Jack Halberstam on "An Aesthetics of Collapse"
Lunchtime Colloquium
15.07.2021
Jack Halberstam (Columbia University, USA) will present on "An Aesthetics of Collapse."
This talk engages the work of Alvin Baltrop, an African American photographer who has been celebrated for his images of gay men cruising in the West Side Piers in the 1980's but who left an archive that, when examined closely, actually offers an aesthetics of collapse. I want to let this gorgeous image of collapse frame my comments today and orient us away from queer bodies – vehicles for capital in current configurations of desire, location software and capital – and towards the abstract forms of the erotic that the collapsed architectures open towards.
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