Tekhne: A Disclaimer

Everything on this newsletter I come to as a white person of mostly Irish/German heritage; Queer, gender ambivalent, AFAB, mostly cis-presenting; invisibly disabled, fat, college educated, marginally middle-class (although pretty broke at the moment) person and foster care/scholarship kid; I can’t be on a screen more than 5 hours a day, eat gluten or be in toxic spaces that activate my flight, freeze, faun symptoms without serious consequences (which doesn’t mean I don’t do those things). I live in Brooklyn, New York on stolen land in 2023. Anything I say here or anywhere else in this newsletter should be taken from within that context. 

My orientation towards writing and art, in general, is one of ethnoaesthetics (how art is understood from a local context, especially outside of Western art history). In the early 2000s, I did not find a welcome reception to these interests within art history departments. My interests include the role of art producers cross-culturally; cultural appropriation; art, taste, and distinction (habitus); patterns and global flows in the circulation and sale of art; conflicted stakeholder interests; the Modernist avant-garde; art markets; artwriting; cultural identity; and the implications of viewing art through the lens of technology. 

I would add that my non-academic interests, many of them lifelong, have included dance, meditation and yoga (25+ years), energy work, poetics, Tantra, Hermeticism, and other mystical, communal, and cooperative traditions including early religious groups and sects of colonial America like the Shakers, communes like The Farm in Tennessee where I once lived to study permaculture or worker cooperatives like Mondragon Corporation and all the ones where I have lived or worked because I believe in interdependence and have never been motivated by having my own two car garage or my own island or buying my way out of having to deal with other people (which does not mean that I am always good at it). I like dogs more than cats (sorry) and believe I have the ability to talk to trees and flowers and that they talk back.

Over time, I have found that art for me, or any of these interests comes underneath spirit and love, in my internal hierarchy of things.

Take what you like and leave the rest