Antiprofile: Art and Personhood Since the 1970s

Jeannine Tang is an art historian who writes about contemporary art, queer and trans visual culture, curatorial and exhibition history. She is a 2020-21 GIDEST Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of Modern/Contemporary Art History & Visual Studies and Director of Visual Studies at Eugene Lang College.

Jeannine is working on a book, Antiprofile: Art, Personhood and Information Since the 1970s. It examines how artists working in the U.S. navigated expanded opportunities and risks arising from the acquisition and distribution of information, by adopting profiling techniques from artist biography, cultural demographics, governmental FOIA files, or by evading informational documentation altogether. Bringing together information studies and contemporary art utilizing diagrammatic, visual, literary, and criminal characteristics of information profiling, this project offers an account of critical art practice, upon the onset of the information age’s societies of control.