Our Literal Speed is an ongoing media opera/textual archive based in Selma, Alabama. Presented as a series of events in the vicinity of art and history in Europe and North America, the project synthesizes collective activity, self-reflexive examinations of the art world’s public life, and an intense concern for art’s movement through institutional and technological mediation. Since 2006, OLS has produced exhibitions, conferences, soundtracks, essays, objects, scripts, reviews, installations, performances, pedagogical concept albums, administrative gesamtkunstwerks, and a website.
Matthew Jesse Jackson teaches at the University of Chicago. His book-length study, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes, was published in 2010 by the University of Chicago Press. Since 2006, in collaboration with Christopher P. Heuer, Andrew Perchuk, and the Jackson Pollock Bar, he has contributed to Our Literal Speed; his writing has also been published in various journals and magazines, including Artforum, BlackBook, Bookforum, New Left Review, and October, as well as in James Elkins and Michael Newman’s anthology The State of Art Criticism (Routledge, 2007). He is currently preparing an exhibition and catalogue entitled Vision and Communism.
Andrew Perchuk is Deputy Director at the Getty Research Institute. Formerly a curator at the Alternative Museum in New York City, he received his PhD from Yale University, and has held fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, the Getty Research Institute, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute. He is the editor of three books—The Masculine Masquerade (with Helaine Posner, 1996), Allan Kaprow: Art as Life (with Eva Meyer-Hermann and Stephanie Rosenthal, 2008), and Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular (with Rani Singh, 2009)—and is a frequent contributor to contemporary art journals. At the Getty, he co-instituted the Pacific Standard Time research project on art in postwar Los Angeles and the related Modern Art in Los Angeles series of oral histories and public programs.
Christopher P. Heuer is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Heuer’s writing has appeared in Word and Image, Res, Artforum, October, Print Quarterly, The Burlington Magazine, Renaissance Quarterly, and elsewhere, and his first book, The City Rehearsed (Routledge, 2009) won support from the Graham Foundation. He is currently working on the Dutch reception of Byzantine icons, a book examining German art and kinesis, and an essay about Renaissance icebergs. In 2011, he co-curated “Vision and Communism” at the University of Chicago and authored an accompanying book. Heuer has held Getty, Kress, Humboldt, and Clark Fellowships, and in 2009 he was Gerda Henkel Stiftung Fellow at the Humboldt Universität Berlin. He is currently Northern European book review editor for caa.reviews.