Nine Pivots
Nine Pivots is an essay focused on works held within the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art and Special Collections. It has been composed as a constellation rather than a narrative, deploying practices of cross-mapping as opposed to a singular and focused mode of academic specialization. I’ve borrowed this approach from Alexander Kluge, who describes cross-mapping as “the application of mutually contradictory maps, methods, or theories” and I’m using it here to indicate the breadth of these collections. It is also an attempt to acknowledge my curiosities and limitations as a researcher. Overall, I have tried to bring a range of traditions into proximity so that questions of responsiveness, communicability, wonder, violence, and care can resonate against and complicate one another. This particular cluster of associations and instigations seeks to enjoin a parallel process in readers and viewers. These are places from which to begin.
