Leech Farms: The Archival Bodies of Terence Sellers, Kathy Acker, and Chris Kraus

Abstract

“Leech Farms” showcases the personal and professional lives of three artists whose work needs to be examined in order to understand the broader political and cultural transformations taking place in the United States from the late 1970s onwards. This dissertation substantially repositions each figure’s lesser known collaborations in photography, film, and video by revealing a chilling and consistent logic underlying their more familiar books and novels. In its broadest conception, “Leech Farms” examines how modes of parasitic behavior--accessing or implicating others for personal gain--operate on a formal, historical, social, and archival level. Each monographic chapter contains a two-part analysis: 1) how the specific social and sexual operations of the artist are formalized in the work; and 2) how these behaviors are stored in the archive decades later. The project is therefore based exclusively on primary source material engaged with for the first time, drawing from the archive to desublimate the discourse of postmodernism that has come to define art production in the 1980s. As I demonstrate throughout the dissertation, the “archival bodies” of Terence Sellers, Kathy Acker, and Chris Kraus continue to carry out the social operations of their donor, programming reception and determining how the work is discussed and distributed--even when the artist is no longer living.