Research

My research focuses on different aspects of the cross-disciplinary and inter-media aesthetic practices that emerged in the post WWII era. I write on contemporary art, film & video, sound art, and poetry, and I also teach a number of different media topics, including early cinema and documentary film.

My first book, Words to be Looked At, is a critical study of uses of language in 1960s American art. It starts with the scores and compositions of the experimental American composer John Cage, and traces Cage’s impact on 1960s artists and poets, including works by La Monte Young, George Brecht, Jackson Mac Low, Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner and Andy Warhol.

My second book, Six Sound Problems, will address projects by Cage, David Tudor, La Monte Young, Bruce Nauman, Max Neuhaus and James Tenney. I am also working on a collection of essays, Aesthetics of the Expanded Screen, that explores film and video installation and the condition of the durational image.

The core of my project derives from the study of modernity, modernist aesthetics and the historical avant-gardes, as these emerge in relation to new technologies of recording, reproduction and transmission in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Additional teaching/research interests include psychoanalysis and theories of subjectivity, and early 20th-century avant-gardes, particularly the cross-disciplinary work in literature, poetics, visual art, photography and cinema produced around Cubism, Dadaism, Soviet Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and Surrealism.