Jane Blocker

Associate Professor

Director of Graduate Studies

Office: 405 Heller Hall

Office Hours - Fall 2009

Tues, 12:00 - 2:00
and by appointment

Phone: (612) 625-1549
Fax: (612) 626-8679

E-mail: block023@umn.edu

Dr. Jane Blocker is a specialist in contemporary art and critical theory, with specific research interests in performance studies and feminism. She offers courses such as "Art Since 1945," "Contemporary Art,""Alternative Media: Video, Performance, and Digital Art," as well as courses on gender and sexuality, and 20th century theory and criticism.

Her research has focused primarily on the problem of history: how it has been written, by whom and with what authority. It has looked at history’s reactionary tendencies, its disciplinary functions, its mechanisms of desire, and its struggles to come to terms with art works, the very purpose of which is to resist historicization.

She is author of three books:
Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity and Exile (Duke, 1999)
What the Body Cost: Desire, History and Performance (Minnesota, 2004)
Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony (Minnesota, 2009)

She has also published numerous articles and essays including
“Ambivalent Entertainments: James Luna, Performance, and the Archive,” Grey Room no. 37 (Fall 2009).

“Blink: The Viewer as Blind Man in Installation Art,” Art Journal (Winter 2008): 6-21.

“Aestheticizing Risk in Wartime: The SLA to Iraq,” in The Aesthetics of Risk, edited by John Welchman. Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2008.

“Binding to Another’s Wound: Of Weddings and Witness,” in After Criticism: New Responses to Contemporary Art, edited by Gavin Butt. London: Blackwell, 2005.

“This Being You Must Create: Transgenic Art and Seeing the Invisible,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 2 (2003): 192-209.

“Failures of Self-Seeing: James Luna Remembers Dino,” Performing Arts Journal XXIII, no. 1 (January 2001): 18-32.

"Woman-House: Architecture, Gender and Hybridity in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" Camera Obscura 39 (November 1998): 126-150.

"The Bed Took Up Most of the Room," in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., The End(s) of Performance. New York: N.Y.U. Press, 1997

Site last modified on September 3, 2009

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