Visiting Artist Lecture: Asher Hartman

Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber

The Visiting Artists Lecture Series is central to Art & Design and includes weekly lectures, studio visits, and critiques by leading artists, curators, and writers working across a wide spectrum of practices and critical perspectives. Students across all programs are invited and encouraged to attend these public lectures, which take place throughout the academic year. All visiting artist talks are free and open to the public.

To request access info for this lecture please email art.design@mgsa.rutgers.edu.

Asher Hartman is a transgender writer, director, and maker of live performances. His works, which combine strategies of theater and performance art, grapple with social and political issues in an era of chronic crisis. His works are dense, visual, poetic embodied texts, infused with clown and cringe humor, evidence of trance and psychic journeying, set in engulfing installations designed to disorient, unnerve, and dislodge deep feeling. A great deal of his work was developed with the support of Machine Project, Los Angeles from 2010-2017.

Asher Hartman is the director and founder of Gawdafful National Theater, a group of visual artists, actors, and performance artists. Gawdafful performances include the 6- part live-in installation about elves and white supremacy, “The Dope Elf” at Yale Union, Portland, Oregon (2019) and (soon) at The Lab, San Francisco (2021); “The Lost Privilege Company,” Visions and Voices USC, LA (2018); “Sorry, Atlantis, Or Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge,” Machine Project, LA (2017); “Mr. Akita,” Hauser & Wirth, LA, (2017); the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2017), and “The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance,” commissioned by LACMA (2016), Mr. Akita at The Tang Art Museum, NY (2015), Purple Electric Play! Machine Project, (2014), “Glass Bang” at the MAK Center for Art & Architecture’s RM Schindler’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House as part of Machine Project’s engagement in the Getty Museum’s “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.” (2013) and with Cannonball in Miami as “The Florida Room” and Southern Exposure in San Francisco (2013), “See What Love the Father Has Given Us, Machine Project, (2012), “All Stars of Non-Violet Communication” (LACE, Highways Performance Space, Human Resources 2011), and “Annie Okay! (The Hammer Museum, LA, 2010).

Recent lectures and presentations on theater, art, and intuition include “Skeletal Readings: A meditation and conversation with Asher Hartman and Rossen Ventzislavov” at ICA, Los Angeles; “Serving It Cold” at Photobook: Reset (2018) at C/O Berlin; “Slow Architecture” at Crystal Bridges, Arkansas (2018); “Mind Reading” at the Philbrook Museum, Tulsa (2018); “The Intricate Speech of Intimate Objects” at Gasworks, London (2017); ”Psychic Reading of the Gamble House,” a short film by David Fenster (2014); Acts of Gawd: Performance as Divine Communication,” Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida (2014). Recent teaching includes classes and workshops at USC, Art Center, Pomona College, Otis College of Art and Design, CalArts, and Ox-Bow School of Arts in Michigan. Asher Hartman is/was, will always be, one half of the intuitive duo Krystal Krunch (with Haruko Tanaka, now deceased) whose performances and workshops were presented in variety of venues including at The Pulitzer Art Museum (St. Louis, 2016); The Hayward Gallery (London, 2012), The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, 2012), The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburg, 2012); Real Art Ways (Hartford, 2013), Extrapool (Netherlands, 2013), and numerous workshops with Machine Project. Asher’s book of plays “Mad Clot on a Holy Bone,” published by X Artists Books has been released in 2020.