Zero Visibility: A reading with Stephanie LaCava and Lynne Tillman, introduced by TZK’s editor-in-chief, Anna Sinofzik.
“What’s in a name?”–The latest issue of the Berlin-based art journal TEXTE ZUR KUNST, titled “Anonymity,” addresses this age-old question, along with a range of related queries that pertain to our present and to the art field in particular: What significance do names hold in the art economy? Under what conditions do pseudonyms of artists or critics become brands? To what extent does the disclosure of identity–or the play with masking it–affect the production and reception of art criticism or artistic work? TZK’s September issue reexamines anonymity as a time-honored creative strategy in the context of changing technological and sociopolitical conditions and engages with both its emancipatory and malicious potentials. The launch event explores how the use of personas and literary masks can be leveraged in the liminal zone between fiction and criticism–the domain of Stephanie LaCava and Lynne Tillman.
With characters like Madame Realism and Paige Turner, Tillman began to blend art criticism and fiction in the mid 1980s. Writing about art through the lens of a fictional third person enabled her to circumvent the “I” that persists in pseudonymous texts, thereby creating a particularly malleable concept of positionality. Inspired by the affordances of assuming other identities as novelists, LaCava and Tillman reassess the use of literary characters in art criticism and beyond, to question the contingency of one’s own judgment, for example. Bringing Tillman’s iconic characters into dialogue with newer fictional personas–such as Bath, the narrator of LaCava’s novel Nymph (2025)–the two fiction writers and critics will perform a reading on September 9 at Amant to celebrate the launch of TZK’s new issue.