Teaching Interests: Critical Theory; Fiction & Non-fiction, Gender Studies; Literature; Social Art Practice
Matias Viegener is a writer, artist and critic who works solo and collaboratively in the fields of writing, visual art, and social practice. He is the author of The Assassination of Kathy Acker and 2500 Random Things About Me Too, a book of experimental non-fiction, sometimes hailed as the first book composed on and through Facebook. In 2004 he co-founded and collaborated for a decade in Fallen Fruit, a participatory art practice focusing on fruit, urban space and public life. His work has been exhibited at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, Ars Electronica, The Whitney Museum, The Smart Museum of Art, The Blaffer Art Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Machine Project, New Langton Arts, Highways Performance Space, The Hammer Museum, the ARCO Madrid biennial, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, as well as internationally in Denmark, Germany, Austria, Colombia and Mexico.
He has fiction in the anthologies The &Now Awards—The Best Innovative Writing, Vital Signs—Essential AIDS Fiction, Encyclopedia F-K, Chronometry, Men on Men 3, Sundays at Seven, Dear World, Abject and Discontents, edited by Dennis Cooper. He has published in Afterimage, American Book Review, Artforum, Art Issues, ArtUS, Artweek, Black Clock, Bomb, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, Ex Nihilo, Fiction International, Framework, High Performance, The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, The Huffington Post, Mirage, Paragraph, Radical History Review, Semiotext(e), Suspect Thoughts, and X-tra, for whom he writes regularly on visual art. His academic criticism appears in Writing at the Edge: The Work of Dennis Cooper; the queer theory issue of Critical Quarterly; and Queer Looks: Lesbian & Gay Experimental Media; and Camp Grounds: Gay & Lesbian Style. He is the coeditor of GET RID OF MEANING, the first comprehensive anthology about the conjunction of art and writing in Kathy Acker’s work. With his colleague, Christine Wertheim, he has edited two anthologies, The Noulipian Analects and Séance in Experimental Writing. He is the editor and co-translator of Georges Batailles' The Trial of Gilles de Rais. As literary executor for the writer Kathy Acker, he has written and lectured extensively on her work, and edited a volume of her correspondence with McKenzie Wark for Semiotext(e). His work has been written about in The New Yorker, salon.com, The New York Times, Art in America, Frieze, Art:21, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post. He is the recipient of a 2013 Creative Capital Grant.
Links:
www.mviegener.com
www.lesfigues.com/lfp/316/2500-random-things-about-me-too
www.salon.com/2013/09/02/with_2500_random_things_matias_viegener_makes_lists_checks_them_twice_partner/
www.huffingtonpost.com/matias-viegener/how-i-wrote-a-book-on-facebook_b_1914212.html?utm_hp_ref=books
www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/03/mapping-public-fruit.html
www.fallenfruit.org
www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/23/viegener.php
https://www.artbook.com/9783753301181.html