Shows how contemporary art is a powerful yet largely unacknowledged player in the articulation of depression in Western culture, both adopting and challenging scientific definitions of the condition. Ross explores the ways in which contemporary art performs the detached aesthetics of depression, exposing the viewer's loss of connection and ultimately redefining the function of the image.
Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in and around New York City, the book offers a kaleidoscope of subjects and stories that address how race is negotiated in today’s world-including tales of book-vending numerologists, urban conspiracy theorists, corrupt police officers, mixed-race neo-Nazis, and gospel choirs forbidden to catch the Holy Ghost.
Part of the Library of Performing Rights (LPR) (P3041).
Document of essay presented at the Performing Documents Conference (Arnolfini, Bristol), 12-14 April 2013, exploring how performance archives can be situated in the cultural and critical context as sets of relations eliciting the meaning and force of events lived primarily in and through the in(tra)corporeal.