Talking to ... Megan Gafford

The artist's becoming the preferred role model of modern Europe
is a perfectly understandable process, as we can see in him the
embodiment of the idea of individuality and, ultimately, human
dignity. However, detaching ourselves from the aura—thus also
from the promise associated with this figure—we see a strange,
even dark question emerging. What if this promise can't be kept,
and what if we’re now confronting the figure of the failed
artist? This is a thought that the American philosopher Eric
Hoffer made, in the early 1950s, the core of his work The True
Believer – in which he argues that totalitarianism, as it raged
in its Nazi and Stalinist varieties, could first and foremost be
counted as failed artists. And this is precisely the idea of
artist Megan Gafford, who sees the disappearance of
beauty—exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's urinal—as one of the great
catastrophes of the last century. Because what art denies itself
seeks refuge in political activism. Since Megan Gafford, who
taught design and drawing at the University of Denver and has
been teaching at the University of Boulder for more than a
decade, has been able to observe this logic of mobilization at
close range, she's emerged as a journalistic voice with this
idea, writing for magazines such as Quillette, Areo, and Tilt
West.


Megan Gafford is an artist who lives and teaches in New York. Her
interest in science and technology drives her artwork's strange
sense of uncanniness. In her studio practice, she repurposes
unsettling scientific tools like radiation and cybernetics as art
materials, to create work that commingles eeriness and elegance.
She also has a Substack blog called Fashionably Late Takes.


Recent Articles:


The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty. In
Quillette


and Megan Gafford recommends


Samuel Hughes: The Beauty of Concrete


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