Hentyle Yapp
New York University, Art and Public Policy, Faculty Member
- https://tisch.nyu.edu/about/directory/app/1245367097edit
Research Interests:
Liberalism glorifies free speech as the primary means to achieve progress. Free speech is presumed to involve a clear association across awareness, individual voice, collective speaking, and increased representation. Michel Foucault... more
Liberalism glorifies free speech as the primary means to achieve progress. Free speech is presumed to involve a clear association across awareness, individual voice, collective speaking, and increased representation. Michel Foucault located a genealogy of related practices of speaking truth in the Stoic tradition of parrhesia. However, as he established, liberalism limits speech, as centrism and civility flatten all forms of speech as equivalent whereby all sides come to matter. As demonstrated today, the alt-right and radical left are seen as equally illiberal and asking for too much. Speech, specifically under liberalism, loses its import. The article asks what happens when we free the concept of speech from free speech and the liberal tradition. To explore this, the article turns to disability, particularly deafness, to grapple with other formulations of speech. It examines Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s classic film A City of Sadness (1989) and focuses on its representations of deafness and its disability aesthetics. Hou’s aesthetics and use of media objects establish a political critique that does not rely on truth, repair, or recognition. This film develops a Marxist theory of speech and reconsiders speech through other modes of governance like autocracy. Ultimately, the article explores how different governance structures rework not only speech but also notions of political change.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
During the late 1980s and 1990s, the presence of women of color dancing on film and television greatly increased: Rosie Perez in Do the Right Thing, the Fly Girls from In Living Color, and Downtown Julie Brown hosting Club MTV. These... more
During the late 1980s and 1990s, the presence of women of color dancing on film and television greatly increased: Rosie Perez in Do the Right Thing, the Fly Girls from In Living Color, and Downtown Julie Brown hosting Club MTV. These figures were highly energetic and up, marking a positivity that can be distinguished from the depressed affects that have been centralized for the 21st century. This article historicizes the sense of up to rethink the terms available for not only the affective turn but also relationality. The latter draws from the former to contend with how different communities relate to one another through shared sensations, precarity, or commons. The author examines the temporal dynamics embedded in sense and affect to analyze the theoretical bases (from Kleinian object relations to Deleuzian intensities) that produce the relational. In doing so, the author engages Rashaad Newsome's Shade Compositions (2009), which reperforms these earlier up practices. Ultimately, this article rethinks relationality by placing an expiration on the way it is presumed to sustain itself. Relational connections cannot be stabilized nor assume that one can fully know the other. The author thus proposes an ethics for relationality that can be traced through the sense of up's entwinement with racialized forms of rage, `killing it', and exhaustion. Sense and anger produce pathways to engage one another again and again.
Research Interests:
This article explores the methodological possibilities of using meditation, breath, and affects to situate contemporary Chinese art, particularly Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters and He Chengyao’s 99 Needles. Through the haptic dimensions... more
This article explores the methodological possibilities of using meditation, breath, and affects to situate contemporary Chinese art, particularly Zhang Huan’s 12 Square Meters and He Chengyao’s 99 Needles. Through the haptic dimensions embedded within meditation, I complicate the oft-deployed frameworks of endurance art and conscious resistance applied to Chinese artists that “challenge” the state. I propose lingering as an alternative possibility for durational, time-based practices. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s accounts of duration, lingering emphasizes indeterminate and slippery experiences within time that shift away from masculinist notions of linearity and intention. The indeterminacy and failures of lingering destabilize how Chinese artists are often understood as conscious, agentic actors who perform resistance through endurance. Lingering, self-practice, and meditation renegotiate and temper our normative and ableist understandings of agency, resistance, and consciousness. As such, this article contributes to disability and new materialist engagements with normative modes of consciousness, contending with the need for considering the social alongside reformulations of the subject.
Research Interests:
In 1990 both China and the United States passed major disability legislation. Why and how does disability become a key category at the turn of the twenty-first century across the Pacific and globally? This essay argues for disability’s... more
In 1990 both China and the United States passed major disability legislation. Why and how does disability become a key category at the turn of the twenty-first century across the Pacific and globally? This essay argues for disability’s centrality in accounting for neoliberalism, China’s rise, and global imaginaries of the non-West. I examine how legal and political engagements with disability overlap and differ in terms of how notions of individualism, the welfare state, and race are theorized and imagined, particularly with regard to a globalized discourse on human rights. Extending Aihwa Ong’s work on neoliberalism as exception, I offer the framework of disability as exception to demonstrate the entwined modes of disability’s inclusion and race’s exclusion that occurred at the end of the twentieth century.
Research Interests:
At the intersection of social practice art and queer failure discourse, performativ- ity pulses with possibility. This article tracks this strong performative force that undergirds theorizations of queer failure, social success, and... more
At the intersection of social practice art and queer failure discourse, performativ- ity pulses with possibility. This article tracks this strong performative force that undergirds theorizations of queer failure, social success, and performance. The author examines Julie Tolentino’s community engagement project, The Magical Order (2014), which brings these divergent discourses together. Her collaboration with Larkin Street Youth Services, which serves homeless youth in San Francisco, explored weaker modes of engagement that bring to the fore the sense of force embedded in performativity. Tolentino and her collaborators renegotiate the strong performative impulse by punking, yielding, and ailing. Punking not only reworks genealogies of performance for social practice but also emphasizes mere survival over successful thriving. Yielding renegotiates how the precariat relate to institutions beyond antagonism, as they succumb to institutional forces without losing a sense of self. Flailing nuances failure as the former tracks the unbecom- ing and temporary nature of punk survival and institutional yielding. These verbs collectively offer a lexicon that directs us to the limits of both social practice and queer aesthetic discourses, highlighting the need to place these two conversations together in order to rework theorizations of performativity and examine the queer possibility of less.
Research Interests:
This is the introduction by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp for a co-edited volume on race and the art world. Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the... more
This is the introduction by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp for a co-edited volume on race and the art world.
Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation.
The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. Saturation provides avenues to situate race as it relates to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. In science, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility, but also how diversity operates for institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” which interprets artworks by racialized subjects as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and a model by which to think with and alongside blackness and indigeneity.
Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation.
The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. Saturation provides avenues to situate race as it relates to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. In science, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility, but also how diversity operates for institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” which interprets artworks by racialized subjects as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and a model by which to think with and alongside blackness and indigeneity.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Gender Studies, Aesthetics, Art History, and 15 moreIndigenous or Aboriginal Studies, Globalization, Museum Studies, Marxism, Middle East Studies, Disability Studies, Contemporary Art, Queer Theory, Asian American Studies, Critical Race Theory, Institutional Change, Art Theory and Politics, Affect/Emotion, Diaspora and transnationalism, and Latinx Studies
In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese... more
In Minor China Hentyle Yapp analyzes contemporary Chinese art as it circulates on the global art market to outline the limitations of Western understandings of non-Western art. Yapp reconsiders the all-too-common narratives about Chinese art that celebrate the heroic artist who embodies political resistance against the authoritarian state. These narratives, as Yapp establishes, prevent Chinese art, aesthetics, and politics from being discussed in the West outside the terms of Western liberalism and notions of the “universal.” Yapp engages with art ranging from photography and performance to curation and installations to foreground what he calls the minor as method—tracking aesthetic and intellectual practices that challenge the predetermined ideas and political concerns that uphold dominant conceptions of history, the state, and the subject. By examining the minor in the work of artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Cao Fei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Carol Yinghua Lu, and others, Yapp demonstrates that the minor allows for discussing non-Western art more broadly and for reconfiguring dominant political and aesthetic institutions and structures.