- Manal Abu-Shaheen
- Vahap Avşar
- Jesus Benavente and Felipe Castelblanco
- Brian Caverly
- Kerry Downey
- Magali Duzant
- Golnaz Esmaili
- Mohammed Fayaz
- Kate Gilmore
- Jonah Groeneboer
- Bang Geul Han and Minna Pöllänen
- Dave Hardy
- Sylvia Hardy
- Shadi Harouni
- Janks Archive
- Robin Kang
- Kristin Lucas
- Carl Marin
- Eileen Maxson
- Melanie McLain
- Shane Mecklenburger
- Lawrence Mesich
- Freya Powell
- Xiaoshi Vivian Vivian Qin
- Alan Ruiz
- Samita Sinha and Brian Chase
- Barb Smith
- Monika Sziladi
- Alina Tenser
- Trans-Pecos with 8 Ball Community, E.S.P. TV, and Chillin Island
- Mark Tribe
- Sam Vernon
- Max Warsh
- Jennifer Williams
- An Itinerary with Notes
- Exhibition Views
- Hidden
- Watershed
- A Distant Memory Being Recalled (Queens Teens Respond)
- Overhead: A Response to Kerry Downey’s Fishing with Angela
- Sweat, Leaks, Holes: Crossing the Threshold
- PULSE: On Jonah Groeneboer’s The Potential in Waves Colliding
- Interview: Melanie McLain and Alina Tenser
- Personal Space
- Data, the Social Being, and the Social Network
- Responses from Mechanical Turk
- MAPS, DNA, AND SPAM
- Queens Internacional 2016
- Uneven Development: On Beirut and Plein Air
- A Crisis of Context
- Return to Sender
- Interview: Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- Mining Through History: The Contemporary Practices of Vahap Avşar and Shadi Harouni
- A Conversation with Shadi Harouni's The Lightest of Stones
- Directions to a Gravel Quarry
- Walk This Way
- Interview: Brian Caverly and Barb Smith
- "I drew the one that has the teeth marks..."
- BEAT IT! (Queens Teens respond)
- Moments
- Lawn Furniture
- In Between Difference, Repetition, and Original Use
- Interview: Dave Hardy and Max Warsh
- Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz
- City of Tomorrow
- Noticing This Space
- NO PLACE FOR A MAP
- The History of the World Was with Me That Night
- What You Don't See (Queens Teens Respond)
- Interview: Allison Davis and Sam Vernon
- When You’re Smiling…The Many Faces Behind the Mask
- Interview: Jesus Benavente and Carl Marin
- The Eternal Insult
- Janking Off
- Queens Theatricality
Fun fact: Michael Fried, the esteemed critic and art historian, grew up in Queens. He graduated from Princeton, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, and completed a PhD at Harvard, yet nevertheless he reserves praise for Forest Hills High. “Princeton, which was educationally just fine for me,” he has stated, “was not as intellectual a place as Forest Hills.”
Fried is still best known for “Art and Objecthood,” an essay that portrayed the art scene of the mid-1960s as a pitched battle between modernism and a new set of tendencies that Fried called “theater” or “theatricality.” Modernism, of course, was that progressive refinement of aesthetic expression that critic Clement Greenberg had located in painting’s flattening of the picture plane and that Fried now ascribed to the shaped canvases of artist Frank Stella. Theatricality was…well, what was theatricality? The straightforward answer would be the open-ended situations instigated by minimalist sculpture, yet numerous critics have taken up Fried’s argument to define theatricality in terms of postmodernism, performance, time, technology, language, experimental composition, even entropy. No clear consensus has emerged.
Being myself a critic and art historian from Forest Hills, I have occasionally idly wondered about Fried’s formative years. Did he see movies at the Midway? Treat himself to sundaes at Eddie’s Sweet Shop? Queens International 2016 turns my curiosity into a question: What’s theatrical about Queens? In one of the most memorable passages of “Art and Objecthood,” Fried describes theatricality by quoting the artist Tony Smith’s account of a midnight drive on the half-built New Jersey Turnpike. What would theatricality look like along Queens Boulevard, the notoriously dangerous thoroughfare that cuts Forest Hills between the pre-war apartment buildings on 108th Street and the Tudor houses on Greenway Terrace? What is theatricality on the former grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair, where visitors once gazed at Michelangelo’s Pietà while standing on a conveyor belt?
With its emphasis on thresholds and transitions, Queens International 2016 suggests a definition of theatricality specific to the borough. Writes Fried, “What lies between the arts is theater.” For Fried, modernism needed to shore up the definition of individual arts. By contrast, it is precisely the space “between” that interests Queens International 2016 artist Kerry Downey. In their videos and performances, Downey riffs on the concept of “handles”—obdurately material things that mediate connections between inside and outside, between one body and another. A related emphasis on haptic intermedia can also be found in the works of Melanie McLain, Barb Smith, Alina Tenser, and Dave Hardy. All of these Queens artists connect objects, materials, and bodies together in willfully awkward arrangements.
I understand why Fried would find transitional spaces perilous. The narrow traffic islands on Queens Boulevard are scary places to stand on. Yet a thin stretch of concrete can also be a site of possibility. Consider, for instance, Fake Estates (1973–74), the fourteen misshapen Queens properties that artist Gordon Matta-Clark purchased from the municipal government beginning in 1973. These oddly configured lots were “gutter space” resulting from new land surveys, zoning laws, or construction. They were the physical remainders of urban transformation, the shifting ground of relentless change.
Colby Chamberlain is an art historian based in Queens. His scholarship and criticism focuses on intersections of art and other fields of professional practice, in particular the law. He obtained his PhD at Columbia University in 2016 and is at work on his first book, Fluxus Administration. The recipient of a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a Helena Rubinstein Fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and the College Art Association Art Journal Award, he is a senior editor at Triple Canopy and a contributor to publications including Art in America, Artforum, Cabinet, and Parkett.