Loose Conceptualism: Deadpan Strategies and the Figure of the Migrant
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 12:10pm
- 1:10pm
(60 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This paper examines strategies of deadpan affect and withholding in conceptual and documentary practices, proposing "loose conceptualism" as a framework for thinking conceptual strategies that operate through elasticity rather than closure. It centers on Renée Green, Christopher Cozier, and Glenn Ligon, bringing together works produced around 1970 and the early 1990s in which migration functions both as socio-political condition and as structuring metaphor for aesthetic movement, translation, and displacement.
Grounded in Lauren Berlant's 2014 writing on deadpan, particularly what Berlant describes as "showing up to withhold" in their "reading-with" William Pope L.'s exhibition at the Renaissance Society U. Chicago, the paper shifts attention from migration as a fact or one occupying a figure position to one of potentiality. Loose conceptualism asks how itinerancy is inhabited through a series of historically sedimented figures: the traveler, the dandy or bohemian, flâneur, maroon, nomad, or other types of mobility and their relations. These inhabitations allow artists to explore non-catharsis, questions of subjunctivity and belief, and holding the tension between opposites–– such as concept/material, staying/migration, and performance/document. Across transmedial forms of documentation, these works inhabit migration obliquely, through figures that register movement, precarity, and displacement without reduction, staging a distinction between resistance and refusal, which highlights incompleteness of story, and the ongoing nature of narrative identity.
Situating these practices within longer avant-garde histories of intermedial experimentation, the paper considers how a post-conceptualism gives way to an ana-performativity or non-performance, and proposes ‘loose conceptualism’ as a way of thinking how impure strategies migrate across media and historical moments. By presenting the talk as a lecture-performance with slides, the oblique engagement is tested.
Grounded in Lauren Berlant's 2014 writing on deadpan, particularly what Berlant describes as "showing up to withhold" in their "reading-with" William Pope L.'s exhibition at the Renaissance Society U. Chicago, the paper shifts attention from migration as a fact or one occupying a figure position to one of potentiality. Loose conceptualism asks how itinerancy is inhabited through a series of historically sedimented figures: the traveler, the dandy or bohemian, flâneur, maroon, nomad, or other types of mobility and their relations. These inhabitations allow artists to explore non-catharsis, questions of subjunctivity and belief, and holding the tension between opposites–– such as concept/material, staying/migration, and performance/document. Across transmedial forms of documentation, these works inhabit migration obliquely, through figures that register movement, precarity, and displacement without reduction, staging a distinction between resistance and refusal, which highlights incompleteness of story, and the ongoing nature of narrative identity.
Situating these practices within longer avant-garde histories of intermedial experimentation, the paper considers how a post-conceptualism gives way to an ana-performativity or non-performance, and proposes ‘loose conceptualism’ as a way of thinking how impure strategies migrate across media and historical moments. By presenting the talk as a lecture-performance with slides, the oblique engagement is tested.
Biography
Joseph D. Steele, PhD (U. Colorado Boulder 2023) is a filmmaker, researcher, and curator whose work traces how moving images shape historical and sensory knowledge within conditions of modernity and decoloniality. His ongoing project Archive Poiēsis: On the Practice of Renée Green explores essay film, conceptual art, and archival practice as poetic and critical methods for engaging transnational experience. Based at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Steele’s films and writing extend these inquiries to experimental nonfiction practices in the Caribbean and Europe. His curatorial collaborations with artist-run labs and media institutions connect theory, practice, [hi-]stories, and the collective work of reimagining archives.