Böcker av Aria Dean

A companion to Aria Dean's Abattoir, U.S.A.! Aria Dean's moving image work Abattoir, U.S.A.!, presented in the eponymous exhibition at the Renaissance Society between February and April 2023, surveys the interior of an empty slaughterhouse. This slaughterhouse was built and animated using Unreal Engine, a 3D computer graphics tool for creating virtual environments. The viewer follows a linear path through an impossible architecture--a seamless combination of nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first-century design elements and non-Euclidean spaces. Dean was initially inspired by philosophers Georges Bataille and Frank Wilderson, each of whom address the slaughterhouse in their writings -whether as a metaphor or paradigm--as crucial to the construction of civil society. Abattoir, U.S.A.! also builds on Dean's own research into the slaughterhouse and industrial architecture and the ways they reveal modernism's intimacy with death on conceptual, political, and material levels. This book documents the exhibition as well as selected material from Dean's process and research. It includes essays by film scholar Erika Balsom, who writes on the history of abattoirs and their relation to modernism, Afropessimist theory, and the dehumanizing rationality of capitalism. Architect and writer Keller Easterling contributes a quasi-fictional text from her ongoing series of Draft Teenage Essays, which are part of her collection of experimental writings titled No One Thing. This volume also includes transcripts of two conversations: one between Dean and film historian Bruce Jenkins in which they discuss Dean's work in relation to historical avant-garde films; and another with Dean and co-director of Rhizome Michael Connor, media artist Filip Kostik, and composer Evan Zierk, who created the soundtrack for Abattoir, U.S.A.! Together they discuss the technical process of using Unreal Engine and the nature of virtuality.

The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean. Compiled here for the first time, the selected writings of Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles) mount a trenchant critique of representational systems. A visual artist and filmmaker, Dean has also emerged as one of the leading critical voices of her generation through a body of writing that maps the forces of aesthetic theory, image regimes, and visibility onto questions of race and power. Dean's work across media has long been defined by what she calls a "fixation on the subject and its borders," and the texts collected here filter that inquiry through digital networks, art history, and Black radical thought. Equally at home discussing artists who embrace difficulty--from Robert Morris to David Hammons, Lorna Simpson, and Ulysses Jenkins--and conceptual frameworks such as Afropessimism, Dean often contends with how theoretical positions brush against the grain of lived reality: how the Structuralism handed down from the academy, for instance, can be commingled with critiques of structural racism, or how Georges Bataille's notion of base matter transforms through an encounter with Blackness. Dean's thinking embraces a definition of "Black art that luxuriates in its outside-the-world-ness," as she writes in this volume, which works to elucidate "Blackness's proclivity for making and unmaking its own rules as it produces objects" of cultural necessity. Originally published in November--of which Dean is a founding editor--as well as in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal, and in exhibition contexts, the essays compiled in Bad Infinity were written over a six-year span that charts our rapidly evolving forms of subjectivity and sociality.