YALE UNION

A Talk as part of Theory of Achievement
Sunday, August 2, 6pm

Richard Hawkins will give a talk on the use of scrapbooks in his work and others. Scrapbooks, Hawkins argues, are a medium counterpoint to “audience-ready” art practices. Rather than merely collages in book form, scrapbooks are entities unto themselves—temporary, loose, sketched-in, relentless. Hawkins explains how the practice of scrapbooking by artists such as Gauguin, Hijikata, Tom of Finland, Grosz, and Hoch, as well as the more under acknowledged scrapbooks of movie fans, can be seen as monologues of “erotic insistence,” or elaborate “optings-out” from the directives of mass-reproduced images.

Richard Hawkins was born in 1961 in Mexia, Texas. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Of late he has co-curated a posthumous exhibition about his friend Tony Greene with the artist Catherine Opie. While the flashpoint for an awful lot of his own recent collage work has been the scrapbooks of Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. This effort culminated in an exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2014. In THEORY OF ACHIEVEMENT, Hawkins looks over his own shoulder into the writings and photos he kept in his twenties. “Self-archaelogizing,” as Hawkins put it, “has become the immutable (yet always mutable, I guess—that’s probably the point) core of the practice.”