Critical Theory’s Secret 2010 Plexiglas and Metal, 48.3 × 58.4 × 58.4 cm © Michael Aurbach Photographer: Bill Lafevor

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Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory LEA Magazine Article

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Critical Theory’s Secret 2010 Plexiglas and Metal, 48.3 × 58.4 × 58.4 cm © Michael Aurbach Photographer: Bill Lafevor

LEA Volume 17 Issue 1
Senior Editor for this issue: Lanfranco Aceti

Reference: Dorothy Joiner, “Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory,” ed. Lanfranco Aceti, Leonardo Electronic Almanac (Mish Mash) 17, no. 1 (2011): 8-13.

Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory
by Dorothy Joiner
Article DOI: 10.5900/SU_9781906897116_2011.17(1)_8

In a satiric series of sculptures, Michael Aurbach uses laughter to lampoon the excesses of the contemporary scholarship known as critical theory. Spun from psychology, linguistic hermeneutics, and philosophy, critical theory, in Aurbach’s view, tends to deemphasize art objects, substituting fatuous speculations for straightforward analysis. The Critical Theorist (2003) is a fantastical contraption on a metal table, each element of which is a visual joke. Reliquary for a Critical Theorist (2005) parodies the tradition of containers for relics. Two Plexiglas “books,” C’est Nothing and Deux Nothing (2009), continue the notion of vacuity. And Critical Theory’s Secret (2010) imitates a safe. It’s empty, however, mocking the notion of an underlying meaning.

Full article is available for download as a pdf at the bottom of the page.

Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He is also the Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, The MIT Press. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People?, an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On, a site-specific choral performance he designed for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with the collaboration of the Boston Children’s Chorus, and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.