As a creative research journal, The Invisible Archive (TIA) is committed to creating a dialogue that investigates how ideas on performativity and embodiment complicate and inform the conventions under which art is made, shared, and understood. By manifesting new relationships between rigorous writing and the radical nature of time itself, the journal critically documents the unique experiences and knowledge produced by cultural workers and artists who primarily work through performance, time-based strategies, and who use their bodies for social, ecological, and political change. The journal is especially interested in discussing the invisible labor, politics, and challenges attached to practices that are vulnerable due to their ephemeral nature, institutional neglect, cultural bias, or politically unpopular content.
This issue offers an experimental obituary of the under-appreciated, yet significant artist Camille O’Grady, seeking to correct her misguided characterization as a ‘minor’ figure in several aesthetic and musical scenes in which she played a major, influential role, and to rightly place her at the deserved ‘center of her story.’ In the process, much is learnt about O’Grady and the expressed ‘macro-movements’ of her life […].
The central question, of how language might be harnessed to center someone’s life in their story, is originally handled by the author’s dynamic deconstruction of the obituary genre […] I took much pleasure in this conceit, and welcomed both the author’s narration of a personal connection to Camille, which felt tender and authentic; and the electric, alive quality of their prose (echoing O’Grady’s own kinetic energy).
About the author: Andy Campbell is an art writer, educator, and curator whose work considers the politics of identities via the visual and material cultures of communities. He is the author of Bound Together: Leather, Sex, Archives, and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2020), and Queer X Design: 50 Years of Signs, Symbols, Banners, Logos, and Graphic Art of LGBTQ (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2019), and he is the co-editor, along with Amelia Jones of Queer Communion: Ron Athey (Intellect, 2020). He is currently working on a project that considers the various ways poverty has transcribed U.S. artmaking practices since the 1960s. He is an Associate Professor of Critical Studies at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, and lives in Long Beach, California. [andycampy.com/]
-Invisible Archive
11/11/2023
