Alex Kitnick
Biographic Data
| ID | 1601406 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Kitnick |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Kitnick |
| SIGNATURE | KITNICK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | ALEX KITNICK is a Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts at Bard College. |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Talking Criticism with David Antin, or Criticism at the Boundaries
In the early 1970s, David Antin became known for talking. A well-regarded poet, Antin began appearing at poetry readings with a tape recorder but without anything to read, speaking off the top of his head. Antin effectively ceased writing poetry; instead, he transcribed his recordings and created work from the transcripts. While Antin’s turn to talking has been much discussed in the context of poetry, it has been considered less in the context of…
Dara Birnbaum (1946-2025)
Dara Birnbaum was one of only a small group of artists in the past fifty or so years to have been deeply attuned to the changing codes and conventions of popular media. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture in 1969 (she was the first woman to do so), Birnbaum moved to San Francisco to work for the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, enroll at the San Francisco Art Institute, and participate in …
Imitate Baldessari
There's a fabled sheaf of increasingly yellowed papers, nicked and stained, gently crumpled-there must be some coffee on them somewhere. They've come to be known as the Assignment Sheets. The story is that the famed Conceptual artist and teacher John Baldessari handed them out to his students when he began teaching at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in 1970. The only problem is that none of his students has any memory of ever seei…
I, etcetera
Over the past few years there has been a marked use of the first-person singular in a broad range of cultural practices, including contemporary art, literature, and criticism. Although it goes by any number of names-autobiography, autofiction, confession, epistle, memoir, personal essay-which each have a specific history and structure, its increased use in our current moment suggests a common impulse and points to a novel conception of the author…
Massage, c. 1966
Tied to the body, the word “massage” in the mid-1960s was also associated with media, as well as the idea of mass manipulation. Framed through the work of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the artist Claes Oldenburg, this essay considers the intersections between media theory and body and performance art
Makeshift Wholes
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
Recent philosophical tendencies of "Actor-Network Theory," "Object-Oriented Ontology," and "Speculative Realism" have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects-from Graham Harm…
The Brutalism of Life and Art
In February 1950, shortly after returning from two years in Paris, Eduardo Paolozzi displayed six sculptures and sixteen bas-reliefs at London’s Hanover Gallery, all of which, as the critic Herbert Read would soon put it, displayed “a scorn of bourgeois finish.”1 Placed in oversized wooden frames like archaeological finds, the bas-reliefs were made out of sandy, textured plaster arranged in odd patterns-rashes of bumps, clusters of squares, and s…
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
Recent philosophical tendencies of "Actor-Network Theory," "Object-Oriented Ontology," and "Speculative Realism" have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects-from Graham Harm…
I, etcetera
Over the past few years there has been a marked use of the first-person singular in a broad range of cultural practices, including contemporary art, literature, and criticism. Although it goes by any number of names-autobiography, autofiction, confession, epistle, memoir, personal essay-which each have a specific history and structure, its increased use in our current moment suggests a common impulse and points to a novel conception of the author…
The Brutalism of Life and Art
In February 1950, shortly after returning from two years in Paris, Eduardo Paolozzi displayed six sculptures and sixteen bas-reliefs at London’s Hanover Gallery, all of which, as the critic Herbert Read would soon put it, displayed “a scorn of bourgeois finish.”1 Placed in oversized wooden frames like archaeological finds, the bas-reliefs were made out of sandy, textured plaster arranged in odd patterns-rashes of bumps, clusters of squares, and s…
Makeshift Wholes
A Questionnaire on Materialisms
Recent philosophical tendencies of "Actor-Network Theory," "Object-Oriented Ontology," and "Speculative Realism" have profoundly challenged the centrality of subjectivity in the humanities, and many artists and curators, particularly in the UK, Germany, and the United States, appear deeply influenced by this shift from epistemology to ontology. October editors asked artists, historians, and philosophers invested in these projects-from Graham Harm…
Massage, c. 1966
Tied to the body, the word “massage” in the mid-1960s was also associated with media, as well as the idea of mass manipulation. Framed through the work of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan and the artist Claes Oldenburg, this essay considers the intersections between media theory and body and performance art
I, etcetera
Over the past few years there has been a marked use of the first-person singular in a broad range of cultural practices, including contemporary art, literature, and criticism. Although it goes by any number of names-autobiography, autofiction, confession, epistle, memoir, personal essay-which each have a specific history and structure, its increased use in our current moment suggests a common impulse and points to a novel conception of the author…
Talking Criticism with David Antin, or Criticism at the Boundaries
In the early 1970s, David Antin became known for talking. A well-regarded poet, Antin began appearing at poetry readings with a tape recorder but without anything to read, speaking off the top of his head. Antin effectively ceased writing poetry; instead, he transcribed his recordings and created work from the transcripts. While Antin’s turn to talking has been much discussed in the context of poetry, it has been considered less in the context of…
Dara Birnbaum (1946-2025)
Dara Birnbaum was one of only a small group of artists in the past fifty or so years to have been deeply attuned to the changing codes and conventions of popular media. After graduating from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture in 1969 (she was the first woman to do so), Birnbaum moved to San Francisco to work for the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, enroll at the San Francisco Art Institute, and participate in …
Imitate Baldessari
There's a fabled sheaf of increasingly yellowed papers, nicked and stained, gently crumpled-there must be some coffee on them somewhere. They've come to be known as the Assignment Sheets. The story is that the famed Conceptual artist and teacher John Baldessari handed them out to his students when he began teaching at the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in 1970. The only problem is that none of his students has any memory of ever seei…
Art (8 works) · Art history (6 works) · Art, Politics, and Modernism (5 works) · Visual arts (4 works) · Aesthetics (2 works) · Art, Technology, and Culture (2 works) · Criticism (2 works) · History (2 works) · Literature (2 works) · Philosophy (2 works)