relations.

I was part of a very interesting arts pedagogy experiment with a couple of other ISP alums called the Arts Research Collective. We took up the question, what is critique? We had a short residency in LA where we would try out different critique methods. Then we would move on to do something we called “meta-critique,” where we would critique the critique, drawing on different histories—for instance, Sedgwick’s idea of reparative reading or Maoist, communist, and utopian ideas of mutual criticism. The activity of doing a critique is often a placeholder for something, and I think a lot of productive work happens when we interrogate what exactly are we holding space for. What do we do when we do critique? What is it that we’re doing together? What have we all consented to do together? How do we want to be together as this temporary community of artists who are engaged in a project of learning?

DP

What have you learned from asking those kinds of questions?

AS

I’ve learned to be a better teacher, for sure. Because I teach in MFA programs, I do critique. I wouldn’t call it anything else. And I have an investment in the work of critique even as I press towards alternative forms. There are definitely people who are pre-paranoid, to return to Sedgwick’s framework, and paranoia is an important position to occupy at some points. Because students come from so many different places, there are some who are pre-critical. It does them no service to skip over critique in the same way that it does them no service to skip over the modes of paranoid thinking that are at the core of different kinds of knowledge production. I feel similarly about what it means to teach “the canon”–even as I feel a strong, anti-canonical ethos. If you skip over the canon completely, then the people who didn’t come in already knowing it continue to not know it. That just reproduces certain kinds of exclusion and class privilege rather than actually changing dynamics in a meaningful way.

I am not yet tired of working with my students each semester to understand what we mean by critique and how to mobilize work in a space of criticality. These still feel like very relevant questions, as they have to do with how we define the category of contemporary art–which is a very powerful boundary to flex. As we know, that boundary has been deployed to exclude and devalue the work of many different kinds of artists. So being able to participate in the discourses through which those terms are set is incredibly important.

One of the most difficult things we talk about in Low-Res is the question of how work can enter critique. Are you making something that is able to be subject to a discourse? Is the work too close to you? If the work is you, it’s not really critiqueable. This is maybe where it gets back to materiality and formalism. How does the content of your work manifest in a visual proposition, sensorial proposition, or an aesthetic proposition? That’s what makes it critiqueable. That’s what makes it engaged in this realm of discursive knowledge production as opposed to something that’s too close to the self.

DP

What have you learned from working with Gregg? What has it been like to carry the torch at Low-Res?

AS

Gregg said something in an interview that we did around the 10th anniversary of the Low-Res program for November that has stuck with me: that there is a limit to criticality, which is why he turns to poetics. For him, poetics opens up another way of encountering and navigating this question of what it means to be an artist in the world. I don’t know if I’m there yet with poetics, but I’m thinking about it. It’s an exciting provocation about what could come next.

Low-Res is scaffolded by a framework of poetics in the Aristotelian sense, which comes from the Greek poiema, meaning “a made thing.” I’ve taught in a number of MFA programs at this point, and I find Low-Res really special because in its format and structure, it is inherently centered on the question of what it means to make a community. How exactly do you have peers? How do you have class when you’re all living in totally different parts of the world? I’ve been so impressed at the kind of community that Low-Res students make, and I think that is because they do not take the relational aspect of being in school together for granted. They are actively working on it all the time, even after they graduate.

Hamza Walker has described Low-Res as the greatest artwork that Gregg Bordowitz has ever made. I totally agree. But what does it mean to inherit the project of another artist? We don’t normally work that way as artists, but I’m up for the challenge. I’m extremely grateful for being the person to take over this program after him. In some ways we are very aligned as practitioners, thinkers, and makers. It’s exciting to navigate what it means for one queer artist to inherit a project or program from another. There’s a kind of citationality in that, or reproductive work. So these questions are not far from the questions I take up in my own art practice. I often see myself as inheriting the projects of others in an intergenerational sense.

DP

I’m interested in intergenerationality as a framework through which to think about pedagogy. I first started thinking about this when I read my advisor’s recently published book, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism, which deals with the neo-concrete Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. My thesis is this thing that, in a lot of ways, appears formally or methodologically similar to her book. I was like, “Wow, Irene really rubbed off on me.”

AS

Fred Moten has an amazing poem called “José Munoz,” which I read a lot after José died. There’s this line I really love: “the curve of my tongue in their mouth.” I am always struck with what this line says about pedagogy, especially when I encounter other people who studied with José or whose work is engaged with him. I hear his voice in them in the way I’m sure people hear his voice in me and in the way that I hear Eve Sedgwick’s voice in José.

One of the most amazing things about teaching is the fact that you hear your voice in your students. That’s kind of what learning is. [Laughs.] I learned things when I started to be able to internalize the voice of the people who taught me. I can tell my students are learning things when I hear my voice in theirs, José’s voice in theirs, Eve’s voice in theirs. It’s a profound moment when one recognizes the porousness of pedagogy as a relation. If anything can destabilize our understanding of the individual author, or the individual artist, or the individual itself, it’s pedagogy. It’s teaching. Those are the moments when the divide between your thought and another’s thought falls away. We think out loud with each other. That’s one of the things I love the most about teaching. It connects back to those ideas of citationality, influence and, ultimately, kinship.

There’s something that Lygia Clark said of her Bichos that to me is an amazing enunciation of materiality and performativity. Someone once asked her, “How many moves can the Bichos make,” and she said, “I don’t know. And you don’t know. But it knows.” I really love that. That’s what it means to have work mobilized in the world of discourse—it’s the capacity of a work to take on life, meaning, resonance, and intimacy separate from you. That, I think, is at the core of what we do when we talk about critique.

DP

It was incredibly inspiring and affecting to read her book and feel exactly what you're describing.

AS

I think that’s pedagogy at its best. Mary Kelly talks to her MFA students about not making one project but finding your life’s project–with a capital “P.” Like, what is the thing that will sustain you for the entirety of your career? It has to be something bigger than yourself. That idea of project-ness, that a single artist should be working on and animating their career around something not bound to an individual is crucial. We’re connected to shared projects in ways that extend far beyond the confines of a single class or a single degree–but those projects often begin there in important ways.