Jack Halberstam: The Aesthetics of Collapse

I am writing about a new generation of trans and queer artists who reach back to the 1970’s to retrieve a vocabulary of unbuilding, unmaking, unbecoming and undoing to represent sexual and gender variance. Artists used the notion of unbuilding in the 1970’s to counteract exploitative city planners and gentrification. Unmaking and undoing and collapse become politically resonant again in our current era of real estate capital, environmental disaster and transphobic lobbying. 
In the middle of the last century, city planners like Robert Moses, architects like Le Corbusier and generations of politicians cast cities as blank canvases for the development of modern systems of rule. Against this vision, the self-styled “anarchitect,” Gordon Matta-Clark, saw the city as a grammar, a system of signs, a matrix of meaning full of gaps and holes where the spaces between buildings were as meaningful as the buildings themselves. Anarchitecture, Matta-Clark wrote in an exhibition text in the early 1970’s, means “working with absence” and “opening spaces to redistribute mass” and “emphasizing internal structures through extraction.” This could almost be a description of one of Yve Laris Cohen’s performances from 2021 within which he worked with the remains of the Doris Duke Theater which had burned down a few years earlier. But it is also a description that resonates with the way that some trans people describe transition – not as a journey from one point in the binary to another, but a labor that begins with absence and opens spaces and seeks to unbuild the conventionally gendered body. 

Bio:
Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press).  Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam  is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. 

Aesthetic Seminar spring 2025 is organized by Mads Krogh and Lynge Stegger Gemzøe, School og Communication and Culture, Aarhus University and kindly supported and co-organized by the Research Programs: Historical Studies of Arts and Culture (Simona Zetterberg and Lisbet Tarp), Cultural Transformations (Britta Timm Knudsen and Peter Boenisch) and the PhD Programme for Art, Literature and Cultural Studies (Stefan Iversen).