As part of the lecture series Intensify Desire at the Kunsthistorisches Institut at the Freie Universitat in Berlin organized by Christian Liclair and Susanne Huber, Professor Casid presented, “Queer Deformativity: Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and Jimmy De Sana at Pat Hearn,” a lecture based on research for a catalogue essay written for the landmark exhibition, The Conditions of Being Art: Pat Hearn Gallery and American Fine Arts, Co. (1983-2004) which opens at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College on June 23rd. The lecture demonstrates that what binds Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, and Jimmy De Sana at Pat Hearn is not a matter of social context or the particular support structures for artistic viability. Rather, as relations that hinge on careers shaped by life-threatening illnesses (Pierson receiving his HIV diagnosis at thirty-two, Morrisroe and De Sana dying from AIDS-related complications at thirty and forty, respectively, and Hearn dying of cancer at forty-five), apprehending the main lines of their ties (economic, affective, and aesthetic) demands the rub of rupture—what is unsustained and unsustainable, what defies permanence, what dies; it is to reckon with the ambivalently creative force of doing things with being undone. What binds the work that Morrisore, Pierson, and De Sana showed at Pat Hearn Gallery is its exercise of the uneasy power of the deformative at the haunted beginnings of queer theory.
The exhibition is co-curated by Jeannine Tang, Senior Academic Advisor and LUMA Fellow at CCS Bard; Lia Gangitano; founder of Participant Inc and Faculty at CCS Bard and Ann Butler, Director of the Library and Archives at CCS Bard. The exhibition is accompanied by a public symposium scheduled for Fall 2018. The exhibition catalogue is a fully-illustrated scholarly publication that features ten new essays by an intergenerational group of writers, critics, curators and art historians, whose work has involved the artists or issues important to PHG and AFA, but who were not active critics regularly reviewing their exhibitions. In the investigative spirit of encouraging new research into PHG and AFA’s histories, Professor Casid was commissioned to write along with Johanna Burton, Lauren Cornell, Diedrich Diederichsen, Jennifer King, Mason Leaver-Yap, and Kobena Mercer. The book includes reproductions of archival material from a variety of lenders, images of exhibitions at the galleries and updated exhibition timelines for both galleries. It is edited and co-published by Dancing Foxes Press, designed by xSITE and distributed by D.A.P.
Click HERE to learn more about the exhibition.